Talk about “spiritual warfare” makes many of us nervous-and for good reason when what is meant turns out to be a duel with the territorial spirit alleged to be in charge of Pittsburgh. But the war is all too real. And sometimes our uneasiness translates into “Don’t bother me. I don’t want to hear about it.”
Especially we don’t want to hear about martyrs. We are in the Age of Information. Martyrdom-primitive and embarrassing-belongs to another era. Obstinately, though, Christians keep getting themselves killed.
In Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith (Harper San Francisco, 333 pp.; $23), Susan Bergman issues a casualty report, reminding us what it means to be people of the Cross. (In this war, the dead are victorious.) Bergman, author of the memoir Anonymity and a contributing editor for this journal, commissioned essays on a representative selection of twentieth-century martyrs, figures as diverse as Archbishop Oscar Romero, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Edith Stein, and the five missionaries slain in Ecuador in 1956. Among the contributors she assembled are a number of outstanding novelists, poets, and essayists: Larry Woiwode (whose piece on the Russian martyr Aleksandr Men appeared in B&C), Carolyn Forche, Gerald Early, Patricia Hampl, Paul Mariani, and Kathleen Norris, to name only a few. Bergman herself contributes a superb introductory essay. “I overhear in the record of fragments,” she writes,
a quiet mingling of purpose and sorrow that speaks sometimes in letters home from the field or in journal entries or phrases of static-congested radio transmission. It is here that the unseen imprint of God seems almost perceptible in the martyrs’ astonishment at God’s presence in the dire straits of their circumstances, in their repeated insistence on an unfathomable peace that suffuses the elements surrounding them.
Look for a review of Martyrs and two other new books-Paul Marshall’s Their Blood Cries Out: The Growing Worldwide Persecution of Christians (Word) and Nina Shea’s In the Lion’s Den (Broadman & Holman)-in a forthcoming issue of B&C.
In his novel The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes a Russian proverb: It’s not the sea that will drown you, it’s the puddle. Most of us will not be martyrs. Instead, we will be caught up in a war of attrition: the war of everydayness.
The battle-weary will find a wonderful tonic in Frederica Mathewes-Green’s Facing East: A Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy (Harper San Francisco, 245 pp.; $20). Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Religion News Service, an NPR commentator, and (like Bergman) a B&C contributing editor (two small sections of her book appeared in these pages, in slightly altered form). She entered the Orthodox communion in 1993 with her husband, who had been an Episcopal priest for 15 years, their three children, and a handful of fellow converts from their Baltimore parish. Facing East is a journal of a year in their lives, from February 1995 to February 1996.
In the everyday war, no one will ask you to trample on an image of Jesus. You won’t be shot or tortured. You will be very busy, going here, going there, and church will be a part of your busy-ness. The reality of God will grow faint in your awareness-never denied, but gradually squeezed out.
Facing East is about the struggle to live a life centered on God. “I wonder, still,” Mathewes-Green writes, “why I should be so drawn to God.”
I want to be near God, not anywhere else. This doesn’t make me any kind of woo-woo special holy person; quite the reverse. I’m endlessly needy. I can’t help what I want. I can’t even explain it. Even my wanting him, I know, comes from him.
How strange this is. I’ve never seen God, so how can it be that he feels more real than anything I’ve ever known? There’s an immediate, breathtaking touch, the presence of one closer to me than I am to myself. As close as I am to my husband or my kids, there’s still a veil.
On this earth, you can’t really touch any other human, even someone you love very much. There’s always that scrap of muffling felt, blunting your touch.
Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Mission-“There were more letters in our name than there were of us”-is an inspiration, not because the members of this fledgling congregation have attained an extraordinary level of spiritual discernment, but rather because they have corporately reordered their lives in worship and prayer and service. To extract that lesson, you don’t need to take an option on Orthodoxy.
Nor do you need to be Orthodox to laugh and cry your way through this journal. You never know what will turn up here. It may be a sign on a diner window in letters six feet high: “Praise Jesus! World’s Number One Cheeseburger! Praise Jesus! World’s Number One Chili Dog!” Or a visit to the studio of a contemporary icon painter (whose work illustrates the beautiful dust jacket). Or a service of baptism and chrismation (anointing with oil), exorcism included. And the ground note is a deep joyfulness, persuasive because we’ve been along for the whole ride.
-John Wilson, Managing Editor
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.
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