Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini | 2 John 4-9 | Luke 17:26-37
Jesus describes the days of Noah. People are eating and drinking, marrying and buying and selling, planting and building. None of it is wrong.
Then the flood comes, and the people who were doing all of it never looked up.
The warning isn't about what they were doing. It's about what they stopped doing.
Today the Church remembers Frances Xavier Cabrini. She asked to be sent to China, and the pope sent her west instead, to Italian immigrants arriving in America with almost nothing. She went on to found sixty-seven hospitals, schools, and orphanages, and in 1946 she became the first American citizen to be canonized.
John's short second letter is urgent in the same way: stay in what you were given, and keep staying in it.
Today in & Altar:
Hearth is asking families to pray tonight for one immigrant or refugee family - by name if you know one - and, if your family has its own immigration story, tonight is a natural night to tell it.
Iron is asking men to pick one ordinary part of the week - work, errands, routine - and give it the attention Noah kept while everyone around him went on as usual.
Vessel is holding Cabrini's reassignment up to the lives women are actually living, and asking what it would mean to treat the one you have as no smaller a calling than the one you pictured.
Eventide is looking back over a long life and asking who among the people you've known kept watching while they lived their ordinary days. Tonight's Sorrowful Mysteries are offered for those who carried an ordinary life faithfully to the end.
Young Disciples is asking what it looks like to pay attention in the middle of homework, a shift, or a chore - and borrows a saint who didn't get the assignment she wanted to show it.
Ostium is pointing at the career that diverged from the original plan, and asking whether a change of assignment has to mean a smaller calling.
Tonight's reflections are about how to stay busy and awake at the same time.