The Virgin Mary, Mother of Our Lord. 15 August NT
The honor paid
to Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus Christ our Lord and God, goes back to the
earliest days of the Church. Indeed, it goes back further, for even before the
birth of her Son, Mary prophesied, "From this time forth, all generations
shall call me blessed."
The New
Testament records several incidents from the life of the Virgin: her betrothal
to Joseph, the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel that she was to bear the
Messiah, her Visitation to Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist, the
Nativity of our Lord, the visits of the shepherds and the magi, the Presentation
of the infant Jesus in the Temple at the age of forty days, the flight into
Egypt, the Passover visit to the Temple when Jesus was twelve, [Matthew
1:16,18-25; 2; Luke 1:26-56; 2]; the wedding at Cana in Galilee and the
performance of her Son's first miracle at her intercession [John 2:1-11], the
occasions when observers said, "How can this man be special? We know his
family!" [Matthew 13:54-56 = Mark 6:1-3 = Luke 4:22; also John 6:42], an
occasion when she came with others to see him while he was preaching [Matthew
12:46-50 = Mark 3:31-35 = Luke 8:19-21], her presence at the foot of the Cross,
where Jesus commends her to the care of the Beloved Disciple [John 19:25-27],
and her presence with the apostles in the upper room after the Ascension, waiting
for the promised Spirit [Acts 1:14]. She is thus seen to be present at most of
the chief events of her Son's life.
Besides Jesus
himself, only two humans are mentioned by name in the Creeds. One is Pontius
Pilate, Roman procurator of Judea from 26 to 36 AD. That Jesus was crucified by
order of Pontius Pilate pins down the date of his death within a few years, and
certifies that we are not talking, like the worshippers of Tammuz or Adonis,
about a personification or symbol of the annual death and resurrection of the
crops. His death is an event in history, something that really happened. The
other name is that of Mary. The Creeds say that Christ was "born of the
virgin Mary." That is to say, they assert on the one hand that he was
truly and fully human, born of a woman and not descended from the skies like an
angel. On the other hand, by telling us that his mother was a virgin they
exclude the theory that he was simply an ordinary man who was so virtuous that
he eventually, at his baptism, became filled with the Spirit of God. His virgin
birth attests to the fact that he was always more than merely human, always one
whose presence among us was in itself a miracle, from the first moment of his
earthly existence. In Mary, Virgin and Mother, God gives us a sign that Jesus
is both truly God and truly Man.
It sometimes
happens that someone will report an appearance of the Virgin Mary, bearing a
message, usually encouraging faithfulness in prayer. A reader has asked,
"How far back do such reports go?" According to Donald Attwater
(Penguin Dictionary of Saints), Gregory of Nyssa (335-395) says that the
earliest known report of a supernatural appearance of the Blessed Virgin to
anyone was of one to Gregory Thaumaturgos (213-270). At the request of a Roman
Catholic listmember, I point out that the genuineness of these appearances is
not official Roman Catholic doctrine. It is perfectly possible to reject all
such appearances as delusions, and still be a Roman Catholic in good standing.
Little is known
of the life of the Virgin Mary except insofar as it intersects with the life of
her Son, and there is an appropriateness in this. The Scriptures record her
words to the angel Gabriel, to her kinswoman Elizabeth, to her Son on two
occasions. But the only recorded saying of hers to what may be called ordinary,
run-of-the-mill hearers is her instruction to the servants at the wedding
feast, to whom she says simply, indicating her Son, "Whatever he says to
you, do it."
This we may
take to be the summation of her message to the world. If we listen to her, she
will tell us, "Listen to Him. Listen to my Son. Do what He tells
you." When we see her, we see her pointing to her Son. If our regard for
the Blessed Virgin does not have the immediate effect of turning our attention
from her to the One whom she carried in her womb for nine months and suckled at
her breast, to the Incarnate God, the Word made flesh, then we may be sure that
it is not the kind of regard that she seeks. A right regard for her will always
direct us to Him Who found in her His first earthly dwelling-place.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Seminarian. 14 August 1965
Jonathan Myrick
Daniels was born in New Hampshire in 1939, one of two offspring of a
Congregationalist physician. When in high school, he had a bad fall which put
him in the hospital for about a month. It was a time of reflection. Soon after,
he joined the Episcopal Church and also began to take his studies seriously,
and to consider the possibility of entering the priesthood. After high school,
he enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia (37:47
N 79:27 W), where at first he seemed a misfit, but managed to stick it out, and
was elected Valedictorian of his graduating class. During his sophomore year at
VMI, however, he began to experience uncertainties about his religious faith
and his vocation to the priesthood that continued for several years, and were
probably influenced by the death of his father and the prolonged illness of his
younger sister Emily. In the fall of 1961 he entered Harvard University in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston (41:20 N 71.05 W), to study English
literature, and in the spring of 1962, while attending Easter services at the
Church of the Advent in Boston, he underwent a conversion experience and
renewal of grace. Soon after, he made a definite decision to study for the
priesthood, and after a year of work to repair the family finances, he enrolled
at Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of
1963, expecting to graduate in the spring of 1966.
In March 1965
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asked students and others to join him in Selma,
Alabama (32:24 N 87:01 W), for a march to the state capital in Montgomery
(32:22 N 86:20 W) demonstrating support for his civil rights program. News of
the request reached the campus of ETS on Monday 8 March (my sources are a bit
confused on the chronology of that week, but I think this is correct), and
during Evening Prayer at the chapel, Jon Daniels decided that he ought to go.
Later he wrote:
"My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit
hath rejoiced in God my Saviour." I had come to Evening Prayer as usual
that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love
and reverence I have always felt for Mary's glad song. "He hath showed
strength with his arm." As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I
found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive,
luminous, Spirit-filled "moment" that would, in retrospect, remind me
of others--particularly one at Easter three years ago. Then it came. "He
hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things." I knew then that I must go to
Selma. The Virgin's song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.
He and others
left on Thursday for Selma, intending to stay only that weekend; but he and a
friend missed the bus back, and began to reflect on how an in-and-out visit
like theirs looked to those living in Selma, and decided that they must stay
longer. They went home to request permission to spend the rest of the term in
Selma, studying on their own and returning to take their examinations. In
Selma, many proposed marches were blocked by rows of policemen. Jon describes
one such meeting (ellipses not marked).
After a week-long, rain-soaked vigil, we still
stood face to face with the Selma police. I stood, for a change, in the front
rank, ankle-deep in an enormous puddle. To my immediate right were high school
students, for the most part, and further to the right were a swarm of
clergymen. My end of the line surged forward at one point, led by a militant
Episcopal priest whose temper (as usual) was at combustion-point. Thus I found
myself only inches from a young policeman. The air crackled with tension and
open hostility. Emma Jean, a sophomore in the Negro high school, called my name
from behind. I reached back for her hand to bring her up to the front rank, but
she did not see. Again she asked me to come back. My determination had become
infectiously savage, and I insisted that she come forward--I would not retreat!
Again I reached for her hand and pulled her forward. The young policeman spoke:
"You're dragging her through the puddle. You ought to be ashamed for
treating a girl like that." Flushing--I had forgotten the puddle--I
snarled something at him about whose-fault-it-really-was, that managed to be
both defensive and self-righteous. We matched baleful glances and then both
looked away. And then came a moment of shattering internal quiet, in which I
felt shame, indeed, and a kind of reluctant love for the young policeman. I
apologized to Emma Jean. And then it occurred to me to apologize to HIM and to
thank him. Though he looked away in contempt--I was not altogether sure I
blamed him--I had received a blessing I would not forget. Before long the kids
were singing, "I love ---." One of my friends asked [the young
policeman] for his name. His name was Charlie. When we sang for him, he blushed
and then smiled in a truly sacramental mixture of embarrassment and pleasure
and shyness. Soon the young policeman looked relaxed, we all lit cigarettes (in
a couple of instances, from a common match, and small groups of kids and
policemen clustered to joke or talk cautiously about the situation. It was thus
a shock later to look across the rank at the clergymen and their opposites, who
glared across a still unbroken "Wall" in what appeared to be silent
hatred. Had I been freely arranging the order for Evening Prayer that night, I
think I might have followed the General Confession directly with the General
Thanksgiving--or perhaps the Te Deum.
Jon devoted
many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of Negroes, mostly high
school students, to church with him in an effort to integrate the local
Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many parishioners openly
resented their presence, and put their pastor squarely in the middle. (He was
integrationist enough to risk his job by accommodating Jon's group as far as he
did, but not integrationist enough to satisfy Jon.)
In May, Jon
went back to ETS to take examinations and complete other requirements, and in
July he returned to Alabama, where he helped to produce a listing of local,
state, and federal agencies and other resources legally available to persons in
need of assistance.
On Friday 13
August Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit (32:00 N 86:36 W) to
join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and
held in the county jail in Hayneville (32:11 N 86:35 W) for six days until they
were bailed out. (They had agreed that none would accept bail until there was
bail money for all.) After their release on Friday 20 August, four of them
undertook to enter a local shop, and were met at the door by a man with a
shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he
aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way
and took the blast of the shotgun himself. (Whether he stepped between her and
the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed instantly. Not long before his death
he wrote:
I lost fear in
the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been
truly baptized into the Lord's death and Resurrection, that in the only sense
that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God. I
began to lose self-righteousness when I discovered the extent to which my
behavior was motivated by worldly desires and by the self-seeking messianism of
Yankee deliverance! The point is simply, of course, that one's motives are
usually mixed, and one had better know it.
As Judy and I
said the daily offices day by day, we became more and more aware of the living
reality of the invisible "communion of saints"--of the beloved
comunity in Cambridge who were saying the offices too, of the ones gathered
around a near-distant throne in heaven--who blend with theirs our faltering
songs of prayer and praise. With them, with black men and white men, with all
of life, in Him Whose Name is above all the names that the races and nations
shout, whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfils and "ends" all
songs, we are indelibly, unspeakably ONE.
(Note: Much
of Alabama has brick-red clayey soil. The region where the soil is black loam
is called "the black belt." The term has no racial referent, although
Yankees often assume that it does.)
(Note: Because
Bernard of Clairvaux is remembered on 20 August, Jonathan Daniels is remembered
on the day of his arrest, 14 August.)
Source: The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J
Schneider (Seabury Press, NY, 1967; 67-20940)
Maximilian Kolbe, Friar, Martyr. 14 August 1941
Raymond Kolbe
(who took the name Maximilian when he became a friar) is known chiefly for the
manner of his death, but his life was also noteworthy. He was born in 1894 near
Lodz (51:49 N 19:28 E) in a part of Poland then under Russian rule, of parents
who worked at home as weavers. In 1910 he became a Franciscan, taking the name
Maximilian. His parents then undertook the monastic life, his mother as a
Benedictine and his father as a Franciscan. His father left the order (I assume
before taking life vows) to run a religious bookstore, and then enlisted with
Pilsudski's army to fight the Russians. He was captured and hanged as a traitor
in 1914.
Maximilian
studied at Rome and was ordained in 1919. He returned to Poland and taught
Church history in a seminary. He left the seminary (1) to found an association
named for the Virgin Mary and dedicated to spreading the Roman Catholic faith
and assisting those who held it to learn more about it; and (2) to establish a
printing press and publish a periodical for the members of his association,
consisting largely of Christian apologetics. He built a friary just west of
Warsaw (52:15 N 21:00 E), which eventually housed 762 Franciscans and printed
eleven periodicals (one with a circulation of over a million), including a daily
newspaper. In 1930 he went to Asia, where he founded friaries in Nagasaki
(34:25 N 129:52 E) and in India. In 1936 he was recalled to supervise the
original friary near Warsaw. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, he knew that
the friary would be seized, and sent most of the friars home. He was imprisoned
briefly and then released, and returned to the friary, where he and the other
friars sheltered 3000 Poles and 1500 Jews, and continued to publish a newspaper
encouraging its readers.
In May 1941 the
friary was closed down and Maximilian and four companions were taken to
Auschwitz, where they worked with the other prisoners, chiefly at carrying
logs. Maximilian carried on his priestly work surreptitiously, hearing
confessions in unlikely places and celebrating the Lord's Supper with bread and
wine smuggled in for that purpose.
In order to
discourage escapes, the camp had a rule that if a man escaped, ten men would be
killed in retaliation. In July 1941 a man from Kolbe's bunker escaped. The
remaining men of the bunker were led out and ten were selected, including a
Sergeant Francis Gajowniczek. When he uttered a cry of dismay, Maximilian
stepped forward and said, "I am a Catholic priest. Let me take his place.
I am old. He has a wife and children." The officer had more use for a
young worker than for an old one, and was happy to make the exchange. The ten
men were placed in a large cell and left there to starve. Maximilian encouraged
the others with prayers, psalms, and meditations on the Passion of Christ.
After two weeks, only four were alive, and only Maximilian was fully conscious.
The four were killed with injections of carbolic acid on 14 August 1941.
Jeremy Taylor, Bishop and Theologian.13 August 1667
(from the Anglican Calendar)
Jeremy Taylor was born at Cambridge in 1613 and ordained in 1633. In the years between 1633 and the ascendency of the Puritans in 1645, he was a Fellow of two Cambridge colleges, and chaplain to Archbishop Laud and to King Charles. Under Puritan rule, he was imprisoned three times, and forced into retirement as a family chaplain in Wales. After the Restoration, in 1661, he became Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland. Among his many books on theological, moral, and devotional subjects, the best known are The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living(1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651), usually cited simply as Holy Living and Holy Dying. Many readers, including Charles Wesley a century later, have reported finding these books of great spiritual benefit. Another work of his, Liberty of Prophesying, argues for freedom of conscience and freedom of speech in a religious context. Being stationed in an area that was largely Roman Catholic, he was, perhaps inevitably, drawn into controversy, and he wrote a book called Dissuasion (or Dissuasive) Against Popery.
One of the prayers for the Visitation of the Sick as found in the Book of Common Prayer (p 316 in the 1928 American edition) was written by Taylor. It reads as follows:O God, whose days are without end, and whose mercies cannot be numbered; Make us, we beseech thee, deeply sensible of the shortness and uncertainty of human life; and let thy Holy Spirit lead us in holiness and righteousness all our days: that, when we shall have served thee in our generation, we may be gathered unto our fathers, having the testimony of a good conscience; in the communion of the Catholic Church; in the confidence of a certain faith; in the comfort of a reasonable, religious, and holy hope; in favour with thee our God, and in perfect charity with the world. All which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.
LinK: http://elvis.rowan.edu/~kilroy/JEK/home.html
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