Wednesday, August 14, 2024
Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
For all generations
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven.
Generation after generation each have the opportunity to call Him blessed. But so often they would not. WE would not.
But we have never been called to success, but instead to fruitfulness.
Whatver you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Henri Nouwen says “the amazing thing is that our fruitfulness comes out of our vulnerability and not just our power. Actually it comes, this fruitfulness, out of our lack of power, our powerlessness.”
If two of you agree on earth about anything for which they are to pray, it shall be granted to them by my heavenly Father.
For several years I spent quarterly weekends in retreat with the Transforming Center at Marytown, a Franciscan monastery in Libertyville, Illinois which also housed the National Shrine for St. Maximilian Kolbe. Over and over I returned to the museum which told the story of his life. I bought a rosary in the bookstore, with Kolbe’s picture on the case. I grew to love this man.
Rajmund Kolbe and his brother joined the Franciscans in Poland when they were 13, after Rajmund’s vision of Mary a year earlier. Adding the names Maximillian and Maria, Fr. Kolbe spent a decade in Asia and then back to Poland, when the German Nazis overran his country in 1939. Upon his return he organized a hospital, directed secret short wave broadcasts and published an underground newspaper. He was arrested and released, arrested and released, again arrested and sent to Auschwitz to work and die. He continued to act as a priest. How could he not?
Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
A prisoner escaped. Gestapo retaliation required that ten men chosen at random would be starved to death. One of the men chosen, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, “My wife! My children!”
Fr. Kolbe begged to take his place, and permission was granted. From his cell Fr. Kolbe loudly led the other prisoners, isolated in their own cells, in prayer. After no water or food for two weeks, six of the men had passed away, and the priest and three others were injected with poison to kill them too.
Franciszek Gajowniczek attended the beatification and canonization ceremonies for Fr. Kolbe. Although his sons were killed in 1945, his wife lived till 1977, and Mr. G lived until 1995, when he died at the age of 93.
Generation after generation shall call him blessed.
Henri Nouwen continued his meditation on fruitfulness:
The mystery is that our illness and our weakness and our many ways of dying are often the ways that we get in touch with our vulnerabilities. You and I have to trust that these sufferings will allow us to be more fruitful if lived faithfully. Precisely where we are weakest and often most broken and most needy,
precisely there can be the ground of our fruitfulness.
That is the vision that means that death can indeed be the final healing—because it becomes the way to be so vulnerable that we can bear fruit in a whole new way. Like trees that die and become fuel, and like leaves that die and become fertilizer, in nature something new comes out from death all the time.
You have to realize that you are part of that beautiful process, that your death is not the end but in fact the source of your fruitfulness beyond you in new generations, in new centuries.
(Ezekiel 9, Psalm 113, 2 Corinthians 5, Matthew 18)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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