Today's Saint: St. Lucia

Today is the feast day of St. Lucia, Virgin Martyr. My previous post was about men standing up for their faith, here is the story of how a brave woman stood up for hers.

St. Lucia's hagiography, or saint biography, tells us that Lucia, who lived from 283 to 304, was a Christian during the time of the Diocletian persecutions. This was a time in which Roman persecution of Christianity was at its peak. She lived in Syracuse, Sicily, and her mother had betrothed her to a pagan. Not wanting to marry a pagan and give up her virginity Lucia urged her mother to give away her dowry; without a dowry her potential groom would not want to marry her. When her rejected pagan bridegroom discovered that the dowry had been given away, he denounced Lucy as a Christian to the magistrate Paschasius.

Paschasius ordered Lucia to burn a sacrifice to the emperor's image and thus commit idolatry. Rather than commit this sin, Lucia replied that she had given all that she had: "I offer to Him myself, let Him do with His offering as it pleases Him."

She had offered her life to God, and she trusted in God to do with her as he willed.

Paschasius sentenced Lucia to be defiled in a brothel, in faith she asserted to the governor:

No one's body is polluted so as to endanger the soul if it has not pleased the mind. If you were to lift my hand to your idol and so make me offer against my will, I would still be guiltless in the sight of the true God, who judges according to the will and knows all things. If now, against my will, you cause me to be polluted, a twofold purity will be gloriously imputed to me. You cannot bend my will to your purpose; whatever you do to my body, that cannot happen to me.

Her hagiography states that when the guards came to take her away they found her so filled with the Holy Spirit that she was stiff and heavy as a mountain; they could not move her even when they hitched her to a team of oxen. Even with a dagger through her throat she prophesied against her persecutor. As final torture, her eyes were gouged out with a fork.

Let me say that again.

With a fork.

A.

Fork.

Finally she was killed.

Many of the facts specific to Lucia's martyrdom are unknown, what little that has been passed down to us I have stated above. We do know that she was tortured for her faith and that she gave her life up for the Lord.

There is a tendency in the church to remember Lucia (and all the Virgin Martyrs) for their desire to keep their virginity intact - a focus on the sexual state - but the focus should be on the spiritual state. She did not want to be defiled by the world. Even when her physical self was threatened, she remained focused on being spiritually pure for her Lord.

It is because of her devotion that we remember her.