To The Rescue!

Yesterday these events grasped my attention: First, the Magnificat has the story of St. Felicity, the pregnant slave girl who died with that other "mother-martyr" St. Perpetua. Waiting to be executed, she and her small community prayed that she might deliver the baby and be able to suffer and die with the group. She was able to do so. She was led with Perpetua into the arena naked: her body still deformed by the pregnancy and her breasts dripping with milk. The Romans had the decency to cover her with cloth, but then handed her over to be gored by a wild cow before they beheaded her. Secondly, the kidnapping in Nigeria of over 200 school girls: inexpressibly horrific! Thirdly, the reading for yesterday in the Liturgy of the Hours has St. Ephrem narrating Jesus' descent into hell: "At length he came upon Eve, the mother of all the living. She was that vineyard whose enclosure her own hands had enabled death to violate, so that she could taste its fruit; thus the mother of all the living became the source of death for every living creature. But in her stead Mary grew up, a new vine in place of the old. Christ, the new life, dwelt within her. When death, with its customary impudence, came foraging for her mortal fruit, it encountered its own destruction in the hidden life that fruit contained. All unsuspecting, it swallowed him up, and in so doing released life itself and set free a multitude of men. Jesus came to earth, and descended into hell, to rescue Eve and to raise up Mary...to rescue Felicia and each of those Nigerian girls. He is our hero! I want to be on His squad!