Today we reach one of the more easily misunderstood parts of Rose of Lima.
Rose was reportedly a strikingly beautiful young woman. Yet early accounts describe her deliberately trying to diminish her attractiveness. Some traditions describe her cutting her hair, roughening her hands through work, and taking other measures to discourage admiration and marriage proposals.
Read superficially, this can sound like:
Rose thought beauty was bad.
That would be a serious misunderstanding.
Today I want us to go beneath those actions.
Because underneath Rose's struggle with beauty lies something almost everyone wrestles with:
Who gets to tell me what I am worth?
KNOW — The beautiful girl who didn't want beauty to own her
Rose's beauty apparently attracted considerable attention.
Her family naturally saw marriage as a desirable future for her.
Rose did not.
She believed herself called to virginity and an unusually complete dedication to Christ.
But this created a conflict.
Her appearance was telling the world one story:
Beautiful young woman → desirable marriage → socially expected future.
Her interior relationship with Christ was telling her another:
I belong to Him.
Rose therefore became suspicious—not necessarily of beauty itself—but of the power that beauty could exercise over her identity and future.
This is our doorway into understanding her.
UNDERSTAND — The problem isn't beauty
Catholic Christianity cannot teach that physical beauty is inherently bad.
God created the human body.
The Word Himself became flesh.
Jesus restored bodies.
Christianity proclaims the resurrection of the body.
Catholicism has filled churches with paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, incense, vestments, stained glass and flowers precisely because beauty can reveal something of God.
So Rose's spirituality cannot fundamentally mean:
beautiful = sinful.
The deeper question is:
What happens when something good begins telling me who I am?
And now Rose suddenly becomes very contemporary.
The identities we construct
Imagine someone asks:
"Who are you?"
We answer with categories.
My profession.
My accomplishments.
My education.
My family.
My reputation.
My intelligence.
My possessions.
My attractiveness.
My influence.
My religious activities.
My usefulness to other people.
None of these things are necessarily bad.
But perform a thought experiment.
Imagine losing them one by one.
Your position disappears.
Your money disappears.
Your influence disappears.
Your children no longer need you in the same way.
Your appearance changes.
Your health weakens.
Someone younger becomes more capable than you.
People stop asking your opinion.
Someone else receives the recognition.
Your achievements are forgotten.
Eventually even your physical strength disappears.
Then comes the frightening question:
Who remains?
Rose's answer was increasingly:
The person God loves remains.
That is Christian identity.
The first great temptation
Notice something about Jesus' temptations in the wilderness.
Immediately before them, at His Baptism, the Father declares:
"This is my beloved Son."
Then the tempter attacks:
"If you are the Son of God..."
There is something profound here.
The Father establishes identity:
You are my beloved Son.
The temptation challenges identity:
Prove it.
That pattern continues in us.
God says:
You are my beloved child.
The world says:
Prove it.
Prove you're important.
Prove you're successful.
Prove you're attractive.
Prove you're intelligent.
Prove people need you.
Prove you're better.
Prove you're holy.
Prove you matter.
And we spend enormous portions of our lives proving what God has already given us.
Rose was trying to stop proving.
This is what detachment actually means
We encountered this yesterday, but now we can go deeper.
Catholic detachment does not mean not caring.
It means becoming free enough to love something without needing to possess it or derive your identity from it.
Consider money.
Attachment says:
"Without this, I'm unsafe."
Detachment says:
"This is useful, but God is my security."
Consider reputation.
Attachment says:
"They must think well of me."
Detachment says:
"I should behave honorably, but their opinion doesn't determine my worth."
Consider success.
Attachment says:
"I must succeed to prove that I matter."
Detachment says:
"I will pursue excellence, but failure cannot remove my dignity."
Even relationships.
Attachment can say:
"You must satisfy the emptiness inside me."
Christian love says:
"Because God is my ultimate good, I am free to love you without making you my god."
That is much harder.
And much freer.
Rose wasn't trying to become worthless
She was trying to discover a worth that couldn't be taken away.
This distinction is crucial.
Christian humility is sometimes distorted into:
"I'm worthless."
That isn't Catholic humility.
God does not create worthless human beings.
Your value is staggering precisely because you are created, known, desired and redeemed by God.
Humility means living in truth.
And the truth is paradoxical:
I am not God.
And:
I am infinitely loved by God.
Both are true.
Pride exaggerates the first direction:
I must make myself great.
Self-contempt exaggerates the opposite:
I am nothing.
Humility says:
I do not need to make myself great because God already loves me.
Rose wanted that freedom.
But now we need to challenge Rose too
This is important for developing a mature Catholic devotion.
Saints aren't superheroes whose every behavior should be copied.
Rose's efforts to diminish her beauty sometimes became severe.
Her later mortifications become considerably more extreme.
We shouldn't automatically conclude:
"A saint did it, therefore I should do it."
The Church's canonization of Rose does not canonize every technique Rose used.
Rather, the Church recognizes heroic holiness in the person.
This distinction allows us to ask:
What is the enduring spiritual principle?
And:
What was a historically conditioned expression of that principle?
The principle remains powerful:
Nothing created should become more important to my identity than belonging to Christ.
The method by which Rose pursued that freedom isn't necessarily ours.
You do not need to damage beauty to become detached from beauty.
You need to stop asking beauty to tell you your worth.
That's harder anyway.
Rose's great Dominican sister appears again
Remember Rose's great spiritual model, Catherine of Siena.
A profound theme running through Catherine's spirituality is self-knowledge and knowledge of God.
We discover ourselves truthfully only in relation to God.
The more I understand God, the more clearly I understand myself.
I discover:
I am created.
I am dependent.
I am sinful.
I need grace.
But simultaneously:
I am wanted.
I am loved.
I am redeemed.
I am called.
I am capable of communion with God.
Christian identity therefore isn't ultimately something we construct.
It is something we receive.
And now Rose turns the question toward us
The easiest way to discover an attachment isn't to ask:
"What do I like?"
Ask:
"What threatens me when I lose it?"
Suppose someone criticizes you.
Why does it hurt?
Sometimes because the criticism is unfair.
Sometimes because we've done something wrong.
But sometimes the intensity of our reaction reveals:
I need to be regarded as competent.
Someone else receives recognition.
Why does that disturb me?
Perhaps underneath it:
I need to feel important.
Someone doesn't respond to us.
Why the anxiety?
Perhaps:
I need to know I'm wanted.
We fail.
Why does failure become humiliation rather than information?
Perhaps:
My success has become evidence that I'm worthwhile.
These reactions are spiritual diagnostic tools.
They reveal where our identity has become attached.
Rose would tell us:
Pay attention there.
PRAY — The Rose Examination of Identity
Today, give this 10–15 minutes.
Sit before a crucifix if possible.
Begin:
Jesus, show me where I look for my worth apart from You.
Then slowly imagine losing these things.
Don't dramatize them. Just notice your reaction.
My reputation
What if people misunderstood me?
My competence
What if someone became much better than me?
My accomplishments
What if nobody remembered them?
My possessions
What if I had considerably less?
My appearance
What if age changed everything?
My usefulness
What if people stopped needing me?
My control
What if life didn't unfold according to my plans?
Notice which one creates the strongest interior resistance.
Don't attack it.
Simply say:
"Jesus, I think I need this more than I realized."
Then ask:
"Who am I to You?"
Remain quiet.
Then hear the Gospel
I want you to spend a few moments with Matthew 3:13–17, Jesus' Baptism.
Pay particular attention to:
"This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased."
Then remember what Christianity says happened at your Baptism.
You weren't merely registered as a Catholic.
You were incorporated into Christ.
You became an adopted child of God.
That means the deepest sentence describing you is not:
successful
or
unsuccessful
or
admired
or
rejected
or
important
or
forgotten.
It is:
I am a child of God in Christ.
Everything else is secondary.
LIVE — Today's act of detachment
Yesterday your act was hidden love.
Today:
Don't defend your image once.
Look for one harmless opportunity.
Perhaps someone corrects you.
Someone doesn't notice something good you did.
Someone else gets the credit.
Someone expresses a different opinion.
Someone doesn't recognize your expertise.
If justice or responsibility requires clarification, clarify it.
But if nothing important is at stake...
let your ego go unanswered.
Don't correct their impression simply because you want to look better.
And internally say:
"Jesus, You know me. That is enough."
That can be surprisingly difficult.
Which is precisely why it can reveal so much.
Your Rose Journal — Entry 4
Tonight complete these sentences:
1. I most want people to see me as ________.
Don't give the virtuous answer.
Give the true answer.
2. I become disproportionately uncomfortable when people think I am ________.
Now you are approaching something deeper.
3. If nobody knew my accomplishments, I would feel ________.
And finally:
4. Jesus, if my identity truly came from You, I think I would become freer to ________.
Spend most of your reflection on #4.
One more step
Before sleeping tonight, look briefly at yourself in a mirror.
Not to inspect yourself.
Simply look.
Then say:
This person was created by God.
This person is known completely by God.
This person is loved by God.
This person does not have to earn the right to exist.
My life is a gift before it is an achievement.
Jesus, teach me to receive my identity from You.
Then walk away.
Don't evaluate the reflection.
That's the exercise.
Where Rose has taken us
Our journey is beginning to form a progression:
Day 1 — Desire
Jesus is worth everything.
↓
Day 2 — Detachment
What competes with Him?
↓
Day 3 — Love
I can give myself because He gave Himself first.
↓
Day 4 — Identity
If I belong to Christ, I no longer need the world to tell me what I'm worth.
And now we are ready for a much more difficult Rose.
Because once Rose became convinced that she belonged completely to Jesus, she looked intensely at the place where Jesus' love was revealed most radically:
Calvary.
And Rose reached a conclusion that modern Christianity sometimes struggles to understand.
She didn't merely want Christ to remove suffering from her life.
She wanted to encounter Him inside suffering.
That is a very different spirituality.
Tomorrow we enter it carefully.
Day 5 — Rose and the Crucified Christ
Our question will be:
Why would someone who loves God move toward the Cross instead of away from it?
We will distinguish Christian suffering from masochism, examine what Catholics actually mean by offering up suffering, look at participation in Christ's Cross, and confront one of Rose's most famous convictions: that the Cross can become a road toward intimacy with God.
That will prepare us for Day 6, when we finally confront the most difficult part of Rose's life: her extreme penances and mortifications—and what we should, and should absolutely not, learn from them.
