Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary

More and more Episcopalians today find that Mary touches their lives. The Living Church every year has an editorial on the importance of today. A newspaper in Florida last week published a special article about a congregation observing this feast today. All this attention highlights our increasing acceptance of Mary’s pivotal role in the history and story of salvation. We’ve moved beyond a saccharine image of a meek and mild brunette, blue-eyed woman to a feisty Middle-Eastern teenager. It’s quite a change. All I can say is, thanks be to God.

One person whose life was changed by Mary is Jonathan Myrick Daniels, martyr. His feast day was yesterday and I think it’s appropriate that it land on the vigil of this feast. (1)

Here is his story:

Daniels was born in Keene, New Hampshire in 1939, one of two offspring of a Congregationalist physician. In high school, he joined the Episcopal Church and also began to take his studies seriously, and to consider the possibility of entering the priesthood. After high school, he enrolled at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia, where at first he seemed a misfit, but managed to stick it out, and was elected Valedictorian of his graduating class. In the fall of 1961 he entered Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Boston, to study English literature, and in the spring of 1962, while attending Easter services at the Church of the Advent in Boston, he underwent a conversion experience and renewal of grace. Soon after, he made a definite decision to study for the priesthood, and after a year of work to repair the family finances, he enrolled at Episcopal Theological Seminary (now Episcopal Divinity School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1963, expecting to graduate in the spring of 1966.

In March 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, asked students and others to join him in Selma, Alabama, for a march to the state capital in Montgomery demonstrating support for his civil rights program. News of the request reached the campus of ETS in early March, and during Evening Prayer at the chapel, Jon Daniels decided that he ought to go. Later he wrote (and this is where his story intersects with today’s readings):

“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.” I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary’s glad song. “He hath showed strength with his arm.” As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled “moment” that would, in retrospect, remind me of others — particularly one at Easter three years ago. Then it came. “He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.” I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin’s song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.

He and others left on Thursday for Selma, intending to stay only that weekend; but he and a friend missed the bus back, and began to reflect on how an in-and-out visit like theirs looked to those living in Selma, and decided that they must stay longer. They went home to request permission to spend the rest of the term in Selma, studying on their own and returning to take their examinations.

Jon devoted many of his Sundays in Selma to bringing small groups of Negroes, mostly high school students, to church with him in an effort to integrate the local Episcopal church. They were seated but scowled at. Many parishioners openly resented their presence, and put their pastor squarely in the middle. (He was integrationist enough to risk his job by accommodating Jon's group as far as he did, but not integrationist enough to satisfy Jon.)

In May, Jon went back to ETS to take examinations and complete other requirements, and in July he returned to Alabama, where he helped to produce a listing of local, state, and federal agencies and other resources legally available to persons in need of assistance. On Friday 13 August Jon and others went to the town of Fort Deposit to join in picketing three local businesses. On Saturday they were arrested and held in the county jail in Hayneville for six days until they were bailed out. (They had agreed that none would accept bail until there was bail money for all.) After their release on Friday 20 August, four of them undertook to enter a local shop, and were met at the door by a man with a shotgun who told them to leave or be shot. After a brief confrontation, he aimed the gun at a young girl in the party, and Jon pushed her out of the way and took the blast of the shotgun himself. (Whether he stepped between her and the shotgun is not clear.) He was killed instantly. (2)

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Daniel’s life was changed by the Magnificat as he prayed it. How might Mary’s song change your life? How might you respond to the powerful words that invite us to make a difference, reverse the injustices of the world to bring about God’s realm here and now? Not that we are being called to martyrdom in the way that Jon was, but we are still called to be martyrs in the original sense of the word, witnesses, to God’s love that is for everyone, a love that turns the conventional world upside-down.

Mary’s feast day invites us not only to pray the Magnificat, but to live it. May her example, that of Jonathan Daniels and of countless others, inspire us to live likewise.



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END NOTES
(1) Because Bernard of Clairvaux is remembered on 20 August, Jonathan Daniels is remembered on the day of his arrest, 14 August.

(2) http://satucket.com/lectionary/Jonathan_Daniels.htm
The writer of this biography based it on The Jon Daniels Story, ed. William J Schneider (Morehouse, 1992 ; ISBN: 0819215864 - out of print but may be available used) (orig. publ. 1967)