Five days before the Venezuelan elections a young man named Luis walked into St. Frances Cabrini Shrine in New York and asked if he could do something special. “I emigrated from Venezuela six years ago,” Luis said, “And I can’t vote on Sunday. So I want to entrust Mother Cabrini and Our Lady of Cotomoro with the future of my country. I’d like to decorate the Shrine for Sunday with flowers.”
Luis, as we quickly learned as we watched him work, is a very talented floral designer. When we popped in to speak with him during the hours he spent creating the arrangements for the Shrine, he told us of how he’d felt at sea spiritually when he first arrived in the U.S. “I couldn’t find a home,” he said, “Until the day I walked in here and thought, ‘Of course! The patroness of immigrants!'”
All the flowers at the Shrine are what we call pilgrim flowers: gifts brought by visitors. Honoring this, Luis carefully incorporated the existing flowers in the chapel into his work.
The end result was nothing short of spectacular. On the day of the elections, we told our regular Sunday mass-goers the story of how the flowers came to be here and asked them to pray for the people of Venezuela.
May Venezuela and all countries in the midst of social upheaval have peace.
