Those Who Endure to the End

A Testimony

Perhaps as a major failing of mine, I have often avoided talking about my faith online and with others, perhaps as to avoid the drama, I tend to avoid the Christian side of Twitter although there are many mutuals of mine who are quite big within their respective camps, whether that be Reformed, Catholic, or Orthodox. I don’t consider myself a worthy interlocuter of the Faith, despite wearing many hats at my parish being on the Parish Council as a Treasurer, singing in the choir, and a student of Iconography. Such things fall short when concerning the efforts to struggle and to endure the waves of life’s temptations, and to hold true to the good tidings and looking towards the life of the age to come. However I am writing about my faith and what I witness, so if that’s not your thing I understand, but I would encourage you to read on nonetheless.

I wanted to spend a short bit of time writing this Christmas season about someone I know, someone who’s strength far exceeds my own, and who’s faith in Christ is something I hope to one day match in my own life. She’s an older woman, someone who has been battling chronic dystonia all of her life. For those of you who don’t know, dystonia is the condition of involuntary muscle contractions that cause repetitive or twisting movements. This leads to abnormal postures, loss of limb use, and walking can become impossible. For Macrina, it’s difficult for her to speak, she’s bound to a wheelchair, but her mind is all there and is one of the most well read people I know. She’s always passing out books on the lives of the Saints, the spiritual life, and commentaries on the Gospels themselves. Macrina is there as often as she can, picked up by a variety of members of the community from regular parishioners with minivans, to our Priest in his old pickup.

She usually parks her wheelchair next to the choir, and we hear her hum along to the litanies and our stichera melodies throughout vespers. She suffers but she endures well, for a woman of her age to resist wasting away in a home or rehabilitation center and instead wills herself despite her immense pain and mobility issues to be useful, to pray, to have faith is something that I know will be rewarded well for her. “But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved.” (Matt. 24:13) While not just applicable to the end times, but applicable in all our daily struggles in this course of life and keeping to the race of faith that we have entered into. The blessed apostle Peter makes this point clearly, “For what credit is it if, when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.” (1 Peter 3:20) She is an example to the rest of us, and she is certainly at the right place as God is the ultimate and the only true physician. My parish is unique in the sense that so few of us are actually fully healthy save for a few. Our subdeacon is a master stonemason, and yet has had several open heart surgeries, and is widower, whose wife reposed a few years ago due to cancer. Our local Iconographer, my teacher and my friend, has recently beaten cancer herself, we have dads with missing parts of intestines, founders who have well out-lived the doctors who told them they had only months to live. Then of course there’s myself, with a then mid-twenties kidney transplant, celebrating my 29th birthday as I write this.

In Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica, he relates to the reader an epistle detailing the martyrdom of many Christians in Lyons, and the hagiography of St. Blandina. Martyred in the area, the spiritual athlete’s moments are detailed as follows:

“But Blandina was suspended on a stake, and exposed to be devoured by the wild beasts who should attack her. And because she appeared as if hanging on a cross, and because of her earnest prayers, she inspired the combatants with great zeal. For they looked on her in her conflict, and beheld with their outward eyes, in the form of their sister, him who was crucified for them, that he might persuade those who believe on him, that every one who suffers for the glory of Christ has fellowship always with the living God. As none of the wild beasts at that time touched her, she was taken down from the stake, and cast again into prison. She was preserved thus for another contest, that, being victorious in more conflicts, she might make the punishment of the crooked serpent irrevocable; and, though small and weak and despised, yet clothed with Christ the mighty and conquering Athlete, she might arouse the zeal of the brethren, and, having overcome the adversary many times might receive, through her conflict, the crown incorruptible…..For Cæsar commanded that they should be put to death, but that any who might deny should be set free. Therefore, at the beginning of the public festival which took place there, and which was attended by crowds of men from all nations, the governor brought the blessed ones to the judgment seat, to make of them a show and spectacle for the multitude. Wherefore also he examined them again, and beheaded those who appeared to possess Roman citizenship, but he sent the others to the wild beasts. “And Christ was glorified greatly in those who had formerly denied him, for, contrary to the expectation of the heathen, they confessed. For they were examined by themselves, as about to be set free; but confessing, they were added to the order of the witnesses…..But the blessed Blandina, last of all, having, as a noble mother, encouraged her children and sent them before her victorious to the King, endured herself all their conflicts and hastened after them, glad and rejoicing in her departure as if called to a marriage supper, rather than cast to wild beasts. And, after the scourging, after the wild beasts, after the roasting seat, she was finally enclosed in a net, and thrown before a bull. And having been tossed about by the animal, but feeling none of the things which were happening to her, on account of her hope and firm hold upon what had been entrusted to her, and her communion with Christ, she also was sacrificed. And the heathen themselves confessed that never among them had a woman endured so many and such terrible tortures.

The key part in this, as Eusebius documents, that through her suffering “Christ was glorified greatly” even among those who had denied him to avoid the tortures. The image of the crucified and risen Christ seen through those who endure well. To “suffer well” and how to handle the wiles and waves of life’s stormy sea is seeped throughout many traditions, practices, philosophies, and political formulas to make sense of the world. Yet through the co-sufferer, the one who is with us to the end of the age, do we see the will and the love of God present with us. Even when we feel enraged or at a loss for words to our pains, we humbled as Paul writes, “If we suffer, we shall also reign with him: if we deny him, he also will deny us.” (2 Tim 2:12) I find myself often re-reading Job in those moments, when the flash of guilt or survivorship emerges in my mind about why I am alive and healthy with this kidney transplant, and a 9 month old had randomly died in a car accident to make it happen.

Macrina offers for the rest of us, myself included the opportunity to see Christ in our neighbor. Just as Blandina endured and those who believed saw her clothed in and emulating Christ, we see the suffering servant in her as well. I pray that I have her faith and endurance if I were to get that bad, and to have brethren around me like she does if I were on the other side of this situation. Macrina is loved by the children, and she always finds joy in their youth and in their laughter which makes up half of the parishioners at my Church. She gives her two mites, and when I was counting money after the Post Communion prayers she rolled up to me with a small plastic jar of spare change to be added into the collections. She is the least of these, (Matt. 25:40) and she is a blessing to have in my life. Through her and her faith, I am strengthened to look towards Christ, the Logos who is the seat of all knowledge and is the chief high priest. He is the warrior who through his sacrifice conquers Death and crushes the head of the Serpent.

Everyday saints can be found everywhere, even in a middle of nowhere parish like mine.

Merry Christmas everyone.