FINDING SOMETHING BLESSED IN OURSELVES

Pope John Paul II's second visit to Australia was in 1995, when he came to declare that most Australian of saintly people, Mary MacKillop, blessed. The then editor of Madonna, Andy Bullen, reflected on her down-to-earth saintliness.

Icon of Blessed Mary of the Cross by Michael Galovich.

Blessed Mary MacKillop is a phrase that has a fine commonsense ring to it. If she walks tall among us, she wears sensible shoes while doing so. She shows us how to be holy while keeping our feet on the ground, and keeping our heads too. This is very Australian of her. On the whole we are a practical lot, and, please God, we will find something blessed in ourselves by looking at Blessed Mary.

The holiness of Mary has its own mysterious cause, but it is reassuring that something of the Australian spirit and the Holy Spirit can have successful dealings with each other. Indeed, it’s a blessing.

Maybe the Australian no-nonsense approach is at its best when we refuse to get too fussed about ourselves, when we can lay aside our preoccupation with ourselves and look to the needs of those around us. For her part, Blessed Mary’s focus was on how God’s people could be best served by herself and those who wanted to be with her. How otherwise can you get to be blessed?

It’s a blessing for us that God’s people for her happened to be God’s Australian people. But, of course, she’s not just for Australia. Any holy person is for the whole world. If we are going to be holy then we are going to give ourselves utterly to God. And the gospels make it completely clear, indeed insist, that unrestricted love of God involves unrestricted love of people, all people. Easier said than done, as we all know. Australians too, sadly, know how to slam the door in the faces of boat people, and for us the parable of the Good Samaritan shows its pungency if we imagine him as an Aborigine. So a holy Australian is a challenge to the ways of unholiness in the nation. All that goodness gets under our skin. How else is it going to strike us to the heart?

What has Saint Joseph got to do with all this? Why is she a Josephite? Maybe it’s that Blessed Mary is as unobtrusive in her own story as St Joseph is in his. Because, I suppose, each of them knew that their lives were significant (even to themselves) only insofar as they pointed to Jesus and his story. So we find traces of Jesus’ death and resurrection in her life.

If our spirit is open to it, this might show us something of the same in our own lives. Dying to ourselves so that others might live gives God the chance to enter our lives. God comes to us in our neighbour’s company. Again, easier said than done. Those, like blesseds and saints, who allow it to be done somehow step aside from the centre of their story, and give that central space to God.

That is where the sense of mystery in Blessed Mary’s story, to name only one, comes from. That is what makes us a little puzzled and scratch our heads, makes us pause by the Hill’s Hoist or between drinks, and stop our yacking for a moment.

Maybe in our national celebrations of what Blessed Mary did, and our Church celebrations of what God did through her, we should do something rather like it. Like open a few doors. Like not be racist. There’s no harm in being practical.