Unpacking our lives

A Reflection for the Memorial of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Find today’s readings here.

I made the Big Move from New York to Connecticut and am now in the process of settling into a new apartment. Possessions are very much on my mind. I lived in a small Brooklyn studio, so there were physical constraints on how much I could accumulate. Still, after six years in one place, you end up with a lot of stuff, and a move is a chance to ask: What do I really need? Toss this, donate that, and the rest—into the boxes.  

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, whose feast we celebrate today, moved a lot. She was born in northern Italy in 1850 and, from a young age, dreamed of being a missionary. After being rejected by two religious orders because of her poor health, and after joining another order that dissolved in turmoil, Cabrini founded the Salesian Missionaries of the Sacred Heart at age 30. She established a number of schools and orphanages in Italy before Pope Leo XIII told her to do the same for the poor Italian immigrants arriving by the thousands in New York, which she did, despite her lifelong desire to serve in East Asia.

After fulfilling her mission in New York, Cabrini went on to open schools and orphanages across the Western Hemisphere, including Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Grenada, Newark, N.J., Scranton, Pa., and Chicago, Ill., the birthplace of our current missionary pope and the place where Cabrini died at age 67 in 1917.

It is safe to say that Mother Cabrini, traveling by train, ship, wagon, mule and foot, did not accumulate much. She was attached to neither place nor possession.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks us to consider how we relate to the things of this world—things that, at the coming of the Son of Man, we must let go of without second thought.

So it will be on the day the Son of Man is revealed.
On that day, someone who is on the housetop
and whose belongings are in the house
must not go down to get them,
and likewise one in the field
must not return to what was left behind.

But it’s not just material possessions we have to let go of, it’s the pleasures of this life and even our relationships: He chastises those who, in the days of Noah, “were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” up to the hour the flood destroyed them all.

Jesus goes further still. In his commentary on the Gospel of Luke, Scripture scholar Luke Timothy Johnson translates the well-known quote from Jesus—“Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it”—differently: “Anyone seeking to hold life as a possession will lose it” (emphasis added).

Most of us do not think of our lives as just another possession—it is not like our prized jewelry or fancy car, only much more important.

But what if we did think about our life as an accumulation of stuff, and our death and the second coming of Christ as the Big Move? What are the sins we need to toss, the gifts we need to donate? And what, in the end, would be left to put in those boxes?

The answer, assuming our intended destination is heaven, is nothing that is not of Christ. Sounds great in theory—who wants to carry all those boxes anyway? In practice, it looks like the lives of saints like Mother Cabrini, who held everything, including her own dreams of missionary life, lightly.

I was able to pack up my apartment in a weekend. It’s been over a month since I moved to the new place, and let’s just say, it’s a work in progress. And I imagine it will be the work of a lifetime to take inventory of all that I have and all that I am and say honestly that I’m ready to lose it all.

Here, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini has some advice for the journey: “Let us keep close to Jesus because if we lose him, we have lost everything.”

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