Saints and Martyrs

Flannery O'Connor is a wonderful writer and I heartily recommend that you read everything the woman ever wrote. One story, in particular, had me thinking a few weeks back: A Temple of the Holy Ghost. In it she describes the paintings seen at the fair where one could see "faded looking pictures on the canvas of people in tights, with stiff stretched composed faces like the faces of martyrs waiting to have their tongues cut out by the Roman soldier." What I was thinking about was the classic circus freaks and how she was right, they are a kind of martyr. 

I mean martyr in the sense of witness. Hear what God tells Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 4, "And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?"

It occurs to me that these people are witnesses to God simply by being. I don't know that I've worked it out much further than that, but God tells us many times in Scripture that his strength is made perfect in weakness and that his glory bursts through by means of very small things.

Britain's Protomartyr

What the heck is a protomartyr anyway, Clark? It sounds vaguely of cavemen and authralopithecines. (Which, now that I see these words written on the screen in front of me, strikes me as a very interesting idea for a series of drawings.) Well anyway, I agree with you, but I didn't make up the term, I'm just using it correctly. So cut me some slack. "Protomartyr" simply means "first martyr". 

If you are curious, you can read St. Alban's story here and allow Wikipedia to endow you with both knowledge and distraction. 

The reason I  have a drawing of St. Alban to show you is because I am a member of St. Alban's Anglican Cathedral in sunny Central Florida. Now, if you know anything about Anglican worship, you know it can be off-putting if you don't already know what is going on. We use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and our liturgy is correspondingly... um... confusing if you are unaccustomed to it. (I have grown to love it over the years for a host of reasons and cannot image going back now.) Instead of asking visitors to try to keep track of a bulletin, Bible, Book of Common Prayer, and a hymnal, we have made a visitor's bulletin that contains the liturgy, service music and prompts as to when to sit, stand, genuflect, cross yourself, etc. So this thing needed a picture on the front and that's where my drawing comes in. 

Actually the whole thing needed to be designed as well as illustrated. My able, talented and beautiful wife did the design work and drafted me to do the illustration work. I'll post a link to the finished bulletin if it ever makes its way online. It looks great!

Polycarp

Polycarp. Pencil, watercolor, gold leaf, ink on paper. Polycarp was an early Christian martyr. He famously defied the Romans in their pleas to him to renounce Christ. As a result he was burned alive.