April 16 – Mollie Brant, Matron among the Mohawks d. 1796.
Mollie Brant was an eighteenth-century Mohawk woman known among her own people as Kon-wat’si-ja-yen’ni, who sustained them with her example of loyalty to the British Crown and the Anglican Church when they were forced out of the United States to make a new homeland in Canada.
She was born into a family of chieftains and attended an Anglican mission school. There she learned to speak English as fluently as her native tongue. In 1759, she became the companion of Sir William Johnson, the British agent for Indian affairs, and soon afterwards they were married according to Mohawk rites.
Though the union was not recognized by English law, the white community admired her dignity and wisdom in the ways of two cultures and continued to treat her with immense respect even after Sir William’s death in 1774. Mohawk matrons have an influential voice in the councils of their nation, and Mollie Brant played a decisive role in convincing her people to remain loyal to the British Crown during the American Revolution.
But she and her family paid a terrible price for their loyalty, because the rebels destroyed her home and forced her to take her clan into exile. She eventually settled at Kingston, where the British government built her a new house and gave her a generous pension. She became a founding member of St. George’s Anglican parish. She died at Kingston on this date in 1796, sincerely mourned by United Empire Loyalists as well as her own people.
April 30 – Marie de l’Incarnation d. 1672
We remember Marie de l ’Incarnation as an important Educator and Spiritual Teacher in New France, 1672. A member of the Ursuline Order, she arrived in Quebec City in 1639.
She had come in obedience to a vision which told her “to go to Canada to build a house for Jesus and Mary.” Over the next thirty years she fulfilled this task by setting up a school for young women of all races, and by establishing the first self-governing congregation of nuns in Canada.
Marie possessed many practical talents, and they were put to the test many times — when the Iroquois war reached the very walls of her convent; when the convent itself was completely destroyed by fire; when merchants tried to cheat her; and when the first bishop in New France tried to tell her that he knew better than she did what was best for nuns living in the wilderness.
In all these trials Marie displayed courage, intelligence, an unshakable sense of divine purpose, and even a sense of humour. But she was more than a good administrator. She was also gifted with mystical visions which revealed to her the loving relations within the most holy Trinity; and all her life she struggled to translate her interior experiences into care for others, so that they might share in the same love to which her visions pointed. Marie knew the cost of loving Christ more than anything else.
As a young widow in France, she had given up her only child, an eleven-year-old boy, in order to follow her vocation as a nun. The pain of that separation remained with her, though she was certain that she had acted in obedience to God’s will for her. Her son eventually became a monk himself, and they kept in touch by writing to one another back and forth across the Atlantic.
Marie came to feel that she had been given back to her son on a level which would not have been possible if she had not followed her vocation. And so we honour Marie de l’Incarnation not only as a founder of the Church in Canada, but also as a mystic who possessed the gifts of a true spiritual mother, able to nurture her own son and the children of New France in the ways of the love of Christ.
