Saints Perpetua and Felicity: No grief in the glory
Our church called together a community reading group this month to go through Dr. Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood (Brazos Press, 2021). Dr. Barr is an historian who shows how “patriarchy may be a part of Christian history, but that doesn’t make it Christian” (37).
Folks are called to be Christ followers and to bring all of our temporal gifts and talents into service of his eternal kingdom. Christianity is not either pro-male leadership or pro-female leadership. It is pro-Kingdom, pro-membership, pro-belonging, pro-mutuality, pro-partnership, etc. as we all follow after Christ and his leadership.
Egalitarian is not a strong enough word. We are members of one another. (Holler if you want to talk more about this.)
So far what has blessed and stirred me the most in Barr’s book has been hearing from Christian women throughout history, sometimes in our sisters’ own words.
Late history has tried to forget the women who spoke, preached, and led communities in following Jesus.
To have their words and the rumors of them fetched from the darkness and laid clearly before me has been a quiet gift of knowing, like the smile you sometimes find in the mirror.
They really are real.
Our sisters are real.
They knew Jesus and they trusted him. Jesus brought them into Love and transformed their ways of being and doing. They moved beyond convention. They were creative. They found options. They did not blindly take the prescription of earthly power but boldly trusted God’s invitation to truly live.
This is God’s glory on display, evidence of the divine reign upon the earth.
This past Tuesday was the feast of saints Perpetua and Felicity (March 7).
I had a passing hesitation as I got out our book of saints to share with our almost four-year-old daughter Henlee. Martyrs are martyrs because their trust in God’s Reality outweighed the horrific violence the world threw at them.
I cannot help but feel the grief of it.
I wish I could have read to Henlee the story of Perpetua and Felicity’s long and faithful lifetimes in God’s service. We won’t know their whole story until heaven because they were killed by the state.
I wish I didn’t have to tell my daughter about how cruel people can be on this plane. I wish there were no powers or principalities to warn and bolster her against. But there are.
Our strategy when sharing such things with Hen is to major on the major point, and so we read the story. I am glad that we did.
A page from our copy of Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage by Carey Wallace and Nick Thornborrow. The art is inspired by Perpetua’s vision.
We actually have Perpetua’s own account of her imprisonment and suffering. Please let me point you there for the full story. This is a link to W.H. Shewring’s translation of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (London: 1931) provided free from Fordham University. Any direct quote from the martyr I have pulled from there.
The empire put Felicity and Perpetua in a position of denying Christ or dying in a spectacle. This is violence and injustice and there is no good in it in and of itself. The powers and principalities in this world manufactured a moment of murder. There is no getting around that.
What is amazing to see is how these new Christians and new mothers found fortitude in the face of everything evil could throw at them. Perpetua and Felicity knew Jesus and that his is the ultimate Reality. He is Love and Life. They knew they could trust him to carry them through even death itself.
Like them, we do not have to be afraid, even in the most harrowing of moments, because our King goes before us and has made a way. God is turning death backwards. There is a new life with him now and, after death, a resurrected life. Though it blows our minds, we can trust that God is good and that God wants us and that God is never ever far away.
Perpetua and Felicity had hope and a power that is not like our power, for, in Perpetua’s own words, “we are not established in our own power, but in God's.”
They also had a dignity beyond something anyone could contrive or strip away. It is written that Perpetua even pinned up her hair, “for it was not meet that a martyr should suffer with hair disheveled, lest she should seem to grieve in her glory.”
I do grieve the death these women endured, but I do not grieve their glory.
They walked a narrow path with confidence, compassion, and complete faithfulness. Their story matters. Jesus was true to them. A brush with their story exposes the violence and sin of empire and brings us into an encounter with the goodness and trustworthiness of God.
It calls us to wonder if we might also trust God’s Reality over the loud and lying taunts of this world.
Might we, too, stand secure in what Love has revealed, never surrendering to deadening counterfeit?
Might we, too, find satisfaction in our savior, come what may?
After our storytime together, Henlee let me braid her hair into a crown to honor these women and the Lord Christ we love so much.
I watched her play in the knowledge that Jesus has given us the victory, even when it seems that all is lost.
Will we ever cease to be surprised by this God? This One who turns even the grievous death of the beloveds into a feast? Who remembers the forgotten and lifts the lowly?
Surely there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
Thank you for reading, beloved.
Please feel welcome to share this piece as you might or to write me if you feel so moved either below as a comment or in an email. I’d love to hear from you.
God’s peace to you.