Facing Fear...the Spirituality of the Christian Martyrs

St Ignatius of Antioch

FACING FEAR.  I think one of the toughest things for us living in post modern times is understanding, I mean really understanding the Christian martyrs …who willingly walked to their deaths.  We marvel at their courage and faith and gasp in horror at what they endured... the gruesomeness of their deaths.   

We wonder, how did they do it?  How did they face it?  How did they overcome their fear?

Today is the feast of St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch who lived and was martyred in the first century.  St. Ignatius became the third bishop of Antioch in the year 67 AD, making him the earliest of the Church Fathers.  It is said he was a student of John the Apostle, and that he was one of the children Jesus took in his arms and blessed! 

St. Ignatius regarded salvation as one being free from the powerful fear of death and was thus to bravely face martyrdom.  He was executed in Rome at the Coliseum in 108 AD.

Yes, we are a culture that fears death.  Martyrdom, facing death, even talking about death is just not a comfortable subject for many of us.  Death is the great unknown.  For many of us, we may say, “Oh, I am not afraid to die…it is just the way I may die that worries me!”

I remember back in the nineties (the 1990s that is) when I saw the movie Titanic when that version came out.   I went to an afternoon showing, as that night I had a “gig”, a musical performance.  Back then, I was still playing music professionally and was the bass player for a local blues and R&B band called Sistah Blue.

I intensely remember the part of the movie where the ship was slipping into the ocean. There was a quartet of musicians on the top deck playing.   As the ship tilted and slipped toward the ocean, the musicians saw they had only moments before they would be in the freezing water.   And what did they do?  They shrugged and continued to play their music enjoying their last moments of life!

I remember thinking, 'Wow, I hope that I could be that graceful and fearless in my last moments of life'.    

But in reality, I am not so sure that I could!

Gerald Sittser, professor of Christian History and Spirituality at the University of Chicago stated in his recent book, Water from a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries, “The martyrs did not die to prove something to God or earn something from God, but to witness to the life they had received as a gift from God.”

I know, martyrdom is still hard for us to understand.

But all of us have suffered in one way or another.  Some of us may have even faced death or endured a life threatening situation or illness.   And in this experience, there are gifts.  It strangely has a way of helping us grow spiritually and in faith by leaps and bounds. 

In walking through that dark valley, facing our greatest fears....realizations of…what a gift life really is.  It can be a great awakening for us….To living, I mean really living….and being fully alive, free.  The illusions of life become much more apparent. The worries, the things that caused anxiety and fear, greatly lessened with the greater awareness that God is always with us, in darkness and in light and life…and a deeper awareness of God’s love.

It goes way beyond words.

Perfect love casts out all fear.

It has been said that we tend to die the way we lived our life.  The martyrs did not die to prove something to God or earn something from God, but to witness the life they had received as a gift from God. 

May we overcome fear, walk in love and dare to truly live!