Today the church remembers the Martyrs of El Salvador.

Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Jean Donovan, and Dorothy Kazel were Catholic Missionaries, Ursuline, and Maryknoll Sisters murdered in 1980 for their outspoken defense of the plight of the powerless and poor. Accompanying the people there, they were irritating the powers of the day with their theology of liberation and hope.

These four sisters were murdered on this day in the same year that Archbishop Romero was murdered, though he was killed in March.

Instead of recounting the details of their lives, I’ll just share a bit from a letter Sister Clarke wrote to her companion, Katie, just before she was murdered:

“There are so many deaths everywhere that it is incredible.

The ‘death squadron’ strikes in so many poor homes. A family of seven, including three small children, was machine-gunned to death in a nearby town just last week. It is a daily thing–bodies everywhere, many decomposing or attacked by animals because no one can touch them until they are seen by a coroner. It is an atmosphere of death.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring…Write to me soon. Know that I love you and pray for you daily. Keep us in your heart and prayers, especially the poor forsaken people.”

The days surrounding Christmas are filled with Feast Days, some beautiful (like St. Nicholas), and some tragic like today. This is because the Divine entered into the world not as we would like it to be, but as it is: beautiful and tragic.

These martyrs today are a reminder to me, and should be for the church, that the first victims of any sort of violence are the poor and vulnerable.

If you need confirmation of that, just ask any medical professional who they treated most for COVID-19.

Those with means, good insurance, fewer health conditions (that are easily and often exacerbated by poverty!), and who can take off work to get treatment without fear of losing their job largely recovered.

Those without, did not.

It is a different kind of violence, a more negligent kind on the part of the powers of the world, but it is violence none-the-less.

Let those with ears to hear, hear.

As we enter into December, the church remembers one I call the “Patron Saint of Mid-Life Crisis,” St. Nicholas Ferrar, 17th Century Deacon and Community Builder.

Nicholas was born in London in 1593 and educated at the prestigious Clare Hall in Cambridge. He would eventually become a Cambridge Fellow and, after traveling the European continent for a while, became a member of Parliament and a trustee in the Virginia Company. His political and financial stars shown brightly!

And then he decided it wasn’t the life he wanted to lead.

In 1625 he gave it all up and settled at a small house at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. He was soon ordained a Deacon and founded an Anglican community which was basically comprised of his immediate family and the families of his in-laws.

From 1626 to 1646 they restored a dilapidated church, held Masses for the community, established a school to teach the local children, and took on the task of caring for the health-care needs of the neighborhood.

They held weekly vespers and daily prayer, and he invited his community to practice intentional fasting, meditation, and spiritual story-telling and writing, composing a number of books illustrating the Christian life.

This little community was visited by English authorities and nobility and used as a place of prayer, blessing, and restoration.

St. Ferrar died in 1637 and the community was eventually destroyed by the Puritans who called it a “Protestant nunnery.” Most of the stories and books composed there were burned, and the chapel was once again put to ruin (though it was rebuilt in the 1800’s).

You might recognize “Little Gidding” as the title of the last of Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” one of the great religious poems of the Twentieth Century.

St. Ferrar is a reminder to me, and should be to everyone inside and outside the church, that it is absolutely Ok to stop doing things you are good at and seek a new path, no matter your stage in life.

The idea that everyone is called to do one thing, and one thing only, is a romantic fallacy. You can switch gears, by God.

-historical pieces from Pfatteicher’s New Book of Festivals & Commemorations

Today, November 30th, the church honors an often overshadowed apostle, Saint Andrew. He’s usually called “brother of Peter,” and rarely seen without that qualifier, making him, in essence, known to the world only in relation to his brother…which many people can probably identify with.

St. Andrew is the patron saint of sea-people, but also the informal saint of all who stand in the shadow of someone else.

He is the saint for the B-side of the record, the underdog sibling, the cobbler and the cooper who are no longer appreciated in their crafts.

Lore notes him dying in Greece, crucified because he refused to make sacrifice to the local gods and kept talking about Jesus.

And though he stood in the shadow of his brother his whole life, Andrew gets a place of prominence in the end: his feast day is the official marker for the start of Advent because the First Sunday of Advent every year is the Sunday that falls closest to St. Andrew’s day.

-icon written by Sister Nadine of the Sisters of St. Andrew in London, GB

Today, as we begin our Advent journey in 2022, the church honors Dorothy Day, Friend of the Poor and Antagonizer of the Privileged.

Born in Brooklyn just before the turn of the 20th Century, Dorothy worked for radical newspapers in her early years, mixing with the bohemian crowds of Greenwich Village.

She found herself living with a man she loved, and became pregnant in 1926. It was during this time that she experienced a life-changing conversion to the faith, and she made her home in Roman Catholicism.

She struggled to marry her internal passion for the Christ with her outer conviction to work for social justice. In 1933 she collaborated with fellow gadfly, Peter Maurin, to found the Catholic Worker Movement. Living simply and intentionally, this pseudo-monastic community took a vow to live collectively for the betterment of the poor and the outcast.

They set up hospitality houses in the city, collective living units in agricultural plots of land, and convened clarity councils to make decisions. They aimed to “create a new society within the shell of the old.”

St. Dorothy died in 1980. There is a story about her funeral that, as her casket was being carried through the street to the sanctuary for the funeral Mass, a person with severe mental illness pressed in on the crowd gathered around the procession. They made their way to the casket, and opened it, peering down upon Dorothy. The whole crowd stood and let it happen, knowing that it was precisely this human Dorothy had come to give her life to, and was ministering to them one more time.

St. Dorothy Day is a reminder for me, and should be for the whole church, that simple living is a calling for some, but not all. Poverty should be a choice, by God, and not the result of unfair economic, social, or political circumstances. The church is called to lift those trapped in poverty and to invite those with much to embrace a simpler life for the sake of their neighbor.

-historical bits from Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove’s Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

-icon written by Dan Smith