Dear Franciscan University of Steubenville

Dear Franciscan,

A little over a week ago, I walked across that well-worn stage in the Finnegan Fieldhouse, shook Fr. Sean's hand, flipped my tassel, and went from being student to alum. In the last few weeks, I've had a lot of time to reflect on my four years at Franciscan, and the more I reflect, the more I realize that it would take a lifetime to even begin to process the last four years.

So as I close this beloved chapter of my life, I just have one thing to say: thank you.

To all of my professors, thank you. Thank you for your commitment to being academically excellent and passionately Catholic. Thank you for witnessing to me at every moment, whether it be through your passion for the subject you teach or through your passion for the God you serve. Thank you for challenging me to always give my best, especially when I just wanted to procrastinate.

To my catechetics professors in particular, thank you. Thank you for taking so seriously your vocation to form us into the Church's next generation of catechists. Thank you for expecting and demanding so much from us. Thank you for setting the bar high, for not settling for mediocrity, for giving us the lessons here that would prepare us to persevere out there. Thank you for being the coolest people and for inspiring us. Thank you for forming us into the men and women of prayer that we need to be to serve God and His Church.

To my dear friars, thank you. Thank you for your spiritual fatherhood. Thank you for your teasing, your jokes, your witness. Thank you for taking your vows seriously. Thank you for bringing us the Sacraments. Thank you for all the times you said yes to spontaneous confessions, and thank you for all the times you said no and made us wait in line. It was good for us.

To my beloved sisters, thank you. Thank you for your witness of a life lived totally for Christ. Thank you for showing us what the joy of religious life truly looks like. Thank you for your friendship, your laughter, your joy. Thank you for your prayers and for your spiritual motherhood.

To my wonderful household, thank you. Thank you for teaching me what it means to be a woman of God. Thank you for challenging me to remain faithful to the covenant that I made to you. Thank you for teaching me how to live out our consecration. Thank you for being my sisters. Thank you for walking with me, for supporting me, for praying with and for me. Thank you for dance parties, praise and worship, physical touch, and movie charades.

To all of my spiritual mentors and moms, thank you. Thank you for listening to my rambling, my rants, my emotional outbursts. Thank you for challenging me in prayer, for supporting me in difficult times, for rejoicing with me in times of triumph. Thank you for helping me to realize the plan God has for my life and for helping me to become the woman He made me to be.

To my friends, thank you. Thank you for the laughter, the shenanigans, the love. Thank you for standing with me through the good and the bad. Thank you for challenging me when I became complacent. Thank you for bringing me down to earth when I got too lofty and crazy. Thank you for putting my needs before your own in so many instances. Thank you for teaching me how to laugh at myself. Thank you for showing me what authentic friendship looks like. Thank you for being the people that I will want to laugh, cry, and rejoice with for the rest of my life.

To my beloved Franciscan, thank you. Thank you for forming me and shaping me into the woman I am today. Thank you for inspiring in me a love for Christ that goes so deep that I will continue to carry it with me wherever I go. Thank you for teaching me to love His Church and inspiring me to spend my life to serve that Church. Thank you for four years of laughter, tears, joy, growth, late nights, studying in the library, praying in the port, Tuesday night praise and worship, Austria story swapping, household commitments, and so much more. I have been changed by you, Franciscan, and I'll forever cherish the memories of these four years that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

Thank you, Franciscan. You will always be home. So until I come back to you, keep that big piece of my heart safe under the statue of St. Francis.

xo,
Catie

Deeply Love One Another

I've been wrestling a lot in prayer with attachments to others and with relationships. And I've discovered that when it comes to loving others, there are two extremes: to be too attached to people or to be too afraid to be attached to people.

For most of my life, I lived in the first extreme. I cared far too much about what others thought about me, and I placed too much emphasis on my relationships with others and not enough on my relationship with Christ. My relationships, instead of leading me into greater holiness, detracted from my relationship with Him because I gave them a higher place in my heart than Him. There was always a certain grasping in these relationships: it seemed that no matter how much love these people showed me, I was always hungering for more, grasping for things that I didn't think they were giving me, expecting more than was reasonable from them.

But now that I've progressed a bit in the spiritual life, I find myself falling into the second extreme. Every time I feel a deep love stir in my heart for another person, I live in a state of fear that I'm falling back into that first extreme. So instead of examining this love or allowing it to grow, I try to squash it or run from it.

There's this relationship in my life right now that is extremely important to me. This person is a spiritual mentor to me, and she's teaching me so much about what it means to be a holy woman of God. She’s become such a big part of my heart that I can’t imagine my life without her in it.

And honestly? That terrifies me. I live in a state of fear that I'm too attached to her, that my love for her is unhealthy, that our relationship gets in the way of my relationship with God.

When I begin to feel this deep love for her rise up in my soul, my first instinct is to run. Squash it. Root it up out of my heart and throw it far from me. Because obviously this deep and incomprehensible love that I have for her isn't from God--it must be from my own grasping, my own brokenness, my own need that I'm grasping for her to fill.

False.

In prayer, the Lord has been opening my heart more and more to the truth that He wants me to be in this relationship. He wants me to have this deep love for her. He wants to use her love to change me. He wants to use my love for her to soften both of our hearts to His love for us. Through her spiritual motherhood, He wants to teach me more about what it means to be a daughter. And through my spiritual daughterhood, He wants to teach her more about what it means to be a mother.

“My children, I will be with you only a little while longer … I give you a new commandment: love one another.” -John 13:33-34.

This is our faith, sisters. It is Incarnational -- He could have saved us in any way, but He chose to come in the Incarnation -- to come as a human person that we could see and touch, to use a human body as the instrument of our redemption. And He chooses to come to us physically in the Eucharist, to give us His Body and Blood in order to continually sanctify us and draw us closer to Him. And just as He wants us to encounter His love in His real presence in the Eucharist, so He uses others to bring us to a deeper encounter with Him.

Faith is not a solitary journey. It's not meant to be. Our God is a communion of persons -- three Persons, one God. And just as the Trinity exists in community, so are we meant to exist in community. We can't go it alone. We need others: friends, spouses, spiritual mentors, teachers, siblings, parents. And when I live my life in fear of being too attached to others, when I try to squash the love that stirs deep down in my soul for others, I miss out on the way that He wants to move through those relationships to transform my life.

Ultimately He is the only one that can fulfill all those desires that we feel so deeply, but that doesn't mean that others aren’t part of His plan to do that. He works through others to fulfill those desires.

And this relationship in my life? The love that stirs so deeply in my heart, a love that seems to reach into the abyss of my soul, a love that scares me and yet brings me an incredible amount of peace and joy--this is His love. I’m not capable of loving that deeply and selflessly on my own. This love flows from my love for Him. Because I love Him with all my heart, soul, strength, and mind, I am free to truly love this beautiful and incredible spiritual mother of mine as myself. "Love of neighbor is inseparable from love for God" (CCC 1878).

And the love that this spiritual mother has for me flows from His love. When she loves me, she is truly and freely loving me, but only because it is His love being poured out into her soul. He could fulfill my desires in any way, but He chooses to do it in an incarnational way--to use her love to show me how deeply He wants to fulfill my desires. When I think of this deep love that I have for so many in my life, I’m reminded of the quote from Les Mis: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Through my relationships, I see the love that God has for me.

Sisters, there is nothing wrong with desiring relationship. There is nothing wrong with desiring to be loved, affirmed, wanted, cherished by others. There's nothing wrong with being attached to others--as long as we're attached first and foremost to Him. When we set our sight on Christ and our focus on our relationship with Him, others are going to come into our lives. He's going to bring other people into our places of need, and He's going to use their love to change us and to show us His own love for us. And what a beautiful gift. What a blessing to know that we do not walk this journey alone, to know that a love that stirs so deeply in our souls is a participation in the love of Christ.

Be not afraid to love deeply, to seek relationship. Just remember that He loves us first and that He loves us most. When we allow this truth to be the penetrating force and guiding principle, we are truly free to love deeply and to love selflessly.

So here's to deeply loving others.

Our Good, Good Father

I have a confession to make. I have been in serious spiritual desolation for the last four months. And y’all, it stinks. I’ve never felt so helpless in my life. But it’s the Year of Mercy! And this morning, our good Father hit me over the head with His mercy!

This morning, as I was trying to pray morning prayer, I reached the end of the intentions portion, and I realized that I didn’t have the strength to pray for anything that wasn’t already scripted for me. So instead of trying to spout off the thousands of intentions I know that I should pray for, I opened my hands and my heart to God and cried out, “Father, you know the intentions of my heart even better than I do, and I don’t have the strength to pray for them myself, but I give you this empty vessel I call a heart and hope that it’ll be enough for You.”

And despite the fact that it’s a very meager gift for the King of kings, I think it was the most pleasing thing I could have given Him.

Maybe this is the mercy of God—that it is more pleasing to Him when we come to Him with empty hands and breaking hearts than when we come to Him with what we think is perfection and righteousness.

Because the reality is that we’re never going to be sinless or perfect in this life. There will always be something within us that is lacking, that needs to strive for a higher degree of perfection. It’s the price that comes with being fallen creatures in a fallen world.

And you know what? I think God prefers it that way. If we were already perfect, or if belief in God were the only necessary requirement for Heaven and it didn’t matter how we lived or sinned (a common misconception in our modern culture), then we wouldn’t need a Savior now. We would only have needed Him to die for us that one time 2,000 years ago, and we wouldn’t need Him now. We don’t still need a Savior if we’re already saved, right? Sure, we might still really love Him—after all, how can you not love someone if you truly believed that He died for you? But we wouldn’t need Him, not really.

But here’s the thing: God is a Father. And like any good father, He wants His children to need Him. 

So often, I’m tempted to think that I need to pick myself up from my sin and make myself perfect before I can approach my Father’s throne. But more often than not, I can’t do that. Most of the time, when I approach that throne, I do so with empty hands. And sometimes, I have to crawl my way to that throne, because I don’t have the strength to pick myself up and walk.

And as I was praying about that this morning, you know what I heard Him speak to my heart? Well obviously you don't, so I'm about to tell you: He prefers it that way. He wants to be the one to pick us up. He doesn’t want the finished product. He wants all of us, all of our brokenness, because He wants to be the one to fix us, to make us whole.

There’s this song that I love. I want you to take a few moments to listen to it now, because I think we all need the reminder. It's called Good Good Father, click here.

Oh I’ve head a thousand stories of what they think you’re like, but I’ve heard the tender whisper of love in the dead of night, and you tell me that you’re pleased and that I’m never alone. 

You’re a good, good Father, it’s who you are, it’s who you are, it’s who you are, and I’m loved by you, it’s who I am, it’s who I am, it’s who I am. 

I’ve seen many searching for answers far and wide, but I know we’re all searching for answers only you provide, cause you know just what we need before we say a word.

The mercy of God lies in the fact that He loves us. Not because of who we are, but because of who He is—goodness itself. 

Today, I’m thankful for my brokenness in a way that I have never been before. Because it is only when I acknowledge and embrace my brokenness that I can clearly hear that tender whisper that reminds me who I am—a daughter loved and cherished beyond belief.