Daily Reflection Thursday of the Thirty-Fourth Week in Ordinary Time

Today the Church celebrates the life and witness of Saint Andrew, one of the twelve called by Jesus into the intimate circle of those who would learn from the Master Teacher and carry his spirit of love and compassion into the world. Like all others of those so called, we have very sketchy biographical information to anchor our celebration, lost in history to us now. But nothing can prevent our Ignatian imagination from opening up a wee bit that barrier... What was it about your family life, Andrew, that created such fertile ground for the leap of faith from you and your brother Simon Peter? What challenges to that faith came when you found yourself in the shadow of that more formidable sibling? Where were you when Peter, James, and John ascended to the mountain where Jesus was transfigured? Or, from John's Gospel account of your vocational call, how difficult was it to transfer your allegiance and devotion from John the Baptist to Jesus? What gave you the insight and courage, risking ridicule, to even suggest that a mere boy with his two fish and five barley loaves could possibly be the solution to feeding five thousand hungry folks? How proud you must have been to introduce your friend Philip to Jesus.

A group of us gathered earlier this week to walk the Stations of the Cross at Loyola with a generous donor and his family who had funded the repaving of the pathways through the beautiful forest setting, "preparing a straight highway for our God." The reflection we prayed at the first station, Jesus is Condemned to Die, read in part, "Jesus has said yes to God and placed his life in God's hands. We follow him in this final surrender and contemplate with reverence each place along the way, as he is broken and given for us." No matter the answers to our own curiosity about Saint Andrew, we know that he made the journey from the poignancy of the Last Supper meal, to the despair of the crucifixion, to the joy of the Upper Room, where his discipleship transformed into 'apostleship.' Tradition has it that he, like Jesus, made his own journey to the cross, martyred in Petras, where he was stretched and bound rather than nailed. This, his X-shaped tool of persecution, has come to be known as the Saint Andrew's cross. It anchors the flag of Scotland.

How is the cross of Jesus anchoring us this day? Can we use our imaginations to carry that cross to new places -- or remove the cross of suffering from another? Saint Andrew, pray for us.

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Today we also mark the life, death, and witness of Etty Hillesum, mystic of the Holocaust, a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. From the day when Dutch Jews were ordered to wear a yellow star to the day she boarded a cattle car for the concentration camps, she kept a journal of her daily experiences and the unfolding of her interior spiritual life. Published four decades after her death, her reflections were quickly recognized as, what Robert Ellsberg describes in his book All Saints, 'one of the great moral documents of our time.' Her affirmations of the value and meaning of life, even in the face of unspeakable suffering, injustice, and evil, are breathtaking. "I must try to live a good and faithful life to my last breath, so that those who come after me do not have to start all over again," she wrote. Her religious vocation, journeying in solidarity with those who suffer, was a call to redeem that suffering from within, by safeguarding "that little piece of You, God, in ourselves." Etty and her family were placed on a transport train to Poland that left the transit camp at Westbork. From the window of the train she tossed out a card that read: "We have left the camp, singing." She died in Auschwitz eighty years ago today. She was twenty-nine.