St. Kateri Tekakwitha: A Personal Devotion

Louisa Ikena shares about her devotion and rich history with St. Kateri Tekakwitha, our first female Native American saint.

I became most acquainted with St. Kateri (I was taught to pronounce (cat-TEER-ee) back when she was Blessed Kateri. Right out of college, at age 22, I did full time missionary volunteer work with a Native American parish in Tucson, Arizona. I had grown up on the East Coast, and I had never been west of the Mississippi River before. I decided to dive into the opportunity in Tucson to work in youth ministry. The name of the parish I was assigned to for this volunteer opportunity for multiple years was Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.

Many people have heard of the Peace Corps. Some people have heard of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. However few people realize that many of the religious orders in the U.S. have their own volunteer corps. I chose to volunteer with the order I grew up with—the Missionary Servants. I joined their volunteer corps, the Missionary Cenacle Volunteers. Their motto is to be good, do good, and be a power for good. Blessed Kateri, now St. Kateri, was a faithful companion in prayer on my three-and-a-half-year adventure at Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha Parish in the beautiful desert of southern Arizona.

Culture is a curious thing. I learned that I don’t tend to articulate much about my culture unless and until I encounter differences, whether that be people who look different than I do or who have customs different from my own. In either case I have found that what we have in common far outweighs any differences. And, in fact, the differences many times greatly enrich our community, whether it be in our neighborhoods, our parishes, or our world.

I learned a thousand things in this missionary work that can’t be taught from behind a pulpit or in a comfortable college classroom. I learned that a missionary doesn’t bring Jesus to people. Jesus is already there. A missionary brings awareness of God’s love in the here and now. I learned what it was like to work with people. I learned to walk gently on the land, both on our earth and in our relationships with one another. And, most emphatically, I learned every Catholic is called to be a missionary. This truth is also echoed in the documents of Vatican II. We are loved and embraced and sent on mission into the Providence of our everyday lives.

I have a mental image of our Lord walking before me everywhere I go. He makes a way where there is no way. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (John 14:6). St. Kateri knew our universal call to holiness well and lived it out extraordinarily. We are called to love as well, in the routine, the mundane, and the ordinary. God needs us, missionaries, in every square inch of the Globe. I don’t have to cross an ocean to find the poor, the abandoned, and the vulnerable. I don’t even have to cross state lines. I simply need to pray that God opens the eyes of my heart.

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Openness to embrace and move towards inculturation is not without a price. St. Kateri knew this fact well. She was born into a family with a Catholic Algonquin mother and a Mohawk father who practiced his tribal spirituality. Both of her parents died of smallpox when she was four years old. Kateri survived, but her face was scarred for life from the smallpox. One of the miracles of St. Kateri was the fact that minutes after her death, the scars on her face disappeared and she was stunningly beautiful.

St. Kateri was taught by French Jesuit missionaries. She embraced the Catholic faith and was very prayerful and endured hardships for her people, especially memorable was kneeling in the snow in prayer. In the tiny hardships that I faced as a volunteer in my twenties, I would pray, “Blessed Kateri, pray for us.” That prayer usually helped bring my tiny hardships into better perspective.

Most of my spiritual focus, however, was on the prayers for Blessed Kateri to be canonized and how very much that means to the good people of our parish there in Tucson. Imagine our joy, years later in October 2012, when Pope Benedict XVI officially canonized St. Kateri!

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A missionary doesn’t bring Jesus to people. Jesus is already there. A missionary brings awareness of God’s love in the here and now. #catholicmom

Today, July 14, we celebrate her feast day. She is the patron of ecology. She is known as the Lily of the Mohawks. Forevermore, St. Kateri Tekakwitha, pray for us!