But
besides that, it isn’t easy to give up one’s will. To give up one’s will to God
is beautiful. People always wonder how to do that. Well, it’s so very simple,
very, very simple! Suppose you were a salesman like I was in a big shop—a big
emporium in New York—and the sales manager called you in and said, “Look
Catherine, you are getting the highest commissions of all. Will you tell me
how? What’s your secret?” I answered, “It’s because I do the Will of God.”
I must
admit this man was very, very astonished. “What do you mean, the will of God?”
he said. “That doesn’t enter into business, does it?”
“Oh,”
said I, “everything enters into God, even business. You and I made an
agreement, but there was a third party to that agreement. Your Personnel
Manager interviewed me and outlined my duties when I became your employee. He
was very clear about it. I agreed. Now comes the doing. Of course, I can escape. I can go into the toilet and smoke
my cigarettes. I can go and have my coffee on any floor. There are all kinds of
coffee shops. I can spend an awful lot of time chatting with other sales
clerks. There are a thousand ways I can waste your money.
But you see, I can’t
because I made a contract between you, me, and God, and I cannot be unfaithful
to it. I could be unfaithful to you, the company, but I cannot be unfaithful to
God. That would be lying. I’m a Christian, and I can’t lie like that.”
He looked at me very
seriously and said, “Catherine, evidently it pays off to be a Christian.” I
said, “Oh yes, sir. It pays off.” You understand how deep those things must go
for a woman who is poor?
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Gospel
of a Poor Woman
Reflection – It is one of the great glories of Catherine
Doherty that she is able to take the most exalted, mystical, profound spiritual
verities and reflections, and then bring them right down to the most basic
level of human life of the most ordinary person in the world.
This is a story she
loved to tell, from her working girl days scrambling to make a living to
support her sick husband and infant son. With all her religious and spiritual
formation, her quite good education regarding the Scriptures and the fathers of
the Church (her father used to read to the household every night from them),
she came to the conclusion, startling, that this meant that if you were
contracted to work an eight-hour shift with x numbers of coffee breaks and so
much time for lunch, then that was an obligation before God to work precisely
those hours, and to spend those hours, well, working.
Sometimes we can make a
bit too much of a mystery of the spiritual life. God’s will is, most of the
time, for the most part, that we do the obvious thing that is sitting in front
of us, demanding to be done. A mother with a house full of children doesn’t
have to deliberate much about what God’s will is at this moment. Her kids will
tell her, repeatedly and at increasing levels of volume if she hesitates.
But of course it is how we do what is in front of us that
makes the difference between sanctity and selfishness, between greatness and
mediocrity. The love we bring into it, the dedication we apply to it, the care
we take with it. ‘Do little things exceedingly well for love of me (Christ)’ is
one of the lines of the Little Mandate, the words God was giving Catherine precisely
during these tough years of hard work and struggle.
To give your all to
selling in a department store is a ‘little thing’, and few would connect it
with God or anything remotely spiritual. But it is, you know. And who knows
what kind of spiritual benefit, what blessings happens when a person of faith
is moving among the shelves and displays and racks of a store, doing his or her
job, and loving, praying, serving in the midst of it? Can you become a saint working at Walmart? Has anyone tried? Only God knows. If they do, Catherine Doherty may well end up being their patron (I'm not presuming on
The beautiful truth—a
hard truth, a challenging truth, but beautiful nonetheless—that both Catherine
and St. Therese knew was that the means to sanctity lie within the grasp of
every Christian, no matter what the circumstances of life are for them.
Selling
in a store, waiting tables in a restaurant, working in some drab fluorescent
lit cubicle, toiling away in a blue-collar trade job, or being in some
so-called ‘higher’ professional field—what matters is that we do the will of
God, which is the duties of our state of life, with as much love and devotion,
generosity and care, justice and fidelity, as we can muster, and always pray
for growth in grace to do it better and be what God asks us to be, which is
lovers dedicated to loving Him and His children in every corner of our world.