The Light Shines in the Darkness and the Darkness Has Not Overcome It

 

Today is the feast of St.John the Evangelist (aka the Theologian or the Divine). It is also the anniversary of the martyrdom of Blessed Sara Salkahazi.  Encouraged and supported by her superior in religious life, Sr.Margit Slatcha, founder of the Sisters of Social Work, she arranged  to hide hundreds of Jewish woman in their convents and institutes when the Nazi occupiers and their fascist Arrow Cross allies began to deport Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. * 

On December 27th, 1944 four Jewish women she was sheltering in Budapest were denounced and arrested.  She refused to be separated from them and along with an unidentified Christian co-worker, all six were murdered on the embankment of the Danube and their bodies thrown into the river.  

In the darkness of the genocidal fury of the Nazi perpetrators and their allies, the majority of  Europe's Catholics and Protestants abandoned their Jewish neighbors to their fate due to fear, prejudice or indifference.  

May the courageous actions and self-sacrifice of men and women such as Pere Jacques de Jesus OCD, Blessed Sára, Raoul Wallenberg ,Chiune Sugihara, ordinary families like the soon-to -be beatified Polish martyrs Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children, and others inspire us to live our lives in the light of compassion, hope and solidarity .

*Yad Vashem estimates that the Sisters of Social Work rescued 2000 Jewish women and that Blessed Sara personally rescued 1000 of them.

 

O Glorious Lady, Throned In Rest

 'O glorious Lady, throned in rest, amid the starry host above, who offered nurture from your breast to God, with pure maternal love.'

This the first stanza of a hymn text by the 19th century English divine, John Mason Neale, an Anglican scholar and hymnographer and contemporary of Saint John Henry Newman.  Like Newman, Neale was part of the Oxford movement and had a particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Unlike Newman, in the end, Neale never undertook the ultimate step of becoming a Roman Catholic.  

In Morning Prayer this morning for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception - a Marian dogma confirmed by another contemporary of Neale's, Pope Pius IX in 1854 - I came across this beautiful hymn to the Blessed Mother, entitled: "O Glorious Lady Throned in Rest" sung by Kathleen Lindquist in an album entitled : "Hymns and Chants of the Divine Office, Vol.1"

All of which coincides nicely with the Virgo Lactans or Nursing Mother of God icon* I've started working on as a way of meditating on the mystery of the Incarnation during Advent and Christmas.  How Mary could give birth to God, much less nourish and nurture her Creator from her own body is a lot to reflect on, which I do better with a brush in my hand. 

*In the Christian East icons of this type had the title of Galaktotrophousa in Greek and Mlekopitatelnitza in Slavonic.