On the evening of our wedding, after the ceremony and reception, my husband and I knelt down and washed each other’s feet. It was an act of love and humility that we wanted to be the foundation of our marriage. We had a beautiful example: A King who washed the feet of peasants; a Savior who washed the feet of sinners; a Friend who washed the feet of betrayers.
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The washing of the disciples’ feet was the act of a dying man. With the last few moments of his precious life, Jesus knelt down. In the last hours with his closest friends, he served. This was the manifestation of the new commandment he was to give moments later at the Last Supper: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.”

Love. This is what it is all about—the meaning of the Christian life. Jesus models love by washing not only the feet of his beloved friends, but of those who will betray him. He knows not only of Judas’ betrayal, but also of Peter’s—which probably stung him even more. He knows Peter, James, and John will fall asleep with him in the Garden. He knows that almost all of his disciples will flee during his torture and crucifixion. And yet he removes his outer garments and kneels to wash their dusty feet.
It would not have been a pleasant affair; their feet would have been caked in dirt and bathed in dust. Perhaps their toenails were long. The feet of these gruff men would have stunk. But I do not imagine that Christ poured just a few drops of water on their feet ceremoniously and then moved on. I believe he spent a few quiet moments with each Apostle, truly washing their feet clean of dirt and grime, and making each feel like the only person in the room. I imagine him drying them tenderly, and looking up with eyes that said, “I do all of this for you.”

Were the Apostles embarrassed by such a vulnerable display of affection? Scripture tells us that Peter recoils and says, “You will never wash my feet.”

For one man to kneel down and wash the feet of another required vulnerability. For the King of Kings to kneel down and wash the feet of sinners required sacrificial, humble, earth-shattering love. This love culminates for us this week on Good Friday, when we commemorate the crucifixion and death of Christ.

While the Church remembers the washing of the disciple’s feet on Holy Thursday, my husband and I have started a tradition of washing each other’s feet on our anniversary. Most recently, we did this on Valentine’s Day. On the day our culture celebrates love, it seemed appropriate to once again remind ourselves of what love actually looks like.

Has anyone ever washed your feet? Perhaps it was part of a Holy Week service at your church or school. Perhaps it was part of a retreat you went on. To have your feet washed is an intimate experience. I think it is often more uncomfortable for the one getting their feet washed than it is for the one doing the washing. In my case, I’m usually worried my feet smell or that my nails aren’t groomed. I’m so worried about what my feet will reveal about me and what the other person is thinking that it’s hard for me to enjoy and appreciate the solemnity and beauty of this moment. Perhaps my thoughts echo Peter: “You will never wash my feet.”

As we draw nearer and nearer to the pinnacle of our faith celebrated in the Triduum, we are probably coming to the end of Lent with dusty feet. We’ve trampled for about forty days in the desert and have probably stumbled in our Lenten observances a few times. Our feet may be caked in inadequacy, sin, or weakness. Maybe you, like me, are thinking so much about what’s on your feet that you’re unable to look Christ in the eye and allow him to thoroughly wash you.

As we enter into Holy Week, I invite you to pray about what keeps you from allowing Christ’s gaze to meet your own. What causes you to join Peter in saying, “You will never wash my feet”? As Pope Francis said during his Apostolic Visit to Cuba, Jesus “came precisely to seek out all those who feel unworthy of God, unworthy of others. Let us allow Jesus to look at us. Let us allow his gaze to run over our streets. Let us allow that look to become our joy, our hope.”

Christ’s response to Peter’s hesitancy is: “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.” Perhaps he is saying that we will be unable to live a life of discipleship if we have not experienced his gaze—the sacrificial love of God. It is this encounter with Christ, with his gaze, that transforms us. We love because we have first been loved—this is our joy, our hope.

This Easter season, may you experience Christ’s life-changing gaze as you allow him to wash your feet.

Questions for Reflection: What keeps you from allowing Christ’s gaze to meet your own? What causes you to join Peter in saying, “You will never wash my feet”?

For more resources to accompany you during the Lenten and Easter seasons, please click here. 

I remember sharing an odd insight with my fiancé as we walked briskly up to the cathedral where we would soon be married. “This is going to be hard,” I said, referring to marriage.

This might have caught most people off guard. It’s not common for a young, blissful couple about to embark on a lifelong journey of commitment to think about its difficulty. I didn’t know at the time how true these words were, only that they were necessary for understanding some of the implications of any lifelong commitment.

It’s a lot easier, and a lot more enjoyable, to think about all the beauty involved in marriage: visions of your spouse bringing you breakfast in bed, selflessly offering to do the laundry, bringing home flowers “just because,” going on countless adventures, experiencing the thrill of starting a family, buying homes, building careers, and doing it all as a team, forever.

In February, the United States celebrates love on Valentine’s Day. The Church celebrates a form of love as well, with February 7-14 being National Marriage Week in the US and February 10 being World Marriage Day.

Celebrations of love are appropriate and beautiful, but I think we do love and marriage an injustice if we only celebrate what we consider to be positive and only on certain days. My husband and I continue to learn—after three years of marriage and two children—that true love is sacrifice. More romantic to me than any bouquet is my husband getting up early with one of our sons, taking the trash out, or working to improve our almost 100-year-old home. The moments when he gives of himself in quiet ways are what make marriage beautiful. And our journey of learning the selfless love Jesus modeled for his disciples is a lifelong one.

We are learning we must choose to love each other after being woken up 3 or 4 times a night, after 2 hour-long commutes a day, after changing countless diapers, mediating children’s fights, trying to solve the latest home issue, and working on a budget. This--this is what makes marriage hard: the choice to give of oneself in the midst of imperfect and less than ideal circumstances. This is the tip of what I meant that day when I told my husband that marriage would be hard. I didn’t know all the details, just that it was a reality we would need to grapple with in the years to come.

Pope Francis speaks often of the realities of marriage throughout his preaching. He said in one homily that marriage is not fiction, acknowledging that “the path is not always a smooth one, free of disagreements, otherwise it would not be human…It is a demanding journey, at times difficult, and at times turbulent, but such is life.” I love that he is so down to earth and realistic in his observations. Yes, marriage is sacred and beautiful and designed by God. But it is also hard work, something I think may need to be more addressed in our culture – especially today when this lifelong commitment seems less and less possible.

The fact that marriage is hard is not cause for fear, despair, or surrender. The fact that it’s hard means your marriage is normal and human. Simply because it is comprised of two people with past hurts, wounds, weaknesses, and imperfections, marriage will always be complicated.

But it is within the context of a lifelong commitment that these wounds and imperfections can be transfigured. This is the beauty of marriage: when seen in the light of the eternal, it enables each person in the relationship to be sanctified. What transfigures marriage is prayer, grace, and, yes, hard work. Marriage is the daily choice to give of oneself, to surrender, to submit mutually to one another. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church notes, “After the fall, marriage helps to overcome self-absorption, egoism, pursuit of one's own pleasure, and to open oneself to the other, to mutual aid and to self-giving” (CCC 1609).

Pope Francis has made note of this as well, saying that a healthy marriage requires the mutual gift of self and the grace of Christ. In a dialogue with engaged couples on Valentine’s Day in 2014, Pope Francis advised those present to entrust themselves “to the Lord Jesus in a life that becomes a daily spiritual journey, made up of steps – small steps, steps of joint growth – made up of the commitment to become mature women and men in the faith.” He continued, “The more you entrust yourselves to Him the more your love will be ‘forever,’ capable of being renewed and it will overcome every difficulty.”
As we continue to reflect on love and marriage in our culture, let us remember that this call to love is not reserved for married couples, but for all Christians. Every act of service and sacrifice made for others is the living out a life of discipleship. Love is hard. But the same Christ who knelt before his disciples and washed their feet, the same Christ who multiplied the wine at the Wedding Feast at Cana, enables us to live this love as we pick up our crosses, daily, to follow him. Let us entrust ourselves and our relationships to the Bridegroom who makes all things new.

Question for Reflection: How can you practice the sometimes difficult love Christ calls us to in your life today?

For more resources on Marriage and Family, please click here.
 

The authentic Christian life resounds with love. Beyond any fleeting attraction or fondness, this love is not meant to be hoarded, but to be given in charity and service to others. The love of a Christian reflects the love of God, without Whom we would not exist nor would we have the capacity to love beyond the other, lesser creatures of this planet. This love cannot be restricted to a single day on the calendar but is meant to flow freely every day at every hour through every difficulty and joy, every sorrow and labor, and every moment of pain and peace. It is love which motivates us not only to live for others, but always for the glory of God.
 
Normally, the marital love between a man and a woman manifests and literally takes on new life in the conception of a child. That child adds another wonderful dimension to the love of married life that encompasses parenthood. Years of teaching, correcting, protecting, caring for, playing with, cherishing, and feeding children are physical and emotional applications of love purposed with raising them as members of the domestic church. Eventually, the outpouring of parental love for children can be reciprocated by them in selfless acts of charity, gratitude, joy, or other expressions of affection. Think of the times your parents would beam at seeing your room tidy without asking, warmly embrace you, offer a surprise gift, or watch you shine at school or on the field. Similarly, the example of love shown between parents is not lost on children. This example imprints the strength of the sacrament of marriage—especially during times of difficulty or stress—and encourages children to better appreciate and actively participate in the love of family life. For example, chores or other labors may be done more freely as intrinsically valuable to the functioning of the domestic church; without love, children might only begrudgingly pick up after themselves when forced.
 
How does love otherwise radiate through family life? The eyes which looked upon the spouse on the wedding day can continue to hold the same gaze of awe-filled love through later moments of despair or pain. The hands which exchanged wedding rings can embrace one another with tenderness, consolation, joy, or mercy. They can also be used in service to the poor, the lonely, or the dying. The lips which uttered sacred vows can impart wisdom, praise, blessings, or part in radiant smiles. Just as God lovingly created the human body down to the smallest detail as “good”, so too can the body we have been gifted be utilized to facilitate God’s love among loved ones and neighbors.
 
Perhaps the first lesson your parents taught you was that God is love. By virtue of our baptism, we have become adopted sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father. As such, every answer to our prayers is entirely out of love, regardless of the result. Similarly, our parents, having been entrusted with caring for us, draw upon the love in their marriage to instruct, guide, nourish, or chastise. While our parents’ love may be imperfect, we can look upon the perfect example of the love of the Trinity to shape our applications of love to transcend human limitations.
 
As St. Paul famously wrote, “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” If it did not, how could any of us be forgiven for our sins against each other or God? How would salvation history exist without love? Authentic marriage or family life is not sustainable without love. And yet, our human limitations may restrict our application of love in certain circumstances. That is why love must be renewed. It must deepen over time to reflect the experiences of life and extend to others. Couples may go on date nights, retreats, vacations, or other activities which can foster relaxation and various communications of love. Similarly, we are reminded of God’s love at each Mass, in which recalling the ultimate Love on the cross helps us receive spiritual renewal to offer that same love to all we encounter. The spiritual renewal we attain allows us to recall the presence of God in our daily lives at every moment and to live up to the potential He calls us to. If our vocation is religious life, then we can hold steadfast to the rules of the order to which we belong and rejoice in our sacred calling. If we are single, we can allow ourselves to increase our capacity to love or extend it to others. If we are married, we can reaffirm the gifts of love in the family— raising children in the Faith or cherishing our spouse.
 
In doing so, we realize that love does not come from ourselves. Rather, God, the source of all love, dwells in our hearts and provides the strength and courage to open ourselves in vulnerability to another. Our love may be spurned, mocked, or tested, but just as God will not refuse His infinite mercy to the hardest of sinners’ hearts, so too are we called to rise above human judgements or inclinations and extend to others the great gift of love God Himself never tires of bestowing.

Question for Reflection: Who are some examples of authentic Christian love in your own life?

For more resources on Marriage and Family, please click here. 

Near the persevered room of St. Vincent Pallotti in the Generalate of the Society of the Catholic Apostolate (Pallottine Fathers and Brothers) in Rome is a small museum. It contains many personal items of Pallotti. Most are very mundane – his umbrella, hat, shoes, habit, chalice and paten, but in a small glass case there are some things that are unique. Among them is a container with small slips of paper and pieces of wax (see the video “What is a Saint?” for more on that) and a notebook with mathematical formulae and assorted notes. Looking more closely, one can see that it is differential calculus. Pallotti was pondering the concept of infinity. He was using mathematics in his ongoing search for God.
 
Pallotti experienced God as “infinite” and “incomprehensible,” and yet also as “infinite love and mercy.” His intimate experience of God caused him to modify the Ignatian motto of Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the Greater Glory of God) to Ad Infinitam Dei Gloriam (For the Infinite Glory of God). Pallotti desired that all experience God as Infinite Love which is why he created the Union of Catholic Apostolate, an association of lay people, clergy, and religious, to assist the missionary efforts of the Church, revive the faith of Catholics, and engage in works of universal charity. Through word and deed, members of the Union could then be witnesses of God who is Infinite Love.
 
As we celebrate today the feast day of St. Vincent Pallotti, may we be inspired by his life to be bearers of God’s Infinite Love to all those we encounter.
 
May the Charity of Christ urge us on!

To learn more about St. Vincent Pallotti, please click here. 

Henri Nouwen said “Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”
 
On December 27, the Church celebrated the feast of St. John the Apostle - referred to in the Gospel of John as the beloved disciple. A few short days ago, we also celebrated the great and holy feast of Christmas: the turning point in history. On that night in Bethlehem, when God became a little baby, He made it possible for us to truly become “the beloved.”

St. John shows us that to truly love and become “the beloved,” we must stick by each other even through suffering. It was John, along with Our Lady and Mary Magdalene, who remained with Our Lord until His final moments at Calvary.

St. John’s Gospel not only gives us one of the most profound recollections of the crucifixion, but it also reminds us that we love others “because He first loved us.” As Christians, everything in our lives must first flow from a lived relationship with Love incarnate, Jesus Christ, whose birth we celebrate this Christmas season. This relationship with Christ enables us to know what St. John knew: Jesus makes all things new, all burdens light.
 
Before we can believe the truth of being beloved, I have found that we often believe a lot of lies. Our world and culture - not to mention the Evil One - tell us that we aren’t good enough, that we are unworthy of love. But to truly love and be loved is to live in the truth of who God says we are and the truth of who He calls us to be.

The truth of our identity is that we are beloved sons and daughters, called to stay close to the manger AND the cross and commissioned to share the Good News that we are called to love because He first loved us.
 
Today as we are still reveling in the shadow of Christ’s manger in Bethlehem, let’s ask Our Lord, Our Lady, and St. John to fill us with the greatest truth of our existence: our identity as beloved.
 

 
As we continue through the Lenten season, it is natural that the newness of Lent has worn off. Maybe, if you’re like me, you have caught yourself on more than one occasion frustrated for “failing” at your Lenten plan. The reality is that Lent is not just about what we can do in terms of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, but who we are becoming. In short, Lent is meant to teach us to love—to love in the desert, to love the daily crosses of life, and ultimately to join with Love Himself through the joy of the Resurrection. Let’s spend some time reflecting on these three types of love.
 
To love in the desert. Even after the 30 years He spent in Nazareth, before He started His public ministry, our Lord withdrew to the desert by Himself for 40 days to pray, fast, and prepare for his mission. And as He did, we must also do. If we can encounter the love of God in the solitude of our hearts and in the quiet of prayer with Him, we will be better equipped to be able to share His love with the world. Time spent with God in the desert enables us to go out on mission. Lent reminds us—even in the deserts—that God is faithful through it all.
 
To love the crosses. A few weeks ago, a wise priest told me to not just carry my cross, but pray for the grace to also love the cross. I’ll be honest, I shrugged the advice off initially. I don’t think I’m alone: it’s natural for us to struggle with our crosses and wonder why the Lord allows them to happen. But the beauty of Lent is that our prayer, fasting and almsgiving can allow our hearts to grow in this grace, be transformed by our crosses, and even come to love them. Let us meditate on the Passion of Christ throughout the Lenten season, asking Christ to help us embrace our cross in order to join Him in the glory of His Resurrection.
 
To join with Love Himself. The good news for us is that the Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. For this reason, Christ instituted the Church in the Upper Room after his Resurrection. When we unite ourselves and our sufferings with the Body of Christ, we are not only participating in the mission of Lent, but the mission of our lives as Christians. We are called to build one another up throughout our lives of faith, including offering our prayers and sacrifices for the benefit of the Church. That being said, the point of these 40 days is not just to journey with each other, but towards Christ. He is our greatest mission partner, our chief example, and the cause for our joy. To join with Love Himself is the great adventure of Lent and to share in the joy of the resurrection is our great privilege as Christians.
 
May He find us worthy this Lent of learning to love like Him.
 
Questions for Reflection: How is your Lenten journey going thus far? Have you been able to keep your Lenten commitments of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving? Take a few moments to reflect on how you’re growing this Lent.

For more resources to guide you along your Lenten journey, click here. 
 

In my prayer life recently, God has been speaking to me a lot about obedience. Obedience to Him, to my family, to my job, to my responsibilities. Perhaps it is because I’m not very good at some of my responsibilities, or maybe it is a call to become more in tune with and to pray for God’s will. 
 
In today’s Gospel (Mark 1:40-45), Jesus heals a man who comes to him asking to be cleaned of his leprosy. Upon healing him completely, Jesus says, “See that you tell no one anything, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed; that will be proof for them” (Mark 1:44). Instead, the man “began to publicize the whole manner” where it made it “impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly” (Mark 1:45).
 
How often are we disobedient like this man? How often has Jesus told us something that we missed completely? How often have we placed our desires and actions above what God wills for us? By his choice to disobey Jesus, instead of exalting God, the healed man exalts himself. The Catechism tells us that “sin sets itself against God's love for us and turns our hearts away from it” and that sin is “opposed to the obedience of Jesus.” When the healed man ignored Jesus’ directions, it furthered him from fully understanding God’s love and mercy for him. For us, too, when we sin and choose to follow our will over the Lord’s, we distance ourselves from God’s love. 
 
How can we know God’s will for us? It is not always so easily stated to us as it was to the man who was healed of his leprosy. To know God’s will, we must pray with open and patient hearts. Pope Francis recommends that we pray for the desire to follow God’s will, to know his will and to follow it. The saints are also great models of teaching us to pray and love God’s will for us. They are in complete union with Jesus in heaven because they learned to desire, love, and follow God’s will for them throughout their earthly lives. Look to any saint, and they will show you obedience. For example, St. Maximilian Kolbe was martyred, taking the place of a man who was to be killed in Auschwitz. Before that, his writings show that his prayer life was repeatedly focused on knowing the will of God. St. Maximilian Kolbe said, “Obedience is the one and the only way of wisdom and prudence for us to offer glory to God... Let us love our loving Father with all our hearts. Let our obedience increase that love, above all when it requires us to surrender our own will. Jesus Christ crucified is our sublime guide toward growth in God’s love.” 
 
St. Maximilian Kolbe’s words and sacrifice point us towards obedience, and teach us that obedience helps us to grow in God’s love. So perhaps my prayers that are revealing obedience as a theme are leading me to stretch my heart to know and share God’s love. Through obedience, I can know Christ’s peace and mercy—the same love he felt when the man with leprosy came to him; the same love he felt when he died on the cross. It is my prayer that as the desire for obedience touches my heart, you too may know the love and joy that comes from asking God to desire his will, know his will, and follow his will. 
 
Questions for Reflection: What are some ways you can grow in obedience to God’s will this year? Are there any saints who inspire you by their willingness to follow Christ?
 

 
As I write this, the weather is gray and cold. It has been raining for what feels like forever, though more accurately it’s been about a week. I miss the summer. I miss a lot of things, and people, when October rolls around. It seems to be a month made for melancholy.
 
Perhaps it is because two of my grandparents died during separate Octobers in my childhood. This month has always been a time of missing them, remembering the past, and grieving. I was eight the October my paternal grandmother died, and she was the dearest person in the world to me.
 
Grief is a word we use to describe the feeling of missing someone or something after they are lost to us forever. We grieve days that are behind us, relationships that never grew, opportunities that we missed. But most of all, we grieve persons. Death seems to be the end of all that is, the end of all who is. It is unbreakable, unbreachable, unending.
 
As Christians, we do not think in those terms because they have been proven false. Jesus Christ, as well as Mother Church, tells us that death is not the end. It is an act of hope to believe this. Death only appears to be final and absolute and unknowable. Through Christ’s resurrection, God has revealed that death is not our final end. It is often hard for us to trust what happens next because we simply cannot know it with the certitude with which we know this world. The Church speaks of the Four Last Things, with Death being the first or entryway to the other three: Judgment, Heaven, and Hell. But that is another topic. What about those of us who remain on earth while a loved one has gone ahead? What do we do? How do we live with loss?
 
C.S. Lewis told a friend who had recently lost his beloved wife, “Sad you must be at present. You can’t develop a false sense of a duty to cling to sadness if­– and when, for nature will not preserve any psychological state forever– sadness begins to vanish” (A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken). Of course we feel sad as a result of someone’s death. A loved one who brought joy and lightness into our hearts has gone, and our sadness is a natural response. There is no Christian commandment forbidding sadness. It is an emotion, which is neither good nor evil. Emotions just are. They come and go, washing over us. If we choose to take them too deeply within ourselves, however, emotions can become dangerous. We can drown in grief, for example, if we make it our cosmology. And the Christian is commanded to have the same mind as Jesus Christ. He sees the world with the eyes of resurrected love.
 
While we may not always be able to choose our emotions, we can choose our attitude and our response to them. Joy, even in the midst of sadness, “comes of being loved” wrote Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est. And love has conquered death in a singular act. Jesus, the Christ, the Second Person of the Trinitarian Godhead, the Son of the Father, died on a cross to redeem us from an unredeemable bondage because he loved us and desired us to be with him. It is to that reality that we must orient ourselves. Grief can too easily turn us inward. Like a black hole, it can devour everything surrounding it so that it is the only thing left. Love perpetually calls us out of ourselves, and asks us to give ourselves as a gift, even and especially in the hard times. I do not doubt that God’s heart broke when humanity sinned the first time, and breaks again at every subsequent sin. But God did not become consumed by grief at our fall. God is love, and love gives of itself to the beloved unceasingly. Therefore, God acted in order to redeem mankind.
 
I want to tell you more about the process of grief, of going through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, of reaching acceptance, but I don’t know your process. I don’t know your specific loss, which we all must face at various times of our lives. That’s okay. We can hold a space for each other as we go through the process of grieving. We can let each other remember and smile and laugh and cry and long for the missing one, repeating this process as necessary. As a recent homily reminded me, our God does not tolerate idols in our lives. Our grief cannot consume our love, or else it makes a golden calf of our beloved. May our love of God, united with the love our dearly departed, orient us to the loving heart of the Father. May we know that this present sadness is not the end.
 
Question for Reflection: Have you grieved the loss of something in your own life? How has your faith impacted your experience of grief?
 

 
Changing diapers. Making dinner menus for the week. Vacuuming raisins out of the deepest crevices of the car’s backseat. Often, the daily tasks of running a household and raising a toddler feel more to me like mindless drudgery than fruitful and productive labor. My inner monologue ends up sounding like this: My husband works eight hours a day at a meaningful job that he enjoys, and his income puts a roof over our heads, food on the table, and clothes on our backs. And what do I do? Sweep floors that are just going to instantly get dirty again and scrub toothpaste off the bathroom mirror—which is my own fault because I left the toddler alone while he brushed his teeth this morning.
 
Lately I had found myself searching for examples of saints whose primary vocation was parenthood and family life. And I began to read The Journey of Our Love, a collection of letters written by St. Gianna Beretta Molla and her husband, Pietro.
 
Prior to reading the letters, all I had known about St. Gianna was that one of her pregnancies was extremely difficult and that she ultimately sacrificed her life for her child. I thought this was the only reason that she was canonized in 2004. But as I read the letters St. Gianna and her husband wrote to each other, I gradually realized that Gianna’s self-sacrifice was only the final heroic act of a life filled with profound joy and holiness.
 
On the surface, the Mollas’ married life looks quite typical for the contemporary western world: St. Gianna was a pediatrician who split her time between her clinic and her duties at home, while Pietro traveled frequently for his job as an upper-level administrator for a manufacturing company. Their older children suffered from persistent, but not life-threatening, health issues like severe reflux and hip misalignment. Where the Mollas differ from most modern parents is in their deep devotion to God and in the trust, love, and joy that flowed from placing Christ at the center of their lives.
 
The more I read of St. Gianna and Pietro’s letters, the more I was struck by my own inability to see the greatness that is possible within the most mundane, repetitive, and irritating aspects of domestic life. St. Gianna and her husband did not found any religious orders, nor were they publicly martyred for their faith, nor were they brilliant theologians. Rather, they were ordinary people whose love for Christ permeated every aspect of their lives.
 
One of my favorite examples of St. Gianna’s quiet holiness is when one of Pietro’s overseas business trips, already over a month long, was extended by several weeks. Gianna initially reacted as many wives would do and “had a good cry” (page 209). But then, rather than wallowing in her loneliness or in the difficulties of parenting alone, she writes that she “offered this sacrifice to the Lord for you [Pietro] so that he might protect you during your continual flights, and for the baby we are expecting, so it will be born beautiful and healthy.”
 
Pietro, too, often writes that while he suffers from the long separations from his wife and children, he offers those sufferings so that he and his family will continue to be blessed. Neither St. Gianna nor her husband ever express a sense of doubt about the apparent banality of their lives—they accept their ordinary trials with grace and humility, and are quick to turn their frustrations or sadness back into thankfulness for the good God has granted them in their lives.
 
Reading the Mollas’ letters helped me see that, like St. Gianna and her husband, I am called to be holy in every aspect of my ordinary and seemingly unremarkable life— whether it be caring for a toddler with a persistent cold or doing my fifth load of laundry in two days. For most of us, we are called to be saints not through grand gestures of faith, but in the love with which we embrace the ordinary burdens of our everyday lives.
 
Question for Reflection: What are some ordinary tasks in your everyday life that can help you become an everyday saint?
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"Don't look for big things. Just do small things with great love."

Many of us are familiar with these words from Mother Teresa, a reminder that we will be measured against the depth of our love, not the number of great deeds we’ve done. It’s also become a personal mantra whenever I think about the idea of missionary discipleship.
 “We become missionary disciples when we take our encounter with Jesus Christ out into the world,” the United States Bishops stated in their document Living as Missionary Disciples. They continue, “As a Church, we are called to be missionary disciples who know and live the faith and confidently share the Gospel.” 

My part-time work with the Catholic Apostolate Center keeps me plugged into the ministry world, but whenever I step out of the “Catholic bubble,” evangelization gets difficult fast. It’s easy to talk about missionary discipleship in theoretical terms among engaged Catholics. The call to actually be a missionary disciple, however, becomes a challenge when I’m the only engaged Catholic in the room.

During my day job as a civil engineer, I encounter coworkers and clients from all kinds of backgrounds. The opportunity to evangelize is enormous, but where do I start? If we’re all called, by virtue of our baptism, to “go make disciples of all nations,” then aren’t I supposed to be evangelizing everyone I meet? How am I supposed to do that without making people think I’m a kooky religious fanatic? Being Catholic is at the core of who I am—but, to many, that does sound kind of kooky!

So how do I do this missionary discipleship thing? How do I evangelize without going too deep too fast? I once heard someone compare evangelization to trying to teach particle physics: You don’t just start with the Higgs boson and expect people to get it. You start with the basics. The same goes for the mission of evangelizing the world. Start with the basics. Or, as Mother Teresa said, “Just do small things with great love.”

I don’t have to pass out copies of Magnificat or start a lunchtime Bible study in order to be a missionary disciple. All it takes is planting a seed here and there: keeping an icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on my desk, silently offering a prayer before lunch (when I don’t forget!), even simply treating my coworkers with kindness and respect. All of these small things add up when done with great love. People notice and they wonder: “Why?”

I vividly remember an encounter I once had in a Chick-fil-A. The cashier, friendly as they always are, randomly asked what church I went to. I told him, wondering aloud what made him ask. Without missing a beat, he said, “Because your light shines.” Ironically, I was in the midst of a rough patch and had taken the semester off of school. In spite of my own trials, all it took was treating the guy like a person in order to elicit that response.

We’re so tempted to think that big accomplishments and programs are all that command people’s attention, but it’s really the opposite. The big stuff fades from our memories faster than a sensational Internet meme or viral cat video. But the little things people do, the kindness and love with which we regard one another, that’s what’s remembered. And that’s what opens people’s hearts to God.

Missionary discipleship isn’t rocket science, or even particle physics. It’s about doing small things with great love.  

Question for Reflection: What are some small things you can do to spread the love of God wherever you go?

For more information on how you can be a Missionary Disciple, visit the Catholic Apostolate Center’s resource page here.
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Click here to read Living as Missionary Disciples: A Resource for Evangelization.