Nothing to Fear...
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
On this day in the Episcopal church, we remember Jonathan Myrick Daniels, seminarian and martyr, who shielded Ruby Sales in Selma, Alabama in 1965 from an assassin and was killed instantly by the 12-gauge blast. Of his time in Selma prior to his murder, Daniels said,
"I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had been truly baptized into the Lord's death and resurrection with them, the black men and white men, with all life, in him whose Name is above all names that the races and nations shout...We are indelibly and unspeakably one."
Also on this day, the Roman Catholic Church remembers Maximilian Kolbe, Roman Catholic priest and Auschwitz prisoner was killed when he stepped forward to die for a fellow prisoner who was a husband and father. The story is that:
a prisoner escaped, and the concentration camp guards, following their usual mode of reprisal, were going to put ten innocent prisoners to death, through starvation in the notorious torture box, the “Hunger Bunker.” One unfortunate man, when he was picked out of the lineup, shouted out, “My wife, my children!”
At that moment, Kolbe, standing nearby, came forward, identified himself as a Catholic priest, and said that he would take the man’s place. The deputy camp-commander Karl Fritzsch agreed, and Kolbe went to the Hunger Bunker, spending the next several days encouraging the men there with prayers and hymns. He did not starve to death in the allotted time, so he had to be killed on August 14, 1944 with an injection of carbolic acid.
The collect below, appointed for this day which appears in A Great Cloud of Witnesses, an Episcopal Church liturgical and devotional book commemorating holy women and men in the history of the church, honors Johnathan Daniels, but it could just as easily be a collect for the day we remember Maximilian Kolbe and so many others in the great cloud of witnesses who have sacrificed their lives willingly and faithfully for fellow human beings..."we are indelibly and unspeakably one."
O God of justice and compassion, you put down the proud and mighty from their place and lift up the poor and afflicted: We give you thanks for your faithful witnesses Jonathan Myrick Daniels and Maximilian Kolbe and countless others , who in the midst of injustice and violence, risked and gave their lives for others; and we pray that we, following their example, may make no peace with oppression; through Jesus Christ the just one, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Maximilian Kolbe in 1936
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