Thomas Becket & Faithful Witness

Yesterday commemorated the assassination of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170 AD. Becket was in an ongoing dispute with the king, Henry II, and four knights took it upon themselves to seek him out and assassinate him in Canterbury Cathedral, a grisly event dramatized by T.S. Eliot in the verse play aptly titled Murder in the Cathedral. In the play tempters come to Becket, one offering safety:

          Take a friend's advice. Leave well alone,
          Or your goose may be cooked and eaten to the bone.

Another invites him to gain power and wealth by acquiescing to the king.

To set down the great, protect the poor,

Beneath the throne of God can man do more?

Becket responds with the oft-quoted words:

Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain:

Temptation shall not come in this kind again.

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

I might not pay much attention to the 850 year-old murder of a British cleric if I hadn't visited the site of his death in the cathedral some years ago and read a prayer elsewhere in the church which acknowledged modern-day martyrs of the faith, those who have spoken "truth to power" with courage, even though it meant persecution and death. Some become well-known, and are made saints, such as Becket and Oscar Romero, the archbishop of El Salvador who was murdered in 1980 by government forces while saying the mass.

Others are "ordinary" Christians who suffer for their faith. I think of the Pakistani Christian woman, Aasiya Noreen, who was sentenced to death for blasphemy against Islam in 2010. Recently her sentence was overturned but she may be forced to leave the country because of ongoing death threats and her family has considered emigrating to Canada.

Those of us who live with the freedom to worship and to criticize the "powers that be" if we choose can regularly pray for those Christians whose safety is precarious. We can support organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch which monitor situations where persecution occurs, including for religious reasons. We can encourage our government to provide refuge for those whose lives are in peril.

Swiss Chalet as an environmental leader? Read about it in today's Groundling blog.
https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2018/12/those-clever-swiss.html



Christ of Maryknoll Robert Lenz