Learning to Love

Father Solanus Guild Reflection by Br. John Celichowski, OFM Cap. – February 5, 2026

At the funeral Mass for Bl. Solanus Casey in 1957, Gerald Walker, OFM Cap., Provincial Minister, preached the sermon. It was a task that was practically easy and emotionally difficult. He could wax eloquently about Solanus’ holiness and other virtues, as well as his many good works. But because Fr. Gerald also knew and loved Solanus as a brother and a mentor, he found it difficult to preach without having to pause here and there to choke back tears.

The late Br. Michael Crosby, OFM Cap. recalls in Thank God Ahead of Time: The Life and Spirituality of Solanus Casey, that near the end of his sermon, Fr. Gerald recalled “two loves” of Solanus—people who were sick and those who were poor.

His was a life of service and love for people like me and you. When he was not himself sick, he nevertheless suffered with and for you that were sick. When he was not physically hungry, he hungered with people like you. He had a Divine love for people. He loved people for what he could do for them—and for God, through them (221-222).

Bl. Solanus’ love for other people was inseparable from his love for God and his desire to love like God—at least as much as humanly possible. The foundations of this love were forged in the earliest days of his religious life. As a novice at St. Bonaventure Monastery, he noted in a journal five ways one acquired the love of God: (1) detachment from earthly things and desires; (2) meditation on Christ’s Passion; (3) making God’s will one’s own; (4) mental prayer, meditation and contemplation; and (5) prayer (c.f., Matthew 7:7).

The love that Bl. Solanus concretely expressed in his care for the spiritual and physical needs of others was rooted in his relationship with God. That relationship, in turn, was something he needed to cultivate through regular spiritual discipline and practices. Real love, we all inevitably learn, is hard work! As our hearts and minds learn to love, that growth is revealed in how we live; and the more we live in love, the more it becomes part of us.

Our celebration of Valentine’s Day on February 14 draws us to the romantic dimensions of love, with all its ecstasy, aridity and agony. Just as these elements are found in eros, they are also part of other forms of love, friendship (philia) and the covenantal love of God with and through humanity (agapé).

Bl. Solanus discovered and exuded the love of God with the people who came to the doors of the Monastery for counsel and prayers. He found and shared God’s love with those who lined Mt. Elliott Street to get a bowl of soup and some bread in the midst of the Great Depression. He experienced the love of God in the care of the doctors and nurses who ministered to him in his final days at St. John’s Hospital in Detroit. He found it, however imperfectly, in his Capuchin brothers. Through God’s grace, prayer and years of spiritual work, he found it in himself.