Martyrs, Saints, and Living Angels

Saint Cecilia, Patron Saint of Music and Musicians

Weeping Wren

MARTYRS, SAINTS AND LIVING ANGELS

Saint Cecilia, Patron Saint of Music, and Musicians.

My late husband Robin carried a small stone from Saint Cecilia’s tomb in a tape cassette box in his bag or pocket whenever he was recording music or on tour.  Saint Cecilia’s day is on the 22^nd of November and Robin and his twin Maurice were born on 22^nd of December, (also coincidently my birthday, although a different year) and of course, he was happy that we all had the number 22 in common.  Saint Cecilia was, and is, the patron saint of music and musicians.

Robin surrounded himself with images of her, practically one in each room.  An ancient stained-glass image of the Saint hangs in the window of the bedroom where he often created music at home and where he slept.  A raised relief of her face in stone hangs in the dining-room, and because of his appreciation of her and his lifetime of music, we had her carved onto the top of his gravestone at St. Mary’s Church in Thame.

The Saint is depicted in many paintings throughout the ages playing a viola, or portable organ, and sometimes a harp.  She was known as a ‘songbird’ often singing her devotions to God. 

Robin always said that he related to religion in and through music, without particularly naming any faith, but he loved listening to choral singing and could compose with chords on any instrument.  His own voice had a unique quality.  Often, I would wake up thinking I heard an angel singing. 

We visited Saint Cecilia’s tomb in the catacombs in Rome.  Open-air cemeteries were prohibited in the city of Rome, and even though these catacombs are now underground within an extended Rome, they are outside what would have been the ancient border.  They are very special, a carved-out labyrinth that stretches underground with tomb niches in the rock walls.  These were constructed in the 2^nd to the early 5^th centuries.  There are over 60 in Rome and the most famous of these is St. Callixtus.  St. Cecilia, after her death was buried in the Catacomb of Callixtus and later transferred to the Church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.  The tombs were forgotten after the fall of Rome and then rediscovered in the Regency period. 

I remember going into these tunnels and seeing other tunnels going off to the right or left, so we were happy to have a guide with us.

It was one of those moments when mythology comes alive, and going into this labyrinth reminded me of the story of Perseus who killed Medusa with her hair of snakes, or the story of the birth of the Minotaur.

I entered with trepidation and had to remind myself it was a pilgrimage for Robin to visit St. Cecilia’s first place of burial, and to forget any misgivings I had for venturing underground into narrow tunnels going in all directions.  I kept in mind my own pilgrimage with him going into the Marble Arch Caves in Ireland, dipping my head in a boat to miss the stalactites, then going further down to stand in the place where three great rivers of Ireland meet underground, one of them being the Claddagh River, three main arteries in the heart of Ireland.  Robin wore the Irish Claddagh Ring I gave to him until sadly, he left this mortal coil.  It has a crowned heart clasped by hands that symbolise ‘friendship and love crown all’.  We made wishes on a little bridge platform over the point of the meeting of the three rivers underground.  It was magical.     

The Saint’s remains did not stay in the labyrinth.  Pope Paschal I removed her, after having a vision of where her remains were buried in Rome and in 1882 he had her and the remains of two Popes: Urban and Lucius moved into the city, to the early Roman Church of Santa Cecily (Cecilia).  Urban was the one who originally collected and buried Cecilia in the catacombs after her death.  This Church was said to have been built over the place of her original home in Trastevere.

Later in October 1559, the relics were discovered in the sarcophagus under the altar during excavations to find her, and she was visited by the order of Clement VIII, her body to be found intact and incorrupt, as if she were asleep.  They were approved genuine by the Cardinals Baronius and Sfondrate.  Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfondrato commissioned Maderno’s Marble statue of St Cecelia in 1600 which is at the high altar.  It is famous throughout Rome, being visited by people from all over the world.  Maderno created the exact likeness of her perfectly preserved body in repose as it had been found, described to him by Antonio Bosio who had been present at that moment.  She was lying on her side, in a dress, with her veiled head turned towards the ground.  They fell to their knees instantly when they saw her body intact after all those years.

St. Cecilia is also remembered at the same time as another saint.  On the Feast of St. Agnes on 21^st of January, two lambs are put in baskets covered in white veils, their legs tied to avoid them running away, and red and white flowers surround them symbolising the martyrdom of St Agnes, her blood and her purity.  The lambs are blessed in the church of Sant Agnese fuori Le Mura, then taken to the Vatican to be blessed by the Pope.  They are afterwards transported to Trastevere.

The Benedictine nuns of St. Cecilia in Trastevere honour this day and take care of the little lambs in their convent.  The lambs are sheared after Easter, never killed, and the wool is spun by the nuns to make woven tiles for the pallia, and taken back to the Vatican on 24^th June and left in the tomb of St. Peter for a few days. Special vestments are made for the Pope and the bishops in memory of St. Peter and St. Paul.  The pallium is a narrow band looped front and back that rests on the shoulders over the garments of the bishops and archbishops.  

Not only was Cecilia beatified and made a Saint, but she also was a Martyr.

Both the Greeks and the Latins vie in their devotions to all these martyrs, because of their piety and miracles and sacrifice for the faith.

(Martyr in Greek means ‘witness’, and it has many connotations.  The Apostles were ‘witnesses’ of Christ’s Life and Resurrection, for example.)

There are different versions of her life story, or at least, her childhood.  It was thought that she was born into a noble Roman family and as a child she vowed her purity to God.  However, the name Cecilia was given to Roman women who belonged to the plebeian clan, the general working citizens of the Caecilii, not the privileged patrician class or the Senate, but one of ancient Rome’s most prestigious people in the Roman Republic.  The House of Caecilii Metelli had plebeian nobles who became famous.

In Butlers: Lives of the Saints, the name Cecilia appears as St Cecily.

Forced into marriage by her family to Valerian, a young Roman pagan, she told him that an angel of God wished her to remain pure.  He acquiesced if he could see the angel or have some proof.  She said he would have to be baptized first before their marriage.  Upon his return from the baptism, he witnessed her talking to the angel.  She then also had his brother Tibertius converted and he also saw the angel.  Both men were martyred before she was, because of their conversion to Christianity.  All of them later became Saints, Tibertius then becoming St. Tiburtius. 

So too did Maximus, the officer appointed to oversee the execution of these brothers.  ‘He was impressed by their piety and converted, received with them the crown of martyrdom in the year 229.  The site of their execution is thought to have taken place in Rome, although some have said it happened in Sicily.’     

Two Saints are associated with music. ‘Gregory the Great’, a Pope after whom the Gregorian Chant was named and Saint Cecilia.  One of the oldest musical institutions in the world The Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecelia in Rome, founded in 1585, venerated these two Saints.  It was recorded that on the day of her marriage, St Cecilia sang of her love for God, and even after her marriage, her spouse Valerian, and his brother Tibertius all assembled to sing together the divine Heavenly praises.

Their deaths, like most of the deaths of the Martyrs were gruesome, many of them being burned or beheaded, some falling to the sword, or stoned.  There are two versions of Cecilia’s demise.

She was arrested and tried for converting over 400 people to Christianity, her ‘refusal to worship false gods’ and for burying the dead instead of cremating them.

One version states that she was tortured by fire but the flames did not burn her or even make her perspire, and then Almachius, her condemner, ordered her head to be severed.

However, one tradition says she lived in the 2^nd or 3^rd century and died about 177 AD, but the version that has endured was that she died on 22^nd November 230 AD at aged 50 years, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius.  Upon Almachius’s order, she was made to suffer in a hot steam bath with efforts to suffocate her, then she was immersed in boiling oil and finally there was an attempt to decapitate her with a sword that cut her head with three swipes in three places.  Despite this horror, miraculously she lived for several days, converted many people who came to care for her, and managed to sell off the wealth and property that was bequeathed to her by her spouse Valerian and Tibertius his brother, knowing now of her own impending death, and she wished to distribute everything to the poor.

Churches and Abbeys, even a ferry going to the Isle of Wight is called St. Cecilia, because an Abbey for nuns there is named for her, founded in Ryde in 1882.  The Benedictine nuns lead a traditional life of prayer and work, under the ancient rule of Saint Benedict.  They built the Abbey themselves and have retained for many years the Gregorian Chant and the Litany in Latin.  The nuns were originally exiled from France when Belgian Law forbade the religious order.  The Benedictine monks under the same rules of exile also set up a priory in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight.  Saint Benedict was made the Patron of Europe by Pope Paul VI.  He is also a patron of all students and had the gift to read minds and study consciences of others.  He performed many miracles in his life, being able to put together a broken ceramic wheat sieve and made an iron tool from a lake workable again by touching and creating a handle for it.  He also could find water in the earth and he healed the sick, bringing a child back from death and because of his earned notoriety he exiled himself to a cave for three years.  Monasteries that he built over the years were destroyed and rebuilt again.  He shed tears when one monastery was burnt down, but he managed to save all his student monks by foreseeing where they could go.  

A martyr was one who suffered death as a penalty for refusing to renounce a religion or for witnessing and converting to a religion not recognized by the state.  It has led to the revering of saints and the making of heroes, often the opposite to the results expected.

In Judaism, the Talmud cites an opinion held by the majority that one should prefer martyrdom to three other transgressions: Idolatry; Immorality; and Murder!

Isaac consented to be sacrificed by his father.  Daniel was another, who was thrown to the lions.

Abraham, according to legend was thrown into a lime kiln and saved by the fire not burning him.  This was considered Divine Grace.

Strange that lime was used in the cleaning of wells, most water having purity going through limestone rock areas.  Cress can equally keep a well clean. 

Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney’s translation of poetic prose, a medieval Irish text of Buile Suibhne about an Ulster king, who was cursed by a cleric Ronán and becomes a mad hermit wandering the land.  His food is cress from the wells, and he tries to overcome his anger when a woman gathers the cress, thus depriving him of his breakfast.  Many saints became hermits and led part of their lives in caves living off meagre rations. 

There is a difference between faith and extreme religion that had its pitfalls even into the last century.  Dreadful to know that the fate of many babies it was said, born to unwed mothers in the strict Christian world, had the terrible fate of being baptized, starved, or strangled and thrown into lime pits by zealous religious leaders of particular orphanages, that is, if they could not sell them to childless families.  Thousands of them have been discovered in mass graves.  There were stories of nuns also being murdered with their babies if they had been raped or had succumbed to sexual union, their remains being put into lime under basements of convents.

This was not martyrdom for forsaking their religion, but sheer murder for a lapse of morals, forced or not.  They were never made heroes and the babies were forgotten, remembered only as ‘the spawn of the devil’ at the time.

Yet, in the horrors of every society, occasional angels appear, or someone will perform an angelic deed.  Margaret, a friend of mine, was researching some of the stories of one or two female guards who did not torture Jewish children and managed to save them from horrors, but this was rare as we know thousands died.  She also discovered a midwife who delivered thousands of babies in camps and was instructed to murder them but refused to do so.  Margaret passed away and never got to finish her book.  Her computer was taken away by her family and the book was never finished.  However, Erin Blakemore wrote a book about a Polish midwife called Stanislawa Leszczynska who had gone into Ghettos to rescue children during the invasion of Poland and was arrested and incarcerated herself in Auschwitz, where she continued as a midwife and refused to kill the babies, even though many died in terrible conditions and some were  taken away and killed anyway, but many went to Nazi couples as ‘Aryan’ children, part of a new scheme.  She tattooed some of them so that later they might be found and restored to their mothers if they ever were released after the war.  The midwife is being considered for Sainthood by the Catholic Church for her efforts to save the children.

Martyrdom is all over the world. 

In Mahãyãna (the Greater Vehicle) in Buddhism, when someone destined to be a Buddha in life postpones his own enlightenment to take away or alleviate the suffering of others, it is considered a sacrifice or martyrdom, although many Buddhists lost their lives in wars and became martyrs in battle.  Sikhs also became war martyrs.

During World War II the Japanese Kamikaze pilots had a religious ceremony before their self-sacrifice.  And today terrorism has produced murderous martyrs for the sake of different religions.

 Where is the tipping point that takes peaceful faith into non-tolerance of other’s beliefs and produces bigotry and fear on such a scale as to commit murder and produce or perpetuate wars?   

Saint Stephen was stoned to death for his religion, hiding from his killers, but wrens were blamed for causing a racket and flying up from the place where he was hiding, thus exposing him.  Because of a mistranslation, it was thought that ravens made the noise, rather than wrens, but for ever afterwards, the little wren was unfairly sacrificed on St, Stephen’s Day, 26^th December, searched for, and bludgeoned.  The day is also known as Wren Day. Then, the Wren Boys traipsed from door to door collecting money for the deed, showing that they had killed the wren that killed the Saint.  Even the little innocent wren became a martyr!  Today, the collections are still made in some places in Ireland for the poor but the wren itself is thankfully no longer sacrificed.

There are living saints and angels today, regardless of their beliefs or religions, who strive to help those in need or who need comfort or restored faith in themselves to carry on.  They are everywhere on the planet.  Just a smile, a helping hand, taking time to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ or hug someone out of their sorrow is an angelic act.   

I remember a kind Irish nurse.  She was much younger than my mother who at the time was in hospital in her late eighties recovering from an operation.  The nurse sat down on the bed, (not allowed in most hospitals now) stroked my mother’s hair, kissed her forehead, and said: “Mrs, Murphy, you are looking well, wee pet.  Sure, you will be as right as rain in no time and that’s the truth of it.” 

From that moment on my mother was smiling and feeling much better already.  We were all there saying it, but when this chatty friendly little nurse fussed over her, it had an added immediate impact.

Going back to Saint Cecilia with her beautiful voice…  so many famous composers and musicians have written songs about her.  Baroque and Classical music, music of the Renaissance from Henry Purcell to Handel and Hayden.  There are too many to mention, and in contemporary music, Simon and Garfunkel in 1970 sang ‘Cecilia’, Benjamin Britten wrote a Hymn to St. Cecilia and W.H. Auden wrote a poem.  Foo Fighters released an EP in 2015.

Even though Robin did not write a song for St. Cecilia (as far as I know), he faithfully carried that stone from her tomb with him for years, but I am still finding his poetry locked into books he read, sometimes words written in the dustcovers of books or paper used as book-marks having words written on them, no knowing if they were thoughts, or poems or lyrics.  One famous song title was scribbled on a boarding pass of an old Viscount plane over Germany.  He was ‘given’ the tune in the sound of the engines.  I may yet find one for Cecilia, perhaps shoved into his Pepys Diaries, or in London Illustrated, Dickens works, even the Dandy. 

 I wrote a poem for Robin: ‘My Songbird Has Flown’.

My songbird has flown and the world sighs

The gentle mouthpiece of his immortal muse has gone

And no music can be heard that is sweeter than the language of his love

No diamond is more precious than the memory of the twinkling in his eyes

And no treasure in the lands will replace his happy smile

My songbird has flown and the world sighs

And if I were to paint a third of what I feel

A masterpiece would be yours to have and hold and hang upon your wall

If I were to write the words that spill from my heart

Tomes and volumes would make your library wide and tall

If I were to sing songs of praise for him

Saints would rise to make a chorus fit to please angel heralds

And if I were to make music for his gentle ear

Celestial harmonies would dance in all the worlds

And so no more, his voice now stilled but never gone

A depth of silence reigns where once he had his say

The veil of night has fallen

But a dawn of the Divine will rise for a new day

My songbird has flown and the world sighs

But we know that he is never far away.

May 2012.

Dwina ***

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