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Honoring Our Laborers
We’ve reached the symbolic end of summer, Labor Day weekend. We use these three days to finish up vacations, do back-to-school shopping, fire up the barbecue one more time and gear up to go back to the daily grind with a renewed spirit.
But Labor Day wasn’t instituted so everyone could have an extra day to rest and play catch up at the end of summer. Rather it was meant to be a celebration of the working class people who contributed to the nation’s spirit, prosperity and well being.
New York City observed the first Labor Day holiday on Tuesday, Sept. 5, 1882 with a Manhattan street parade. A dozen years later, with the growth of labor organizations, Congress declared the first Monday of each September a national holiday in honor of working class people.
In his column this week, Bishop DiMarzio reminds us that “the moral dimensions of work and workers’ rights are at the center of our Catholic social tradition. … the dignity of work and the rights of workers are central elements of Church teaching that continue to challenge all Catholics.”
American workers know they are entitled by law to certain rights in their workplaces — among them are equal employment opportunities, safe conditions, fair wages, health benefits and job security. What we easily forget is that these rights were made possible by innumerable men and women who organized into unions to fight for these privileges.
This weekend, let us remember that our immigrant ancestors weren’t entitled to these benefits when they came to this country. Let us also recognize that these rights are still not enjoyed by every segment of our society.
Each day, millions of immigrant laborers are exploited but are too fearful to say or do anything about it because they have families to feed and rent to pay. They contribute to our society’s social and economic strength while sacrificing their dignity in the hopes that their children will have a better life and never have to do the same.
As Catholics, we know that human rights and dignity are granted by God — not the city, state or government, nor are they dependent on our national origin, race, sex, creed, and least of all, what documents we possess.
Despite Congress’ inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform, there are glimmers of hope — modest wage increases and groups of workers who are organizing themselves and getting results.
The challenge that lay ahead of us all — as Catholics and Americans, Bishop DiMarzio notes, is to, in our own ways, “defend the lives, dignity and rights of workers.”
One step you can take this weekend is to join the New York State Catholic Conference at www.nyscatholicconference.org.
Mother Teresa’s ‘Dark Night’
As the 10th anniversary of her death nears, seeing Mother Teresa’s care-worn face on the cover of Time magazine with the words “The Secret Life of Mother Teresa” last week was intriguing.
The “secret” dealt with Blessed Mother Teresa’s decades-long “crisis of faith,” which has been documented in a book of her letters, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” edited by Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded.
Reading that Mother Teresa endured an almost 50-year long “dark night” of the spirit during which she could not feel the presence of God is at first breathtaking. How was she able to work among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta for years if she did not feel God beside her? In fact, the “absence” she writes about in her letters to a number of spiritual confidants began about the time she started her work there and only lifted briefly for a five-week period in 1959, only to descend again like the night.
Theologians write that most saints go through a “darkness” before moving on to a higher stage of spirituality. But for Mother Teresa the darkness lasted until the end of her life.
In a letter in 1951 Mother Teresa wrote of her desire to share in Jesus’ Passion. “I want to drink ONLY from His chalice of pain,” she wrote. Perhaps she received exactly what she had desired. Even Jesus felt abandoned by his own Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In her feelings of abandonment, perhaps Mother Teresa was able to empathize even more so with the poor of Calcutta who she served, for surely they are abandoned by society.
Father Kolodiejchuk is Mother Teresa’s postulator, the person with the charge of putting together materials for her case for sainthood. He has expressed his amazement at the depth of her love for God even when she could not feel His presence.
It is humbling to imagine her unselfish love. She was not concerned with what she was getting back or what she was feeling. She continued to live among and work with the poor. She didn’t turn away because she was not feeling loved or appreciated.
We are all called to holiness. Sometimes it is easy to use the excuse that we are not “saints” like Mother Teresa, as though she was given some extra help to which we don’t have access. Now, for us, in these letters there is the undeniable realization that in her holiness, Mother Teresa was at all times human. She didn’t get extra help in being holy, but rather her spiritual struggle may have been greater than ours.
It reminds us, too, that God is always with us, even when we may not feel His presence. Indeed, maybe that is when He carries us, when we are unaware.
From these letters, some may see a weakness of faith, but others will see a great spiritual strength. In her humanity, Mother Teresa may have felt abandoned by God, but she reached into her soul and found there a great strength. She held on to her faith in God even when she felt no reason to do so. She went on to do that day after day for almost 50 years under the most desperate of conditions.
For those who have the warmth of love so often around them, it makes life’s daily tribulations seem small. When life seems unbearable we should, like Mother Teresa, live by faith and not by feelings.
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