Elizabeth Seton

Resilience is a by-product of faith. It’s the ability to see beyond present pain and trouble to trust God for the future. As I consider the life of Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), her resilient faith wins my respect. Her mother died when she was three, as did her younger sister a year later. Her father remarried, but the marriage didn’t last, and her stepmother rejected her. Elizabeth’s strong faith, shaped by devout Anglicans, kept her going. She married William Seton at nineteen, who ran a prosperous shipping business with his father. When Will’s father died, his six half-brothers and sisters came to live with them, adding to their three young children. Sadly, Will’s health and business began to fail. Elizabeth wrote, “If I would forget my God one moment in those times, I would go mad.” When the business went bankrupt, they sought a warmer climate in Italy as Will’s tuberculosis worsened. They were placed in quarantine upon arrival in a cold, damp building, and Will died shortly after the isolation lifted. Elizabeth was now stranded, a twenty-nine-year-old widow with five children under nine. Adversity can draw people toward God or away from God. Elizabeth chose in her grief to draw closer to God. Her resilient faith is evident in her words, “I resign the past and the future to Him who is the author and conductor of both.” God placed caring Catholics in her life to sustain her in dark times. When she returned to the states, she joined the Catholic church and dedicated herself along with five other women to acts of charity. They were given a farmhouse in Emmitsburg, Maryland to provide free education to poor children, the beginnings of parochial school education. They became Sisters of Charity, still vital in relief ministry today. “Do what you can,” she wrote, “and God will do the rest. What seems impossible in nature is so easy for grace.” Her prayer gives evidence of the way she ordered her life: