Feast of St. Scholastica
Saint John Paul II Seminary, Washington, D.C.
February 10, 2025
From Chaos to Kosmos
We have concluded reading from the Letter to the Hebrews and now the Church’s liturgy presents to us the Book of Genesis where we read about the creation of the world. As God began his work of creating the heavens and the earth, it was a formless wasteland, a wind-swept abyss. In a word, it was chaos.
Speaking the creative Word in the power of the Spirit, God the Father transformed chaos into cosmos. He gave blessed order to the sky and water, to the land and water, to the light and darkness. What had been chaotic, became a well-ordered universe, a cosmos.
Restoration of Blessed Order
You and I know the sequel. Man sinned & the order of the universe was shaken. There was introduced into God’s good creation every kind of sin and malady. Disorder constantly vied with God’s well-ordered design for creation, including and especially his design for creation’s pinnacle, the human person. God could have abandoned his creation as a failed experiment but instead sent his Son to redeem humanity and to redeem humanity’s world.
This we see in the Gospel. Wherever Jesus went, people rushed pell-mell to bring him the sick: They begged that Jesus might touch them if only with the tassel of his cloak. At Jesus’ touch, the chaos of illness gave way to the cosmos of health. Those whom Jesus touched regained wholeness of body, mind, and spirit.
Living a Well-Ordered Life
Essential to the following of Christ is a passion for order. This doesn’t mean that room inspection will follow this liturgy. It does mean that blessed order must prevail in our lives as Christ’s followers. While all of us still have our share of weeds and dead flowers, our soul must come to be like a beautiful garden where we can walk in friendship with the Triune God. The chaos of sin must give way to an orderly, virtuous life made possible by the grace and mercy of Christ, channeled through spiritual direction and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. In case you’re wondering, the landscapers are still at work in me.
Good Order in the Church
St. Scholastica’s feast takes us to the origins of Western monasticism. Her brother Benedict founded the monastery to be a place ordered by love, a microcosm of the Kingdom of God, if you will. His rule is celebrated and observed to this very day. What’s more, the order of the monastery was not just for the monks. It was founded for the sake of the good order of the whole Church.
Scholastica was Benedict’s twin. Her name, as you may have read, means “learned one”, and like her brother she was both learned and holy. Their relationship as brother and sister blossomed into a spiritual friendship. They were bound together, not only by nature, but also by grace. Theirs was a friendship ordered by God’s grace.
Similarly, the seminary is to be an orderly place of formation. It is meant to be a place where individually and collectively you are cultivated by prayer, study, service, and healthy relationships. It is a place where God’s redeemed cosmos prevails over sinful chaos. Just as St. Scholastica prayed with and for her brother St. Benedict, so too may she intercede for all of us on our lifelong journey of being formed in the likeness of Christ and of striving to bring about blessed order in the Church we love so dearly. May God bless us and keep us always in his love!