The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [76]
I knew that in a few hours I’d be on a plane, damp shoes and all, flying back through two time zones, to the man I love, to a dusty old house in a dusty little town on the Plains. I laughed and cried myself to sleep.
THE VIRGIN
MARTYRS:
BETWEEN
“POINT VIERGE”
AND THE
“USUAL SPRING”
For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point
vierge between darkness and light, between nonbeing and being.
You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are
experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.
—Thomas Merton, CONJECTURES OF A GUILTY BYSTANDER
I first came to the virgin martyrs as an adult, and from a thoroughly Protestant background, which may explain why I have little trouble taking them seriously. I find them relevant, even important, but many Catholics I know so resent the way they were taught about these saints that they’ve shoved them to the back of the closet. “Why are you writing about the virgin martyrs?” one Benedictine sister asked me, incredulous and angry: “They set women back! As if in order to be holy, you had to be a virgin, preferably a martyr. And that’s not where most women are.” The current edition of the Roman breviary gives credence to the sister’s outburst, saying of St. Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr, that “she is praised as the most perfect model of the Christian woman because of her virginity and the martyrdom which she suffered for love of Christ.” Married Christian women, then, and those who do not suffer enough, would seem doomed to be imperfect models of Christian faith.
For many Catholic women, the virgin martyrs are simply a mystery. A friend relates, “In parochial school, we were taught things like, ‘She sacrificed her life to preserve her virginity,’ and we thought, well, why didn’t she just give it to him—like a handbag? The nuns never explained to us what virginity was. They didn’t want you to know exactly what you weren’t supposed to give up, so you were regularly confused by these cryptic narratives.” In fact, the virgin martyrs make little sense unless you are willing to talk about what their virginity means, and are also willing to look at them in their historical context. The women who provoke such irritation and puzzlement, identified in the church’s liturgical calendar as “virgin and martyr,” were among the first women revered by Christians as saints. Most come from a time when there was no powerful Christian church, as we understand it; many Christians came from the Roman nobility, but to declare yourself a Christian was to relinquish social standing, and be executed as a rebel, a traitor to the Empire. Most of the virgin martyrs date from the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperors Decius and Diocletian in the third and fourth centuries, but they range from second-century Rome to sixth-century Persia, where Christians were persecuted by both Persian emperors and Jewish kings.
The virgin martyrs were a source of inspiration to Christians through the Middle Ages, but today are maddeningly elusive. There is no entry for “virgin martyr” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, and one can search entries there, and in The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, on both “virginity” and “martyrdom” without getting a picture of these women or their importance in church history. A secular reference, the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia, reveals that while the tales of early women saints and martyrs (some of them virgins, some married with children) have largely been dismissed as legendary, historical sources do exist, notably the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, written in the early fourth century, and the third-century Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, especially valuable because “it includes the prison diary of Perpetua herself, one of only a handful of works by women authors to survive from antiquity.”
Growing up as a Methodist, I envied Catholic girls their name days, holy cards, medals, and stories