A House for a Cup of Water: Mother Cabrini in Seattle

On this feast of St. Frances Cabrini, I thought I’d tell this story:

I had a kind of private shrine to St. Frances near where I lived in Seattle in my early days as a Catholic.

My basement apartment was on the edge of a large park on Lake Washington with spectacular views of Mount Rainier. I used to rise early and walk the park at dawn and pray and there — on a hill above me — you could see what looked like a little castle but was, in fact, an old home that Mother Cabrini had purchased for her sisters nearly 100 years earlier.

As in Golden, CO, she found the site by direct mystical guidance.

She and a couple sisters had made the long trek from downtown Seattle to look for a new house and had already seen and determined the house was what she wanted but was told that the owner refused to sell.

On the way back home, the sisters were given a ride by a wealthy woman who turned out to own the house in question. Cabrini asked the woman for a glass of water (which got her into the house) and then asked for the house itself. As Cabrini later observed, “I got the house in exchange for a cup of cold water given in his name”.

In the 1920’s, one of her sisters living in that house was miraculously healed during a novena to Cabrini and that healing was one of the two used in her canonization process!

Knowing all this fueled my own prayer for the city.

Related:
Faithful Traveler, Diana von Glahn with Saint Francis Cabrini and her Travels

Comments remain closed as I am traveling. – SW