From the Rector
Dear friends in Christ~
Christ’s suffering enfolds our own, gathering into his victory of death the wounds, burdens, and losses that condition our humanity. And in another way, our suffering enfolds Christ and conditions his divinity, for he has taken flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, becoming dust and ash, sharing fully the weariness of our lives—the exhaustion of sorrow, the ache of resignation, the sting of loss. In Christ, God suffers with us; in Christ, our suffering is caught up into his resurrection. Saint Paul once wrote, "Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory?" (1 Corinthians 15:55).
This past Wednesday the 9th, the Episcopal Church commemorated in its annual calendar of saints the Martyrs of Memphis: Constance, Thecla, Ruth, Frances, Charles Parsons, and Louis Schuyler. In 1878, the city of Memphis was ravaged by an epidemic of yellow fever, decimating its population such that the city lost its charter and was not reorganized for fourteen years. Almost everyone who could afford to do so left the city and fled.
Yet some chose to remain. Among them were Anglican and Roman Catholic sisters, priests, and lay workers who refused to abandon the sick and dying. They nursed the afflicted, buried the dead, and consoled the bereaved. Many paid the greatest price: thirty-eight sisters lost their lives to the fever. One of the first to die, on September 9, 1878, was Constance, superior of the Community of St. Mary.
The collect appointed for their feast day says:
"We give thee thanks and praise, O God of compassion, for the heroic witness of the Martyrs of Memphis, who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death…"
“The heroic witness of the martyrs”—a beautiful redundancy, the witness of the witnesses, the martyrdom of the martyrs. To “love not their own lives” (cf. Rev. 12:11) pushes against every instinct of survival, in every age, so often our compassion confined to ourselves and our own people. These martyrs, though, in the face of deprivation and death, did not flinch but gave themselves fully to their neighbors, steadfast in love, regardless of the cost.
Our world cries out for this conviction that love that bears all things, endures all things, hopes all things (1 Cor. 13:7), and lays down its life, as Christ did, for one's neighbor. In one of my favorite passages from Saint John's Gospel, Jesus said, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12–13). The world needs the voice of the martyrs, witnesses to faith, hope, and love. The world needs Jesus, and we are his hands and feet.
I continue to pray for you and yours and give thanks that "for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgement," as Saint Paul wrote to Saint Timothy (2 Timothy 1:7)
Yours in Christ's love,
Fr. Peter Helman
