Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year C
Angela of Foligno is at once fascinating and strange. She died in 1309, and was beatified 400 years later in 1701. It took another 300 years to become Saint Angela via Pope Francis’ application of a mechanism called equivalent canonisation in 2013, a simple declaration without all the paperwork and drama, instituted by Pope Benedict XIV in the eighteenth century. Pope Benedict XVI declared Hildegard of Bingen a saint in the same way. Thomas More and Boniface became saints like that too, well before Hildegard and Angela.
It took the Church a long time to recognise Angela as a universal model of holiness. One reason is certainly, that she was a mystic. Mystics are particularly difficult to ‘authenticate’ because they are tuned in to a sphere of reality different from the ‘ordinary’ spiritual one.
Of course, once you are different, you are too difficult for most of us to understand and appreciate. In this case, your mysticism does not fit in too comfortably with our religious language and practices, which are tried and tested.
What has all this got to do with the lady in the gospel today, the one thrust into history by the keepers of the tried and tested religious ways? And with Jesus?
Well, the three of them have adultery in common.
Adultery was the place where the two of them encountered the healing touch of Jesus. We know the gospel lady’s story, for it is today’s gospel. Angela’s relations while married were, shall we say, not few and far between. When she was forty years old, she began her repentance from this disparate life, which did not bring her the happiness she already had in husband and children. She began to encounter visions of God and of heaven that were as terrifying as they were consoling.
I couldn’t see any love in it. So I completely lost the love I received during the consolations. I realized I was created for non-love. The most secret goodness, God, can only be seen through this kind of darkness. When I am in this darkness, I cannot remember anything that is human, not even the God-man or anything from my life. Yet I can see everything. At the same time, nothing. When the vision withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-man, who draws me to him with great gentleness, saying to me at times: “You are me and I am you.”
Of another vision:
God is here in me; as He also is in a demon and in an angel, in heaven and in hell, in good deeds and in adultery or murder, in beauty as in horror. In all that is, there is God. I am completely free, I cannot sin anymore. God is the soul’s true existence.
One would expect that Angela would live happily ever after, for now she repented and gave her life to loving God and her neighbour. Three years after her repentance, her mother died. Not long after that her husband passed away. Then their children, every single one. Her dark night of the soul.
To Angela and her gospel mate, one can imagine, the encounter with the Lord was what the words of the prophet Isaiah in our first reading today describes:
Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new!
Nothing is impossible for God, as the lives of Angela and the gospel lady, and by the way, of Mary mother of the Lord and Elizabeth her aged cousin, show.
Jesus came to Angela and the gospel lady in their place of shame. He encountered them there, in their place of horror. His presence to them in that very place made it a place of beauty. For it was there that they heard the words of forgiveness and healing and acceptance:
Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on, do not sin anymore.
It takes time to turn around. Because we doubt and we feel embarrassed. We go to confession, but refrain from naming the big and shameful one, or we whisper it, hoping that Father will not hear it.
No matter how shameful our sin and how horrible our place of sin, Jesus comes to us even there. That is the beautiful mercy of God, and it is painful to see and experience, for what have I done to deserve such love? What am I to you, Lord?
Pope Benedict XVI said in October 2010 during a Wednesday audition with Blessed Angela of Foligno as his theme that God uses a thousand ways to reveal Himself to everyone, to show us that He is present because He loves us. When Angela repented and looked back on her life, she realized that there was no other way for her to return to God except through her specific sins. It was as if her sins were the very instruments of God to lead her to Him with patience.
Now, now, it is the Lord who speaks, come back to me with all your heart, for I am all tenderness and compassion.