I contributed the Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster on Monday 14 July.
You can listen here, or read the text below.
The Feast Day of Kateri Tekakwitha
Today is the Feast Day of St Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American to be canonized by the Catholic Church.
Kateri was born in 1656 in a Mohawk settlement in present-day New York. When she was four years old, small pox – a disease brought by European colonizers – ravaged her village. Her parents died; and Kateri was left with blurred vision and badly scarred skin.
Kateri’s damaged eyes meant she avoided sunlight, walking in the shadows. Her name Tekakwitha translates from Mohawk to “she who bumps into things”. Kateri’s scars made her feel humiliated and marginalized; she wore a blanket to hide her face.
While Kateri’s Algonquin mother had been a Christian, Kateri did not convert until she was 19 years old, after a Jesuit mission to the Mohawks. Many Mohawks objected to the work of these “Blackrobes”, their dismissive term for the priests. Christians, after all, had invaded North America, bringing unimaginable suffering upon their peoples. Mohawks must have wondered how such Christians could claim to follow a loving God.
Even so, Kateri eagerly adopted Christian understandings of her experience of divine love. She journeyed hundreds of miles to live among Native converts near Montreal. She often walked barefoot through the snow to pray outdoors for long hours, lingering under towering trees and beside fast-flowing rivers.
Kateri clearly experienced God through nature, like generations of Mohawks and Algonquin before her. The 17th Century North American wilderness, whose beauty and brutality we cannot fully grasp, connected her to God. She balanced reverence for the divine and for creation, seeing the earth as sacred and discerning the connections between all living things.
When Kateri was canonized in 2012, she was named a patron saint of ecology and the environment.
Kateri also inspired Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s 1966 novel Beautiful Losers. In it he writes: “[The saint] can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such [people], such balancing monsters of love.”
(Image: Portrait of Catherine Tekawitha, c. 1690, by Father Chauchetière, Wikipedia)