"Martyres", Part 1

Today, with the Refugee Center closed for the weekend, I ventured with eight St. Paul’s parishioners (guided by Fr. Austin & our superb senior warden, Larry) to the Catacombs of St. Domatilla. As I would soon learn, the Catacombs were (and are) a burial ground for early Christians in the first two centuries A.D., before the religion was legalized in the Roman Empire. In short, the space was built to be a dormitorium – a place for Christians bodies to “sleep” for a short time after death until the expectedly imminent second coming of Christ. Once holding some 17,000 bodies deep underground throughout 11 miles of tunnels, all but a few corporeal remains were exhumed in the 7^th century.

Entering the cave, as our tour guide shared with us the story of the ancient martyres (Latin for “witnesses”) who were buried there, I was surprisingly struck by the palpable morbidity of the place. I should’ve seen it coming perhaps, since I was in the catacombs of all places, but I couldn’t shake the sense that the spirits of those long-deceased children of God were there walking with us and among us along the way. The average age of death, in those days, was just thirty-five years old. Among them were people of all walks of Roman society – mothers, fathers, doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, teachers, paupers, children, babies, and people of varied ethnicities, home countries, and languages.

Buried here together, unadorned, unmarked, unheralded and unknown to us as individuals, they are nonetheless our family. I wrote here recently about the “great cloud of witnesses” we celebrate annually at the Feast of All Saints, and its twin celebration the Feast of All Souls on the preceding day. (All Souls honors the totality of our deceased predecessors in Christ, whereas All Saints specifically marks those people whom the church remembers as being extraordinary models of Christian piety).

 Today, honoring these saints and souls together from nearly two millennia ago, it was the incredible greatness of their number that left me awe-inspired. Think about it – the 17,000 Christians once buried in these very catacombs of Domatalla from the first three centuries in Rome, plus the thousands of Christian souls from the same era buried elsewhere in Rome, and the hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, not to mention the hundreds of millions of departed Christian witnesses from all over the globe assembled in the last twenty centuries! What an enormous multitude of angels, saints, and blessed souls we have the honor and responsibility to honor.

As if this were not enough on its own, it was their extraordinarily ordinary lives that humbled me so deeply, far beyond my expectation. These were not people who commanded great fame or attention, not people who led empires or found their names written in the great histories of the world. They were people of every age, across magnificent diversity who loved their families, worked hard at what they did, and lived as best they could in this troubled and difficult world. They faced so many of the same challenges that we might recognize today, even walking on the same ground and the same streets which I traversed this morning to arrive in this place.

Preparing to celebrate the Eucharist at the catacombs

Yet their world was also so different from ours. Even in a city like Rome where we even walk through the same buildings that our ancient ancestors knew, this modern world has so often forgotten its ancient present. Amidst the ubiquitous cars and hotels, pizzerias and gelato shops, the souls of those whom we call “long lost” lie not only deep underground or high in the heavens as we imagine. Try as we might to domesticate and constrain death - to avoid our mortality until an “appropriate time” - it is not going anywhere. The dead walk with us still.

These siblings in Christ of the past and present age believed this earthly world would come to an end imminently – any minute now, any day now. They must have never imagined that two thousand years hence, Christians would continue each day to walk by their burial sites - to pray for and with them in such a radically transformed and yet remarkably unchanged world. Some day soon perhaps, our great-great-grandchildren (a hundred generations on, give or take) will walk by our gravestones too.  And in this season of Advent we continue to wait with them, no less confident that all Christ’s servants of past, present and future continue to prepare, and live, and love our ageless God together.




**N.B., Because picture taking was not allowed for most of the tour, the first three pictures were borrowed with permission from here, here, and here. The fourth picture was taken by the Rev. Rosa Lee Harden.