Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

On this second day of our Lenten journey, there could perhaps be no more fitting saint’s day than today’s Feast of Saints Perpetua and Felicity who died in the Roman arena on 7 March in the year 203. Their collect in Lesser Feasts and Fasts 2018 is lovely, but their collect in the old medieval missals is particularly wonderful and has about it a beautifully Lenten sort of flavor. Here it is:

Help us, we beseech Thee, O Lord our God, to honour the victory of Thy Martyrs, Saints Perpetua and Felicitas with unceasing devotion, that those whom we are unable worthily to imitate we may at the least commemorate with humble obeisance. Through thy Son Jesus Christ, our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the Unity of the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

There’s something refreshingly real about that collect in its admission of the limits of our righteousness, the limits of our ability to imitate the holy, and the need for humility as a response to these limits. And also, quite subtly, we get a sense of humility's real power—it’s humility that can pitch us toward the righteousness we cannot rightly imitate. It’s humility that can throw us beyond our limits and into a way of life and its living that is new and fresh for being truly holy, truly human, truly ours in Jesus Christ.

Look at Perpetua. Before entering the arena and meeting her death, Perpetua had two visions. In one, a ladder to heaven was set before her, at the foot of which lay coiled a ferocious dragon. When Perpetua was warned of the fierceness of the dragon’s bite, she steeled herself and exclaimed, “It shall not hurt me, in the name of Jesus Christ!” at which the dragon bent its head. Approaching the ladder, Perpetua stepped on the dragon as if it were the first rung of her upward ascent. After another vision in which she sees herself transformed into a gladiator who handily wins the field, she comes to herself with insight into her predicament: “I understood that I should fight [in the arena] not with beasts but against the devil.” [You can read her legend here.]

There is a certain boldness to Perpetua that might appear to belie any sense of holding her up as a model of humility. But consider what the Cloud of Unknowing says of the two wellsprings of humility (freely paraphrased and contemporized here): the first is a consciousness of our humanity besmirched, frail and wretched on account of sin, and the second is the incomprehensible and unimaginable wonderfulness of the love and worthiness of God in Godself. The Cloud Author says that the first wellspring is imperfect and will eventually dry up. Why? Because sin is not eternal and the Spirit’s work of sanctification spells the end of sin. The second wellspring, though, is perfect and will be a source of meekness, wonder, awe, and joy for all eternity.

Perpetua’s boldness is actually grounded in that second wellspring of humility, in the deepening and awe-inspiring consciousness of God’s grace and God’s goodness, in the power of the powerful name of Jesus Christ, in her conviction that even in the midst of the trials of this life, God is with her and upholding her for no other reason than that God is good. Her life is grounded in God.

As we struggle with temptation, as we wrestle with the devil throughout the coming days of Lent (and beyond) in the arenas of our own lives, may we also know the bold humility that conquers temptation. May we know humility not only on account of our sin, but on account of our growing knowledge of the awesome goodness of God. And may that goodness, working boldly in and through our humble hearts, make us a people of bold humility, pitched beyond the limits of ourselves, dancing on the head of the dragon as we are sanctified by the Spirit’s wondrous and amazing grace.

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+