Unaware of what I was going through, a friend sent me a picture of a kintsugi bowl with the message, “When I see you, I see gold.”
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of bowl-mending. Artisans reassemble broken ceramic bowls and costly gold is set into the seams between the shards. The cracks are not concealed, they are accentuated—remaining a symbol of admiration, bestowing more value, emboldening strength.
Today as we celebrate the feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, I can’t help but think of how accurately her life resembled kintsugi. Set against the brutal Black Plague in Italy, her witness emanated a rare kind of beauty, reminding us that God doesn’t merely fix us in our suffering, He restores us to usefulness, and by virtue of gleaming Grace, transforms the world around us.
Early Life of Catherine
Catherine was born Caterina di Jacopo di Benincasa in the spring of 1347. She and her twin sister, who died in infancy, were the twenty-third and twenty-fourth of twenty-five children.
At the tender age of seven, Catherine was touched by extraordinary movements of the Holy Spirit and began to see visions of Jesus seated in glory with Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and Saint John the Evangelist. The sense of affirmation that God was calling her to a life consecrated to Him was both powerful and permanent.
As a child, Catherine was nicknamed Euphrosyne, which in Greek means “joy.” Though Catherine’s mother longed for a "normal" daughter, Catherine refused to be stereotypically feminine. At age fifteen, she frantically chopped off her hair to thwart pressures to marry and even dreamed of joining a monastery disguised as a boy. At sixteen, motivated by a vision of Saint Dominic, Catherine entered the Third Order of the Dominicans, the female branch known as the Mantellate.
Catherine spent many hermetic years in the confinement of her room, where she experienced spiritual union with God which she described as "mystical espousal" to Christ. It was in this encounter that she discovered true ‘joy’ in the face of plague and pain. It was in this solitude that she wrestled to gain dominion over her heart and fleshly impulses. It was in this intimacy that she experienced the all-consuming Divine fire that invades our hearts, transforms our lives, and turns the world upside down.
Pursuing Truth with Love
During Catherine’s era, the dark age of the Church was manifest. In a power struggle over dominance in northern Italy, the papacy had moved to Avignon.
In an age when women’s religious vocations were confined and apart from the world, it was Catherine who boldly informed Pope Gregory XI to leave Avignon and return to Rome. Often referring to Him as the "sweet Christ on earth,” she called him out in truth. “Respond to the Holy Spirit who is calling you,” she commanded. “Come! Come! Come! Don’t wait for time because time isn’t waiting for you.”
We don’t have to have a call like Saint Catherine’s to have experienced the sting of having to speak truth with people we care so deeply about. How desperately we want them to know Jesus, the only sure way to freedom. But because speaking truth in love can be so challenging (see Ephesians 4:15), we tend to either speak it with harshness or say nothing in so-called “love.”
Catherine’s evangelical fervor overflowed not so much from what she spoke but rather from what God did in her interior life. She was completely docile to the Spirit. She understood that truth brings transformation, not by merely standing on podiums but by restoring from within. Truth penetrates to the degree all our faculties are surrendered in worship. Truth produces fruit when we seek reconciliation for the ways we fall short of Grace.
Catherine was unconcerned about making a mark as a woman in active service to the Church, and was more consumed by Christ's love for her to be a woman who serves.
In the Church of the twenty-first century, in which one finds fractures of sexual abuse and financial corruption or manifestations of dishonesty and raw ambition, Catherine’s love for a sinful Church is not easy to embrace. Yet it was this love that brought clarity and conviction, rallied support for change, and unified Christians in service.
Are our words and actions seasoned with truth and love?
If we are criticizing the Church more than we are praying for her, we are not speaking truth, we are not serving in love, and we are not reflecting Christ.
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“I see Gold”
It is hard to grasp the strain the “Black Death” put on the physical and spiritual fabric of Siena. The illness seemed to strike through breath and sight. People went to bed perfectly healthy and were found dead in the morning. Yet, despite it all, Catherine stayed and served. Her devotion to the sick was as contagious as the Plague itself. In the midst of poverty, terror, and stench, Catherine spread the aroma of Christ, often risking her own life.
I have often pondered over Catherine’s witness, especially last year. It seemed like the pieces of my life were so destroyed that they weren’t just shattered: they were ground to dust. I found myself taking the familiar path of self-protection, retreating from pain, even glamorizing the gouges of my circumstances.
But it is precisely here that Christ met me personally and profoundly and used my suffering to reveal more of Himself to me. He was the gold that bound my broken pieces, lovingly, painstakingly putting them back together. Where my heart was ground to dust, He created a new one, filling every crack with His light and life.
Interestingly, in kintsugi, before the artisans begin mending, they hold the broken pieces in their hands and honor them. This is what God was calling me to do: to honor the broken pieces of my heart, to entrust my sorrows to His Sacred Heart, to relinquish my pain to His wise plan and to trust that He was at work in the darkness.
Though all I saw were broken places, people saw gold.
At the heart of Catherine's service was the image of a bleeding Christ, the Redeemer—ablaze with fiery charity, eager sacrifice, and unqualified forgiveness. In The Dialogue Jesus told her, "Your love should be sincere: you should love your neighbors with the same love with which you love Me."
Catherine had astounding spiritual manifestations, but she understood that being seated with Christ in the heavenly places did not mean lolling about in mystic ecstasies. It meant being brought down from ineffable glory into the valley to be crushed in service. It meant asking God to use her in whatever way possible to mend the brokenness she saw around her.
Sisters, we each have our own private stories that have shattered us. Mankind is fallen and we are all broken. But in the slain Lamb of God, who now stands (Revelation 5), we can encounter both the beauty and power of One who died and yet is living. In Him, our broken pieces remain an important part of our history. In Him, their redemptive value is extended to those who do not know how to confront their pain and only see broken pieces.
God wants to heal your broken places with golden lines. Will you yield to His beautifying work so others can see gold . . . so people can encounter our gracious Redeemer?
Rebuild My Church
It is no coincidence that Saint Catherine was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970, on the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. Saint Francis’s call from God to “Rebuild my Church” continues to echo through the generations.
Today, on her feast day, Catherine urges us women to return to our spiritual boot camps and become houses of prayer. She urges us to return to intimacy, to pursue truth and become who God made us to be, so we can go forth and set this world on fire.
Michelle Karen D’Silva is a regular contributor to the BIS blog and an itinerant Catholic speaker housed in the little peninsula of Qatar. With an immense passion for discipleship, her vision is to see young people bloom into radical future saints. And so she finds herself most at home engaging with these fire-starters over conversations coupled with karak and hummus. Whether preaching, writing, or training, she never fails to return to Pope Benedict XVI—her go-to guy—who constantly inspires her to live out the “Call to Greatness” as an empowered woman empowering women in ministry, wife to a doting hubby, and mama to two constantly hungry sheep. Find out more about her here. Read all of Michelle's posts here.
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