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August Saints
H o m i l y G r i t s
August Feasts and Fasts 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup -
permission given for free distribution in fair use or quotation
)
Use one the votive masses in the Book of Common Prayer, from the
section "The Common of Saints", pages 925-927, or from the section
"Various Occasions", pages 927-931, or a common of saints from "Lesser
Feasts and Fasts", or this, the votive "For Social Justice."
Almighty God, who created us in your own image: Grant us grace fearlessly
to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression; and, that
we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the
maintenance of justice in our communities and among the nations, to the
glory of your holy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Isaiah 42:1-7 I have given you as a light to the nations
Psalm 72 , or 72:1-4, 12-14 Deus, judicium - Give
the rulers your justice, O God
James 2:5-9, 12-17 What good is faith without works?
Matthew 10:32-42 Whoever gives even a cup of
cold water to one of these little ones--none of these will lose their
reward.
1 - Joseph of Arimathea
Alphonsus Mary Ligouri, founder of the
Redemptorists, 1787
2 - Basil the Blessed, Fool, 1552
3 - Flannery O'Connor, Novelist, 1964
4 - John Baptist Vianney, Curé of Ars, 1859
5 - Mary McKillop, Founder of Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart,
1909
6 - TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
Paul VI, Bishop of Rome, 1978
7 - John Mason Neale, Priest 1866
- Victricius, Peacemaker, 407
8 - Dominic of Guzman, Founder of the Order of Preachers, 1221
- Fourteen Holy Helpers
9 - Franz Jägerstätter, Martyr, 1943
10 - Laurence, Martyr at Rome, 258
- Edith Stein, Martyr of the Holocaust 1942
11 - Clare of Assisi, Poor Clare, 1253
12 - Florence Nightingale, Renewer of Society, 1910
William Blake, Poet & Seer, 1827
13 - Jeremy Taylor, Bishop, 1667
- Tikhon of Zadonsk, monk & bishop, 1783
- Clara Maass, Renewer of Society, 1901
14 - Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Martyr,
- Maximilian Kolbe, Priest & Martyr, 1941
15 - ST MARY THE VIRGIN
16 - SIKH festival: Paryushana Parva (festival of fasting,
friendship,
forgiveness)
16 - John Courtney Murray, scholar & priest,
1967
17 - Joan Delanou, founder of the Sisters of St Anne of Saumur, 1736
18 -William Porcher DuBose, scholar & priest, 1918
- Jeanne de Chantal, co-founder of the Order of
the Visitation, 1641
19 - Blaise Pascal, Apologist 1662
20 - Bernard of Clairvaux, 1153
21 - Abraham of Smolensk, Abbot, 1221
22 - Ignacio Silone, Novelist, 1978
- SIKH Day of Forgiveness: Khamapana
23 - Rose of Lima, Penitent, 1617
24 - ST BARTHOLOMEW THE APOSTLE
Anniversary of the Massacre of
the Huguenots 1572
- Simone Weil, Mystic, 1943
25 - Louis of France 1270
26 - Anne Hutchinson, Prophet, 1643
27 - Thomas Gallaudet with Henry Winter Syle
- Monica, Widow, Mother of Augustine,
387
- Helder Pesoa Câmara, Bishop, 1999
28 - Augustine of Hippo, 430
30 - Jeanne Jugan, Founder, Little Sisters of the Poor, 1879
31 - Aidan of Lindisfarne, 651
- John Bunyan, Teacher, 1688
"Bless" and "Bliss" are close enough, and a Bliss Ninny is a fool, marked
out for special blessing. Robert Ellsberg's "All Saints: Daily
Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for our Time" has an
entry for Basil the Blessed on August 2nd, and subtitles him as "Holy
Fool." He cites I Corinthians 3:18 for this splendid category of saint,
along with virgins, martyrs, confessors: "If any one among you thinks
they're wise in this age, let them become a fool." The Russian Church has
with prescience always made room for fools. We also have all known one or
two of them, and there are plenty of them around today both in the
hierarchy and the lowerarchy, for some of us marginals may even aspire to
this honorific. Fools have been tolerated to tell the truth in the most
oppressive circumstances, for they keep it comic, like the prophet who
suggested that the Philistine's god who did not answer prayers was out
"covering his feet" (i.e., lowering his drawers to defecate). The
cathedral in Moscow's Red Square was, appropriately, named for a Fool,
Basil the Blessed, who used to wander naked in the city, bearing his
witness and baring his buttocks, mooning over Moscow. He taunted the
rich, including the Tsar Ivan the Terrible, and took food from shops to
give to the hungry. One Lent he took forbidden flesh meat to the Tsar and
bid him eat; when the Tsar piously objected, Baboso Basil riposted, "Then
why do your drink the blood of humanity?" He was canonized by the Russian
Church in 1580.
Of the saints listed above, I have been blessed with the great honor of
meeting two of them in person--Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal
seminarian, and Dom Helder Câmara, the saintly Brazilian bishop. I met
Jon at St. Paul's, Selma, Alabama, in a long, hot summer there, at the
end of which he was murdered by white racists as he tried to protect
children from their gunfire. Jon was a seminarian on leave from the
Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who tried hard to change the
Church, brought his African American friends to St Paul's Selma, and in a
conversation I remember (in the sacristy at St. Paul's) tried to limn
some distance between the civil rights movement and the Kingdom of God,
which some of us were willing to see as too closely identified for his
comfort. He gave his life for both, but first for his young friends.
Dom Helder I met at a lecture hall in Chicago, taken there by my
Carmelite artist friend Dennis Zygadlo. I remember Dom Helder as being
very short, his English even shorter, but his love enormous and obvious
to all. He died in 1999 at age 90 at his home in Olinda, Brazil, famous
for his work among the poor and his denunciation of dictatorship. When he
was called 'the red bishop', he responded: "When I fed the poor I was
called a saint. When I asked why they are poor, I was called a
communist." Porque los pobres son pobres? Porque los ricos son ricos.
(Porque means both 'why?" and 'because'.) Brazil's president eulogized
him as a "blessed man who dedicated his life to ecumenical human rights"
and declared three days of mourning.
On another occasion I was further blessed by Paul VI, at a general
audience at Castel Gondolfo in 1969, when Roman Catholic sisters mistook
me for a bishop and tried to kiss my hand because I was holding up an
amethyst pectoral cross (which I had bought in Lebanon) for the Pope to
bless. Thus bishops are recognized sometimes, for their gemstones, and
not for their conspicuous poverty. I tried to tell them that I was an
Episcopalian, but that of course came out in Italian as a bishop, and the
amethyst was conclusive evidence. It disappeared from the Casa in a
burglar's visit. A Roman Catholic seminarian once presented me with
several authentic first class relics (he had a friend at the Curia in
Rome), one of which was a relic of the Curé d'Ars, John Baptist Vianney,
a bit of bone or a hank of hair, which I had for years and reverenced
until it was stolen for the silver reliquary in which I kept it. Lay not
up for yourselves neither amethysts nor relics upon the earth where
thieves break through and steal.
John Mason Neale I remember from the beautiful carved wood statue of him
which was commissioned by my friend William Ferndel Orrick, when he was
rector of the Ascension, Chicago, and which stands in that church's organ
screen today, with Father Orrick's ashes in the pavement of the sanctuary
under the altar, where we bury saints. He was, like Bill Orrick,
uninhibited in his high churchmanship, but as was usual in such cases,
inhibited by his bishop. The Hymnals 1940 and 1982--indeed the hymnals of
all the denominations--would be much the poorer without his gifted
translations of the old Greek and Latin hymns, and indeed his original
hymns as well. He also revived a nursing sisterhood (later to become St.
Margaret's) in the Church of England and led the Cambridge Camden
Society in its renewal of the church's liturgies.
Dominic Guzman I know of because each year here in Managua he is
celebrated as one of the city's patrons. The official patron of Managua
since its foundation has been Santiago, Saint James, the Lord's brother,
but he appears only on city stickers. Dominic gets promoted and pushed by
the populace, who celebrate his day with lots of rum and coke, and the
Dominicans, who run the University of Central America here and some
parishes under his patronage. A tiny foot high statue of Domingo is
carried about and brass bands accompany it all over town, adorned with
flowers and gauze curtains. There's fireworks and a great Desfile Hipico
(Horse Parade) here, with races and high class horseflesh on display by
the horses' wealthy owners, who are thoroughly sozzled in the saint's
honor each year. Blaise Pascal I met in college, when my religion
teacher, a Presbyterian minister, used his Pensées for a text, because he
was glad of the concurrence of his Calvinism with Pascal's tendency to
Jansenism. Pascal, a brilliant mathematician as a youth, had in 1654
several midnight revelations that told him his religion was too
intellectual and too remote. He joined the Jansenists in their battles
with the Jesuits' "meaningless jargon, casuistry, and moral laxity." His
provocative and pregnant "Pensées" were published only posthumously, and
are only fragments that he probably intended for a casebook of Christian
truths. After you have read them you will always remember that "the heart
has its reasons that the Reason does not know." The Jesuits I know in
Managua are closer to the heart of Jesus than the ones Pascal knew about
in his arguments.
Of Joseph of Arimathea, more is known from legend than from history. Our
"Lesser Feasts and Fasts" commentary insists that "Joseph's claim for
remembrance does not depend upon such legends, however beautiful and
romantic" but nevertheless repeats the early church's face-saving
propaganda that Joseph had come forward boldly to do for Jesus' corpse
what was demanded by Jewish piety, and to provide his own garden tomb for
the murdered rabbi. It's more acceptable too for the Easter pageant, and
a model for our Easter gardens. John Dominic Crossan and other scholars
think otherwise--that the Bible story is a cover for the horrible
facts:--that graveyard dogs finished the desecration and disappearance of
the physicality of Jesus, which was the usual follow-up to the disgrace
and outrage of imperial crucifixion. The Church couldn't bear the shame
of its failure to save him, and rewrote a magic history. The Qur'an did
the same, and says Jesus was saved from that by Allah, who substituted
someone else, and exalted him directly to heaven. See Central
America in this century for further "Desaparecidos" of imperial
policy--we're still digging up their bones. Joseph has ever since been
enlisted to be patron saint of undertakers, a comfort to us all.
Many women mystics die young and far from home, or far from themselves.
Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) a Roman Catholic marooned with peacocks on
her mother's dairy farm in rural Georgia, wasted away with lupus, and
clung to Christian hope in spite of her disability. She died in "the
Christ-haunted Bible Belt" where, out of the purgatory of her life (she
believed purgatory the most hopeful doctrine of the Church) she brought
forth the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and wrote them
down in stories with miraculous names. "The Violent Bear It Away" (from
Matthew 11:12) "Everything that Rises Must Converge", and "The Artificial
Nigger", a title that got the book banned by a black priest and a cracker
bishop in Georgia who hadn't bothered to read it. It is appropriately a
tale about the moral blindness of southern bigots.
Simone Weil (1909-1943) was born a Jew in France, studied philosophy,
joined an anarchist brigade in the Spanish civil war, until an accident
forced her return to France. A mystical experience watching a religious
procession in Portugal convinced her that "Christianity is preeminently
the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I
among others." While reciting to herself George Herbert's poem "Love"
{for text, see Homily Grits for Mary & Martha, July 29}, she felt "Christ
himself came down and took possession of me." The pro-Nazi Vichy
government fired her from her teaching job, 'though she considered
herself an unbaptized Roman Catholic. She said she could not bear the
thought of separating herself from the "immense and unfortunate multitude
of unbelievers" by being baptized. The spirit of imperial Rome horrified
her as its pervasiveness spread in the Christian church. Though some of
her mysticism is weird and semi-gnostic, some of her religion self-hating
and even Marcionite in her rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures, she
remains an example of an intense marginal sanctity, ferociously hanging
onto "heaven by the hems" from just outside the door.
Accompanying her this month is Edith Stein (1891-1942), born to Orthodox
Jewish parents in Germany on Yom Kippur. By the age of 13 she had
declared herself an atheist, and was one of the first women to
matriculate at the University of Göttingen, where she studied with Edmund
Husserl, father of phenomenology. He invited her to Freibug, where she
got her doctorate at the age of 23. One night in 1921 she happened on the
biography of Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite mystic. By morning she had
finished it and been converted. Baptized on New Year's day, Edith
continued to go to synagogue with her mother, feeling that baptism had
reunited her with her Jewish roots. (It's an understanding of Baptism
that Jesus embraced, and gave as the reason for his own Baptism.)
Frightened by the growing anti-Jewish hatred in Germany, she wrote to
Pius XI, to warn him; he didn't reply. Of course she lost her job, and
applied to enter the Carmelites. She spent her last night with her mother
in a synagogue before she was formally clothed as Sister Teresa Benedicta
a Cruce--"blessed by the Cross"--which she explained was chosen to refer
to the "fate of the people of God, which was beginning to reveal itself."
She was smuggled into Holland after Kristallnacht, but in 1940 the Nazis
arrived and forced her to wear the Yellow Star. The Nazis said they would
spare Jewish Christians if the Church kept silent, but the bishops of
Holland denounced he persecutions and the Gestapo arrived at the convent
to arrest her. She died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on August 9,
1942. She was martyred as both a Jew and as a Christian: she saw that her
death was in solidarity with her people and with Jesus, her Jewish
brother. But we ought not to think that we can co-opt her for a Jüdenrein
Aryan heaven, for there is no such place.
Mary McKillop,(1842-1909) a/k/a Mother Mary of the Cross, is Roman
Catholicism's first recognized saint of Australia, the founder of the
Sisters of St. Joseph. She suffered much, as did many religious women, at
the hands of he hierarchy. She insisted that her sisters be governed by a
mother general responsible directly to Rome, and not to the local bishop.
After all that's how Dominic got away with real preaching at the local
level of ignorance and superstition with his well trained Order of
Preachers. (My own bishop is far away in Chicago, a blessing indeed for a
priest in Nicaragua--a form of the globalization of Hope.) One bishop
excommunicated her, a second expelled her, a third wrote poison pen
letters to Rome. She travelled to Rome, talked with Pius IX, who was
amazed to meet an excommunicated nun, and got his approval. Nevertheless
a bishop in Adelaide slandered her as an alcoholic embezzler of funds,
but another official inquiry again exonerated her, although the
Australian bishops ganged up on her and had to be overruled once again by
the Pope. She referred to all her trials as "presents from God."
Florence Nightingale and Clara Maass are canonized together in the
Kalendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches. Florence also has a date
in the Episcopal Church's lists. The first was born in 1820 in the
Italian city for which she was named, brought up in class privilege in
England, educated in languages by her father. At the age of 17 she heard
the voice of God calling her to mission, and she found it to be in
nursing. In the Crimean war, she went to Turkey with a party of nurses in
1854 and found hospital conditions appalling. She became a national hero
in her struggle with filth and foolish doctors, a fight that would last
most of her life, even into her blindness. Clara Maass was born in 1876
in East Orange, New Jersey, and was one of the first graduates of the
Newark German Hospital. She served in the Spanish-American war, in Cuba
and the Philippines, nursing victims of Yellow Fever. She herself
contracted dengué, "breakbone fever", and was sent home. She volunteered
for experiments to prove that yellow fever was also vectored by
mosquitoes, and after a second infection she died. She was the only
woman, the only north American, go give her life in the research. In 1952
Newark German Hospital changed is name to Clara Maass Memorial.
Rose of Lima was born in Lima, Peru, and called Rose because she was so
pretty. Much sought after by suitors, she refused them all and plastered
her pretty face with pepper and lime to disfigure herself and discourage
los muchachos. When her father's investments failed, she worked at
gardening and needlework to support the family, and spent years as a
recluse in a shed in the garden, and gave herself to good works amongst
the poorest, 'though often sick herself and in anguish. She wore a little
prickly silver crown of thorns as a permanent penance, and when she died
she was much eulogized by the male hegemons of the Church.
Less retiring, Anne Hutchinson,a Puritan prophet, came to Boston in
1634, with her husband and children. She was a midwife and a healer
skilled in herbal medicines who might have given Rose of Lima another
model for her imitation. She had advanced ideas about women's rights that
we don't think of as Puritan, and was brought to heresy trial at 46, in
her fifteenth pregnancy. Forced to stand for the trial, she was called a
heretic and held in prison in the winter, though she continued to teach
and preach until she was banished from the "shining city on the hill"
which Puritanism thought itself to be. She was forced to travel to Rhode
Island and there had a miscarriage, over which the Puritans in Boston
rejoiced with their monster god as they promised to do in heaven whilst
they watch the sufferings of the damned. Forced also to flee Rhode Island
to escape the god's monsters, she got as far as Long Island and there in
1643 was massacred with her children, by American Indians, a martyr to
male stupidity.
Monica was a Christian in Carthage before her more famous son, Augustine,
and was appalled by his immersion in the Manichean cult, a Babylonian
religion, dualistic and doubtless with much influence on Augustine for
the rest of his life, and even on our own lives, for his dotty doctrine
of Original Sin served to import the bonds of darkness and evil impulse
for along time back into our religion. No "Jesus of history" for them,
but a celestial Christ, and a celibate one, presiding over the "elect"
who were always superior to the mere auditors, as elders over their
Puritan congregations. An angel consoled her in a vision that her son was
with her, but he wisecracked back that this meant she would join his
cult. "No", she said, "The angel did not say that I was with you; he said
that you were with me." And she prayed constantly for him and nagged him
into orthodoxy. She followed him to Milan, where after studying rhetoric,
he opted for Christian instruction by Bishop Ambrose and was baptized.
Having got her son into the Church, she said the one reason for her life
was now fulfilled, and asked "What is left for me to do in this world?"
and fell sick. He asked her if she did not fear dying so far from home,
and she replied, "Nothing is far from God." And left him without her
further wise guidance by dying at age 55.
"And what more should I say? Time would fail me to tell" of this harvest
of August saints--"who through faith conquered empires, administered
justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions. . . women who
received their dead by resurrection. Yet God has provided something
better, so that they would not apart from us be made perfect." (Hebrews
11.)
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
GRITS 3rd series now on-line:
http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/homilygrits