Opening the Word

On Tuesday morning I emerged from the vestry to discover that nobody had braved the chill and damp to join Rick and myself for mass. Like many churches at our end of the spectrum, we gave up a daily eucharist, in the late 1990s in our case, because it had become unsustainable - though my scouring of old service registers is revealing how it was barely sustainable almost everywhere even when it was happening. The Tuesday service is the only survivor of that tradition, and again you can find that pattern in many churches.

We carried on through the service just in case anyone else came along, which has happened in the past, but it meant my meditation on the Feast of SS Perpetua, Felicity, and Companions didn't reach more than a pair of ears, so here it is. I offer it not because it's a masterpiece of the form, but because it's representative of the kind of short homily I usually offer on such occasions. Readings were Revelation 12.10-12 and Matthew 24.9-13 (mercifully brief).

I often say that the early martyrs we commemorate in the calendar are people we know next to nothing about, but that’s not quite the case with Perpetua, Felicity and their companions – though what we know about them is mainly the story of their martyrdom, which we have a detailed account of, some of which could even be in their own words. In fact, through that account they became the model for the early martyrs of the Church, and accounts of what happened to them, as well.

Some of the story might seem a bit morbid and odd, especially perhaps the bit where the gladiator is making a mess of despatching Perpetua and she basically says ‘Oh, give it here’ and grabs his sword-arm to guide the knife to her own throat – but then if you’re on the way out anyway you probably want to expedite matters!

In fact in the story I find myself thinking today less about the saints and more about the crowd in the arena in Carthage at the time. Martyrdom is hard, but cruelty is all too easy. For the crowd watching Perpetua, Felicity and the others, that kind of cruelty was part of public life, the culture they were brought up with. Even if what happened in the arena was often a way of executing people, it was death as a spectacle, an entertainment, whether people were being gored by wild animals, or someone who’d never handled a weapon before was being put up against a professional gladiator – they weren’t going to last very long. The crowds had learned their cruelty.

We must be aware of every step that takes us along that road, whether as individuals or collectively, even if it seems like a small one – because we know where it goes. To argue and act against cruelty in our own time, which may not be popular at all, may just be the martyrdom we are called to.