Christopher Bentley
“I will listen to what the Lord God is saying,
for he is speaking peace to his faithful people
and to those who turn their hearts to him.”
— Psalm 85:8
Dear Friends,
A well-worn trail leads from the Abbey of Gethsemani into the Kentucky hills. A tin sign marks the trailhead: “To the Statues”. Along the path are stone and wooden saints tucked in shady hollows. Then, near the top of the hill, a pile of bronze men draped on a rock. The sleeping apostles. That means—yes, there—in an opening just beyond is our Lord, kneeling, hands covering His face in agonizing prayer.
It’s in this memorable setting I first learned of Jonathan Daniels, whom we remember today (Lesser Feasts & Fasts). A plaque there reads:
In memory, Jonathan M. Daniels, Episcopalian Seminarian.
May we always remember that the church exists to lead men to Christ in many and varied ways, but it is always the same Christ.
In 1963, Daniels found his calling and joined integration efforts across the South. On August 20, 1965, he was murdered in Haynesville, Alabama after pushing Ruby Sales, a Black 16-year-old civil rights worker, out of the path of a shotgun blast fired by Tom Coleman, a White, off-duty sheriff deputy.
Thomas Merton believed the perfect response and fulfillment of our baptismal vocation is martyrdom (from Greek, martys, meaning witness). In light of this, Daniels’ ultimate act of loving witness raises in me these questions:
Would I have even been in his situation?
“All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindler”, wrote Dickens. How many times have I swindled myself from doing what I knew was just? Divine courage is necessary to heed a calling and to silence the swindler.
Would I have acted as Daniels did?
I don’t know. I pray for that fearlessness, selflessness. Daniels wrote: I lost fear when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been baptized into the Lord’s death and resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters, I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.
Can I love the Tom Colemans of this world?
Jesus asks us to do so. But goodness, this is challenging, isn’t it? And yet, I know I must.
Friends, I truly don’t know if I would have acted as Daniels did. Perhaps you feel the same. But we can take inspiration from his courage and radical witness. Let us together, with St Jonathan Myrick Daniels, be loving witnesses of Christ, the Prince of Peace.
Pax,
—Christopher