When I first walked into the Church of St. Stephen in Rome it felt cool and calm, quietly beautiful. It was built in the fifth century and in the round, which is rare. On the inside you pass through several graceful columns, and there in the center, down several steps, is the golden altar. The walls curve gently around you, the stone a warm, creamy gold. There’s a sense of simplicity and space, very different from the elaboration and ornamentation we’d been seeing in other churches, though I loved those churches, too, for what they were.
But when I looked more closely at the frescos on the walls, I noticed more and more of their details, and however muted they were, what they depicted was shocking, grotesque, panel after panel:
grey-bearded men being boiled, fried, grilled, crimped, singed, eaten by wild beasts, worried by dogs, buried alive, torn asunder by horses, chopped up small with hatchets: women having their breasts torn with iron pinchers, their tongues cut out, their ears screwed off, their jaws broken, their bodies stretched upon the rack, or skinned upon the stake, or crackled up and melted in the fire.
This is how Charles Dickens put it when he visited the church in the nineteenth century. St. Stephen’s is named after a deacon who is described in Acts as the first martyr of the Church, stoned to death by an angry mob, and in this spirit the frescos illustrate in gory detail the tortures and deaths of martyr after martyr, from St. Sebastian to St. Agnes to St. Artemius to St. Peter of Verona, thirty-four in all. “Such a panorama of horror and butchery,” Dickens said, “no man could imagine in his sleep, though he were to eat a whole pig raw, for supper.”
I had to turn away. I couldn’t look. I had to allegorize. To laugh.
But really, we are all being asked to martyr ourselves, every day, in small ways. We are all being asked to die to our selves.
The blood and gore in the stories of the martyrs are just a way of getting our attention, as they are in Dante or Flannery O’Connor. The violence in her stories, O’Connor says, jolts her characters into facing “reality” and so prepares them to accept “their moment of grace.” Their heads are “so hard” that “almost nothing else will do the work,” and that seems to be describing the heads of her readers, too, the heads of all of us.
The paradox at the heart of Christianity, Dermott Lane says,
is about the isolated ego becoming a relational being, the indifferent self becoming an active subject in solidarity with others . . . It is this peculiar pattern of dying to live, of passing over, of letting go, that is at the heart of the mystery of Christ. Being a disciple of Christ involves the living out of this paradox.
Every day we struggle with our selfishness and our weakness. Every day we try to rise above our ego. Every day we try to be in right relation with others. The difference isn’t in kind but in degree. The logic of martyrdom is only an extreme version of the everyday logic of the cross.
As Pope Francis says in Gaudete et Exsultate, “Rejoice and Be Glad,” we don’t have to be perfect, and we can’t be, because it’s not we who are ever holy. It’s Christ in us. “When you feel the temptation to dwell on your own weakness,” the Pope says, “raise your eyes to Christ crucified and say: ‘Lord, I am a poor sinner, but you can work the miracle of making me a little bit better.”
To be holy doesn’t mean doing grand and noble things that will get us a lot of attention. It means slogging along in our ordinary life, not just at church but at home and in our jobs and in our hearts.
Francis talks about the holiness of our next-door neighbors, of the woman, for example, who refuses to gossip in the checkout line, who cares for her family even when she’s completely worn out. The Church is always being attacked for its hypocrisy and rigidity, and it should be, but everyday behind the scenes there are countless, quiet acts of heroism. Of self-sacrifice.
A writer makes the sign of cross before he opens her laptop. A woodworker makes the sign of the cross as she enters her shop. All work done with integrity and skill is holy, because Christ is present in all that is good. Just being patient is an act of holiness, one of the hardest acts of all—with the telemarketer, with the tailgater, with the homeless person sleeping in the passageway. “We are all called to be holy by living our lives with love and by bearing witness in everything we do, wherever we find ourselves. “
We are only the farmer, and the seeds we plant grow in the night, in the darkness, we know not how.
We are not the source of holiness or of grace, God is, and He neither slumbers nor sleeps.
I think of John Lewis, mowed down by the mounted sheriffs on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the courage that required, to face that, to allow the sheriffs to flatten him with the others and fracture his skull. I wonder if those of us in the comfortable first world who are never beaten on trampled on or even yelled at most of the time aren’t being asked to do more than think of the cross as a symbol. If you want to follow Christ, Daniel Berrigan said, you better “look good on wood,” and John Lewis, in his faith and his conviction that he must live out that faith, he knew that.
But Lewis was just an ordinary man, as Bonhoeffer was, too, as I think Stephen was and all the martyrs, drawn slowly by events and a series of single choices, buoyed up the commitments and energies and presence of others, until at a certain point they suddenly found themselves on the front lines, almost without a choice. They found themselves standing on that bridge, sitting in that cell. It all happened before they knew it.
We can only make our own choices day to day and for most of us that final, climactic moment won’t come. For most of us the challenge is much simpler: not to post the angry rant or complain about a slight, to try to be patient when someone we love does the one thing that always drives us crazy. To not take the credit when the credit is ours. To listen to the person we most detest. Even to show some kindness to person we see in the mirror.
The problem with the sentimentalizing of martyrdom is that it reinforces the idea of a heroic, muscular Christianity, as if to follow Christ means to be a spiritual athlete, elite, exceptional, strong in ourselves—as if we are the ones who act.
That’s completely wrong.
All we can do is what Mary does. All we can do is say yes when the grace is offered us, and often we don’t.
All is grace. We can’t even hold our tongues or put money in the collection basket without grace. Even those simplest things are beyond us most days.
St. Lawrence is my favorite deacon. He’s depicted too on one of the frescoes, being roasted on a spit. The Emperor had asked that he bring him all the riches of the Church, and St. Lawrence responded by gathering all the poor and the lame and the homeless in Rome and bringing them to the throne.
Legend has it that at one point he said to his tormentors, “turn me over, I’m done on this side,” which is why–and this is true—St. Lawrence is the patron saint of bakers.
It’s a macabre joke in a way, this being done on one side, but maybe it helps us to shrink our own martyrdom to the proper scale.
I can be like Lawrence, through grace, if I value the poor more than my own comfort and wealth, if I measure my worth not by what I own or by my position in the world and for that matter not measure my worth at all.
I can be like Lawrence, through grace, if I let myself be spoken to harshly or discounted or cut off in traffic or treated rudely by a cashier—if I stay silent and walk away–or, hardest of all, reach out. Offer the kind word. Say: peace be with you.
If when things are too complicated and intense and everything goes wrong, I remember what matters most.
If I make a joke. If I say, if only to myself, turn me over, Lord, I’m done on this side.