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Snakes on a Stick

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The problem with the story about the snakes in Numbers 21:4-9 is that it seems to be about magic.  And the problem with Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus in  John 3 is that Jesus’s use of the Numbers story is completely bizarre.  It would be easy for preachers to dismiss this, to move too quickly to clever theological explanations or, worse, obscure textual analysis, and ignore the fact that the majority of people sitting in the pews are bound to be completely bewildered.  In fact, most people in the pews will be in the position of one of John of Patmos’s first listeners.  They’ve wandered into a kindly space, full of good light tinted by stained glass, and they know from previous visits, or just from observing the behavior of others, that a certain decorum exists in this place, and maybe, hopefully, they appreciate that calm decorum.  And then someone gets up and reads something weird about people looking at a snake on a stick in the wilderness.  And then someone else gets up and reads about Jesus talking about eternal life and connecting it, somehow, to that snake on a stick.  The proper reaction to this is absolute confusion.

As far as the Bible is concerned, we live in a post-literate society.  Even dedicated church goers have rarely dipped into Numbers.  They and their children have, hopefully, heard and understood the main stories: Jacob and his ladder, Joseph and his coat, Moses and the Red Sea, Joshua and Jericho, David and Goliath.  But this is probably the first time they’ve heard about snakes in the wilderness.  Most have spent some time thinking about what it means that Jesus died on the cross for them.  But these are the church-goers.  Only about 40% of the general population.  Which means that the majority of Americans don’t know these stories, even if they claim to be Christian.  Preachers should assume that at least a few people in the pews are hearing even the most popular stories for the first time.  And preachers should avoid the temptation to be erudite or clever.  The person who wanders into church for the first time is looking for something, and it’s probably not an experience of being wowed by the cerebral accomplishments of the person in the pulpit.  They are looking for meaning, for an understanding about themselves and their world. And the proper question to ask of a set of readings such as those kicked up by the Revised Common Lectionary for the fourth Sunday of Lent, is whether they can help answer those questions of meaning.

I think they can.  Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night and pays him a compliment: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  Jesus answers him obscurely, to say the least: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Now Nicodemus has problems with this.  How can anyone be born twice?  We can’t crawl back into our mothers’ wombs and insist that she give birth to us a second time.  Jesus tells him that there are, essentially, two births.  One is from the water of one’s mother’s womb.  The second is from the spirit.  We are born from above by being born from the holy spirit.

All right, so far so good.  But what on earth does that mean?  What does it feel like to be born of the spirit?  How do you get it to happen?  What will happen to you if you do get it to happen?  Jesus answers the last question, but not the two previous questions.  When you’re born from the spirit, you’ll know it, because the winds of life, all of those troubles and joys, blow past you without you getting too anxious and upset over them.  To me, this sounds like a beautiful thing – to be born of the spirit is to become skilled at being at peace.  Peacefulness, that’s the spiritual good that is promised to us.  But how we attain it is a question that is left unanswered.

Or, rather, answered in a very obscure way.  Jesus keeps talking.  He talks about himself.  He is God’s son, sent to bring eternal life to the world.  How?  Not by condemning the world, but by trying to show us the light, to lead us into enlightenment.  And if want this enlightenment, we must respond by coming into the light, by seeking it.  This involves action.  Our actions in the world must be open and honest, available for the consideration of anyone.

So those are the elements at play.  Seek enlightenment and act honestly in the light, so that you may know the spirit in your life and be at peace.  But the question remains: what does this have to do with snakes?

I heard a story this week about a woman who had served as a cancer nurse for thirty years.  Thirty years of sorrow and loss as she saw patients worsen and die, and knew that even the moments of hope couldn’t be called cures, but only remissions.  A huge psychic weight of suffering.  And after thirty years, she found that her work place had changed.  She had a new boss who was very demanding.  It wore her down, to the point where she collapsed.  Who could blame her?  She left nursing for awhile and sought help.  And after some months passed she felt better, and was ready to return to nursing.  She wouldn’t be a cancer nurse anymore, but she would be at the same hospital, and with the same demanding boss.  The day before she went back to work, she was terrified.  She told her husband that she didn’t know how she was going to handle being in her boss’s presence again.  Her husband told her “You’ve got to face the snake.”

That’s what the snake is.  It’s that little piece of darkness in anyone’s life that is keeping them from walking in the light.  The shame of feeling that you’ve failed a demanding boss.  The pain of a childhood memory that keeps coming back.  The fact of a rejection, the grief from a loss, the ingrained dissatisfaction from not getting something that we really wanted.

For the Israelites in Numbers 21, the real, physical snakes appear after the people have become impatient and complained about the food.  Their impatience and complaints prompt the Lord to send poisonous, biting snakes among them.  Many of them die.  They recognize their mistake, go to Moses, and ask him to intercede on their behalf.  Moses consults with the Lord, who tells him to “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”  It is, unquestionably, a bizarre story, and it doesn’t make the Lord look very good.  But it does have spiritual value.  It suggests that we get over our snakes by facing them.  You have to face the snake.  Whatever little shard of darkness is keeping you from the light, you don’t get over it by ignoring it.  You get over it by facing it and moving through it.

And this is why Jesus compares that snake on a stick to being lifted high on the cross.  For people who aren’t used to the story of the cross, and who hear it for the first time, it sounds like foolishness.  The idea that the world would be saved by a Palestinian peasant being tortured to death doesn’t make much sense.  And for the disciples, the cross represented the end of their hopes and ambitions.  It wasn’t the salvation they were looking for.  But they walked to the cross with Jesus because they couldn’t help themselves.  They loved him too much.  He had taught them how to live.  They watched him die, and if that was the end of the story, they would’ve been sunk.  But they spent two days in hiding, and on the third day, Jesus rose again from the dead.  They had stared at the snake, and moved through the pain of its darkness, and found themselves blinking in new light.

This is what happens to us when we face our darkness.  It hurts to face it.  It leads us into deep grief.  But if we look on it with steadfastness, we move through it, and find ourselves emerging into a new life.  Being born, as it were, from the spirit.

James Theodore Holly

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Even during the years right before the Civil War, most white people in the north refused to believe that black people could be their intellectual equals.  They might be adamant in their opposition to slavery, but this rarely meant that they were willing to cede to black people full political equality, or entertain the notion that men like Alexander Crummell or James Theodore Holly were as capable of profound thought or religious enlightenment as they were.  In his fantastic new book 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart tells the story of Abby Kelley, the brilliant Quaker abolitionist who converted whole communities to her cause, but who also “nearly lost her audience when she declared that black men and women were no different from whites under the skin” at an anti-slavery meeting.  Given these prejudices even among their allies, men like Crummell and Holly felt that they had something to prove.  They and other black intellectuals  felt that their accomplishments, and the accomplishments of African peoples throughout history, were constantly ignored or understated by white authors.  They wanted to influence the way that history was taught and thought about by correcting the prejudices that constantly regulated the history of their ancestors to the negligible sidelines.  When they thought about the history of Africa they emphasized the brilliance of Africans such as Saint Augustine and Tertullian.  When they thought about the history of the African diaspora, their thoughts turned to Haiti.

They emphasized that Haiti was the second independent nation in the New World, having declared independence from France on January 1st, 1804.  They raised up the name of Toussaint Louverture as a patriotic hero on the same scale as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  They pointed to the aid that Haiti had leant to Simon Bolivar in his struggle to free Spanish colonies from imperial rule.  For them Haiti, an independent country ruled by the descendants of Africans, represent proof that blacks were capable of self-rule, which in turn proved that they were as able, politically and intellectually, as any white.  James Theodore Holly would refer to his contemporaries in Haiti as “the sable heroes and statesman of that independent island of the Caribbean.”  The black abolitionist William Watkins Jr. called Haiti “an irrefutable argument that the descendants of Africa were never designed by their Creator to sustain an inferiority, or even a mediocrity in the chain of beings.”   (You can read about this in Benjamin Quarles book Black Mosaic: Essays in Afro-American History and Historiography, p. 121-122).

James Theodore Holly was remarkable in that he decided to live out his admiration of Haiti and his determination to prove the whole equality of black people.  He was born in Washington D.C. on October 3rd, 1829, the son of Roman Catholic parents.  His parents were free, his grandfather having come to D.C. from Maryland in 1799 to work on the capitol’s construction.  The family moved to New York when James was fifteen years old, and there James was befriended by Father Felix Varela, a Spanish priest who gave him his first Bible.  Roman Catholics had long proven themselves to be allies of African-Americans who were trying to reclaim their history from the negligence of white authors.  Several of the books that were written about African history and heroes were penned by Catholic priests.  But, according to Holly’s own testimony, it was the gift of that Bible which was to lead him away from Roman Catholicism.  Being able to read scripture without mediation convinced him that Roman Catholics practiced “unscriptural ways.”  He withdrew from the church when he was twenty-two, only to become an Episcopalian two years later.  He later stated that “I became a member of the Episcopal Church in Detroit, Michigan, and was immediately admitted a candidate for Holy Orders (http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/jtholly/facts1897.html).”

He was ordained a deacon in Michigan, and requested his bishop to recommend him for missionary work in Haiti.    He was sent by the Episcopal Church’s Foreign Committee to explore the feasibility of a mission in Haiti, and spent two months there in 1855.  When he returned, the committee agreed that he should be sent as a missionary as soon as funds could be raised.  However, the raising of those funds took six years.  In the meantime he was ordained a priest and served as Rector of Saint Luke’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut.

He finally set sail for Haiti in May of 1861, just a few weeks after Frederick Douglass himself was supposed to leave for the island nation.  Holly had known Douglass since his time in New York, and some of the same desires motivated the two men.  Douglass’s intended move to Haiti was motivated by disgust at an America that was preparing for Civil War but not, apparently, for emancipation.  Douglass changed his mind at the last minute.  But Holly sailed forth with about a hundred others, including his wife and seven children.  They were greeted by President Fabre Geffrard, who had seized power in a coup but who ended his reign by attempting to establish a constitutional government.  Geffrard gave the American missionaries some of his own land for the establishment of their mission.  It was about three miles from Port-au-Prince, and it soon proved to be unhealthy.  Contagion broke out during the next nine months, and many of the missionaries died, including Holly’s wife and five of his children.  Many of the survivors chose to return to the United States.  Only about twenty chose to remain.

An American living in Port-au-Prince gave the missionaries a large hall to relocate to, and Holly returned to the U.S. in 1862 to gather funds, leaving his “two motherless boys behind me, in the care of a member of the colony, as a guarantee of my return to Haiti, and to assure them that I would not desert them.”  He returned with a missionary stipend, which had been granted him by the General Convention, and rented a house in the city.

Given the suffering, the uncertainty, and the poverty of the situation, it’s amazing that Holly managed to accomplish so much during the following years.  He oversaw the building of a church, schoolhouse, and rectory in Port-au-Prince, and an expansion of missionary efforts into Haiti’s rural districts.  By 1897 he had established or helped to cultivate schools and hospitals.  He had ordained priests and deacons, the majority of whom worked at several jobs, farming and helping to administer the government.  Chapels were built in the mountains, and lay readers went out from them to minister to a scattered flock. “They make missionary visits from house to house, and like Saint Andrew, they return, bringing their brethren to the Lord Jesus,” Holly wrote of them.  The main church in Port-au-Prince burnt down twice during those years as fires spread through the city.  Again and again, Holly came up against hardship and disaster, but he always stayed true to his vision of educating and healing in Haiti, of spreading the church, and of proving the full of equality of the children of the African diaspora.  He died on March 13, 1911, having established a lasting mission in Haiti and served as Episcopal bishop there for thirty-seven years.

The Will, The Force of Habit, and Enlightenment

~ KPB Stevens ~ 5 Comments

David Brooks started his March 1st New York Times column by saying that

In the 19th century, there was a hydraulic model of how to be a good person. There are all these torrents of passion flowing through you. Your job, as captain of your soul, is to erect dams to keep these passions in check. Your job is to just say no to sloth, lust, greed, drug use and the other sins.

He went on to contrast this to an emerging model of human behavior (I won’t call it morality) built around habit formation.  For years psychologists, sociologists, and advertisers have studied habit formation, discovering tools for the manipulation of behavior that we can use and that others can use on us.  It seems that most of us respond automatically to a three part cycle of cue, routine, and reward.  Charles Duhigg, who just wrote a book about this, uses his own cookie eating habit to describe how this works (see video below).  Every day at around three-thirty he would feel the urge to eat a cookie (cue).  So he’d go to the cafeteria, buy a cookie (routine), and spend about ten minutes chatting with his friends (reward).  But before he started thinking about this process, he didn’t really know what cue he was responding to or what reward he was truly seeking.  He discovered that the cue was time – he always began his trip to the cafeteria at around 3:30.  The reward was harder to figure out.  He tried varying his routine.  Maybe he just wanted to stretch his legs at 3:30.  He tried walking around the block.  That didn’t work.  Maybe he was hungry.  He tried eating an apple.  That didn’t work.  Finally he realized that the reward he was seeking was the chance to socialize after a long afternoon working at his desk.  So instead of trekking down to the cafeteria at 3:30, he would stand up, survey the office, find someone to talk to, and after about ten minutes of chit chat, return to his desk.  And this worked.  He lost eight pounds.

These unthinking habits account for about 45% of our daily choices.  We like to think that we’re morally alert, judging and weighing every decision, but the truth is that we’re morally awake for less time than we are actually awake every day.  And knowing this has to effect the way we think about the Ten Commandments.  Some of them are so stark that only psychopaths and nymphomaniacs would habitually break them.  You shall not murder.  You shall not commit adultery.  But some of them can be broken habitually.  Advertisements often attempt to train us to covet our neighbors’ cars, clothes, even cleaning products.  Its easy to fall into habits of neglect and not honor aged parents with visits, or not so aged parents with phone calls, or into habits of annoyance, where we visit and call our parents, but only to criticize and berate them (and if you don’t think this is habitual, think of the most tense relationship you have with any other person, and ask yourself why you fall into sniping and arguing with that person so easily).  Misusing the Lord’s name is often habitual.  And idol making is probably the most habitual thing we do.  For me the main idol is my own sense of self-importance, which causes me to check my e-mail every time the little bell dings and to constantly check to see how many hits I’ve gotten on this blog.

If we sleep walk our way through our transgressions, what chance do we have to change them?  I don’t think that the 19th century model that Brooks describes is the right way to go – those captains of their own souls in the Victorian era also managed to exploit child laborers, cudgel poorly paid workers, sanction domestic violence, and lynch African Americans.  They trusted to their own wills, and the human will is a very untrustworthy shipmate.

I know that there are strong advocates for the idea that community ethics should guide personal ethics, that in a Christian community individuals will act in keeping with that community’s ethics because they love the community and don’t want to damage it by behaving badly.  But when, in all of human history, has this ever succeeded?  Consider Ananias and Sapphira, who in Acts 5 break the community’s ethic by refusing to share the proceeds from some property that they’ve sold.  They drop dead when Peter confronts them with his knowledge of their actions.  Shame certainly works to right the wrong.  But it doesn’t work to prevent the wrong.  It didn’t work to keep the Puritans on track, it didn’t work for the Oneida community or any other attempt at utopia, and it doesn’t even always work for the Amish.  And love of community, and the shame that comes from failing in that love, can at times be a bad thing.  The people who resisted the Nazis chose a greater moral good over a love of community.  So did abolitionists who lived in the slave states in this country.  Communities, even those that claim to be Christian, are sometimes wrong.  And it’s foolish to claim that such a model would work in the ideal Christian community, because that community doesn’t exist.  You end up sounding like the mid-twentieth century radicals who kept claiming that communism would work if it was only given a fair chance.  Ways of life that require ideal conditions to prosper won’t help us in the here and now.

So what chance do we have to actually be moral?  I think that the main error that those 19th century captains-of-the soul made was to believe that their own willpower would suffice.  What is important here is not our own will, but God’s.  There’s a reason why God comes first on the list of commandments, and that loving the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul is the first clause of the Great Commandment.  The first step in acting ethically for a Christian is to humble oneself before the Lord and submit to the will of God.  And in truth, aligning oneself to this morality is very simple.  You simply ask God to enter into you every day.

About a month ago, I was reading a book about ancient forms of prayer (Rodney Werline’s essay “The Experience of Prayer and Resistance to Demonic Powers in the Gospel of Mark,” which can be found in Inquiry Into Religious Experience in Early Judaism and Christianity).  The author suggested that, for the Jews of Jesus’s time, the soul was a battleground where God engaged in struggle against the world’s many demons.  To pray was to invite God onto this field of battle, to invite God into the soul.  I realized, after reading this, that my form of prayer has always been something akin to a visit to a high school guidance counselor.  I would lay out my problems and worries and ask for guidance, but in the end I would retain my right to choose.  My will was still the abiding concern, and God was just there to occasionally nod and make quiet suggestions.  But what if I tried praying in this other, more ancient way?  I began to spend just a minute or two in the morning, inviting God to enter into me and engage in my daily battles.  And I began to find that I had much more resistance to all my usual sins.  Because I couldn’t pretend that I was making choices by myself anymore.  I couldn’t pretend that I was alone in those choices, and safe from prying eyes as I made them.  If God has really entered into me, and is really present during the day, then there is no place that I can go to hide from God.  Some of this is about shame.  But a lot of it is also about joy – knowing that God loves me and is willing to inhabit my soul, even though that soul is vastly imperfect.

A self and a world that is inundated with God calls us to action.  The psalms describe this world, although we don’t often think of them as poems about morality.  “The fear of the Lord is clean and endures for ever; the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.  More to be desired are they than gold, more than much fine gold, sweeter far than honey, than honey from the comb.  By them also is your servant enlightened.” (Psalm 19)  These are songs about setting one’s own will aside, and accepting God’s will.  In the end, that is the habit that Christians must try to cultivate.  That’s why Jesus put it first, when he gave the Great Commandment.  “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart and all your mind and all your soul.  And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  The second clause is dependent on the first.  To submit to love of God is to submit to love of neighbor, because  if God loves us in our imperfections, God loves our neighbors in their imperfections, as well.  If we are to think of the world in terms of habit, this habit of daily enlightenment is the one that matters most.  Love God and feel grateful for the world and the life that God has given you (cue).  Invite God in to fight on the battlefield of your soul (routine).  Find yourself acting morally as you go about your daily life (reward).

Perpetua and Her Companions

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Perpetua was a young mother when she was arrested in 203 A.D.  She had become involved with a group of Christians, and was walking with her fellow catechumens through the town of Thuburbo Minus when she was taken into custody.  The crime of these early Christians was a refusal to sacrifice to the gods on behalf of the emperor.  The Emperor in this case was Septimius Severus, who had risen to power in 193, a year that was so politically chaotic that it was know as the Year of the Five Emperors.  Septimius Severus was the son of a freedman, which showed how quickly the Roman Empire was changing.  It used to be that Emperors had to be born into the senatorial classes, but not any more.  The Empire was so desperate for stability that the son of a former slave would do, as long as he could provide that stability.  Septimius Severus managed to do just that.  He waged successful wars in Africa and against the Parthians in the East, he built triumphal arches, and he put an end to the venal corruption that had been destroying Rome.  And he had two sons, Caracalla and Geta, which meant that when he died he would have a natural successor and the Empire could avoid more civil war.  Since the stability of the Empire depended on one man, it was natural for people to wake up every morning worrying about his health and to run to their temples to beg the gods that he might have long life and prosperity.  But it wasn’t natural for Christians, and because of this they were persecuted.

Perpetua was imprisoned in Carthage.  She spent her first days of incarceration without her baby.  The baby was still nursing and she worried about its nourishment, and suffered pain in her breasts because she couldn’t relieve the pressure of the milk.  Her father came to beg her to recant and make sacrifice to the Emperor.  He would appear again and again during her time in prison.  He wasn’t a Christian himself, and when Perpetua said that she was, “he moved towards me as though he would pluck my eyes out.”  When she next saw him, he was “worn with worry,” and instead of violence he tried persuasion, begging Perpetua to have pity on him in his old age.  He kissed her and wept at her feet.  But it was clear that his concern wasn’t only for her.  “You will destroy us!” he said.  “None of us will ever be able to speak freely again if anything happens to you!”  Again Perpetua refused him.  A few days later, she and her fellow Christians were dragged before the governor, Hilarianus, who passed judgement on them in the forum.  Her father appeared, this time with her infant son in his arms, and shouted to where she stood in the prisoner’s dock – “Perform the sacrifice – have pity on your baby!”  He made himself so obnoxious that the governor ordered soldiers to push him down and beat him with rods.

Up until this point, Perpetua’s baby was a bargaining chip between her and her father.  After his first visit to her, her mother came and brought the baby with her.  The warden allowed the infant to stay locked up with Perpetua so that it could nurse.  This relieved her mind and seems to have changed the very nature of prison for her.  “At once I recovered my health, relieved as I was of my worry and anxiety over the child.  My prison had suddenly become a palace, so that I wanted to be there rather than anywhere else.”  In her recount of her martyrdom, she doesn’t mention how the baby came to be in her father’s arms there in the forum.  But after Perpetua and her companions were sentenced to death, and her father, despairing, left the forum, he kept the baby with him.  However, as Perpetua says, “As God willed, the baby had no further desire for the breast, nor did I suffer any inflammation: and so I was relieved of any anxiety for my child and of any discomfort in my breasts.”

What did she do while she was waiting for execution?  Mostly, she and her companions had visions.  These must have been odd, shining, God-struck days.  Some of the places they were kept were very dark and horrible.  But they prayed together ceaselessly, and when they slept, they were given intimations of their futures.  Perpetua’s first vision occurred when she still had the baby with her.  She saw a narrow bronze ladder reaching to the heavens, with sharp weapons attached to it that would cut a climber if she didn’t stick to the middle of the rungs.  There was a dragon at the base of the ladder, but it was so cowed by Perpetua’s faith that it stuck out its head so that she could use it as her first step up the ladder.  When she reached the top, she found a gray-haired man milking sheep, who was surrounded by thousands of witnesses in white garments.  He welcomed her and gave her milk which she drank from cupped hands, a ritual action which ended in the crowd saying “Amen!”

After she had been sentenced and her father had made off with the baby, she had a vision of a younger brother who had died when he was seven years old.  This boy, named Dinocrates, had cancer of the face, “and his death,” Perpetua writes, “was a source of loathing to everyone.”  In her vision, she saw him in a kind of limbo, forever trying to drink from a pool of water that was just above his head and out of reach.  The poor child had been ostracized in life because of his illness and was now sentenced to eternal misery.  This tells us something about the dearth of compassion for sick people in the Roman Empire.   But it also tells us something about the harshness of the Christian vision of the afterlife at the time, the apparent belief that unbelievers would be sentenced to eternities of sorrow.  Perpetua resolved to try to save him from this misery by praying for him every day.  And on the day when she and her companions were transferred to the military prison, from which they would go to their deaths, she had a vision of her brother in which he was clean and refreshed and had lost the cancerous sores on his face.  The pool of water had been lowered and he could drink from it, and there were other children there for him to play with.  After she had this vision, her father came to visit her one last time.  He tore out his hair and rolled, sobbing, on the ground, and Perpetua felt pity for him.  It’s hard not to sympathize with this father.  From his perspective, his daughter was involved in a death cult.  And his repeated entreaties and fervent appeals demonstrated how much he loved her.

Perpetua and her companions were to be killed by wild beasts in the arena, in celebration of the birthday of Septimius Severus’s second son, Geta.  Death in the arena was a kind of highly ritualized state murder.  On the day before their executions a public feast was held for them, called ‘the free banquet,’ because the crowds who would jeer at them the next day could eat with them at the expense of the state.  There was, in the arena, a gate called the Porta Sanavivaria, ‘the Gate of Life,’ through which gladiators who had been victorious and people who had been spared by the crowds could leave.  That ‘Gate of Life’ featured largely in Perpetua’s last, and strangest, vision.  She saw one of the deacons who had been regularly visiting the prisoners come through the prison gates.  He led her by her hand into the arena, where she found herself facing a huge Egyptian, whom she understood to be the devil himself.  She was supposed to fight him in gladiatorial combat.  And when her clothes were stripped off so that she could fight, she found that she had become a man.  A giant came into the arena to judge the match.  Perpetua defeated the devil, and walked in triumph to the Gates of Life, as the crowd sang psalms.  What to make of this vision?  Perhaps she became a man simply to ensure her modesty.  Or maybe it was because gladiators were men, and if she was to be one in her vision, she had to be a man as well.  But maybe her transformation had to do with her role in the community of catechumens.  She was clearly one of the two leaders.  Her own account of her imprisonment up until the day of her martyrdom is one of the earliest Christian works written by a woman.  In her life and in her death she obviously assumed a role that was normally reserved for the opposite gender.

In one of her companion’s visions, the martyrs in heaven were greeted by God and given a preeminent position over the priests and the bishops.  They professed to be surprised by this, but it’s obvious that in early Christianity the martyrs role was becoming all important.  Much of this had to do with the peace and composure with which the martyrs went to meet their deaths.  While in prison, their prayer and evident love for each other so impressed the warden that he became a Christian.  When Perpetua and her companions were led out for the free banquet, they turned the meal into an agape feast.  They preached to the mob that had gathered to watch them eat.  The next day, when they were led out to die, they thought of it as “the day of their victory.”  Their jailers tried to mock their faith by dressing them in the robes of the priests of Saturn and the priestesses of Ceres.  But Perpetua stared them down and shamed them, and the military tribune ordered that they should be left alone.  When they were led out onto the sands of the arena, the screaming crowd demanded that they be scourged, and they excepted this whipping gladly, since it allowed them to share in the scourging of Christ.  Animals were used in horrifying ways into the arena.  Some of the martyrs were tied to posts and mauled by enraged bears.  Some were tied to the backs of wild boars, which dragged them through the arena, turning to gore them as they went.  One of the martyrs endured this, and then had his throat ripped out by a leopard.  Perpetua and her companion Felicitas, who had just given birth, were brought out naked in a net, so that they could be trampled by wild heifers.  But the crowd rose to their defense, shocked to see new mothers with milk at their breasts treated in this way.  So they were taken back in, dressed, and then given to the wild heifers.  Perpetua was thrown up in the air, but not badly injured, and when she was led through the Gates of Life for a reprieve, she came out of a trance and asked when the executions were to begin.  She had been praying so deeply that she hadn’t noticed what was happening to her.  Goring and battering by animals rarely killed anyone outright, and so at the end of their ordeal the martyrs were led back into the arena to have their throats cut by the gladiators.  The young gladiator who was assigned to Perpetua was trembling and he missed with his first stroke, so she steadied his hand and led the sword to her neck herself.  Her last act was one of pity for her young executioner.

What can we make of this gruesome story?  The faith of these martyrs was so deep, so profound, that they were willing to leave behind home and family, even infant children, in order to remain true to that faith.  And those who witnessed it were awed by their fearlessness.  In a world that was full of chaos and calamity, such calm perseverance must have seemed deeply hopeful.  People died all the time, in civil wars and random street violence, from disease and hunger and childbirth.  Yet almost everyone still feared death.  They feared it so much that they subjected other people to torture, just so that they could taunt death and fool themselves into thinking that if it happened to the poor suckers in the arena it wouldn’t happen to them.  But in the Christian martyrs they found people who didn’t fear death one bit.  Death had truly lost its sting.  And what was the source of that fearlessness?  Curiosity sparked interest, and interest sparked conversion.  The church grew because of the martyrs, and they were considered the great heroes of early Christianity.

Unknown. “The Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicitas.” Medieval Saints: A Reader. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1999. 21-32. Print.
Also check out the iTunes U course, “History 106B – Spring 2008: The Roman Empire,” taught at UC Berkeley by Professor Isabelle Pafford (available through iTunes).