Novena of Grace: St. Francis Xavier

I. END OF MAN, 1

I. The Wisdom of True-Heart

Man does not change much over the years, even if we reckon by centuries. Four hundred years ago, a Buddhist monk summed up much of the heartache and the heartbreak that is on Broadway today, and in my own city of Manila, and, in fact, everywhere. His name was Ninjit, which means “True-Heart,” and he was the superior of a community of Buddhist monks in the town of Kagoshima in Japan. It was there, when Ninjit was eighty years old, that Francis Xavier found him.

Oddly enough, they became good friends. They had long talks together. Francis Xavier, who was not a man to mince words, told Ninjit that his religion was a false religion. This did not offend Ninjit because it was true. He himself did not believe in his gods. He pretended that he did to the people, because he was paid for doing so; but in his heart he had no faith in them. He doubted whether there were any gods at all.

Francis Xavier was different. He not only believed in his God, he was in love with Him. So much in love that he had traveled across half a world, through burning sand and shrieking waters, wild winds and blinding sun to make Him known to all men, to men like Ninjit, that they, too, might fall in love with Him.

Ninjit could not but admire so deep a faith, so great a love. He wished he could believe and love like that. Then, perhaps, life for him would have a meaning, and his old heart find peace. So he mused, until the voice of Francis Xavier startled him.

“Which would you rather have, Ninjit,” asked Francis Xavier, “past youth or present age?”

“Youth,” cried the old man. “Youth.”

“Why, Ninjit?”

“Because then the body is strong, and a man can do what his heart desires.”

“But which part of the voyage does the sailor like?” asked Francis Xavier very gently. “The beginning, with the hurricanes still before him, or the end, when he has sighted port?”

Ninjit smiled.

“I see what you mean,” he answered slowly. “But that is not for me. What is my port? I do not know. For him who knows, and to whom the port is open, the end of the voyage is the best. But I, I do not know whither I go, or whether I shall arrive.”

This was the sum of the wisdom of Ninjit. This was all the truth that True-Heart knew. And the wisdom of our generation, is it not as hollow? The hearts of our generation, are they not as empty? Aside from those who share our Catholic Faith, how many people there are in this great city who would not cry out with the old monk, “I know not whither I go, or whether I shall arrive!”

I think we should begin this Novena to Francis Xavier by thanking God for giving us the Faith of Francis Xavier. Because we have this Faith, life for us has a meaning. We know exactly whence we came ― from God; and whither we go ― to God. We know that God made us for Himself; and so if we had God alone and nothing else, we would still be supremely happy; while if we had all things else, all the riches, pleasures, honors of the world, but not God, we would be miserable forever.

This is our Faith; and we have only to look about us to realize what a great gift it is. To those who gaze at the pleasures of the world from afar off, they may have some attraction; but you who see them close at hand, your eyes are not deceived by the glare and glitter; you know exactly what these things are worth, and what is their final price in blood and tears and broken lives.

Not here is the ending of the pursuit of happiness; not here, not in any creature, but only in God. He is the longed-for port; in Him alone, after our perilous voyage, is still water and a quiet haven, as Francis Xavier said to True-Heart, four hundred years ago.

II. END OF MAN, 2

II. Place, New York ― Time, The Present

The saints of God are a motley crew, when you come to think of it. If we take the Jesuit saints as a representative cross-section of the population of heaven, we shall find among them a shoemaker's son, John Berchmans; a duke, Francis Borgia; a businessman, Alfonso Rodriguez; a captain of infantry, Ignatus Loyola; a lawyer, Bernardine Realino; and a college professor, Francis Xavier. You will find such a crowd in the subway any day. There is no aristocracy of sanctity. Anybody ― anybody at all ― is likely to become a saint.

The fact is, everybody, you and me included, is destined for sanctity. I do not think that we shall all be canonized; but then, canonization doesn't make a saint, any more than the Congressional Medal of Honor makes a hero. Canonization is a public recognition of sanctity, just as the medal is a public recognition of valor. There must be thousands of saints who have never been, and never will be canonized. So, too, there are thousands of your own sons and brothers beneath the sod of Europe, beneath the palm trees of my land, who will never get a medal for the brave way they died.

The words of Our Lord, “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” were not addressed to a chosen few. They were addressed to all. Now Christ would never have set a task for all which only a few could perform. So then, we all have the power to be perfect. God has given to each of us the stuff that makes a saint.

This is a very uncomfortable truth. This puts us on the spot. It means that this business of being perfect, of becoming a saint, is up to us. If we fail in this business ― and it is the chief business of our lives ― we cannot blame God, we cannot blame our friends, we cannot blame our enemies, we can only blame ourselves. Shakespeare has said it, and it is true. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”

We can't get away from it. We have all got to be saints. But what is a saint? There are two very common errors about sanctity. Sometimes we get the idea that a saint is a weakling. It crops up now and then in our conversation. We say, “He (or she) is a regular little saint.” Why “little”? If a saint is “little,” then is a sinner “big”? Does sinning make one tall, handsome, strong bursting with energy? The poet Swinburne had the same idea. He sang of “the lilies and languors of virtue, the roses and raptures of vice.” You may recall Chesterton's reply to this: “If you think virtue is languor, just try it and see.”

That is a good test. Try it. Try being a “little” saint. Francis Xavier was a “little” saint. I would like to see the great big sinner ― one of these he-men who “don't go in for all that pious stuff” ― I would like to see him do half the things that “little” Xavier did.

The fact is, that it is sin which is weakness. It is virtue which is strength. Our very manner of speaking proves this. We say that we “yield” to sin. We yield ― the act of a weakling. But we never say that we “yield” to virtue. Virtue is never a surrender. It is always a conquest. It is always a victory. It is derived from the Latin word “vir,” which means a man. To be virtuous is to be a man. That was the Roman way of looking at it. That is also the Catholic way.

The other error about sanctity is that it requires special equipment; equipment that is absolutely essential but very rare. According to this view, the saint is like the atomic physicist. You cannot be an atomic physicist unless you have a cyclotron, and cyclotrons do not grow on trees. So, too, you cannot be saint except in very special circumstances. You must get sent to India, like Xavier; you must live among lepers, like Damien; you must be a nun and have visions, like Margaret Mary. But you cannot be a saint in New York ― oh, no. Saints do not ride in subways, shop at Macy's, or live in Brooklyn.

This is false. You have only to state it to see how false it is. It wasn't his surroundings that made Xavier a saint, any more than it is scenery that makes an actor. A good actor would still be good, even on an empty stage. Xavier in Rome instead of India would still have been Xavier.

They asked Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, one day while he was playing billiards, what he would do if he were told that he would die within an hour. There was no hesitation in the reply.

“I would go right on playing billiards,” said Aloysius.

For it is not what he does that makes a saint. It is how he does it, and for whom. Sanctity is in the heart. To do whatever you are doing with all your heart, as perfectly as you know how, because that is what God wants done ― that is virtue. And to do this from day to day, every day of our lives ― that is sanctity. Xavier did no more than this. We must do no less.

III. SIN AND HELL

III. The Impatient Saint

“Saint in a Hurry” is the English title of a play about Francis Xavier. It means, I think, not that Xavier became a saint in a hurry, but that he gave the impression of being always in a hurry, of being engaged in some work that had to be done, and fast. This is clearer in the title of the Spanish original; El Divino Impaciente, the Impatient Saint. There is paradox here, for patience is almost the first thing we associate with sanctity. Thus we say of whatever makes us lose our tempers that it is “enough to try the patience of a saint.”

But there is one thing with which the saints have no patience whatever. That thing is sin. Sin and what sin leads to: hell. The thought of sin and hell was like a thorn in the side of Xavier, like a lash across his back, driving him beyond the limits of physical endurance in a frantic effort to rescue souls from their clutches.

We find it difficult to understand this fever of impatience. We watch this “saint in a hurry” dashing from Goa to Cochin, from Cochin to Malacca, from Malacca to the Islands of the Moor, then back to Goa, only to streak out once more to Japan...eleven driving, striving, restless years until he fell, a burnt-out meteor, into the waters of the China Sea...and we sit back in our easy chairs and wonder mildly what the excitement was all about.

We are like spectators looking at some bad newsreel shots of firemen in action, in which the excited cameraman forgot to include the fire. The jerky movements, the strained faces, the running back and forth ― of course they are meaningless, they are even funny...because we do not see the fire.

Then ― with Saint Francis Xavier's help ― let us try to see the fire. The fire called hell.

It is a real fire. It burns. With the war so recent a memory, I need not describe to you the grim details of death by burning. You too have looked at pictures of what the flame-throwers did at Okinawa. They are not pleasant to remember, those charred corpses sticking out of their fox-holes, with the yell of pain in their open mouths frozen by the flame. They say it was only a brief agony, two or three seconds at the most. No wonder. Nobody can stand that much pain, and live.

How do you think it would feel if we were to extend those three searing seconds to an hour ― to a day ― to a year ― to infinity? “Where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not extinguished.” It is a peculiar fire, the fire of hell. Our Lord says that it is like salt. Salt is a preservative. So is hell-fire. It doesn't consume what it tortures, it preserves it. Indefinitely. The damned soul is the charred corpse of Okinawa made eternal. But alive; and shrieking.

Some people use the word “hell” quite frequently. It is a pity they do not pause a moment every time they say it, and think of what it means. They would be better men and women if they did.

Hell is the punishment for one mortal sin. One is enough. One unrepented mortal sin. For a pleasure all too brief, for a thrill that does not last, this burning heat, this death without repose. That is the tragedy of it. We lose by sinning that very happiness which we dimly seek in all our sins. We turn on our own vitals that terrible elemental hunger which only God can satisfy.

Seen against the lurid background of the pain, the eternity, the fact of hell, Xavier's feverish impatience, his sense of working against time, takes on full meaning. We can understand a little now why he was willing to go so far, to suffer so much, even for one soul. We do not think it funny that he should steal behind a clump of bushes and lash himself to blood with a scourge, that he might win the grace of repentance for some blaspheming soldier.

We call this the Novena of Grace. What a grace it would be if praying thus together we could obtain for one another ― or for some dear one, perhaps ― something of Xavier's burning vision of sin and hell! If we can bring back even one sinner to repentance, we shall not have prayed these nine days in vain.

IV. DEATH

IV. Sweet Wine

They tell a charming story of Xavier's last days on the island of Sancian. It has all the Hollywood ingredients: a girl, a gambler, a chest of gold, a glass of wine; but very little, I am happy to say, of the Hollywood glamor. You see, it is a real story about real people.

The girl, when Xavier came across her, was wandering about the beach in a kind of daze. It was hardly the place for a nice girl to be. Sancian was a Portuguese trading station. Since the great port of Canton was closed to foreigners, it was here that the Chinese dealers brought their silk and jade. While the merchants haggled, the seamen drank and gambled and fought in the squalid huts that lined the shore. It was no place for a girl.

Xavier got her story soon enough. He could have guessed it. She loved the young seaman very much. But she didn't have the dowry for a proper marriage. So she had just stowed away on his ship. Xavier decided that they should be married right away. But there was the problem of the dowry. In those days a dowry, however small, was almost as necessary as a marriage license is today. So Xavier went to look for a dowry.

This is where the gambler came in. His name was Pedro Velho, and he had known Xavier in Japan. Xavier found him in the middle of a game of chess. Quite a crowd had gathered about the table, because there was a lot of money on the game.

“I need a hundred ducats, Pedro,” said Xavier shamelessly.

“Ah, now, Padre,” complained the gambler. “Can't you wait till a fellow earns it?” Then he laughed and tossed a key on the table. “You know where my strong box is. Take what you want, Father. Just leave me the price of a drink.” Xavier thanked him, picked up the key and left. Years later, Pedro Velho would get very dramatic when he got to this part of the story. He returned to his lodgings that night, he said, sat down before his chest, took out the key which Xavier had sent back, and inserted it in the lock. He knew exactly how much had been in that chest. Ten thousand ducats. He lifted the lid. He counted the money Xavier had left. There were still ― ten thousand ducats.

Scratching his head, he went out to look for the Padre.

“Padre,” he asked, “how much did you take from my chest?”

“A hundred ducats,” was the reply.

“But you can't have!” cried Pedro. “There's nothing lacking from my chest. You can't have, I tell you!”

Xavier smiled and clapped him on the back. “And I tell you, Pedro,” he said, “in the name of God, that nothing will ever be lacking to you as long as you live. You will always have someone to give to you, as you have given to me. And I will make you another promise, Pedro. When sweet wine tastes sour in your mouth, prepare for death, for your time has come.”

Old Pedro Velho used to tell this story often, sitting in his favorite tavern with his fellow traders in the city of Macao. He drank sweet wine always. One night he lifted his glass and sipped it, then put it down again rather suddenly. A shadow of fear crossed his face ― the merest shadow ― it was gone as quickly as it came. When he rose to leave, he was calm and even smiling.”

“Good night, gentlemen,” said Pedro Velho.

They never saw him again alive. But they remembered the glass of wine that stood before his empty chair that night, the glass of sweet wine, which he had barely tested.

I won't spoil the story by extracting any lessons from it. You would like to learn what happened to the girl and her seaman. So would I. Let us hope that they lived happily ever after. And wouldn't it be a fine thing if we all had such a chance to prepare for death as Pedro had? But if we stop to think a bit, we do not lack such warnings. We all have times when the sweet wine of this world tastes sour in our mouth; when the pleasures of this life pale before the prospect of eternity. At such times, God grant us the grace to heed the warning, and to profit by it.

V. PRAYER

V. Broken Toys

We learn how to pray from very great saints or very small children. Parents, we know, have to be constantly on their guard against spoiling their little ones, because it is so hard to refuse anything to a child. Why? Most of all, I think, because it asks with such complete and utter faith. The idea never even enters its head that you may not want to give what it asks for, or may not be able to. Your little son does not run to you with a broken toy and say, “Respected Parent, I doubt very much whether you can do this, and I would rather do it myself because I hate to be so totally dependent on you, but anyway, will you please repair my plaything?” It sounds very logical and sensible, but it is not what he says. What he says is, “Daddy, fix.” So you try; and although you have never before in your life repaired a toy, you discover that you can repair this one, because in your son's eyes, you can do anything.

But children grow up, and soon they cease to believe in the omnipotence of their elders. What they gain in knowledge they lose in simple faith. It is one of the tragedies of growing up.

With God, however, truth does not cost our faith. For God, unlike ourselves, is omnipotent; He really can do anything. And, unlike ourselves, He is never too busy or too tired or too cross to listen to His children. No matter how old you are, if you live to be a hundred, you can still go to Him with the “Daddy, fix” of childhood.

Now it is almost a definition of a saint that he is one who prays like a little child. That was how Francis Xavier prayed; and that is why his prayer were always answered. He cured incurable diseases, brought hopeless sinners to repentance, raised the dead to life. He had that mighty faith of which Our Lord said that if we had even a grain of it as big as a mustard seed, we could move mountains.

We need such faith today. We have to move so many mountains. Not only our individual problems, which are pressing enough, God knows; but problems which concern all of us together, problems which threaten the very existence of society, the very existence of man.

When the war ended, we were pretty sure that this time the peace would last. We would make it last. Some of us were pretty cocky about it. Now, we are not so sure. We are not so cocky. What seemed to us then to be a simple matter of careful planning is beginning to look more like a desperate gamble. We plan and plan, but none of our plans seem to work very well. We mustn't be discouraged. We must continue to work with all our might for peace.

We must keep on planning; but we must also pray. Pray hard; pray all the time; and above all, pray with faith. We have kept God out of our counsels long enough. We have tried to build our lives, our cities, our nations without His help. As if we could! But we thought we were so grown-up; so perfectly capable of taking ourselves; and we are only little children, after all. We can smash our toys, but we cannot fix them. We can hurt ourselves, but we cannot heal our wounds. Now that everything else has failed us, we must do as the Prodigal Son did in Our Lord's story. We must get up and go to our Father.

We have only a very little time. For one of the things we have learned to smash is the atom. We have also learned that the atom can smash us. The scientists have told us what they think of their discovery. They have summed it up in two short, simple, deadly sentences: “There is no secret. There is no defence.” There is no safety, then, even for your great city. There is no hope for any of us, except in God. But though we have good reason to pray, we have no reason to despair. There is nothing new in this. We have only forgotten it for a while. Long ago the Psalmist knew it, and his words may well be the motto of our generation.

“Unless the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Unless the Lord keep the city, he watches in vain that keeps it.”

VI. COMMUNION OF SAINTS

VI. Saints, Incorporated

In the great business of our salvation the Church has always insisted on individual responsibility; but she has been no less emphatic about community of effort. We must each of us fight our battles, but we need not fight our battles alone. No one, not even a hermit, becomes a saint all by himself. Sanctity is a cooperative enterprise. We are all supposed to help one another to heaven. In fact, it is mostly by helping others to save their souls that we save our own. Thus if I make a mess of my life, that is entirely my own fault; but if I make a fine success of it, I cannot take all the credit.

For the saint is not like that old king, Melchisedech, whom Saint Paul describes as “without father, without mother, without genealogy, without beginning of days or end of life.” Nor is he like the goddess of the Greek fairy tale, who sprang full-grown and fully armed from the head of Jove. His is not a solitary grandeur. It is the common achievement of a host of smaller people, many of them anonymous, who by word, by example, by secret prayer, by sheer drudgery, often without his knowledge, helped to make him the man he is.

Clearly, Saint Ignatius had a great deal to do with the making of Saint Francis Xavier. But he was not the only one. The horror for impurity which kept Xavier chaste in the cesspool of the Latin Quarter ― his mother gave him that. His brothers did not have his brilliant mind, so they stayed at home and worked their heads off to keep Francis at the University. It was not easy. A Catholic education was just as expensive then as it is now. The Xavier family was almost bankrupt before they decided, reluctantly, to call the young man home. Then a sister you seldom hear of, Magdalena ― she spoke up. Cost what it may, she said, Francis must stay at Paris. So he did. And met Ignatius. And the rest you know.

Except, perhaps, one other thing. Magdalena was a nun ― a Poor Clare. At the very time that Francis was wrestling with his destiny, trying to decide whether to follow Christ or glory, she was dying in agony at Gandia. She had asked God for such a death. And only God knows what weight her suffering had to tip the scales in favor of Christ.

In honoring Saint Francis Xavier, let us not forget these obscure men and women who helped him climb the heights; these ordinary, run-of-the-mill Catholics who did their duty without fanfare or complaint, and by so doing helped a great saint give glory to God. Let us take heart from their example. Perhaps there is some boy in this church now who will some day become America's Xavier. If there is, it will be because of you; because he shall have drawn from the quiet goodness of your daily lives, from the purity of your women, the courage of your men, the zeal of your priests and sisters, from the great cooperative achievement of your American Catholicism, the very secret of sanctity.

VII. ZEAL

VII. Brother Fernandez

An early biographer of Xavier described his work for souls in India as fishing with a net; in Japan, as fishing with a line. The metaphor is apt. The conversions which followed Xavier's preaching and miracles along the Fishery Coast could be numbered by the thousands. But in the Japanese city of Yamaguchi, this fisher of men had to wait a long time before he got so much as a nibble.

Ignorance of the complicated language was the least of his problems. He set himself doggedly to learn that, as he had learned three or four others. The Japanese laughed at his pronunciation, but they misunderstood him all right. They jammed the street corners to hear him preach. They were curious to know and quick to learn. They asked him many questions, some silly, some profound. His answers pleased them. His doctrine, they said, was reasonable; what he said was all true; they found nothing wrong with it.

But there they stopped. They refused to be baptized. They would not accept with their hearts what they admitted with their minds. All Xavier's eloquence could not move them. It was a stalemate.

Xavier had a companion; a lay brother named Fernandez. Brother Fernandez was a silent man. He had little to say for himself. He worshipped Xavier and shared everything with him. When Xavier was dead they asked him to tell the story of their adventures. Brother Fernandez had much to say about Xavier's journeys, Xavier's labors, Xavier's sufferings. But about Brother Fernandez he had not a word to say.

He used to pinch-hit for Xavier, preaching at the street corners. There was a humorist in the crowd one day. This humorist kept interrupting Brother Fernandez with wise remarks and loud laughter. As Brother Fernandez paid no attention to him, he felt that he was not being properly appreciated. So he stepped up from behind and tugged at the Brother's sleeve, as though he would speak to him in private. When the Brother turned to listen, he spat full on his face.

The crowd growled their disapproval. In their code, such an insult was repaid with death. With grim satisfaction, they waited for the Brother to explode. But Brother Fernandez did not say anything. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the spittle of his face. Then he finished his talk and went home. The crowd broke up. The humorist tried to stir up a little fun, but no one would laugh at him. Everybody was suddenly very thoughtful.

Some time later a samurai presented himself to Xavier. The samurai is the Japanese professional soldier: proud, arrogant, afraid of nothing, very difficult to convert. But this samurai had been in the crowd that day, and now he wanted to be baptized. Many others followed his example. Soon, Xavier was fishing with a net again.

There is an obvious moral to this story. It is the familiar yet always difficult lesson of Christian meekness: of turning the other cheek, of repaying evil not with evil but with good. I leave you to apply this lesson to yourselves. There is another truth involved in the story which I would like to call your attention.

You live in a great city where there are many who are not Catholics. We would like them all to be Catholics. We would like them all to share the blessings of our Faith. For this reason our priests preach to them the truth of our religion; our teachers explain to them its necessity; our writers describe to them its advantages. But preaching is not enough. Teaching is not enough. Good books are not enough. We must back up these fine words with deeds. For when all is said and done, people will judge the truth of our Faith by the way we live it.

They will say to us: “You Catholics claim that yours is the only true way to happiness. You claim that happiness consists in loving God above everything, and everything else for God. Your arguments are very convincing and very eloquent. But if you really believed all this, you would practise it. Do you? Do you always put the interests of God above your own? Do you restrain your passions when they go against law of God? Does your religion really make you kinder to your friends, more forgiving of your enemies, more honest in business, more generous towards the poor? If it doesn't, then you cannot really believe what you say about it. And if you don't believe what you say, how do you expect us to do so?”

The answer to these questions is not words. It is deeds. Your deeds and mine. Such deeds as that which started conversion of the people of Yamaguchi, when a simple Catholic, with one magnificent gesture of meekness, made visible and splendid for a moment the sum and substance of our Faith.

VIII. SUFFERING

VIII. Great Expectations

The troubles of Francis Xavier (and they were many) began on the day that he surrendered himself, body and soul, to the service of God. Before that day, he was a young man of great expectations: a popular professor at the University of Paris, with the prospect of a lucrative canonry in Pamplona, and bubbling in his brilliant brain, a couple of books that would have made him famous through Christendom.

After that day, he was a Jesuit.

To become a Jesuit in those days was to look for trouble, because there were so few of them, only ten, and Saint Ignatius found so many things for them to do, almost all of which spelled trouble. He sent them to argue with heretics, quite a number of whom had very short tempers and very long daggers. He sent them to reform lax nunneries, where tongues were sharper than daggers, and cut more deeply. He sent Salmeron and Broet to Ireland, where, of course, a fight was going on. But Francis Xavier, because he was his dearest friend, he sent on the toughest assignment of all. He sent Francis Xavier to the East.

I need not recount to you what Xavier suffered in the East. You know it well. He was sick unto death on the voyage to India. He was almost killed on the Fishery Coast. He starved in the Moluccas. He journeyed 500 miles through the depth of a Japanese winter, on foot, without proper clothing, to see the Emperor; and the Emperor refused him audience. When he returned to Goa from Japan, his hair had turned completely white. He set sail again, in a leaky boat, through driving storms and scorching calms, this time for China. He never entered that mysterious empire. He died within sight of it, on a miserable island, in a tumble-down hut, racked by fever, abandoned by his friends, without the sacraments of the Church he had served so well.

This is what happened to the brilliant young scholar, the athlete of the Ile de France, the nobleman of Navarre, who gave up his great expectations in order to follow Christ. This was how Christ repaid His faithful servant.

You remember what Our Lord said to Saint Teresa, when she complained that He did not seem to care what happened to her. Our Lord said, “That is the way I treat my friends.” And you remember Teresa's quick rejoinder: “Yes, Lord, and that is why you have so few.”

This is quite true, isn't it? The Lord has so few friends, so few real friends. And we, who would like to count ourselves among these few, we must weigh well and not forget what it means to be His friend.

It does not mean that we will have life easy. Life was not easy for Francis Xavier. Life was not easy for Teresa. Remember what Pa Baxter said to Jody in “The Yearling”? “Life's fine, son; but 'taint easy.” That's how it is with the friends of Christ. We serve a crucified Lord. We cannot avoid crucifixion.

And yet when sorrow comes, when the shadow of pain or failure falls across our life, do we not cry out, “O God, why does this have to happen to me? What have I done, that you should do this to me?”

What have you done? You have served Christ well. You have been His true friend. And so He loves you. And so He shares with you His Cross.

For those of you who are in love ― husbands, wives and sweethearts ― there is not mystery in this. Love in any language spells sacrifice. Poets since the world began have said it: “The course of true love never did run smooth”...”All for love, and the world well lost”...Christ has said it: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” No one knew this better than Francis Xavier. Not only did he not avoid the Cross, he clung to it. He exulted in his sufferings, because they made him more like Him whom he loved so much; and like the Apostles, he went on his way rejoicing that he was accounted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus.

Let us ask him, to teach us to bear our little crosses, if not with joy, at least with patience; knowing well that for God's friends these are not signs of His anger, but tokens of His love; and that for the price of a little pain that passes, we purchase an eternity of joy.

IX. LOVE

IX. This Happy Breed

Before we close this Novena to Saint Francis Xavier, it is only right that we should take at least one brief glance at the cause for which he gave his life and of which he is the heavenly patron: the cause of the missions. And let us not talk of missions in the abstract, but let us talk of missionaries, of those wonderful men and women who have risen from your midst, perhaps from the very pews where you are sitting now, to follow in the footsteps of Francis Xavier. I who lived in a mission country, I have the proud privilege of knowing many of them, and I would like to tell you something about them and what they do.

It may seem strange to you, but the first thing that strikes one about a missionary priest or sister is a kind of deep-down joy. Here, you say to yourself, is a completely happy person. You would think tat living as they do, so far away from home, amid such strange surroundings, often without the very necessities of life, they would be crushed by the cross they carry, or if not crushed, changed to stern unsmiling steel by the effort to hold themselves erect and unbroken. But they aren't. They are happy. And their happiness is contagious.

Why? What is the secret of their serenity? Whence comes their joy? Homeless, scattered broadcast by the needs of the Church over the whole wide world, they are found in far forgotten corners utterly at home. The candid camera catches them teasing a grin from the chubby faces of Chinese orphans, and Japanese guards used to scratch their heads to hear them singing parodies in prison. Defenseless, without armament of any kind, they seem to have forgotten the very name of fear. They cross desert and ice-floe as though it were Fairmount Park, and your liberating armies have found them amid the rubble of bombarded towns, calmly brewing their last pound of coffee for the boys. Vowed to virginity until death, they are not strangers to the miracle of fatherhood and motherhood. All their lives, they are surrounded by laughing children. Boys and girls of every race bring them their hearts and their growing pains and find deep in their kindly eyes a healing that the world cannot give. They are fathers and mothers to whole cities. They stand at the crossroads of the earth ladling hot soup to the starving and binding up the wounds of conquered nations. The sorrows and the sins of men are left daily at their doorsteps, and in return they give, out of the inexhaustible abundance of their hearts, peace.

What is their secret, then? They are in love. They have fallen in love with Christ; renounced for Christ the handful of happiness that the world can offer; and in exchange Christ has given them ― Himself. Poets since the world's beginning have found words of little worth to describe the glory of human love and human friendship; what then must it be to have for Friend and Lover the eternal Son of God?

But you are not strangers to this love. How can you be? It is from your midst that Christ has chosen these chosen ones. And you too are apostles. You may live all your lives on the island of Manhattan, but you need not b strangers to the island of Sancian. You can be converting China. You can be helping us hold, in the Philippines, their little rampart of Christendom.

The same generous love of Christ which inspired Xavier and his successors to the apostleship of action must inspire you to the apostleship of prayer. Your morning offerings, faithfully made, must surely bring to birth a new morning of peace for all the nations of the world ― that longed-for morning of which Christ is the Sun, and Our Lady of Light the splendor, and Xavier so bright a star.

― Fr. Horacio Luis de la Costa y Villamayor, S.J.

Holy Innocents' Church

New York City, 4-12 March 1948

The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier by Peter Paul Rubens. 1617-1618.
Oil on canvas. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.