Yesterday, while working on our save-the-date cards for our wedding, we were looking through favorite quotes. I came across this one from C.S. Lewis; I have loved it for many years.
“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters to large for some of us to see.”
I think, in this case, he might be describing the “small” miracles that surprise our hearts, interrupt our days, and that we keep as markers of our humanity, community, and faith journeys.
This time reading it, though, I also thought about all the saints’ stories I know. A favorite one came to mind: Felicity and Perpetua. They were two women, sentenced to death by lions in the colosseum. To display their heart-felt and true belief in God, and belief that death would merely deliver them into the morning of their lives in their Father’s kingdom, they held hands and sang, facing the lions.
I was at a conference once (concerning women in Orthodoxy), and spent a great deal of time gazing upon an icon of the two of them (they are always, inevitably, pictured together) during the more boring paper deliveries. I tried to imagine the scene, the sounds and the smells. Were people shouting at them? Could they hear the lions? Did they know immediately which hymn it would be?
Then, of course, my mind wants to construct the rest of their story. One was first the servant-girl of the other, but in Christianity, they were sisters. How did they get in so much trouble? What were their daily lives like? Who did they leave behind? Was one stronger, more headstrong and willful? Did one hearten the other, sharing her bravery?
Here are two common icons of them. In the first, they are pictured as European ladies. In the second (the type with which I am more familiar), they are correctly Northern African, and clasping each other close.
One of the things that I never considered was racial prejudice in relation to Christians. If it was in Rome where the “feeding to the lions” happened and if the important people in Rome were caucasians then maybe some Christians might have ended up in trouble because they were racially different and practicing a religion that scared people. Two strikes against them. We humans fear what we don’t understand, things that are different from us. Isn’t that one of the prejudges about Islam now? Those people look different and their religious practices are strange to us? Sigh. Why can’t we appreciate differences? We wouldn’t want everyone to be the same, that would be so boring. We get reminded, however, that we are tribal at our base and one way we can distinguish our enemies is their difference. We need to work beyond our tribal roots before we can get to a prejudice free peaceful world. Another sigh is in order.