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When I was a girl, my mother took us to a chapel to see where Elizabeth
Ann Seton was buried. I remember her talking about what a good woman
“Mother Seton” had been in her life so many years before. Now that
I look back to that day with my mother, I realize that she probably felt
quite connected to this saint. As she herded and hushed the six of
us kids around the Seton chapel, my mother could reflect on the life of
this woman who had also been a wife and mother.
Elizabeth Ann Seton’s beloved husband died in 1803, when she was
29, leaving her with a failed business and five children. Her life
changed dramatically from prominent New York socialite to one struggling
not only to care for her children but also to find God’s will for her life.
She moved her children to Maryland to run a Catholic school and finally
became the founder of a religious community, the Sisters of Charity of
St. Joseph.
In the years that followed, Seton suffered the painful deaths of
a number of her loved ones, including two of her own children. But
again and again, she used her own sufferings to open her life to God, looking
for ways to draw closer to God’s will for her life.
Today as we look at Mark’s gospel of the multiplication of the loaves
and fishes, we can be reminded of Seton and the generous love in her heart
that moved her to dedicate her life to God. Not a saint of a protected
monastery, this woman of 200 years ago understood what it meant to be a
wife, raise children, juggle work and family, struggle to pay bills, and
face the death of loved ones.
When Jesus’ disciples suggest he send the huge crowds home to find
something to eat, Jesus instead calls them to something deeper, to the
care and service of these hungry people. It is that same service
of the hungry and poor that guided the second half of Seton’s life.
Had Seton’s husband lived and she remained in her wealthy home in
New York, would she have ever turned to God in such a deep way? Would she
have been declared the first American saint for dedicating her life to
the poor or would she have been a socially-successful and now long-forgotten
woman? Wasn’t it the suffering in her life that invited her to search
for God more deeply in her life? Perhaps even with her happiness
in her marriage and motherhood, there was an emptiness in her life that
could be filled only by God.
Seton’s life reminds us of the same message in today’s gospel: our
lives are an invitation to serve others as a way to follow Jesus more closely.
Only if we can drop the clutter of things, achievements, titles and riches,
can we empty our lives enough to make room for God. It is then, finally,
that we will be filled.
It may even be that the disciples who spent so much time with Jesus
were emptier and hungrier than the thousands in that crowd who had not
eaten in so long. The disciples were more concerned about keeping
their own lives easy and convenient rather than tackling the impossible
task of feeding this hillside full of people. Once again, Jesus shows them
– and us – how to take our own lives, like the bread in the baskets, bless
and break them and give them away.
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