When I retired last year I brought home art work from my study for which there was no wall space. One piece, a reproduction of an icon by Robert Lenz languishes in a corner in a spare bedroom, sad to say. This is Lenz's imaginative depiction of one of the few "home-grown" Canadian saints. Well, so we claim. It's an embarrassment that when Kateri Tekakwitha was canonized in 2012 Canada and the United States squabbled over who could rightly claim this 17th century Mohawk woman. She was born in the United States but spent a good part of her life in Canada and was eventually buried at Kahnawake in Quebec.
Tradition tells us that Tekakwitha took a devout vow of perpetual virginity when she was in her late teens. This often seems to be a big deal in Roman Catholicism. Choosing not to marry, she left her village in the US and moved for the remaining five years of her life to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, south of Montreal in New France.
I love this icon because it portrays her as an environmental saint. She is holding turtle island, the aboriginal symbol of the earth, and she is surrounded by birch trees. Apparently she would make crosses from sticks and then hang them from trees as “stations” at which one should be reminded to pray. Her biography tells us, “she often went to the woods alone to speak to God and listen to Him in her heart and in the voice of nature.”
Kateri's Feast Day was on April 17th, appropriately close to Earth Day. Do we need "saints" of any kind these days? I'm not so sure, and it isn't part of our Protestant ethos. Yet we can admire those who point the way to deeper understanding of what it means to live God's compassion and the love of Christ. And if "God so loved the world" that God came to us in Jesus, the Christ, why not celebrate Kateri Tekakwitha on this Earth Day/Earth Sunday?
No comments:
Post a Comment