The Way Down to Glory
28 August 2022
Those of you familiar with my blog may recognize this telling of St Macrina’s life. I (Leah) wrote it in honor of her feast day a few years ago. If not—or if it’s been a while, and you’d like a refresher—read on to meet the person I’ve spent much of the last five years with.
Once upon a time, in the reign of Constantine, a girl was born into a Christian family of considerable privilege and wealth. The girl’s father was a well-respected rhetorician. Her grandfather was a martyr.
She grew up in the area that is now Turkey, as the Church argued over the divinity of the Son and the office of Bishop began to accumulate this-worldly benefits. She was the eldest of nine.
When it was time for her to be betrothed, she schemed her way out of marriage to seek God as a dedicated virgin, an ascetic. (Don’t picture a colorless renunciation, so much as a disciplined and even passionate re-directing of desire. The Song of Songs was a key text.) All four of her brothers and at least one sister eventually followed her into some version of this renunciation.
Her new life was disruptive: though she stayed in the household, she worked with the slaves and eventually gave her inheritance to the local church. When, after her father’s death, her mother was persuaded to join her in the ascetic endeavor, they freed their slaves.
Women came even from Constantinople to learn from her. When famine struck the region, she opened her granaries to the poor and rescuers infants exposed to die. The food did not run out.
She raised her youngest brother Peter, who oversaw the monks at their monastery and eventually became Bishop of Sebaste.
The monastic community she worked out seems to have been the foundation for the Rule that has come down to us in the name of her brother Basil the Great. He was the Metropolitan Bishop of Caesarea, the capitol of the province. He too, spent his inheritance to feed the hungry in the famine, eventually building a city outside the city to care for the sick and the poor.
Another brother, Gregory of Nyssa, is honored as one of the Church’s first mystical theologians. Against those who argued that the Son is not divine because God’s nature is known to consist in unbegotten-ness, a quality the Son does not share, Gregory wrote of God in the darkness of unknowing: infinitely beyond our comprehension, and infinitely good. He was also a bishop, and the first Christian on record to entirely condemn the institution of slavery.
She spent almost all her life at a rural villa on the family’s estate. We have no writings in her hand, and only Gregory wrote about her after her death. But he was generous: from his pen came both a biography and a philosophic dialogue honoring his sister Macrina. (In the dialogue, she’s his teacher.)
This Sunday was Macrina’s feast day. While the concept can be a stretch for Protestants, I think it’s salutary: Christianity is not something we do alone, either in space or time. And that’s a good thing. There are days our history of compromise and complicity can make it feel like we’re living in a ship on fire. (White Christian’s participation in racial injustice is only the most recent scandal.)
That’s why we need Macrina and all the other saints. They didn’t live perfect lives here, and they weren’t trying to answer the exact questions we’re facing. But they lived faithfully in complicated times. They followed the self-giving God to rewrite the script of privilege and power. In the age of Constantine, they thought clearly and served the weak.
May the God they love help us to do the same.
Macrina the Younger, as masterfully imagined and rendered by our friend, Deirdre Kelley.
In Leah’s bedroom, the ceramic bowl pictured at top was thrown by Becca and designed by Deirdre. An image lifted from the poetry of the Song of Songs, the apple tree was sometimes used to speak of Christ’s incarnation, his God-becoming-man. As an apple tree among the trees of the wood he dwelt with us, sharing our nature, but where we bore only thorns and shadows, he offered life-giving fruit.