Elizabeth Ann Seton
1774-1821 18th century Feast day: January 4
Lifting the heart to God in the midst of everything, without waiting for perfect silence.
Who was Elizabeth Ann Seton?
A New Yorker of Episcopalian high society, married at nineteen, mother of five. Widowed at twenty-nine and ruined, she converted to Catholicism on returning from Italy (at the cost of her family's rejection), then founded the Sisters of Charity at Emmitsburg and the first free Catholic school in the United States. The first American-born saint, canonized in 1975.
In their own words
We must pray without ceasing, in every occurrence and employment of our lives, that prayer of the heart which is independent of place or situation, or rather which is a habit of lifting up the heart to God as in a constant communication with him.
The first end I propose in our daily work is to do the will of God; secondly, to do it in the manner he wills it; and thirdly, to do it because it is his will.
God is with us, and if sufferings abound in us, his consolations also greatly abound, and far exceed all utterance.