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November 4, 2018I deem it a privilege to be here with you on this feast day of St. Martin de Porres and to take the oath of your new pastor, Father Paul DePorres Whittington, OP, that he will faithfully serve this newly configured parish of St. Katharine Drexel, formed most recently from the parishes of St. Joachim, St. Ailbe, and St. Felicitas.
We often muse about the apparent contradictions found in Christian life. We live in a world that has laid claim to the Christian message for over two thousand years in lands east and west, yet civilization has witnessed the mistreatment and slaughter of peoples in the name of God and for reasons of greed and conquest.
The inability or unwillingness to perceive dignity in dark-skinned peoples and their contribution to the fabric of life at every level is another perduring contradiction when the Gospel of Jesus Christ begs us to take His message and give it as gift to all peoples and nations.
Martin de Porres {1579-1639} lived in a world of some stark contradictions. The world of the 16th century had its own complexities and social evils. In societies where Christians mingled the categorization of peoples into blacks, mulattos and caucasians; those who dominated and those who served with little to no recognition. Even in the church there were categories of who can vow their lives to God and who could, if they were admitted, serve the rest but at a lower rank.
By standards of our day despite a higher consciousness about human dignity and social rights we find still a strange accommodation if not a tolerance of social biases mixed with the praxis of the Christian message. Our own country stands out by the critique of neighboring nations for our stubborn hold on racial delineations and classifications that leave some people privileged and others on the sidelines.
Martin, the son of a Spaniard and a free black woman was born into a world where he would never be fully recognized as a man, as a full human being. But God worked through the crooked lines of human behavior and raised up in Martin, a Christian, a Catholic, a saint of full stature whose reputation perdures to this day… a man, a religious of the Dominican family through whom the rich and the poor alike saw the face of Christ and through whose hands the poor felt the affirming touch of Christ.
God gives us holy men and women precisely to offer counter-messages in face of the prevailing sins of the culture. These men and women are embodiments of the riddles presented to us in the parables of Jesus: Where seemingly the greedy and the haughty control the world, the meek and the lowly shine through as the ultimate victors through the mud and the mess of life. Precisely, when evil stomps on the lives of innocent people, the martyrs buy back the human condition with the spilling of their own blood.
In the 16th century, God’s power and presence needed to be seen despite racism and classifications of poor-and-rich, master and slave. So, we have interestingly, ministering simultaneously as contemporaries on the world scene remarkable workers of the Gospel: Martin de Porres in Peru, Peter Claver in Colombia and Vincent de Paul in France … three men living and serving the Gospel, lavishly pouring the Gospel on the paradoxical lines of the human condition.
For us African American Catholics, Martin was presented as the singular black saint for our admiration and inspiration from the early years of our instruction. He was one of us, like unto us in our misery and social unacceptability, yet one through whom we could see our own call to sainthood through the saga of segregation and discrimination. He was dark and so are we. He was Catholic and so are we. He was poor and so are we.
Precisely in us the riddles of the Christian message come alive as Jesus pronounced them himself. Those who are last shall be first, the greatest among us are those who serve the rest. The childlike among us have first places in the kingdom of heaven. The poor among us are the inheritors of the riches of God’s kingdom. We anxiously look toward the fulfillment of these promises.
Only with eyes and hearts of faith can we survive the ravages of life in order to have what is destined for us in Christ. Despite the pain of life. Despite the hatred and indifference we experience in life… God comes through incarnate in the men and women who bear his name, unknowingly and unwittingly themselves never seeking a stage or spotlight. Without the makeup or the fashions, Christ walks in our midst in the lives of his saints.
In order to recommend Martin for tired, weary Christians, three hundred years removed from Martin’s time. In order to recommend Martin for a people with little respite, if not retrenchment apparent, think of him akin to a Mother Teresa of his day, or known popularly as “Martin of Charity,” model for a world which continues to be disturbed visually and emotionally when a person of dark skin enters their space. He extended his dark hands to everyone. Everyone recognized that he was touched by God. In his ministry to the streets people stopped in their tracks watching him in wonder and amazement.
Having encountered Martin, people attested to being cured by his words and by his touch. Martin was gifted with a deep spirituality and a number of mystical prayer experiences. He was close to God.
Essentially, Martin was profoundly aware of how little he was in the world’s eyes and turned that around for himself to claim his dignity before God, a spirituality that led him to ecstasy in his prayer.
Judged to be without full heritage, a mixed breed, being poor and an outcast of his time he himself could not bear to see people treated harshly just because their skin was of darker hue. Martin treated and cared for the sick and poor of all races: Spaniards who were hated by the native Peruvians, Indians who were looked down on by the Spaniards, and African slaves who were despised by them both. Martin deliberately chose to be blind to the differences foisted by race and background and showed himself very much people-conscious. Because of these gifts of his person, Martin was able to perceive the lost sheep and the lost coins of society. He carried on the Lord’s ministry of showing people just how valuable they really are to God, the Father of us all. And God placed upon him his stamp of approval.
Why do we have saints? Well, the human condition pines for symbols and heroes and heroines representative of our highest strivings. We realize we will probably never reach what heroes and heroines reach in their lives. They have somehow made it to the top, we say. But, notice, we tend to see making it to the top spelled exclusively in terms of popular gain, i.e., promotions and obtaining degrees, having won an election, a job with a nice salary, having the things money can buy, financial security, or being a media or entertainment star… making it to the top in worldly terms, that is.
Sainthood means none of these things. We should see the saints as human beings who have made it in such a way that they live something of the pain of our lives; heroes who look like us, who can speak to us from the past and the present and tell us this Gospel is possible for us. And, a trace of the Cross is to be found in their lives, as it was for Jesus and as it is for us too.
Over the course of our Christian lives we have heard from time to time in lesson and in preachment that we are expected to be saints. Our baptism puts us on the road to sainthood. But we don’t believe it. It sounds nice and pious. But we figure saints are somebody else, from times past… certainly extraordinary people if not odd individuals of a sort who are somehow untouched by ordinary life.
On the contrary, saints are men and women of flesh and blood who deal with ordinary life in an extraordinary way.
Martin de Porres leaves us a message about how to move in the world of contradictions; how to survive amidst racial demarcation, how to move in the world where dark skin is seen a scourge that incites fear and insecurity and, sometimes, hatred in people; in a world where people are driven by misinterpretations of power.
In our lifetime we have witnessed a variety of ideas about how to deal with racism and bias. Some of those ideas have passed with time. But one idea remains… the love of one’s enemies, service to one another irrespective of who they are or where they come from or the color of their skin. It is the idea of the Gospel. And an experience of the Cross is part of this idea.
Saints are men and women who cut through the evil that’s found in the world with a new idea, the idea of Jesus. Then, in face of what they see in your behavior and mine, everyone stops in their tracks and are forced to formulate a decision for or against the Christ.
Like St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta [October 2003] walking through bombed-out Beirut with sniper fire shooting from every side, while she, unprotected, walks innocently through the streets picking up children hovering in the shadows and hiding in the debris. The bullets freeze in motion and enemies on both sides stare at her in absolute amazement.
In the same way, the Gospel brought a new idea to the human sinful situation. Remarkable men and women living that Gospel with heroic seriousness have been beacons of that message while everyone stops and stares at us in amazement.
Dom Hubert von Zeller, the famous Benedictine monk and writer on the spiritual life, in his book “Sanctity in Other Words,” 1963, comments that, “The way to think of sanctity is as something that, by being generous and faithful to grace, gives back to God the love that He has given to the soul.”
No one can fake being a saint. Christians, and especially sinners, can spot a saint in a glance. St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is recognized as saint by everyone the world over, Christians and non-Christians alike. As von Zeller says, “We work away at holiness not because we are ambitious and want to be experts in a particular kind of lofty career but because God wants us to be saints and is praised by our striving after sanctity.”
For what is sanctity other than being next to God… spending our lives trying to achieve nearness to God.
“… there is only one real goodness – one perfection, one sanctity – and that is God’s… the model of all holiness is our Lord and unless you grow to be like Him you will never get anywhere with holiness… our Lord, who is himself the way, the truth, the life, wants something out of you that is your own to give and is not just a copy. The saints produce masterpieces because of each one’s likeness to our Lord, not because of each one’s likeness to another… God wants an original reproduction of himself, not a forgery.”
“Sanctity, says von Zeller, like everything else in life, should be looked at from God’s point of view rather than from man’s. We have come from God and we exist for Him; our holiness must come from God and must exist for him.”
In a world where racial and economic and class distinctions remain obvious we too can walk with heads held high unconquered by the ravages of life but assured of the love God has for us and all people.
The Christian message has made it possible for people of color to survive with an inner power that raises us above the muck of life and the power of our enemies…. A different idea! Our idea does its own work as subtle as the application of salt enhances food or as wondrous as light dispelling the darkness of night by the rising of the morning sun.
Martin’s life reminds us that each and everyone of us, white, black, brown or whatever, bears the imprint of the Divine. In turn, we Christians, bear the responsibility to evangelize the world with the new idea of Jesus in hopes that everyone’s stares and amazement will usher them toward the Christ.
In this the world will be saved.
May the Lord bless each one of you for your works of justice and peace.
St. Martin de Porres, pray for us!
