Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

It was a few decades before the Council of Nicaea. Three hermits have fled Rome to a rural area on the western coast of Italy, near Naples. They are living a simple life and not seeking to evangelize their neighbors, but they have some capacity with medicine and herbal remedies and so the farmers begin to come to them for help. As they go about their lives of prayer, raising basic food stuffs, the cures they bring to their community are at points all most miraculous. Some word of the three hermits gets around. They, with hesitancy, begin to evangelize, to baptize, and bring the locals who are converting from the faith of the Roman Empire to Christianity.

This was problematic because at the start of the 300s the Emperor Diocletian had finally stabilized the Roman Empire after decades of civil wars. His attempts to restore order had now focused on Christianity, which he viewed as an anarchist sect that failed to show proper respect to civic customs and rituals, infected the Roman Army with pacifism, and continually sought to disrupt the class system and social order with calls for equality and the sharing of resources. For a decade the last, greatest, and most documented persecution of Christianity by the Roman Empire took place. When the three hermits were found by the persecution and brought before the courts another problem arose…the hermits who had been living their lives as three monks were found, upon examination by the court, to be Archelais, Thekla, and Susanna whom the law understood to be women citizens of the Roman empire.

The courts, the story goes, condemned them to all varieties of torture, but none of the attempts seemed to work. The courts, the story goes, put them in cages with hungry wild lions who suddenly became calm and cuddly as house cats. The courts, the story goes, condemned them to being beheaded, their executioners refused, until the three said they were prepared to die in hope of the resurrection. Over the years the three have appeared to monks, and others, to remind them that “We must pray to God with the soul, the mind, and the heart”—which is the moral of the story.

If you are wondering how a story so convoluted in both characters, contexts, and numerous miracles can have so simple a moral as “We must pray to God with the soul, the mind, and the heart” it is good to remember that, if we do our life as Christians correctly, that should always be the ultimate moral of the story no matter how simple or complex.

Pax,

—Ben