The Mission of Padre Pio: In honor of his Feast Day

On New Year’s Day, 1903, St. Pio was thinking about his vocation to the Capuchin cloistered life and was feeling apprehensive about leaving the world, his family, and his beloved countryside. Suddenly, he was favored with a vision, not of the imagination, but of the intellect.

We can see things in different ways, and it is said that we can know the angels like we know ideas, although they are persons; they are like living ideas. This is a part of our seeing that we do not exercise enough; we rely too heavily on the physical sense of sight, “Seeing is believing.” But this vision was presented to St. Pio through his intellect: he knew what he saw. And it gave him the answer to his apprehension about his vocation. It was a mandate, a warning, and a promise of aid. This vision was the mean and mode of St. Pio’s life as a priest and monk of God—and his immense suffering. He was permitted a part in protecting and helping weaker souls to attain salvation in Christ.

This vision, which the icon depicts in visual form, was the meaning and the goal that Our Lord planned for Padre Pio, and St. Pio accepted it. It is his acceptance, and the mode and depth of his acceptance, which is one of the great hallmarks in the life of this beloved saint. The Padre’s life was suffused with obedience, for he knew that all obedience, in its proper form, was directed ultimately towards Christ. “If my superior asked me to, I would jump out that window,” he was heard to say. Does this sound like folly? Yes, the Padre was a fool for Christ, and his way of showing that folly was love, to be obedient, obedient when no other would be, to show his love of Our Lord.

From his earliest days, Padre Pio was a docile servant to Our Lord. He did not place his will in any place where it would ever conflict with the Lord’s; therefore, he was freer than the rest of us. It is interesting to note, that he was often charged with disobedience, especially as a young friar, when he was too ill to be at the friary and could only survive, it seemed, in his home area. This was a suffering the Lord allowed him, perhaps to test and strengthen his obedience to the Lord’s will, even at the cost of his superiors accusing him of disobedience. He simply continued to follow orders where it was in his power to do so. And later, when the Holy Office censured him, and even took his spiritual director from him, he expressed sadness but not complaint. This did not mean that he did not see injustice and mistakes; he simply accepted them as from the hand of the Lord, as part of his mission as expressed in the vision.

Obedience is an integral part of the meaning of the vision, because Padre Pio had developed it and been given the virtue in such high degree that his will was malleable for great things by the Lord. For most, the devil we fight is primarily our own wayward will, the desire to put ourselves above what others want for us, primarily the Lord. We will not accept the mysterious will of God because we cannot understand it for ourselves. Padre Pio seemed to forego the need to understand for himself, and he just obeyed. Therefore, the Lord was able to use him to fight Satan himself in order to save other souls.

Obedience was Padre Pio’s crown, which he wears now: obedience and docility to the Lord’s hand, and great love of poor, little souls. Here is the description of his intellectual vision in his own words:

At his side he beheld a majestic man of rare beauty, resplendent as the sun. This man took his hand and said, “Come with me for you must fight a doughty warrior.” He then led him to a vast field where there was a vast multitude. The multitude was divided into two groups. On the one side he saw men of the most beautiful countenance, clad in snow-white garments. On the other. . . he saw men of hideous aspect, dressed in black raiment like so many dark shadows.

Between these two groups of people was a great space in which that soul was placed by his guide. As he gazed intently and with wonder . . . in the midst of the space that divided the two groups, a man appeared, advancing so tall that his very forehead seemed to touch the heavens, while his face seemed to be that of an Ethiopian, so black and horrible it was.

At this point the poor soul was so completely disconcerted that he felt that his life was suspended. This strange personage approached nearer and nearer, and the guide who was beside the soul informed him that he would have to fight with that creature. At these words the poor little soul turned pale, trembled all over and was about to fall to the ground in a faint, so great was his terror.

The guide supported him with one arm until he recovered somewhat from his fright. The soul then turned to his guide and begged him to spare him from the fury of that eerie personage, because he said that the man was so strong that the strength of all men combined would not be sufficient to fell him.

“Your every resistance in vain. You must fight with this man. Take heart. Enter the combat with confidence. Go forth courageously. I shall be with you. In reward for your victory over him I will give you a shining crown to adorn your brow.”

The poor little soul took heart. He entered into combat with the formidable and mysterious being. The attack was ferocious, but with the help of his guide, who never left his side, the soul finally overcame his adversary, threw him to the ground, and forced him to flee.

Then his guide, faithful to his promise, took from beneath his robes a crown of rarest beauty, a beauty that words cannot describe, and placed it on his head. But then he withdrew it again, saying, “I will reserve for you crown even more beautiful if you fight that good fight with the being whom you have just fought. He will continually renew the assault to regain his lost honor. Fight valiantly and do not doubt my aid. Keep your eyes wide open, for that mysterious personage will try to take you by surprise. Do not dear his formidable might, but remember what I have promised you: that I will always be close at hand. And I will always help you so that you will always succeed in conquering him”.

When that mysterious man had been vanquished, all the multitude of men of horrible countenance took to flight with shrieks, curses and deafening cries, while from the other multitude of men came the sound of applause and praise for the splendid man, more radiant than the sun, who had assisted the poor soul so splendidly in the first battle. And so the vision ended.

The Search For Solace

We met, once a month, for a year and a half, timidly sipping various coffees at a Borders Café, somewhere inconspicuous, common hairdos in a common strip mall. We were all moms, we never thought of anything more creative to call it than “Mom’s Group”; no one ever looked twice at us, except perhaps when we prayed or when more than one of us came in pregnant, easing into her seat like a ship at dock, heavy with child.

We were surrounded by students with laptops and morbid T-shirts; lonely and obnoxious teenagers and lost young adults. There was no beauty, but there I found solace, and each face around the table became more and more luminescent as the months passed. The beauty came from within, from the laughter, listening, and the occasional outburst and sympathetic tears. Each life, each common mom with common kids, became a mirror for the face of Christ for me; and the light spread around that coffee shop until the ceiling reflected a glow. We had topics, we searched for truth, we talked about the Cross-and the little crosses of each day; we told horror stories of days beyond repair and the eternal meaning encased in each day.

I remember one of us talking about being in heaven, and that we will somehow share a special place with those people we loved especially. We didn’t think of each other at the time, but now, after a year and a half of loving each other, we would now. I was on a search for solace, and the Lord gave me four friends, four common moms, with uncommon souls.

Now I am headed into the sunset, quite literally, to California. So what? Lots of people move. But I know that the Lord sees every life, every event in that life, as quite special. This I know for sure, now, and am glad to have lived long enough to really understand that existentially. And so I know He knows both the gratitude I have for each of those moms, for their husbands and children; for no person gives a gift from solitude- it is always with the foundation provided by others- most fundamentally, Our Lord. And He knows the tears I have on my face now because the daily minutiae matter in a friendship, and I will miss those now. I won’t be on a speakerphone on the Borders table: like a river, life will flow on. But sitting on a grave, as I did on a hot day in July in the middle of a Long Island suburb (my father-in-law’s new grave), will teach you quite forcefully that even in the silence and separation, love goes on. It goes on in a torrent, reaching ever back to its source in God, in eternity.

Am I overdoing it? This is friendship after all: friends come and go. No, I am not overdoing it, as C.S. Lewis bemoaned, friendship is heavily undervalued in modern life. Friends are the solace God gives us in this valley of tears, and the love of friendship, philia, is, like the other loves, meant to be baptized and thus super-naturalized into a higher level, an eternal level. The loves work together: the development of one kind of love is meant to help the growth of the others. In Christian friendship, friendship itself is baptized and begins to draw the other loves in a person’s life into the supernatural, the eternal.

So the common moms at the franchised Borders Café were aiding me in super-naturalizing my whole life. My God bless each person with at least one friend like that. I have been blessed quadrice.

The Economy of Suffering and Love

I was standing in the vestible of the sanctuary at Immaculate Conception Church. I was annoyed, as is often the case; my blood was pounding in my neck and I was waging an inner war, to offer up the mental suffering and not to be angry at my three-year-old. I had just lost a battle on the inside to anger and on the outside to her will-pushings, and swatted her on the backside. I was going into combat mode, and the Holy Sacrifice about to commence beyond the green padded doors was suddenly in the background, like memory of a green meadow.

Quite suddenly, a woman was beside me, and the battle lifted. She could barely talk; I could see the open hole in her tracheal tube , like a gaping fissure, underneath a clear plastic bandage, all packaged neatly and bravely under the buttoned-up collar of a purple silk blouse. As she gasped and whispered, making my own throat feel sore, I tried to pick out the strong Irish brogue to which I’d been accustomed.

She used to sit behind us in Mass, always alone, but not fearful: a wide-shouldered, rough-toothed, kind-eyed, straight-forward lady. She was the one who said of my little one, “She keeps you running, eh?” And I remember turning round, expecting to see an expression of disdain and annoyance, but instead to find myself folded in life-hardened, but kind peat-green eyes, full of humor. She made me laugh. She made the three-year-old more precious, even if just a tiny bit.

Now here she was, making the tears stream down my face, as her story of surgeries and months in the hospital gushed out. “I wanted to tell you,” she said, and I wondered why-at least, my mind idly wondered, while that deeper part of me, the part which doesn’t use words, understood perfectly. “I almost died three times”, she said. “And I’ll tell you, too, that I saw myself, I was on the cross.” And she put her wide, now bony shoulders forward a bit, and her arms straight out either side. Her purple blouse rippled in response. “ Jesus was holding me, his arms around me; and I could look down and see Mary. ‘See’, says Jesus, ‘you are suffering for Me’.” And she looked up again, and I, with that strange fright of visions, said in a hurry, in order to come back to earth, “ So, you were dreaming?”

She looked at me with those iron eyes. “No, I was in a coma.”

There was something in me that I’m not sure I understand. I felt strange, the strangeness of an Other. Yet I doubted her story, I felt that condescension in me, the kind that says, “oh wow” and “I’m sorry” and then moves on to the next person-that fear of the ‘weird’ the ‘self-deluded’. But I couldn’t turn away, there was something else in me that didn’t care about the strangeness; besides, I was out of energy to respond to the insistence of inhibitions. The tears streamed down my face, because she was in the hospital, suffering on the cross, alone in a coma, and alone in so many other ways. Were there flowers at her bedside? “Oh,” she said, “I hope I didn’t make you cry; because, God is so good. He is so merciful.”

And I and she looked at each other, distant acquaintances, and we conversed without words. So I knew that she came to me, to somehow tell me not to be so angry at my little daughter, that she’d suffered for me in the hospital in a way, and that this was such a great and noble act only because God accepted it- and this meant that He was merciful to her. He accepted her suffering, He was good and kind because her suffering was useful to Him. It wasn’t wasted, or just left as a punishment for her sins: it was transformed. She told me in her humility that none of us escape suffering, because we all deserve it. But God, in His mercy, deigns to use it- for others, even the angry and struggling mother in the vestibule. And I wonder now: are those daily battles, even the ones with three-year-olds, are they such temptations; is my anger and resentment offensive enough to God that they required all this lady’s suffering? “Surely not!” I say, but after all, who am I to be angry? Am I not putting myself in a Judge’s place? Am I not saying, “I don’t like this situation, Lord, You must have put me in the wrong place!” Am I not committing type of sin that Adam and Eve committed?

Who knows how much suffering is required to expiate one act of petty rebellion? Our Lady understood. If I understand, too, how can I stand to sin? Yet, if I also understand my weaknesses, how can I even stand on my feet? Yet as I remember the Irish lady’s eyes, I saw love there. And I remember, too, in that place without words, how, when we are truly immersed in Love, we want to suffer for the beloved. It is a fire, a self-immolation for the sake of the lover: that eros from which is born courage and the forgetting of self. So, perhaps, I, like the choir of angels St. Thomas Aquinas elucidates, the angels who are made solely to receive love, I receive her offering- or rather, I receive the mercy God deigns to give me, out of the Irish lady’s gift of herself.

So let me rejoice with my Irish lady, let me rejoice in God’s mercy to her and to me, let me let the rejoicing stand side by side with the sobered sinner in me, the one who is learning the enormity of each offense. Let me love the traitor in me, the part I keep asking to be burned away. Let me love in truth, let me have clear sight and have the courage to see myself as God sees me, and then let me repent truly and have the gift then not to see myself at all, only You. Like my Irish lady, who is being transformed into You, grant me freedom from fear. And freedom to love. It is a gift. Words are so heavy: no part of me completely understands the economy of love and suffering, but the part without words understands better- like Job, who just put his arms out, threw back his head, and did worship to the Whirlwind- and it ravished him.