RC Diocese of Argyll & the Isles

Mary MacKillop was the eldest of eight in her family, and I was struck on reading a little about her brothers and sisters that most them died quite young – one as a little child, and others from illness in their 20s and one brother died in New Zealand after falling off his horse. By the time Mary was in her forties there were only three of them left – Mary, Annie (who accompanied and cared for Mary through much of her life as a Josephite) and Donald, who was a Jesuit and was ordained a priest in 1885. On being ordained Donald wrote to his sister – “You have your long cherished wish. I am a priest of the Society of Jesus. What a fine cry you will have over this!” I don’t know if in true Jesuit style he would have approved of what he imagined Mary’s emotional response to the news would be, but he was certain that his ordination would touch Mary deeply and she would be overjoyed by the news.

For this very religious family  vocations to the priesthood and to the religious life were something to be accepted and treasured – Mary’s sister, Lexy, was also a nun with the Good Shepherd Sisters, but she was already dead when Donald was ordained. Mary’s father had been a seminarian for a number of years before emigrating, and her mother was a deeply religious woman, who encouraged her children to think about the possibility of offering themselves entirely to God in the religious life. In Mary’s case also she was greatly encouraged to listen to God’s call and choose the religious life by Fr Woods, the charismatic priest, with whom she started the Josephite Sisters in response to the need they saw for Catholic education for the children of Penola and the surrounding districts of South Australia. Mary was still a very young woman when she committed her life to God and took on the mission she understood the Lord was calling her to undertake – she brought to it all her energy  and enthusiasm, and her own deep faith and complete trust in the Lord. She wished to follow his will for her, and throughout the trials and joys of doing this, she remained ever faithful to this vocation and so we honour her now as a Saint and seek her intercession in our prayer.

In this particular Mass on her Feast-Day, and on other occasions as well, I commend that we pray for religious vocations – for young women to be open to the call to give their lives to the Lord in vowed religious life; for young men to respond to the Lord’s invitation to serve in the Lord’s vineyard as priests; for married men, who love the Church and feel called to serve the Lord more closely, to think about the possibility of becoming permanent deacons. The Lay Faithful also have their God-given vocation, whether as married or single people, in their own chosen work or profession, and it is important to pray that we all understand the offering of our lives to God through the prism of “vocation”, both in the sense of understanding we are all blessed with our own God-given gifts, and are invited to use them fully in honouring and serving God fully each day as we strive to be “other Christs”. Through the grace of baptism and confirmation the Lord’s Holy Spirit is alive in us, and can remain strong and fruitful through our receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood in Holy Communion. Our particular vocation is something therefore that has grown with us and continues to grow and develop throughout our lives as we respond to the blessings the Lord has given us and the opportunities to be his disciples and witnesses in the world. Some words of St. Mary of the Cross to her Sisters in the Josephites offer her own great sense of the vocation God had called her to and indeed offers to each of us in our own vocation:

“Have courage and think of the noble work to which the Will of God has called us all. I think of the love too deep for words to express, with which God watches over his children.”

She certainly understood her calling, and that of her dear sisters, as something particularly noble, coming out of God’s will for her. For Mary, therefore, the religious vocation is a beautiful gift – the pearl of great value we heard the Lord speak of in a recent Sunday Gospel – and it is clearly in her mind worth giving up all worldly desires and ambitions to serve the Lord in this way. The Lord’s words in tonight’s Gospel invite this same complete response, and the willingness to trust completely in his providence:

“That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing…..Set your hearts on his kingdom first, and on his righteousness, and all these things will be given you as well.”

Mary spoke of the love with which God watches over his children as too deep for words to express, her own special understanding of the Lord’s invitation to set her heart on his kingdom and his goodness. The result of such a deep understanding of the Lord’s love was a life of selfless love and giving to others in the Lord’s service. Hers was a vocation of love, and each and every vocation has this same love as its foundation – the blessed awareness we have of God’s love for us and our response of love in return, offered in his name in our love for others. St. Paul’s words tonight encourage us to appreciate the love at the heart of every Christian vocation:

“You are God’s chosen race, his saints; he loves you, and you should be clothed in sincere compassion, in kindness and humility, gentleness and patience……Over all these clothes, to keep them together and complete them, put on love.”   

In St. Mary MacKillop’s final letter to her Sisters before she died in 1909 she used words from that same passage of St. Paul:

“Whatever troubles may be before you, accept them cheerfully, remembering who you are trying to follow. Do not be afraid. Love one another, bear with one another, and let Charity guide you in all your life.”

The words, the person, the cross of Jesus filled her whole being, and she wanted others to know and follow the Lord in the same complete and loving way. A contemporary of Mary MacKillop, St Therese of Lisieux, described how she discovered her Vocation of Love :

“Charity – that was the key to my vocation. If the Church was a body composed of different members, it couldn’t lack the noblest of all; it must have a heart, and a heart burning with love. And I realized that this love was the true motive force which enabled the other members of the Church to act….Love is in fact the vocation which includes all others; it’s a universe of its own, comprising all time and space – it’s eternal! Beside myself with joy, I cried out: ‘Jesus, my love! I’ve found my vocation, and my vocation is love.’ I had discovered where it is that I belong in the Church, the niche God had appointed for me. To be nothing else than love, deep down in the heart of Mother Church.”

St. Mary MacKillop was filled with the same awareness of the Vocation of Love as St Therese – it had taken on a more practical apostolate in teaching and leading a religious congregation but at its heart was a journey of love, her own personal love for Jesus and her desire that others would come to know that love also by the love she and her sisters offered to them. Some of her own personal devotion was directed to Jesus as the Sacred Heart, the heart that poured out his love for us on the Cross. Her personal love for Jesus meant accepting and living with the Cross also in her own life and through this acceptance she grew in her knowledge and love of the Lord throughout her life, perhaps particularly in her later years when she had become disabled after suffering a stroke. Her vocation didn’t end because of illness but rather continued to grow and to be an inspiration to others, both her sisters and the many Australians, New Zealanders and others, who knew and loved her. In visiting the rooms were she lived in her later days in North Sydney I found the photographs and description of her funeral very moving – huge numbers of people lined the streets to pay their last respects and hundreds of newspapers carried obituaries honouring the special life she had lived, the special person she was, and in some ways already acclaiming her as a saint. It took the Church just over 100 years to do this officially, but her contemporaries recognised her holiness and her own living of the great Vocation of Love.

We have gathered here this evening in similar spirit to honour St. Mary of the Cross MacKillop and to pray that we in our turn will know Jesus in our hearts and live as fully as we can the same Great Vocation. It is fitting also to seek Mary’s intercession that young people will open their hearts to Jesus, and respond to the call to live this love in religious life or priesthood. May the Church everywhere be alive with people of the Heart, who live the Vocation of Love to the full and in so doing bring the message of Christ in all its richness to others. We thank God for St. Mary MacKillop and we are grateful that we have come to know so much about her here in Scotland, especially in Lochaber, and that she may an inspiration for us all in our own living in the Lord Jesus.