This week we'll celebrate two important feasts: the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, on September 14, and the following day, September 15, we'll remember Our Lady of Sorrows. Two days linked forever in meaning, inseparable, poignant.

The canonized women who are mothers add to our altars a special kind of incense - a two-fold fragrance of motherhood, both natural and spiritual. The very definition of their sainthood reveals that the life of the soul was sacrosanct to them, and that while they nurtured the physical life of their children, it was eternal life which they desired to impart above all.

One of the most saintly love stories in history began on a bridge.

The young Spanish priest had felt in his prayer an unidentified urging for several years, a vague call, a sense of something more. On October 2, 1928, while pondering some notes in his journal, Fr. Josemaría Escrivá suddenly saw it: the ‘call within a call’ such as Mother Teresa had received. He saw his mission clearly and definitely - to open a new path to holiness, a way of living out the universal Christian vocation in the midst of the world by sanctifying the everyday and the ordinary.

It was year 1450, and it the first Holy Year declared in the Church. Lay and religious pilgrims joyfully converged upon Rome – including a band of Augustinian nuns from Cascia, in the region of Umbria in central Italy known for it’s saints, as the birthplace of St. Benedict and St. Francis.Among them was an elderly nun, weak and exhausted from the long journey, but rejoicing to be the great Holy City. Little did Rita of Cascia know that 650 years later, during another Jubilee year, she would return to Rome – or, her mortal remains would – by police helicopter, to be venerated by pilgrims and the Pope himself, in honor of the 100th anniversary of her own canonization.

Almost twenty years ago, when I was a new mom, I slipped out one evening for a presentation – an introduction to the then newly beatified Gianna Beretta Molla. The presenter came to share the story of this doctor, wife, and mother who had captivated the world with her fierce devotion to human life even if it should cost of her own. He came with stacks of holy cards printed with her photograph and the prayer for her canonization. And he came with her wedding gown. I remember pressing the holy cards to the satiny folds of her white dress. Touching them to a piece of her life, a symbol of the sacrament that she gave herself over to with radical faith and deep love, I felt a connection and a desire to know her more. “This will be a relic someday,” he predicted. “Gianna was saving her dress, hoping to turn it into a vestment if she should have a son who would become a priest.” Her son, as it turned out, would not become a priest. But she would become a saint.

If you are busy woman juggling family, friends, work, and prayer, trying to balance works of mercy with your daily duty, prayer time with household chores, and marriage with ministry, then let today’s saint be an inspiration. There are few women who can’t relate to her in some way- she was a wife, mother, friend, prayer warrior, champion of the sick and poor, and founder of a religious community. But most of all, she was a daughter of the Church who lived both her marriage vows and baptismal promises to the full.