This World is Not My Home – The Feast of St Mary of the Cross

When Mary MacKillop was canonized in 2010 I was working at a Catholic bookshop in Melbourne. In the months leading up to the canonization the shop was inundated with every kind of Mary MacKillop piety that you can imagine. There were candles, key rings, bookmarks and medals but for some reason, in my mind, the epitome of this madness was a ‘Daily Thoughts Calendar’ with quotes from Mary MacKillop for every day of the year. So one day, for some reason, I bought one.

This was really the beginning of my close and delightful friendship with St Mary of the Cross MacKillop. While I was there, thinking about how it was a great thing for Australia to be celebrating our first canonized Saint but that the obsession with all the little knick-knacks went a bit far, she was quietly and gently working on my heart.

I started reading about her life and was overwhelmed again and again by how wonderful she is. I found some things I could relate to, as well. She was from a big family (I’m also one of 8 children) and she felt responsible for looking after her younger siblings. She was an Australian girl, not afraid to get her hands dirty, full of life and spirit, energetic and faithful but most of all with a heart so full of love combined with the drive to do something with that love.

One of her most well known sayings (often quoted in the ‘Daily Thoughts Calendar’!) “Never see a need without doing something about it” is often at the forefront of my mind and helps me to push past laziness, fear, discomfort and selfishness to give and to love. I imagine her beside me in these moments, encouraging and helping me.

Another of her traits that I relate to is her love and respect for the Church, instilled in her by her father. My father, too, had a great reverence for the Church and taught me to always respect and pray for the Pope, Bishops and priests, even if it is difficult.

One of the most painful parts of the life of St Mary MacKillop that I’ve read about is her excommunication. This is what she wrote of the moment she was excommunicated:

“I really felt like one in a dream I seemed not to realise the presence of the Bishop and priests; I know I did not see them; but I felt, oh, such a love for their office, a love, a sort of reverence for the very sentence which I then knew was being in full force passed upon me. I do not know how to describe the feeling but I was intensely happy and felt nearer to God than I had ever felt before. The sensation of the calm beautiful presence of God I shall never forget.”

I can’t think of this moment without being deeply moved. Even though her excommunication was unjust and later found to be based on untruths, her trust in God and respect for his shepherds was unwavering.

So often St Mary MacKillop’s words are an exhortation to love. She reminds the Josephite sisters  and, through them all of us, to be constant and faithful. To trust in Jesus and to stay close to His Most Sacred Heart. I can’t help thinking she is as much an apostle of the Sacred Heart as St Margaret Mary Alacoque, St Gertrude, St John the Evangelist and all the saints whose mission was to point to the Heart of Jesus, burning with love, which has had such a deep impact on my own conversion of heart.

I am also greatly inspired by her devotion to the poor families of outback South Australia and Queensland and her tireless efforts to minister to and teach the children of the farmers and miners who were largely forgotten by everyone else. It was this commitment to go where nobody else would go and serve the poor and those in need that is one of her enduring legacies. The impact it had in this country can still be seen in the many schools, churches and a even a bridge in Port Adelaide, named after her! I have this wonderful image of her in her brown habit riding a horse through the Australian bush that I love so well, greeting people cheerfully, rolling up her sleeves to get to work, always giving it all to God.

Perhaps the strongest influence her friendship has had, because it strikes at the very core of me, is her reminder that “we are but travellers here”. For someone who has a tendency to want to put down roots, to build a home in a beautiful pocket of this world and to become attached to it, her words are a gentle prompt  to remember that this world is not my home, that the longing I have to belong and to be satisfied will not be fulfilled on this earth but can only be realised in Paradise, when I meet Him face to face.

~ Sara Moore 

Sara is a wife and mother of three young girls. She hails originally from the Riverina district of NSW but currently lives in Melbourne.