God loves a paradox. The Trinity is three Persons in One God. The King of the World was born in a stable. “I am with you always,” Jesus tells His Apostles right before the Ascension (Matthew 28:20). He tells his disciples “The greatest among you must be your servant” (Matthew 23:11) and “Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39).
And in a deep ravine in rural New York, this last paradox takes concrete shape. This ravine is deep shades of green, a quiet stream trickling nearby. The only sounds are natural ones. This ravine exudes a holy peace.
The quiet, beautiful, peaceful ravine is, in reality, a messy, ugly, violent way of the Cross. It is, in itself, the paradox of discipleship: “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.”
In this place, the blood of the martyrs became the seed of Christians. It is the place Saint René Goupil was tossed after he was tomahawked by two of the Iroquis to whom he was bringing the Good News of the Gospel. It is the place Saint Isaac Jogues snuck into during the middle of the night to bury his brother. Isaac Jogues had been standing next to René when he was killed. He fully expected to be next, but for some reason his life was spared, at least for a while. He describes what happened next:
After [René] had been killed, the children had stripped him and tieing [sic] a cord around his neck, dragged him to a torrent which runs at the foot of the town. The dogs had already gnawed a part of his thighs. At this spectacle, I could not withhold my tears. I took the body and aided by the Algonquin, I sank it in the water and covered it with large stones, to hide it, intending to return the next day with a spade, when there was no one near and dig a grave and inter it. (source)
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Delayed a few days in being able to sneak back to bury Rene’s body, he describes what happened next:
I entered the water already quite cold, I [came and went], I sound[ed] with my feet to see whether the water had not raised and carried off the body, but I saw nothing. How many tears I shed, which fell in the torrent, while I sang as I could the psalms which the church chant[s] for the dead. After all I found nothing . . .
[ . . . ]
[T]he young men had taken it up and dragged it to a neighboring wood, where during the fall and winter it was the food of the dog, the crow, and the fox. When I was told in the spring that he had been dragged there, I went several times without finding anything; at last, the fourth time, I found his head and some half-gnawed bones, which I interred. [ . . . ] Repeatedly did I kiss them as the bones of a martyr of Jesus Christ. (source)
Somewhere in that ravine, Saint René Goupil is buried. Just above the ravine is a small plateau where the Mohawk village once stood. Pilgrims now quietly explore the grounds where it is both easy and hard to imagine the torturous, holy events in the midst of the day-to-day village life that took place here. One can walk to the edge of the largely unchanged village and see the steep hill leading to the river. It is this hill that Saint Isaac Jogues, Saint René Goupil and others, after having been forced to march from their capture miles away, were forced to run the gauntlet.
Stumbling and dragged into the village, they were tied and staked to the ground, enduring unimaginable tortures we only know about because Saint Isaac Jogues escaped and wrote about them. He wrote them with the short remains of his fingers that had been chopped, beaten, and bitten off. To this he wrote: "I thank you, Lord Jesus, that I have learned from this slight test how much you deigned to suffer for me on the Cross when the weight of your whole body was suspended not by ropes but by your hands and your feet cruelly pierced with nails" (source).
Saint René Goupil was killed on September 29, 1642. A short fourteen years later, Saint Kateri Tekakwitha was born on that same plateau, and converted to Catholicism when she was nineteen.
It is not out of the realm of possibility that those who witnessed or even participated in the torture and martyrdoms of Saint Isaac Jogues and Saint. René Goupil later witnessed and even participated in the life of the first Native American saint.
Here again, in this peaceful ravine with no outward scars of the brutality it has seen, is the paradox God loves. It is the paradox of the Cross.
Sr. Mary Claire of the Holy Family is a member of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity (SOLT) and currently serves in Corpus Christi, TX. She loves Jesus and Mary, and her students would say every Saint is her favorite. She graduated with a degree in elementary education and is currently working on a Masters in Theology from her Alma Mater, Franciscan University. A Tennessee girl who could live off Dr. Pepper and popcorn, she loves road trips, especially this one we are on to Heaven.
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