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One sweltering August night of my early girlhood, a slow electric fan humming near the pulpit, the missionaries to China who visited our New Testament Baptist church unwrapped a pair of celadon porcelain dragons pried from the rafters of their house. No more evil spirits to ward off. No lingering demons to let slither through the open shutters once they had prayed for God's protection. I was not yet ten years old, captivated as they unveiled their treasure-trove of object lessons. When the red lacquered to pao ko was passed to me, I balanced it on my lap, sure I could find all 40 compartments in the box of hidden drawers, each concealed trigger that would spring the next choice riddle, and the next, as the missionaries told the story of a small village girl, just my age, who refused to "trample the cross and live." For this offense, Communist soldiers opened fire as she raised her hands to the sky and sang, in her own language, "Jesus Loves Me."

I looked up from the magical box. She made it look so easy: the pretzel bones of a small girl snapped in the desecration of her soul's house. She let the body go, when I would have snatched it back. The girl's face shone with tears while I would move to the back of the line, watching what was happening to the others, waiting for the soldiers to grow tired of their game, or hungry, so they would order me to run and get the rice they could smell scorching on the bottom of the old enameled cooking pot.

This is an age of atrocity, a "tyrant century," as the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam calls it: "My animal, my age, who will ever be able / to look into your eyes?" Though there are ways to resist resignation, despair--call it what you will--I read the stories of the Christian martyrs of the twentieth century not so much to restore my hope in progress as to glimpse what it might mean to cherish God in such a time, to understand how they were able to profess belief in the Divine over all and through all and in all when what I have to go on is a seed of faith. How did they live in the darkness? How did they die in the light? I sink roots into the tenacity of their affirmation to the end: Jesus is Lord.

The word martyr conjures up scenes of Roman arenas where early Christians were pitted against wild animals, or it may bring to mind the gruesomely illustrated sixteenth-century accounts in the best-selling Foxe's Book of Martyrs--that favorite text of Protestant children. A friend of another tradition recites the names of Jesuit priests and friars killed by Protestant heretics. Some think of a in a pamphlet, in a hand-circulated publication, in yesterday's newspaper, or never reported except in a letter home from a widow of the man whose body was discovered only yesterday.

Drawing my finger across a globe of the world I find the places where the Chinese girl and others like her have died. She was the first of the dead to charge me with the improbability of faith. To be a martyr you have to believe that something matters more than life. With the death toll of Christians rising throughout the world, my thoughts are drawn to the point of intersection between faith and death. In obscure archives and mission agency offices, I have been sorting through correspondences cut short, journals from the fields of missionaries' quiet labor and mostly unnoticed losses. I am responding to an almost overwhelming shadow narrative of this century's news--the world wars, the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the legacy of colonialism in Africa, the violently changing social landscape in Latin America--told through the stories of committed Christians whose faith in God not only did not spare them the peril of history, but often demanded their lives. How to account for such surety in a century of indifference and drift, such single-mindedness in a century whose cultural and moral pluralism, whose greed, disavows the singular?

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August 12 1996, Vol. 40, No. 9