Paying Attention To The Sky

Rose Hawthorne, Mother Rose and co-founder of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne

 

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
Luke 10:27

IT WAS A COMMON PRACTICE in Jesus’ time to ask a rabbi to identify the central precept among the hundreds of laws that governed Jewish life, to specify the canon within the canon that would serve to interpret the whole of the Torah, Sometimes, to assure succinctness and brevity, a rabbi was compelled to offer this summary while standing on one foot.   Thus Jesus, in accord with this custom, is asked, “Rabbi, which is the greatest commandment?” He gives his famous answer: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  

All of religion is finally about awakening the deepest desire of the heart and directing it toward God; it is about the ordering of love toward that which is most worthy of love, But, Jesus says, a necessary implication of this love of God is compassion for one’s fellow human beings. Why are the two commandments so tightly linked? There are many different ways to answer that question, but the best response is the simplest: because of who Jesus is, Christ is not simply a human being, and he is not simply God; rather, he is the God-man, the one in whose person divinity and humanity meet.

Therefore, it is finally impossible to love him as God without loving the humanity that he has, in his own person, embraced. The greatest commandment is an indirect Christology. What does this entwined love of God and neighbor look like? To answer this question, we might turn, not first to the theologians, but to the saints.

Rose Hawthorne was the third child of the great American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and some of the best short stories of the nineteenth century. Rose was born in 1851, when her father was at the height of his creative powers and enjoying a worldwide reputation. In the mid- 1850s, Hawthorne, at the instigation of his friend President Franklin Pierce, was appointed U.S. consul to Liverpool, and the writer took his family with him to England.

There Rose came of age in quite sophisticated surroundings. She studied with private tutors and governesses; she mixed and mingled with the leaders of British society; and she traveled with her father to London, Paris, and Rome, where she even managed to charm Pope Pius IX.

But this idyllic existence ended rather quickly. Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864, when Rose was only thirteen, and her mother died just two years later, leaving the girl bereft and adrift. When she was twenty, she married a man named John Lathrop, and a few years later she gave birth to a son, whom she deeply loved. Her child died at the age of five, however, leaving his mother saddened, as she put it, “beyond words.”

At this time, her husband’s alcoholism began to manifest itself, and their marriage fell on hard times. In her deep depression, Rose Hawthorne began a spiritual search that eventually led to an interest in Catholicism. Despite her family’s rather entrenched Protestantism, she entered the Catholic Church.

A turning point in her life occurred when she read in the paper the story of a young seamstress of some means who had been diagnosed with cancer, operated upon unsuccessfully, and then told that her case was hopeless. Squandering her entire fortune on a vain attempt to find a cure, the woman found herself utterly destitute and confined to a squalid shelter for cancer patients.

The story broke Rose’s heart. Getting down on her knees, she asked God to allow her to do something to help such people. In her prayer, the dynamics of the greatest commandment were operative. Her compassion for suffering humanity led her to God, and the confrontation with God led her to act on behalf of suffering humanity, the two loves joined as inextricably as the divine and human natures in Christ. And God answered her prayer.

Rose enrolled herself in a nursing course and began to work at a hospital specializing in the treatment of cancer victims. On her first day at the hospital, she met Mary Watson, a woman with an advanced case of facial cancer, which rendered her so physically repulsive that even experienced nurses and doctors balked at caring for her. But Rose didn’t flinch. She helped to change Mary Watson’s dressing, and from that day they became friends.

Rose rented a small flat on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, living among the crowds of immigrant poor who were flooding into New York at the time. (She and her husband had separated, John having never been able to get his alcoholism under control.) She simply opened the doors of her apartment to cancer patients who had nowhere else to go, and she cared for them. Mary Watson, cruelly discharged from the hospital by doctors who considered her incurable, moved in with Rose.

In time, people came from all over New York to stay with her and to find comfort in their dying days. And in accord with a basic law of the spiritual life, people began to present themselves as volunteers to help in Rose’s work. We remember that when Francis of Assisi commenced to rebuild a crumbling church, he was soon joined by eleven helpers, and that when Mother Teresa of Calcutta went into the slums to aid the poor, she was joined by many of her former students.

When people embrace God’s work in a spirit of joy, others are drawn to them magnetically. Given the influx of patients and volunteers, Rose and her colleagues were obliged to rent larger space, which became possible because donations had begun to arrive.

At this point, Rose’s husband, John, after a long and unsuccessful struggle with alcoholism, passed away, sending Rose into another bout of deep sadness. But his death also made possible what the Spirit was prompting her to do: to become a religious. She entered the Dominican order and took the name Sr. Mary Alphonsa.

As a Dominican nun, she continued her work with cancer patients and in time managed to supervise the building of a large hospital in the country. Finally, with a number of other sisters, she formed a new branch of the Dominican order, dedicated specially to this much-needed and challenging work. This community of nursing sisters — now called the Hawthorne Dominicans exists to this day and continues, with joyful devotion, to care for those suffering from incurable cancer.

Rose Hawthorne died in 1926. At the time of her death, her life story was published in a New York newspaper, where it was read by a young intellectual named Dorothy Day. Day was living on the Lower East Side and struggling to eke out a career as a journalist. She was also a spiritual seeker, and the encounter with Rose’s story helped focus her energies and prompt her in the direction of a more radical love.

Just a few years later, she founded the Catholic Worker movement, an organization dedicated to the intertwining of the love of God and the love of the poor, the hungry, the ignorant, and those forced to the margins of society. A seed sown by Rose Hawthorne took root in the receptive soil of Dorothy Day’s soul.

Those who know Christ Jesus, fully divine and fully human, realize that the love of God necessarily draws us to a love for the human race. They grasp the logical consistency and spiritual integrity of the greatest commandment.

From Fr. Robert Barron’s wonderful little book on scripture, The Word on Fire.