Chapter VII: The Death of Jacopo and First Death of Lapa

Saturday, December 8, 2012
Feast of the Immaculate Conception

Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset
Chapter VII

Catherine nearly loses both her parents in this chapter.  Just before the town of Siena explodes into civil unrest, just before Catherine is forced to literally place her brothers under the mantel of her famous holiness, Jacopo dies.  Days before, with God explaining to a mournful Catherine that it would be better for him to die now, when he is prepared and pure.

She asks to suffer his Purgatorial pains for him, and the pain in her side for the rest of her life is given to her.

Her mother clings so tenaciously to life and refuses to take the Final Sacraments that Catherine calls on a promise God made to her - that no one in her house would suffer eternal damnation - to bring her mother back from death.  Despite the warnings to Lapa from God, delivered through Catherine, that there would come a time when she would beg to be taken from this world and find herself unanswered.

I listened to a podcast today that raised a similar topic.  A woman who had adopted four children from a woman who, roughly every year (she had 8), delivered a baby badly addicted to drugs.  This woman started a foundation to pay women who are addicted to drugs to use birth control - some permanent form of birth control.  As the host of the show so eloquently put it: ironically, the best argument against what the woman is doing is the woman's two sons and two daughters that first provoked her crusade.

We would not know as much about the saint's early life - or, I imagine, her later life - if her mother Lapa had died so early, before even Catherine met her great biographer Raimondo.  I cannot help thinking that, for all God's warning and all that Lapa would come to suffer, she had one part left to play.  Can the world ever really be "done" with a person?

But then, that reminds me of a fantasy television show called Legend of the Seeker, which I am kind of ashamed to admit I watch.  In the second season, the Keeper of the Underworld begins trying to conquer the world of the living, including allowing people who have died to return to their bodies as Banelings - they can live relatively normal lives, provided that they kill one person every twenty-four hours.

Besides the obvious serial murder, the sin of every Baneling is the same: the inability to imagine the world without us.  The inability to imagine the world going on without us.  Over and over again, the show would present Banelings with excuses like "who would take care of my son/mother?" to justify their serial murder, and that exposed the root of their sins.

It's the opposite of the suicide's sin - imagining that we can disappear without a trace.  The world is capable of moving on without us, but that does not mean that our passing will have a profound cost to those we love, to those we hate, to many that we do not know, and perhaps even to future generations wanting to peer into the extraordinary life of a great saint.

I wonder, since Undset says that Lapa was the more worldly of the pair, if her sin was the Baneling's sin - unable to imagine her family going on without her, especially in this time of turmoil.  And I wonder how many of us can claim immunity from it.  We are fortunate not to have that kind of choice before us.

Lapa's return to life did not have the messy consequences of the fantasy world, but it cost her and others much.  Something in me rebels and wants to say they and she also gained much, but I do wonder.  Would we rather go out when our lives were happy than linger, a little more of this life, even if it turns bitter?  Do we only want this life when it's sweet?  Do we want more of life at any cost?

Is the problem that we cannot imagine the world going on without us?  Or that we cannot imagine ourselves going on in the next world?

Was is it we fear in death?  And if we cannot name it, can we ever conquer it?  Are we meant to, or is it our final test?

What was it that made Jacopo pass and Lapa fail, in this pivotal year for the Benincasas and all of Siena?