7/17/2014 – Thursday of 15th week of Ordinary Time – Matthew 11:28-30

      Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. We look at the different contexts in which believers can hear these words. I often pray these words in the anointing of the sick, in which the person receiving the sacrament is facing an illness or surgery or is at the end of his life.

     Today happens to be the feast day of the Carmelites Nuns of Compienge – perhaps these nuns are saints that are not very familiar to us.  In 1790, one year after the start of the French Revolution, a group of Carmelite nuns were ordered to disband the monastery in which they were living.  The nuns refused to do so, and were sent to the guillotine as a consequence after being formerly arrested in 1794.  In 1957, more than 150 years after these nuns were martyred for their faith, the celebrated French composer Francois Poulenc premiered his opera based on the story of these nuns – The Dialogue of the Carmelites.  At the conclusion of the opera, which is the only major opera comprised of only female voices, Poulenc portrays how the nuns sang the Salve Regina as they were put to death in Paris.  Poulenc, a lapsed Catholic at the time, credits his work on this opera to reviving his Catholic faith. I became fascinated by the story of these nuns when I found out that the opera was based on a true story, and then read the novel on which the opera is based – The Last on the Scaffold by German writer Gertrud von le Fort.  The nuns were beatified by Pope Pius X in 1906.  One person who was a strong advocate for their canonization was Therese of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun herself, and now one of the most popular saints and a Doctor of the Church.  Interest in the canonization of these nuns from France still remains popular in the Church today.  The lives and deaths of these courageous nuns might seem to be from a time and place so different from our own, but when we think of the secularization and attacks on religious liberty that have in our own country in recent years, the story of these Carmelite nuns perhaps is very relevant to us today.  Through our labor and our burdens, the Lord reaches out to us.  He gives us the courage and strength to endure.  And the discipleship that we follow is what leads us and guides us along the way.