Catherine of Siena - Little Talks With God

FOREWORD

A lthough I grew up with a fairly robust spiritual life in an American town with churches of many different denomi-nations, I didnt step into a Catholic church until I was nineteen and living in the Philippines. I was a Baptist missionary at the time, and my job was to convert Catholics. I wasnt very good at it. Instead, I just learned to love them.

It wasnt the power of the Church, or the architecture, or the doctrinal subtleties that drew me to Catholicism. It was the extravagant love and devotion that individual Catholics demonstrated for God. I was able to recognize the strength of their commitment, even though the ways they lived out that commitment were sometimes unusual, sometimes inspiring, and always fascinating to someone with my different background and experiences.

St. Catherine of Siena is one of the amazing people that I discovered that year. There were paintings of her and chapels devoted to her, and I heard that she was a Doctor. Her life was full of love and charity for the unfortunate; she fought for equality among all people; she even challenged the hierarchy of her Church when it seemed necessary, challenging priests and bishops and even popes to do better; and she loved people in personal ways with great vulnerability. The images, vibrancy, and stories that I first encountered that summer are still with me today, nearly a quarter-century later. Eventually, the example of extraordinary people like Catherine led me to become a Catholic myself, and to spend years studying the saints.

The book you are holding, Little Talks with God, begins with this marvelous opening line:

When the soul is lifted by a great, yearning desire for the honor of God and the salvation of souls, it practices the ordinary virtues and remains in the cell of self-knowledge, so that it may know better Gods goodness toward it.

This instruction is so simple and so rarely followed.

As Catherine says, she is drawn to her cellboth a literal one and a more figurative one. Her literal cell was a simple room where she could be all alone, just her and God. The simple life today usually means turning off electronic gadgets for a few hours, or driving to the country for the afternoon. But for Catherine, stepping into her cell was like entering another world entirely, a world where she was alone with God. She would do this daily, often many times a day. Her cell was where she was truly at home.

Her figurative cell was the place inside her where she listened for Gods voice. It was, as she says, the cell of self-knowledge, and Catherine was expertlong before the word psychology was inventedat being truthful with herself about herself. In the pages of Little Talks with God we watch her practice a rigorous self-examination so that she might always know that it is God she is hearing and not some other motivations guiding her.

I mentioned that the extravagance of the saints, and particularly of St. Catherine, draws me. I realize that, for others, thats often not the case. Some people are repulsed by some of what seems strange today. For instance, as you go deeper into Catherines life you will discover how she sometimes mistreated her bodyeating little, fasting much, ignoring illnesses, driving herself in a way that surely contributed to a relatively youthful death. This is because she valued the soul far more than the body in ways that are hard for us to appreciate today. Above all, her faith in heavenly rewards and her ultimate feeling of being a stranger on this earth were always unshaken.

The other aspect of Catherines spirituality that sometimes troubles twenty-first-century readers is her often ecstatic-sounding union with Christ. She uses wedding imagery to describe her bond with Jesus. Far from finding these ideas unsettling, I find them appealing; indeed, these were far more than ideas to her. As her near-contemporary the great poet Dante states, the joy of divine union begins with a light in the mind and grows into something more precious:

Light intellectual replete with love,
Love of true good replete with ecstasy,
Ecstasy that transcendeth every sweetness.
(Paradiso, canto 30)

As you read this book you will notice that St. Catherine is a subtle thinker. Completely untrained in theological schools, she became an instructor of theologians. In 1970, Pope Paul VI designated her a Doctor of the Church, along with St. Teresa of Avila. She is acknowledged worldwide as having produced writings that are of supreme importance for understanding who God is and how we may know God.

May your reading of these teachings guide you, too, toward that promised sweetness.

JON M. SWEENEY

INTRODUCTION

O n October 4, 1970, the Roman Catholic Church awarded the title of doctor of the church to two women: Teresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena. The writings and teachings of both these women remain very popular today, but it is Catherines writings that teach us the most about incorporating our spiritual natures and our quests for union with God into our daily lives.

Although she is often called a mystic like Meister Eckhart, Catherine combined her own mystical experiences with a fervent activism. She was a Dominican, but she was not a cloistered member of that Order. Instead, from the very beginning she was active in ministering to the sick and aiding the poor. She also played a significant role in the politics of church and state in fourteenth-century Italy. Yet, in the midst of her activism, Catherines quest for justice and equity was founded in her own experience of union with God. The knowledge and truth that she gained from this encounter strengthened her, as she worked tirelessly to share Gods love and compassion with those around her.