{"id":60996,"date":"2025-11-13T00:01:43","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T05:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/setonshrine.org\/?p=60996"},"modified":"2025-11-13T06:08:51","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T11:08:51","slug":"through-lifes-ups-and-downs-with-mother-cabrini-and-mother-seton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/setonshrine.org\/es\/through-lifes-ups-and-downs-with-mother-cabrini-and-mother-seton\/","title":{"rendered":"Through Life\u2019s Ups and Downs With Mother Cabrini and Mother Seton"},"content":{"rendered":"

This reflection was previously published<\/em>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

An old farmer\u2019s horse ran away. When his friends came to him saying, \u201cWhat an awful thing to happen!\u201d the farmer just shrugged and responded, \u201cGood or bad, hard to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

A week later, the horse came back accompanied by seven wild horses. \u201cWhat good fortune!\u201d his friends gushed. The farmer shrugged and said, \u201cGood or bad, hard to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the next week, the farmer\u2019s son was riding one of the wild horses, when it bucked and was thrown to the ground and broke his leg. \u201cWe knew it,\u201d said the farmer\u2019s friends. \u201cIt was bad luck all along.\u201d The farmer shrugged again. \u201cGood or bad, hard to say,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Then the king of the village went to war, and commanded every able-bodied man to enlist. The farmer\u2019s son wasn\u2019t well enough to qualify.<\/p>\n

Good or bad? Hard to say.<\/p>\n

The moral of this fable is that we\u2019re so driven to find meaning in what appears coincidental\u2014to make sense of what we don\u2019t understand\u2014we can forget that declaring whether something is \u201cgood or bad\u201d assumes we have knowledge that only God has.<\/p>\n

A while back, my little sister came home after spending two years in a strictly cloistered convent. She\u2019d\u00a0been hoping to spend her whole life there. But her health was steadily declining, and a long stream of specialists couldn\u2019t find any answers\u2014or even any clues\u2014as to what was wrong. She was less and less able to live the life her sisters were living, and eventually, her superiors said that they were sorry, but since they were no closer to a cure, she would have to return home.<\/p>\n

My sister didn\u2019t have an easy time, and as to how this story would play out in the larger picture of her life, that was up to God. How would\u00a0He use it for good? What would that look like? We don\u2019t get those answers, but we do get to know exactly one thing: that God can<\/em> use my sister\u2019s mysterious illness for His own ends. My sister would say that wherever she is, God is the same God she\u2019s always loved, and that\u2019s something.<\/p>\n

The lives of the saints were full of obstacles and setbacks, too. There\u2019s a lot of comfort in that. Their problems no doubt look different to us, from our vantage point, than they did to them.<\/p>\n

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, also known as Mother Cabrini, is one saint whose life helps us to remember God\u2019s perspective when we\u2019re in the middle of our own disappointments and frustrations. She was born premature, and because of her delicate health, was not admitted into the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, the order she had hoped to join. Instead, she ended up founding her own order, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.<\/p>\n

Mother Cabrini dreamed of becoming a missionary in China, but when she finally obtained an audience with Pope Leo XIII, he sent her \u201cnot east, but west,\u201d to America, to help address the crisis of the thousands of poor Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York. She went on to become the patroness of immigrants, and the first naturalized citizen saint of the United States.<\/p>\n

Today, Mother Cabrini\u2019s order is doing God\u2019s work in fifteen countries, and that\u2019s to say nothing of the effects of her intercession, which we have no way to quantify. Her life had plenty of failure in it, but ultimately, it\u2019s a story of God\u2019s victory.<\/p>\n

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton\u2019s setbacks turned out to be just as important in God\u2019s plan for her life. Another heroic American foundress, her conversion to the Catholic Church came as a result of a desperate trip to Italy, where her husband\u2019s health failed to improve as she had hoped. As a widow, she turned to teaching when her family and friends, scandalized by her conversion, distanced themselves from her. From there, she went on to found the first congregation of women religious in the United States, the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s.<\/p>\n

Even when she didn\u2019t know why God had allowed an event to take place, Mother Seton always understood that when her plans failed it wasn\u2019t the same thing as God failing. Her faith in Divine Providence steadied her. She advised her son not to put too much weight in his own plans, \u201cSince the Providence of God turns out so often quite different from our calculations,\u201d and that he should not blame fate for his misfortunes, since \u201cyou say fate…but I say tide of providence which [is] as infinite goodness.\u201d
\n<\/strong>
\nTo her friend Julia, she wrote, \u201cGod will provide, that is all my comfort never did that Providence fail me.\u201d<\/p>\n

If it seems simple, that\u2019s because it is. There\u2019s a kind of heroic, courageous simplicity that accompanies faith that leaves everything in God\u2019s hands. Mother Cabrini and Mother Seton were steadied by that faith throughout their tumultuous lives, and we can be, too.<\/p>\n

So events might be good, or they might be bad. We have to accept the fact that we won\u2019t know what\u2019s what until we get to heaven and see our life through God\u2019s own eyes. Here on Earth, though, we don\u2019t need to spend too much time wondering what\u2019s good and what\u2019s bad, because we know what Mother Seton and Mother Cabrini knew: that God is good, and no apparent failure is so devastating that He can\u2019t bring good from it.<\/p>\n

ANNA O\u2019NEIL\u00a0likes cows, confession and the color yellow, not necessarily in that order. She lives in Rhode Island with her family, and tries hard to remember that \u201cAnything worth doing is worth doing badly.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Image: St. Frances Xavier Cabrini MSC, also called Mother Cabrini<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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