Fr Matthew Reese

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.
—Philippians 1:22-24

Dear Friends,

The cycle of lessons we read in the Daily Office and the cycles we read at the noonday Masses have no formal interrelation. But one of the joys of chapel life is coming across those wonderful—one might even say providential—concordances between the two.

This beautiful passage that we will hear at Morning Prayer today speaks also to the commemoration we will keep at the Eucharist: Constance and her Companions, or, “The Martyrs of Memphis.”

Constance, a superior of the Community of Saint Mary, was one of those Victorian “school sisters,” working in an Episcopal school for girls attached to St Mary’s Cathedral in Memphis. And it was there that in 1878, a terrible outbreak of yellow fever gripped the city, killing some 5,000 residents and sending nearly half the population fleeing.

Rather than stay in the countryside, in the safety of her order’s mother house, Constance went into the breach, serving not only the girls in her charge, but the suffering, the ill, the homeless of the whole city of Memphis.

It was dire work—there was severe scarcity of supplies and food, and the economy of the city was in free fall. In her last letter to Bishop Quintard, before she herself succumbed to the disease, Sr Constance wrote “I see no reason to be more hopeful than we were in 1873 […] the form of disease is undoubtedly worse.” But, she concluded, “We have daily celebrations [of Holy Communion] and while we have that, there is nothing that really depresses me.”

Constance, three of her sisters, and two of their priests died. But the call that brought them back to Memphis, the call that made them stay, was not a call to martyrdom, it was not a call to self-sacrifice. It was a call to service.

One can imagine Constance, like St Paul, uttering those simple words on her hospital wards: “to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.”

What a service to those in need. What an offering of self to Christ.

Constance, pray for us.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Matthew