“But Jesus answered them, saying: The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it and he that hateth his life in this world keepeth it unto life eternal.”

—St. John 12:23-25

Our Lord spoke these words on Palm Sunday, just after He had made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. They are words which fill us with emotion as we understand how Jesus is looking into the depths of His Passion. The grain of wheat that dies and is buried in the earth, which then bringeth forth much fruit, is Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in His Death and Resurrection.  The grain of wheat that dies in order to bring forth more abundant life is also a key image of our own Christian lives. Eternity is contained within our “grain-of-wheat”. It is only by our dying that it can be released.
We have been considering in our Conferences over the past six Lenten Fridays how God used the Holy Cross Brother André Bessette (who held only the lowly office of the door-answerer in his religious Community) as an instrument of divine power, all the while the Brother saw himself as a secondary instrument to Saint Joseph, who was the primary conduit of God’s divine power at work through prayer.
It is striking to us from a distance just how “unadorned” Frere André’s apostolate was. We are quite accustomed to the religious celebrity who sits at the center of a well-organized (and frequently well-funded) “ministry”. The developments in social media have further promoted this style of reaching people.  Inescapably, it tends to fall into the groove of the business model of expansion and public-relations promotion.
But the apostolate of Frere André through Saint Joseph was not at all like that. He wrote no books. He gave no speeches. Our record of what he said is cobbled together from people’s memories of them. Frere André’s apostolate had three phases: first, people began to seek him out as the porter at the College NotreDame; then the Community sent him down to the tramway station to talk to the people who came in the tramway reception room; finally he was assigned to the original, small Oratory of Saint Joseph erected on the Mount Royal to receive the visitors. Other than that he was taken to visit the poor sick who could not come to him. His tools of ministry were the sacramentals of St. Joseph medals and St. Joseph oil, to be rubbed on the sick body, accompanied and followed by prayers to St. Joseph. 
The last years of Frere André’s life were a virtual Way-of-the-Cross. He was very old, his health was failing, he was at the point of exhaustion, and yet—throngs of visitors came to his office making ever-increasing demands. Under the strain of it all, the cracks of impatience began to show through, as his Superior, Father Cousineau, later testified:
Many people, frightened by his ascetic expression or by the abruptness with which he put an end to meaningless conversations, failed to notice that Brother André maintained, despite his abrupt demeanor, a facial serenity [which was] the mirror of his inner peace…
For five days at the turning of the Year 1937, Frere André lay dying in a Catholic Hospital run by the Sisters of Good Hope. He asked the Sisters attending him to “Pray for my conversion”. On January 3rd, he said: “The Almighty is coming.” Fifty minutes after midnight on January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany, Frere André breathed his last. The grain of wheat had died and was buried in the earth.
Since then, his life in eternity has borne much fruit. The Church has given her judgment by raising him to the altars as one of her canonized Saints. But as with Christ, so with His Saints: an unbelieving, cold-hearted world does not recognize the goodness of God in their midst. This is our challenge—to see through the world’s filter and to discover just what it is to be a Christian!