Angela Merici: Wise Guide on the Path of LifeMary-Cabrini Durkin, Company of St. Ursula

Introduction Much of what I will say is not new to you. You are already on this path. I simply hope to encourage your continued faithful service. I shared your ministry for many years, so please let me say “We” as a fellow Ursuline educator.

The fine speakers addressing you in these days together are helping you focus on various aspects of Ursuline education, including educational leadership. You have inherited the mission of Ursuline education. Naturally you look to Angela Merici and to others who share this mission for guidance. Your educational mission flows from St. Angela’s spiritual wellspring. Naturally you come here to drink from that spring.

My topic today is Angela Merici as a wise guide on the path of life. Angela is a wisdom-figure. Her wisdom guides us as human beings, as followers of Christ, and as Ursuline educators. She calls us to integrate spirituality and action. What is sown in our hearts flowers in our profession. Angela calls leadership and teaching “this task – there cannot be another more worthy” (Prologue to the Counsels, 7-8). Why are these roles so “worthy”? Because of the worthiness, the intrinsic value of the students whom you teachers teach. Because of the worthiness, the intrinsic value of the entire school community whom you administrators lead: St. Angela calls them “so noble a family, [entrusted] to your hands” (Prologue to the Testament, 11-12).

My focus will be primarily on Angela’s spiritual wisdom. We will also recognize some educational implications of her wisdom. My underlying assumption is that authentic Ursuline educational leadership is rooted in authentic Ursuline spirituality. As living water, Ursuline education wells up from deep inside educators who drink from Angela’s spring. None of us is called to replicate Angela Merici. After all, God didn’t make us 15th-century Italians.

But we are called to imbibe and integrate Angela’s guidance, her spirit. This is the only way to be authentic Ursuline educators. Authenticity as an Ursuline educator involves a personal spiritual journey that integrates awe, Scripture, and a relationship with Christ. Think of the four centuries of Ursuline schools that have flowed into the institution in which you now serve. Think of the rich, deep, and global reality of Ursuline education represented in this room today. Ask yourself, what made all this work? Think of the Ursuline sisters on whose shoulders you stand. Ursuline education, now handed on to you, did not emerge from a checklist labeled “Ursuline values.” It flowed out of these women’s lives, out of the regular prayer and contemplation that both opened them ever more to God and deepened their own spirits.

This morning, we will break apart this title - Wise guide on the path of life – into three parts: Angela’s wisdom, Walking a path, and Life: Earth and heaven.

I. Angela’s wisdomFirst of all, there is so much to be said about Angela’s wisdom! Books have been written, seminars conducted, articles read…. I can focus on only a few aspects.

Secondly, wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Angela’s wisdom cannot be understood or emulated unless we see its full perspective – God’s perspective. Angela’s wisdom, the fruit of her authentic human maturity, is rooted in her relationship with God. “Rooted”: God is the Source that nourishes this human growth. It would never occur to Angela to separate humanity from its divine Source, its roots.

Why did Angela “invent” a form of life for women in the world – the Company of St. Ursula? Not because of a sociological program. She inaugurated this way because her own heart and spirit yearned to belong to God alone. God had called her in a visionary experience in her teens that continued to energize her life until it took shape as the Company of St. Ursula. Angela recognized a similar call from God in other Brescian women.

The spiritual family that grew from this call is our ancestral origin. She is our Madre. Our authenticity as her spiritual family today – Company, Order, schools – depends on our fidelity to what we sometimes call her charism: her particular spiritual gift. We inherit this legacy from our Madre. At its core is this central truth: God loves you. God invites you into a loving, committed relationship and into a spiritual family where the members love one another and nourish and foster a new generation.

Angela’s wisdom is the fruit of a life lived deeply, intentionally, and in prayerful discernment. Her writings manifest the fruit of her experience. Let us observe the significance of these ways of living as Angela’s life reveals them: deeply, intentionally, and in prayerful discernment.

Deeply – Angela lived deeply, with depth of feeling and depth of experience.

First, Angela felt deeply. She felt suffering. She did not protect herself from the anguish that is a natural part of human experience. We know how deeply the loss of her parents and her sister affected her. Her suffering bore fruit in compassion. When Caterina Patengola lost her husband and children, the Franciscan friars thought of Angela as the person who could accompany Caterina. Why? Because Angela was equipped with authentic compassion; she had entered the depth of suffering.

Secondly, she related to others with genuine warmth, which was reciprocated. After Angela had spent several months with the Gallo family in Cremona, Agostino Gallo said

he and his wife and family “could not live without her” and invited her to reside with them in their home in Brescia. Her affection shines through the Rule, the Counsels, and the Testament in language such as “most beloved daughters and sisters…” (Rule, Prologue, 4). She encouraged the leaders to share her warm affection for their daughters – we would say for our students: “Therefore, my most loving mothers, if you love these dear daughters of ours with a burning and passionate charity, it will be impossible for you not to have them all depicted individually in your memory and in your heart” (2nd Legacy, 10-11).

She was passionate in her relationship with Jesus Christ. She called him “my Lover, or rather, the Lover of us all” (5th Counsel, 38). Her prayer, recorded in the Rule, reveals her intensity: “Lord, on behalf of those miserable wretches who do not know you…my heart is wrenched” (Ch. 5, 31-33).

In another aspect of living deeply, Angela related to others at a deep level, not superficially. She saw people’s inner reality, not their social standing or their accomplishments. Angela gave her deep attention to people as varied as Simona Borni, a serving girl and Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan. When our students absorb society’s categories of value based on income or athletic stardom or academic success, what a treasure we give them by relating to them deeply, on the basis of their intrinsic human value. Angela’s example challenges us to foster a school culture based on this deep truth. Counselors have a particular role in cultivating this deep truth.

She called the members of her Company to be “queens in heaven” (Rule, Prologue, 17). These were simple women, some of them servants, all of them single and thus on the bottom rung of their family’s social position. Angela saw their dignity.

She instructed her successors in leadership to have the Company’s members “carved” or “engraved” on their minds and hearts. For us, the parallel is to have our students engraved on our hearts. What a powerful metaphor! “Have engraved on your mind and heart all your dear daughters, one by one” (2nd Legacy, 1).

Living deeply, Angela plunged into new, risky experiences. She was not satisfied with the safe territory of the familiar. In midlife, she left the rural landscape of the family farm at Le Grezze and the familiar streets of nearby Desenzano and moved to Brescia. Not only was Brescia the big city. A military invasion coupled with civil war had devastated its social fabric and its families even more than its buildings and institutions. At fifty – old age! – she went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There were no Delta Airlines or Marriott Inns. This was a long, arduous and dangerous journey. The sea was vast. Pirates were threatening. Language and customs and food were strange. Yes, Angela took risks and lived deeply.

A second aspect of Angela’s wisdom was what we might call intentionality – Angela lived intentionally. She did not drift through life. Or at least she learned this intentionality as she grew from a rather impetuous young woman into the wise Madre whose guidance we treasure.

Angela lived intentionally by being purposeful and by being authentic in matching words with deeds. To achieve a purpose, one must take specific steps. Angela was very realistic about what she called “means and ways.” “Seek out, and desire all those means and ways that are necessary to persevere and prosper till the end. Because merely beginning is not enough if not carried through” (Rule, Prologue, 10-11). Pious words mean little unless they are put into concrete actions. And actions, including spiritual practices, must have a purpose. They are not to be empty or automatic. For example, in her Rule’s chapter on fasting, Angela makes it clear that this practice is not for its own sake, but has value only as a tool for the purpose of spiritual fruitfulness.

Having said that Angela lived intentionally, I’m not sure that she always lived this way. In fact, her youthful vision of a company of women did not become a reality until she founded the Company at the age of sixty. It seems that her illness in Cremona, almost unto death, catalyzed her action. Perhaps it scared her. Perhaps she realized that she had almost died with the mission of her life incomplete. In the prayer recorded in her Rule, she says “…nor have I ever been obedient to your divine precepts” (Rule, Ch. 5, 29). An exaggeration, surely, but reflecting how she must have felt.

We tend to look back at Angela through the lens of what she eventually accomplished. We honor the holiness and wisdom that marked her final years. But she had to grow into that ripeness. Forty years intervened between her early vision and the foundation of the Company. She would later say that, after her illness catalyzed her into taking action, an angel scourged her for her tardiness. I take this as figurative way of expressing her anguish over her delay. Like us, she too journeyed and searched, sometimes literally journeyed – on her pilgrimages. Some biographers think that her search for guidance and clarity was at least one motive for her several pilgrimages. What actions was she called to take?

It would not be realistic to see her as a model if we could not recognize ourselves in her struggles and uncertainties. So Angela can be our guide not only in the final outcome of her journey, but also on the uncertain path of search and discovery. Perhaps you come to conferences like these and groan inwardly at the distance between yourself and the saint who is held up as our model. Take heart! Let Angela be your guide precisely as a sincere and earnest seeker.

In a third aspect of her wisdom, Angela lived discerningly, and I cannot separate this discernment from the way she arrived at it: She lived prayerfully. To discern is to see clearly, to distinguish between the false and the real, between the superficial and the

deep. Discernment includes the capacity to see reality not only from the narrow perspective of one’s individual experience. Instead, Angela could see a broader, fuller reality. Perhaps today we would call that quality a capacity for the larger view, or for the common good.

Like Mary of Nazareth, Angela pondered over her experiences. (Luke 2:19, 51) Pondering, she learned from experience. Pondering, she discovered deeper truth and wisdom. Angela spent long hours of the night in prayerful reflection, her friends tell us. She found guidance in the Bible and other spiritual reading. We cannot turn a page of her writings without encountering quotations or references to Scripture. Jesus was her model. She regularly cited his example for her daughters to follow.

Angela’s prayerful pondering led her to discover more than met the eye. In the Prologue to the Rule we find these poetic lines, which I will return to throughout the morning: “We will cross through this momentary life with consolation, and our every pain and sadness will turn into joy and gladness, and thorny and rocky roads we will find flower-strewn for us, paved with finest gold” (Rule, Prologue, 27). Honestly, she acknowledges pain: thorns, rocks. Like us, she has felt the prick of thorns, the hardness of life’s often stony path. Only the combination of time and of looking deeply into her experience allowed her – and allows us – to see the flowers and the gold.

A second example of this deeper seeing – or we might say deeper hearing – comes in the Rule’s chapter on obedience, where she says, “And above all, to obey the counsels and inspirations which the Holy Spirit continually sends into the heart, whose voice we will hear all the more clearly the more purified and clean our conscience” (Rule, Ch. 8, 14-15). Hearing the Holy Spirit clearly is not automatic. It depends on what she calls purifying our conscience, what we might call both our continuing conversion and our inner work.

She calls for discernment about difficult situations and individual students. In her 2nd Counsel, she says to the teachers, “You will achieve more with kindness and gentleness than with harshness and sharp rebukes, which should be reserved only for cases of necessity, and even then, at the right place and time, and according to the persons. But charity...teaches such discretion, and moves the heart to be, according to place and time, now gentle and now severe, and little or much as there is need” (2nd Counsel, 3-7). Rigid discipline is far indeed from Angela’s way. Reflection – loving reflection – will discover the most effective approach.

As I said before, Angela could stretch herself to understand from a point of view different from her own. What does this stretching call for, from Angela and from us? It means thinking through a situation from more than one point of view, that is, not just automatically from my own point of view. By the way, both fiction and non-fiction narrative and the study of history can be tools for developing this capacity.

Angela gave very practical advice in her third Counsel. She is speaking here to the colonelle, the teachers, about possible disagreements with the matrons, that is, the administrators. The principles can apply in any disagreement. Perhaps her words will be useful to you.

6: Now, if it should happen that you have some just reason to contradict or reproach them, do it with discretion and respect. This advice applies to disagreements that Angela identifies with a “just reason.” She calls first for thinking this through, not just sounding off, not just voicing my opinion merely because it is my opinion. Is this a matter of simple disagreement, or does it involve a matter of justice? She also calls for respect, which includes the willingness to recognize the other person’s intrinsic worth, not to look at her primarily through the filter of the disagreement.

7: And if they do not want to pay you heed, have patience. Sometimes we just have to put up with the situation or decision. Patience means accepting without complaint, without, as Angela says elsewhere, grumbling. Grumbling means that I’m still stuck within the narrow confines of my self, unwilling to let go of my opinion or my way.

8: And know that it is right to love the mothers if they are good, and bear with them if they are eccentric. Angela calls us to love, to bear with the other. Unlike the polarized and vitriolic atmosphere so poisonous to a sense of community, we are not to see the person we disagree with as an opponent, much less an enemy. The person I disagree with is also someone I continue to love.

9: And be very careful never to complain, or grumble, or speak ill of them, whether with others or with your daughters. A reminder: here Angela is speaking to the Company’s teachers, responsible for modeling behavior to their daughters, that is, in our school context, to their students. She describes behaviors that none of us want our students to learn, least of all from us: complaining, grumbling, and speaking ill. Even worse would be driving a wedge between students and the administration. This would damage the relationships that are the fabric of the educational community. The next line makes this clear.

10-11: But always and everywhere preserve the honor and respect due to your mothers, seeing that if God commands us to honor our natural fathers and mothers, how much more our spiritual [mothers] should be esteemed. And so, make sure that they are always held in esteem and respect, especially among your daughters. Angela makes a play on words, as the Company’s administrative leaders were then called “matrons” akin to the Italian word for “mothers.” The underlying metaphor is a spiritual family, one made up of loving relationships. We are all responsible for its health.

12: And remember, if they are good you do not deserve them, and if they are bad you deserve even worse. This may be expressed rather negatively, but let us not therefore dismiss the challenge Angela offers, a wise one: Can I refrain from placing myself high up on a pillar? Can I refrain from self-righteousness? Can I refrain from casting myself as a better person than the one I disagree with? Angela is realistic enough to acknowledge that the other person may indeed be wrong. Yet she asks us to step back from an automatic, ego-centric reaction and examine whether there may perhaps be flaws in our own position.

13: Still, if you have something in your heart that disturbs you in them, you may rightly and without scruple talk about it in confidence with some person who is good and faithful in many respects and ways. “Still…” I love Angela’s ability to balance. She has put her finger on a real problem. She has called us to reflect on it in the context of the big picture. She has challenged us to step back from our immediate and perhaps egocentric impulses. “Still” the problem remains and must be dealt with. Having done our inner work as sketched out above, we are now urged to take the next step “in confidence,” that is, privately, with confidentiality. No public displays, no back-biting, no partisanship. She recommends consulting a “person who is good and faithful in many respects and ways” – someone of solid values, someone wise. This is a person who can help us see clearly and identify whether we should take some further action.

14: Know, however, that where you see clearly that the salvation and honor of your daughters are in danger, you must on no account consent to it, nor tolerate it, nor have any hesitation. Angela calls for a sense of proportionality. Truly serious and urgent matters – danger to the essential well-being of “your daughters” – require action. She has counseled careful reflection, giving the benefit of the doubt. Now she uses strong language: “on no account consent…tolerate…have any hesitation.”

15: Yet, all this always with discernment and maturity of judgment.The final words of this section sum up her wisdom, the wisdom required of those who would carry on her mission: Discernment: seeing clearly, from more than one point of view. Maturity of judgment: reflecting, consulting, weighing.

Angela’s pondering helped her to share God’s perspective, God’s way of seeing and thinking and intending. How important this aspect of reflection is to educators and educational leaders! Our plans, our projects, our intentions must line up with God’s. Often that means being open to mystery. Each human person is a mystery. “Love your dear daughters equally,” Angela tells the teachers, “and do not prefer one more than another, because they are all creatures of God. And you do not know what he wants to make of them. For how do you know, you, that those who seem to you to be the least and lowest are not to become the most generous and most pleasing to his Majesty? And then, who can judge the heart and the innermost secret thoughts of any creature? And so, hold

them all in your love and bear with them all equally, for it is not up to you to judge the handmaids of God; he well knows what he wants to make of them...” (8th Counsel, 1-5).

SummaryIn summary, then, Angela’s wisdom was the fruit of living deeply, intentionally, and in prayerful discernment. She entered fully into relationships and into life. She linked purpose and action, and she opened herself to God and others and to mystery.

II. Walking a path

Path is a common metaphor for life. Via is one of the several Italian words conveying this meaning. Via could also be translated into English as road or way. Via is the word Angela uses to describe the life of the Company of St. Ursula.

To speak of a path in regard to Angela is also to be reminded of her as a pilgrim. We find her on the path to Jerusalem, on the path to Rome, on the path to Varallo. She models for us the qualities of openness to other places and people, forward movement toward a destination, and equipping ourselves for the journey.

Open to a wider world and to the future, Angela’s vision of the world extended beyond her immediate horizons. She could go to these far-off places because she could imagine going to them. Imagination is often the key. Imagination must be sparked. In the evenings after the Merici family’s supper, Angela’s father read the lives of the saints aloud. These stories brought into the farmhouse of Le Grezze a parade of heroic and holy people from around the then-known world.

How can we open ourselves to different places and to different times? How can we prepare our students for these journeys into the world or into the future? Our educational settings are now open to a truly global reality through the Internet.

The world also opens to our students through the people that they meet. They meet contemporaries, of course, but also historical and fictional persons through their study of history, art, film, and literature, including science fiction. In the United States there is a current movement to replace much of the fiction on reading lists with more non-fiction. Compared to my own years in the classroom, this movement probably provides a good balance. However, fiction has an essential role to play in sparking imagination. Solid, well-balanced lives of the saints can spark both imagination and inspiration, expanding students’ horizons as they expanded Angela’s.

Angela’s pilgrimages required an openness to new places and people, to different languages, foods, and customs, as I mentioned earlier. Perhaps her openness began in the Desenzano market near Lake Garda, a waterway into Lombardy for Germans coming from the north for trade or on their way to Rome.

And what a perfect resource the Ursuline Educational Services offers, bringing all of you together! You and your students realize that you belong to a global family. The rich contacts among all of you will bear fruit for your students in opening them to the world.

Angela was willing to follow a path that led not only to distant places, but into the future. She saw life itself as a path. Remember that she called the life of the Company of St. Ursula a via, that is a path, way, or road. Let us ask ourselves, what does it mean to walk a path? It means to move, to have a destination, to equip ourselves for what we will face. Let us gain some perspective from Angela. First, it means to move, not to be static. Today’s world is in constant motion. We cannot survive if we are static. Educators know that they are equipping young people to move forward into and beyond tomorrow.

When I first started to teach American literature, there was a literary canon between the covers of our textbook. Read and assimilate that, and one had a foundation, shared with every other high school student in the country. That was certainly a static model. The curriculum used to provide common reference points in literature or the arts. Now students hear many cultural voices, including contemporary ones. Something has been gained, but something has been lost. “Foundation” suggests a static future, solid, like a building. It encourages stability. Now the future feels more like an express train. Something has been lost, but something has been gained.

These changes tell us of movement. But movement for its own sake has limited benefits, mixing loss and gain. What is its destination? Where is this path going? Just as Angela the pilgrim traveled to the destinations of Jerusalem, Rome, and Varallo, the path of life also has a destination. That destination is the future.

“Future” can mean the years of life ahead of us. It can mean the eternity of heavenly life ahead of us. “Future” can be the world’s unfolding history. “Future” can mean the ultimate fulfillment of all Creation.

When the apostle Thomas asked Jesus, “‘Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’ Jesus answered, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life’” (John 14:5-6). In Angela’s time, the scriptures were read in Latin, and she would have heard Jesus’ reply as “Ego sum via….” “I am the way….” For her and for us, Jesus is the way. To walk life’s path is to walk as Jesus did, to walk in his footsteps, to walk along the paths of this world toward the same eternal destination.

So we have a destination. The path of our life leads us forward. Yes, we sometimes take wrong steps or step backward. Yes, we sometimes look backward with nostalgia about the “good old days,” whether our good old days were the 1960s or the 1990s. By the 1990s, some of us were already nostalgic for the 70s. 2014 may be the good old days for some of your students.

Nonetheless, as people of faith, people of hope, we trust the Holy Spirit’s momentum. Chapter 8 in the Letter to the Romans is a meditation on this topic. In verse 22 Paul affirms, “We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now” (Romans 8:22). Creation continues to bring forth new life.

At times we may be tempted to pull back from the demands that the future makes on us even now, in the present. For example, as educators we are called to re-think methods, to re-learn content, to implement new instructional systems. For students to remain learners in an unforeseen future, we are called to equip them with critical skills. Surprise, surprise – they apply these critical skills to challenging us. Yes, I taught in high school – lots of criticism!

Angela’s hopeful spirit encourages us forward. Her eyes are definitely set on a heavenly destination. She could not have held the same dynamic worldview that marks our sense of the cosmos. (I wrote these words on a plane passing over the Grand Canyon, awestruck by the vestiges of eons in earth’s history.) But Angela did see in individual human lives a forward momentum along the via – the path – of life. “Now to the task, with courage! … so that we may be able to return gloriously to our homeland, where from all those in Heaven and on earth great glory and triumph will arise. So now, all of you kindly be attentive, with great and longing heart” (Rule, Prologue, 29-32).

Walking a pathway calls for important equipment, according to the nature of the path. Will it cross unfamiliar territory? We need a map. Will it pass through a desert? We need a water supply. Across a stream? We need good boots. Up a mountain? We need a walking stick. Angela can help equip us for the path of life.

We need the map of faith. How else can we know the destination? Life is a pathway forward, not only in time, but to greater fullness of life. Angela tells us, “Although at times they will have troubles or anxieties, nevertheless this will soon pass away and be turned into gladness and joy. And then, the suffering of this world is nothing in comparison with the blessings which are in Paradise.... They must not lose hope” (5th Counsel, 29-32).

We need the water of hope. How else can we survive the heat? Perhaps your path has taken you through terrible losses, even tragedies. Acknowledging suffering, Angela does not ask you to be optimistic but to be hopeful. Optimism says, “Everything will turn out well.” Hope says, “God can bring grace into and out of everything.”

Angela herself had lived through many sufferings and loses, especially of beloved family members. She had suffered with Brescia through the aftermath of war. She had been a refugee in fear of attack. She had endured a nearly fatal illness. She had struggled with uncertainty about how she was to carry out her life’s purpose. Angela earned the right to

say, not that the thorns and the stones on life’s path will go away, but that we will be able to find flowers and gold there too: “…our every pain and sadness will turn into joy and gladness, and thorny and rocky roads we will find flower-strewn for us, paved with finest gold” (Rule, Prologue, 27).

We need a support team bound together by mutual love. How else can we be helped, and help others, along the rough patches? Ursuline educators should serve one another along the road. In this regard, the medium is truly the message. Your students will learn far more about community from observing you than from your words. Angela is intense in saying, “And there will be no other sign that you are in the grace of the Lord than that you love one another and are united together… And thus, loving each other and living in harmony together are a sure sign that we are walking the path right and pleasing to God” (10th Legacy, 10, 12). In a culture of cut-throat competition, physical education teachers and coaches have a special role to play in fostering supportive relationships.

Summary: Angela understood life as a path open to new places, with a destination. We can equip ourselves for its challenges. Our lives and those of our students are experiences of journey.

III. Life – Earth and heaven

Let us now consider the terrain traversed along the path, the terrain that is Life itself. Warning: This part may get a bit abstract. Just to get us back down to earth, it will end with a wastebasket.

We all know that life is more than a sequence of years. Life is more than a landscape of historical events through which we walk. The path of life is not like an elevated board walk above the ground, above the soil, above the earth, above our human milieu. It is not like an asphalt superhighway cutting through the countryside, distinctly separate from the life of the earth on either side.

No. The path of life is life itself, life with all its monotony as well as its high points, life with its aspirations and its disappointments, life with its sufferings and joys, life with its challenges and triumphs.

Our life itself, our living, has a direction. Angela urges us to look eagerly ahead, as she did, toward the eternal, heavenly homeland that is our destination. “Invite them to desire the celestial joys and treasures, to long for those joyful and new feasts of heaven” (5th Counsel, 3). Yet life’s destination is not outside of life. Rather, its destination is the fulfillment of life.

Angela was not oriented only to some otherworldly destination. She understood Jesus’ words “The Kingdom of heaven is within you” or, in another English translation, “The Kingdom of heaven is among you” (Luke 17:21). She experienced the sacred dimension of the world, as I stressed earlier. Thus she could tell her daughters to listen for the Holy Spirit’s guidance amid all the voices around them: the voices of the boss at work and of family members at home as well as the voices of the priest and of the Company’s leaders.

Thus she could direct her daughters to practice the evangelical counsels in the ordinary circumstances of lay life, at work and at home. We would add, at school.

Angela had experienced God’s presence manifested all around her, and she knew that this awareness was available to us also, if we open our eyes and ears. I like to recall her visionary experience, a ladder between earth and heaven, on which young women and angels processed. This vision occurred in her workplace during harvest time, not in a chapel during prayer time.

Her capacity to see the sacred dimension of ordinary reality colors the words I have already quoted twice, “…thorny and rocky roads we will find flower-strewn for us, paved with finest gold” (Rule, Prologue, 27).To use a classic phrase, we could say that Angela lived “in the light of eternity.” But that light was not a distant beacon. Rather, for Angela it illuminated this earthly landscape: our path, our life.

Seen in this light, Angela can call the life she proposes to her followers “angelic,” although it is not at all otherworldly: “…the angels of eternal life will be with us insofar as we will partake of the angelic life” (Rule, Prologue 28). Your life, too, is in touch with heaven. God’s messengers hover around your shoulders, too, often in disguise.

In this light, Angela can see simple Brescian women as called to be “queens,” as I said earlier. They were single, young – at the bottom of the social pyramid – yet royal in their inherent dignity. As educators, you share her capacity for seeing the intrinsic value of the least important, least powerful members of society: children, girls, and poor adults. You see them with God’s eyes.

It was Angela’s highly original genius to recognize the sacred dimension of this world, the sacredness of this ordinary secular life of ours. I repeat this fact because it is so central to her spirituality. In the 16th century, a clear separation existed between sacred and secular, between religious and lay, between the monastery and the home. In fact, apostolic religious life as we know it today, with a mission to the world, did not even exist yet. That is why I identify her recognition as her original stroke of genius.

In her Rule of life, she teaches her daughters to see this sacredness: Angela teaches Gospel obedience as action based on listening for God’s guidance among the many voices of civic society, workplace, and family, as well as Church and company. Angela

teaches Gospel poverty as a continuing process of focus on Christ amid the material circumstances of ordinary lay life. Angela uses the word “sacred” to describe what we would call the consecrated celibacy of single lay women in the secular world. She saw no distance between the secular and the sacred. This integrated understanding of life is a gift we can offer our students.

Let us consider three worldviews that they are faced with, and some implications of each.

One is dualism, which sees light coming only from heaven above. Dualism sees in the world only the dark shadows of sinfulness and illusion. Do you hear people bemoan the sad state of the world “nowadays…”? (To be honest, technology does intensify the scale of violence, and communications media do expose us to more suffering than our grandparents knew about. But the dynamics of sin remain the same as they were in the world reflected in the Book of Genesis.) This dualistic view tends to focus on problems. Some contrast today’s world with an imaginary past when everyone was supposedly faith-filled and moral. To burst this fantasy, I would suggest reading Chaucer or Dante or Shakespeare or Cervantes!

From this dualistic perspective, we must look always to heaven above, free ourselves from the world, and seek perfection. The goal of life is to get out of this life. Life’s destination is far away, far above.

A second view sees the world as a composite of blind forces, with no meaningful destination. Have you followed the “new atheism” of Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great; of Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion; and of Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, all best-sellers? This view looks no further than the human lifespan. It holds no hope for any destination beyond ourselves. It sees religious faith as a harmful delusion or a lie.

From this perspective, our task is to bring ourselves to fulfillment and then to let go of life and of any further meaning.

A third worldview could be described in the language of Creation spirituality. That’s a trendy phrase. But it has antecedents in parts of Scripture and in the Patristic era of the Church. It has deep roots among First Peoples on several continents. This view understands the world and the cosmos as imbued with the divine creating Presence. It is not pantheism, because the Creator is understood as a person, a divine person. According to this worldview, life – all life – evolves in an ultimate direction. All moves forward toward completeness, toward fullness. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called that destination the Omega point to which all Creation is drawn by the energy of Christ within it, within us.

From this perspective, our task is to be united with all Creation and with the Creator in whom “we live and move and have our very being,” as St. Paul said to the Athenians, quoting the ancient Greek poet Aratus of Soli (Acts 17:28). Individuals, the human community, and earth itself have a destination, a shared destination. Our – and our students’ – growth and fulfillment can move toward our divine destination as we align ourselves, here and now, more deeply and authentically with Christ. If we keep our eyes on Jesus Christ, we will find the truth expressed by St. Catherine of Siena in the words “All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, ‘I am the way.’”

I propose to you that this third worldview is consistent with Angela’s. I do not want to fabricate an image of Angela Merici in a 21st-century frame. I do not want to squeeze her into the understandings that have developed since her time. She was certainly a woman of the 15th and 16th centuries, and her language reflects her era. Yet, as I said earlier, she had found the sacred, had experienced God, within the world, within creation. She actually radiated the divine energy that permeates the world. Her secretary, Gabriele Cozzano, described her as “like a sun that gave light to all the others. She was like a fire, a conflagration of love, that set them alight…that everyone was compelled to say, ‘God is here.’” (Epistle).

Angela embodied the awareness that the theologian Karl Rahner expressed as the Kingdom of Heaven “already but not yet.” That is, God’s Reign has already begun in the here-and-now but has not yet reached fulfillment.

Angela looked always to Jesus as the model for authentic living. In her spirit we repeat the Gospel verse, “I am the way and the truth and the life.” Jesus is the way – the path – we walk; he is the true teacher of how to walk, and he is our destination: fullness of life.

We can help our students develop this keen vision, and St. Angela can help us. Here are some ways.

Angela can help us recognize the divine dimension of life’s ordinary, day-to-day realities and of all Creation. The spontaneous response to this recognition is awe. Angela teaches us awe. She stood in awe before the mystery of the human person, as I said before: “…Who can judge the heart and the innermost secret thoughts of any creature?” (8th Counsel, 4). She was struck with awe before the wonders of Creation. “Your holy name—may it be blessed beyond the ocean’s grains of sand, beyond the drops of the waters, beyond the multitude of stars” (Rule, Ch. 5, 26). Science teachers have an essential role in awakening awe. But they are not alone. Artists of all sorts help develop the inner space that is essential for awe. Religion teachers and campus ministers help students absorb our Catholic sacramental spirituality, lived out in liturgy. We touch mystery. Heaven penetrates earth. We are in awe.

Angela can remind us that our path stretches into eternity, as we have already seen, but also that the way itself – this life – shimmers with promise. The response to this vision is hope. Angela teaches us hope: “Act, move, believe, strive, hope, cry out to him with all your heart, for without doubt you will see marvellous things...” (Counsels, Prologue, 17). Her hope rests on God. As educational leaders, take into your own hearts the encouragement that Angela gave to the Company’s original leaders: “Do not be afraid of not knowing and not being able to do what is rightly required in such a singular government. Have hope and firm faith in God, [who] will help you in everything” (Counsels, Prologue, 14-15).

Angela reminds us to look to Jesus Christ for truth about life. As model and teacher, he not only points but accompanies us upon our path. He loves us. The response to his love is love – for him and for all that he loves. Angela teaches us love. To the teachers she addresses words that have meaning for all: “The more you esteem them, the more you will love them; the more you love them, the more you will care for and watch over them” (Counsels, Prologue, 10). The loving community of an Ursuline school is not confined to the religion class or the chapel. The school’s leaders are called to love and respect their collaborators: from the president of the board to the secretary to the person emptying the wastebaskets.

Maybe wastebaskets are a good place to conclude, that is, getting back to the nitty-gritty. In the end, the nitty-gritty of how we all treat each other is the way God’s Reign begins among us. At a conference like this, we want to be uplifted, but it can be discouraging to think: That’s so far beyond me…! We may feel as though we belong in the wastebasket.

For me one of the most consoling passages in St. Angela’s writings is this: “As for you, live and behave in such a way that your daughters may see in you a model. And what you want them to do, do it yourselves first.” That goes without saying, but here’s the part that I find consoling, as she continues: “How will you...counsel them, and urge them to any virtue which you do not first possess, or at least, do not then begin to practice yourselves, together with them? (6th Counsel, 1-5).

So let us at least begin.

Angela wants to help us. Let us conclude with her words: “Understand that now I am more alive than I was when I lived on earth, and I see better and hold more dear and pleasing the good things which I see you constantly doing, and now, even more, I want and am able to help you and do you good in every way” (Counsels, Prologue, 23-25).

SummaryEarthly life itself is the path, with a heavenly destination. Angela saw no separation between secular and sacred. Her worldview shares elements of Creation spirituality: awareness of God’s indwelling presence, fulfillment in Christ, and awe, hope, and love.

Conclusion Like any mother, St. Angela wants to continue helping her family. She wants to share her wisdom with you, both to enrich your own life and to assist you in serving your students. How will you deepen your listening for her wise guidance on the path of your life?