When His disciples asked Him how to pray, Jesus taught them the Our Father. In it we pray: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We pray that like Jesus we might be obedient to the Father, carrying out the will of the Father in our lives. One part of that will is to forgive those who sin against us.
Following the Father’s will is not always easy. It certainly wasn’t for Jesus. Yet, like Jesus, we can depend on the help of the Holy Spirit. In Isaiah 55:10-11, God says, “For just as from the heavens the rain and the snow come down and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, giving seed to him who sows and bread to him who eats, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.”
God’s will is accomplished in us, whenever we co-operate with it. The work of our prayer is to ask God to open our hearts to know His will and to give us the courage to carry it out.
On March 3, we celebrated the Memorial of St. Katherine Drexel. St. Katherine give us an example of what it is to follow God’s will so as to produce good fruit. She came from a prominent Philadelphia family and her father was a banking executive. When he died, Katherine and her sister inherited the family fortune. Katherine responded to the call of our Father to do God’s will on earth as it is in heaven, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to work among African and Native Americans. This was at the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th century – a time when racial discrimination, lynchings, the KKK and Jim Crow laws were rampant. Her congregation of sisters was also one of the very few who welcomed women from those communities to join them. She also helped to found Xavier University in New Orleans, the first historically black Catholic college.
Closer to our Charlotte home, when the Benedictines were building the new St. Peter Church in 1892, Sr. Katherine, then in her mid-30s, gave the money to buy the pews that parishioners continue to sit in to this day. The one stipulation was that black Catholics could sit in them, too. This was certainly unusual at that time in Charlotte.
St. Katherine had the obedience and the courage to see that God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. Today her example and gift are honored at St. Peter’s in a bas-relief to the left of the altar. There St. Katherine is caught up in prayer and ecstasy as she contemplates a Jesus and Mary with African-American features. She knew that God’s will is to reconcile all peoples into the one Body of Christ, and she acted to carry out His will.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Jesuit Father John Michalowski is parochial vicar of St. Peter Church in Charlotte.