“She was always, always asking ‘What is God asking me to do now?’ and she would turn on a dime and do it. And nine times out of ten she was right.”
Raymond Arroyo spent years working with and interviewing Mother Angelica. She was like a second mother to him and he loved her dearly. And the feeling was mutual, which was obvious to anyone who ever saw them together, even on television. With his most recent book about her, Mother Angelica: Her Grand Silence, I finally asked him: So you knew and loved and worked for and with a saint. What’s that like? How do we do the same?
She was “single minded and driven. It is God or nothing,” he said of her approach to life, focused on Him.
He noted the same would and has been said about Mother Teresa, someone he also interviewed and spent several days with. About the two saintly women he continued: “The mission they are given is totally consuming,” even admitting that “it’s very difficult to be near someone like that.” Their concerns are not the world’s concerns. “They were on a mission.”
With Mother Angelica, he said, “you either get on the train, or the train is going to move past you.” It’s part of the “beauty” of God, that He works with the nature of the individual. “Their sanctity is found in their willingness to give of themselves to someone… and to live out those virtues of faith, hope.”