Overview:
The Memorial of St. Benedict, Abbot
A Reflection for the Memorial of St. Benedict, Abbot
I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne,
with the train of his garment filling the temple.
Seraphim were stationed above; each of them had six wings:
with two they veiled their faces,
with two they veiled their feet,
and with two they hovered aloft.
Find today’s readings here.
I have always loved stories of prophets, visions and miracles—this rich spiritual tradition in which six-winged angels appear with messages from God, or nuns levitate while praying or honeybees build a cathedral atop a communion host. (With so many of these stories dating to the Middle Ages, you can understand why I minored in medieval studies in college.) Isaiah gives us one of his most famous visions in today’s first reading: He sees God, enthroned, flanked by the aforementioned six-winged angels, who sing “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts!”
Today’s memorial is associated with another great miracle story: St. Benedict, the founder of the Benedictines, was known for the monastic code he authored, which he followed strictly. One night, he went to visit his twin sister, St. Scholastica, who was nearing the end of her life. As evening fell, Scholastica asked Benedict to stay with her, but he refused, saying his code forbade spending the night outside his cell. So Scholastica began to weep and pray, until the previously-clear sky filled with thunderclouds. Trapped by the ensuing deluge, Benedict stayed with his sister and the two spoke all night about the spiritual life.
God, we know, speaks to us in stories. Jesus was constantly confusing his disciples with his parables, so much so that we can imagine Peter or some other outspoken apostle snapping, “Get to the point!” But the brilliant thing about these stories is that, with the exception of the ones Jesus explains, we are free to mine them for meaning. Years ago, I volunteered at an O.C.I.A. program where candidates discerning becoming Catholic were given Gospel parables with no explanations and asked what they meant. As a lifelong Catholic myself, I was surprised by the different meanings they drew out, so different from the ones I’d been taught and long taken for granted.
In that spirit, let me take a crack at drawing out a lesson from Isaiah’s six-winged angels. Isaiah, realizing he has just seen the face of God, is overtaken with a sense of his unworthiness. “Woe is me, I am doomed!” he cries, “For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” One of the angels responds by taking a hot coal from the altar with tongs (does the angel have hands in addition to wings? Where’d he get the tongs?) and presses it to Isaiah’s lips. The angel tells him that now his “wickedness is removed,” and his “sins are purged.” Immediately, Isaiah gets the courage to say, “Here I am, Lord, send me!”
The story, to me, underscores how much of a miracle forgiveness is. A Jesuit friend once told me, “Forgiveness is a miracle you can work.” How incredible, to think that something a six-winged angel did with a hot coal in a prophet’s vision is something that I can do in everyday life! That my decision not to hold the wrong someone has done me against them—to choose that over and over, which I have to do as a compulsive grudge-holder—could free a person to stand up into the vocation God has called them to just as this angel’s hot coal could free Isaiah to say “Here I am, Lord, send me!”
This miracle of forgiveness that we can work is the central “good news” of Christianity: Why did Jesus come to earth, and die, and rise from the dead, if not to “free us from sin”—that is, forgive us?
It’s certainly not easy. It often doesn’t seem possible. But it is at least as possible as a flying nun or a bee cathedral or a God who dies and rises again.
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