Fr Matthew Reese

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not live according to the truth; but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.”
—1 John 1:5)

“[O Lord,] let this same love compel you to enlighten the eye of my understanding with the light of faith, so that I may know your truth, which you have revealed to me. Let my memory be great enough to hold your favors, and set my will ablaze in your charity’s fire.”
—Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue

Dear Friends in Christ,

I’m cheating a little bit this time. The reading from the First Epistle of John that I’ve quoted to you is not appointed for the Daily Office today, but is rather the lesson appointed for the noonday mass.

Today we commemorate St Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), one of the great medieval Doctors of the Church. And the Scriptural lessons we will be hearing at 12:15pm all echo some of the central themes of her own writing—the Divine Light, and the real ways in which God inhabits our souls and bodies.

St Catherine’s Dialogue is a bodily text—at times her preoccupation with blood, especially, can seem a bit gruesome to modern readers. But Catherine is not expressing some hasty drive for martyrdom.

Rather, she is constantly pointing us to two central realities of the Christian story: the broken body of our Lord on the cross, and the broken bread of the Holy Eucharist.

Catherine expresses an extraordinary, all-consuming yearning for oneness with God. In “walking in light,” according to the truth—as John writes—we come closer and closer to that oneness.

“You are the Craftsman,” she writes, “and I, your handiwork, have come to know that you are in love with the beauty of what you have made, since you made of me a new creation in the blood of your Son.”

What words to meditate on as we approach the altar ourselves, to receive that very Body and Blood. May we feel that deepening oneness, may we feel the warmth of that light.

Catherine, pray for us.

—Fr Matthew