21 October – Feast Day of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins

Today I learned that someone close to me was raped this week. 

I’m sorry. Let me repeat that, because simple language is such an inefficient carrier for news this tragic:

Today I learned that someone close to me was raped this week.

The details are dreadful and painful in the extreme. To say nothing of the psychological wounding the perpetrators (yes, there was more than one coward) inflicted, the physical pains will resonate through her battered body for months, at least.

Where does this deeply ugly thirst for violation derive? How is it possible that man, born of woman’s womb and nursing, can exact such terrible suffering from his virtual sister?

I find it incomprehensible, and an ineraseable blot of shame on my gender.

Back in the early Middle Ages, around the ninth century, the cult of Saint Ursula began to flourish. Storytellers generally agreed that she had sailed to Cologne, Germany, where she was killed.

Any number of explanations have been proffered to explain away the extravagant number – eleven thousand – of virgin martyrs who died in her company: Perhaps it was a misreading of roman numerals; or a misreading of Ursula’s youthful age (only eleven years old); maybe it was a misreading of Ursula’s true name (“Undecimillia”); etcetera.

All arise to explain away the supposed impossibility of eleven thousand women being martyred by men.

Tonight, though, I read that a woman is raped every six minutes in the United States alone. Every six minutes: that’s ten an hour; it’s 240 a day, every blessed day of the year.

Urusula’s martyred companions seem to me tonight almost too small a number, by a magnitude of eight. It’s terrible – shocking – terrifying – sickening – to realize; but even today, in our enlightened age, over 87,000 women are raped every year in the United States.

May we somehow eventually come to honor the suffering and agony of Ursula, her companions, and their several thousand sisters, by raising our sons to be men who will treat women with equality, love, and respect.

30 August – Feast Day of St. Fiacre, the Misogynist

My muse for my Santa Ynez painting

The fall of 2000, when I began the rich journey through the soul of L.A. that would become All the Saints of the City of the Angels, I was researching – with an eye to portraying – the streets named for saints in and around Downtown Los Angeles.

It was in this way that I found myself one morning in the lobby of a drop-in shelter on San Julian Street in the heart of Skid Row; and it was at that moment that I noticed – how could I not? – the lovely young woman in the photo at left.

Jevona welcomed my request to photograph her, and as I did, she began telling me, unbidden, her life story. It proved a sad, difficult tale, with avaricious men attempting at every turn to take advantage of her. As she told me several times, “If I would sell my body, I wouldn’t be homeless.”

That fall I connected Jevona’s situation with the legend of Saint Agnes – Santa Ynez – whose street I needed to portray. One of the aspects of All the Saints’ first year of of which I am most proud is the positive effect my painting of Jevona as Santa Ynez had on this frail young woman – Ah, if only that could have lasted.

The troubled and troubling ways in which men have, and still, historically abused women is beyond lamentable, thus important to remark and to overcome.

Therefore I bring this relationship up today, for today – Saturday – is the feast day of a particularly unpleasant misogynistic saint (so-called), Fiacre, of Ireland. I recommend taking a few minutes to read his tale from Jacobus de Voragine’s great Golden Legend.

The gist of it is that he felt himself wronged  – “full sorry and wroth” – by one woman and then, after solitary reflection, decided to take revenge on all women.

As Jacobus tells “he made his prayer to our Lord that no woman should never enter into his church, without she be punished by some manner of sickness. ”

His awful prayer, it seems, was granted: one woman lost an eye; the foot of another “swelled by such manner that all the leg, knee, and thigh of it was grieved with sickness.”

Nor were these isolated instances: “many other miracles have been thereof showed.” It seems also a continuation of his demonization of women, that he is invoked against syphilis, venereal disease, and sterility.

As we struggle for gender equality and for honest and open relationships between women and men, let us recall today all the Santa Ynezes who have struggled – and struggle still – against all the Saint Fiacres.