Are You a Broken Dish? Go To the Cross!

We all know someone who is a 'broken dish.'  They cannot function properly, if at all.

In this essay, Grondelski reminds us that the Psalmist spoke of being a broken dish, too; that was a reference to Christ's crucifixion, but not only to that.

...Bl. Aniela Salawa (1881-1922) was a Polish mystic who is not very well known in the West. She was a third-order Franciscan who spent most of her young life (she died at age 40) as a servant girl in wealthy houses in Kraków, Poland. Though a servant girl, she gave alms.

During World War I, she assisted with the sick and wounded in Kraków hospitals. By the time the War ended, Aniela had succumbed to multiple sclerosis, followed by stomach cancer and tuberculosis. Never a strong girl, she was no longer able to support herself by cleaning work and so passed her last years living in a Kraków basement, supported by benefactors.  ...

In her childhood,

 ...Aniela wanted to contribute her fair share to her family’s livelihood. But the youngest and littlest child could not give much, nor did her family expect much from her. Describing her place in her childhood home, she wrote: “At home, I was like that piece of broken junk, cast off in the corner.”...

After she was no longer able to work as a serving-girl, she wrote:

 "But one day the Lord Jesus came to me and, looking with pity upon me, thought to Himself: “just maybe something might be made from that broken piece of junk?” And He did with me just what He thought."

 Grondelski concludes:

 Ours is a broken world. The number of people suffering from loneliness, the scourges of depression, even the growth of suicide all point to a world in which people no longer see value in life—that of others or even their own. But God sees that value. Fr. Leo Trese, a popular spiritual writer of the 1940s and 1950s, once remarked that even if you were the only person in the entire universe who needed redemption, Jesus would have died this Good Friday for you.  

 Because He knows “just maybe something might be made” from you. Or, as an old Glenmary Missionary poster put it, depicting two poor boys holding each other by the neck: “God made me…and God don’t make junk.”

Broken?  Go to the Cross!