Chapter VIII: Fame and Father Lazzarino

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset
Chapter VIII

Of course, it was not the quiet life that God had in store for Catherine, and her first taste of fame and its dark cousin, notoriety, came as a holy woman's to whom many faithful and many lost souls flocked.  This, of course, in turn provoking jealousy.

It's an interesting arrangement for a chapter by Undset.  She begins talking about some of this fame and notoriety - of Catherine no longer having private time to spend and a few hints of jealous enemies or just gossipmongers, as Undset constantly references.  Then she discusses the increasing extremity of Catherine's visions and the toll it begins to take on her body.  Then, lastly, we get the attempt of Father Lazzarino, a charismatic priest convinced Catherine's exaggerated holiness must be a sham, and his transformation into her friend.

In Camelot, Lancelot has a lovely line where he says that zealots are always annoying.  They are more than annoying - they make others deeply uncomfortable.  Zealots for petty things that constantly talk about them are annoying, frustrating.  You learn to avoid them.  But a zealot like Catherine - we have whole elaborate dances that keep us from looking too closely at such a person.  Some, of course, are drawn to her, but the impulse to prove that such extremes cannot be real - that such ecstasies are not granted to mortal men in truth - that's natural too.

Father Lazzarino is the second person Undset describes to have convinced themselves that they are upright, good, and holy - surely moreso than this upstart girl who had people tramping through her little room all hours of the day and night.  Surely their simple devotions and their lifetimes of service count for more than a few ecstatic trances!  Surely, if God were to choose someone in Siena to bear His message, they would be a better choice than this girl - and He could use less extreme measures to speak through them!

The first was a nun who reconciled with Catherine before her death.  Father Lazzarino likewise came to feel his pride and returned penitent to Catherine the next day.  Then he sold most of his possessions and eventually retired to a life of greater contemplation and only occasional preaching outside of Siena's walls.  Where, reportedly, his sermons were world's better - and perhaps more precious and marked for their greater rarity.

Our strategies these days seem, increasingly, to me to be more about designating these days of wonders as something that worked long ago and far away.  I first wrote about this idea about stories of heroes - every story has two purposes: to remember forever the greatest inherent in the human spirit and to remind us that we don't do things that way anymore - that kind of thing only worked when everyone was running around wearing tights or pumpkin pants or robes and sandals.  Our own age cannot be the Age of Wonder - for how then would you explain how we are so ordinary?

But it is not only the saints who try to tell us, over and over again, that they are simply ordinary.  That their world seemed just as ordinary and grounded in reality as our own.  Catherine knew her own world.  The chapter casually mentions Catherine asking a friend in Florence to give her brothers a loan to get them out of a tight spot when they moved the family business there.  Everything seemed just as real and cluttered and fallen from grace as it does now.

It is still the Age of Wonders.  Miracles are still possible and happening.  We are the stuff that saints and heroes were made from.  The difference is our calling, our dedication, our will.  The difference is us.

We should not hide from that.  We need heroes and saints in our world as much as Catherine's time needed her.