You can drink a Mary MacKillop Shiraz, you can eat a cake named after her, you can wear her gold and sapphire encrusted image, you can see a musical on her life, you can even lick the back of her head and stick her on an envelope, but how many people are truly aware of the relationship with her Heavenly Father that founded her very existence?
There are many positive aspects to the secular attention that is being bestowed upon Australia’s first saint, as the publicity generated has reached far beyond the confines of the Catholic Church.
We have her image scattered across the nation, from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to a commemorative gold coin and her tireless, wonderful work with the underprivileged has been promoted in a public square that is more accustomed to negative perceptions of the Church.
These are all great things, however I’m not so sure that Mary herself would be so enthralled by the celebrity-hype surrounding her canonisation – because it seems that the God that she loved with such passion has been trampled underfoot by the increasingly commercialised stampede.
It could even be argued that within Church circles it has been Mary’s works that have become the primary focus of her earthly life, a concept that I’m sure she would be the first to reject.
To define Mary, or any of the saints recognised by the Church, by their external deeds, is to undermine the very meaning of their existence.
As with all Christians, what we do with our lives is secondary to why we do it. The life of St Theresa of Lisieux, who became a nun at the age of 15, spent the next nine years in a cloistered convent and then died at the age of 24, is no more or less important than the life of Mary MacKillop.
What these two women have in common, however, and what is recognised by the Church, is that they were both obedient to what they believed to be God’s will for them, and they persevered despite the hardships and opposition that they encountered.
That is not to belittle anything that Mary achieved in this world, in fact, it is to acknowledge it with even more honour than she is even now being given, because it was the fulfilment of why God created her. Mary achieved what we are all called to do, to follow the example of Christ and “Seek not my own will, but the will of Him who sent me” (John 5:30).
While Mary undeniably put her whole heart into what she did, no doubt she would have done the same had she determined that God wanted her to marry and raise a family or to clean toilets in a cloistered convent.
We only have to read from the notes preserved by a participant at a retreat presented by Mary to truly understand what drove and sustained her throughout her life:
“Let us place ourselves in the presence of Our God, of Our God Who created us, Our God Who redeemed us, Our God Who sanctified us. Let us bring to this great God all the powers of our minds, our memory, our understanding, our will. Let us humble ourselves before our God, in Whose presence we are not worthy to appear, our Great Creator. We dare not, of ourselves, so much as approach Thee, but, confiding in the merits of our Redeemer, we come to tell Thee that we wish to love Thee, that we wish to please and glorify Thee; we wish to serve Thee faithfully. But in order to do this, we desire to know ourselves, our complete nothingness, our entire dependence on Thee as our first beginning and our last end …”
It is a prayer all Christians should pray. It could make saints of us all!