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| St. Josephine Bakhita & the Door to Holiness |
"I am definitively loved
and whatever happens to me,
I am awaited by this Love.
And so my life is good."
+ Josephine Bakhita
1869-1947 A.D.
As we step past All Saints' Day and see the season of Advent on the horizon, Emmaus City Church is seeking to soak in stories of people throughout the past millenia who have followed Jesus, using Our Church Speaks: An Illustrated Devotional of Saints from Every Era and Place as our resource. Here are recent highlights:
When we handed these books out to our congregation this past weekend, this is part of the note we included inside each one:
This might seem at first to be a peculiar Advent devotional. But saints often are peculiar people who stand out in a particular time and place. In fact, the times when saints shine the most are times of darkness. They give glimpses of Jesus’ Light, which darkness cannot overcome.
Advent begins in the dark. And we, as part of Jesus’ Church, are called to live as Advent people who anticipate Jesus’ coming into our darkness today to overcome it. Ultimately, our hope rests in the God of Advent who drew near to us in Jesus’ first coming and will come again to take away the darkness forever and be our eternal Light.
That hope is what saints have embodied as our sisters and brothers across time, ethnicities, Christian traditions, nationalities, and more.
As we step into this next year, our prayer is that we will shine all the more with the holy light of Christ in us and through us. And we pray that we “being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love.” After all, “the Father has enabled us to share in the saints’ inheritance in the light. He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of the Son He loves.”
This post features an excerpt from Our Church Speaks so that you might also walk some of this journey with us with reflection, prayer, and anticipation for how the Light of the world might shine in your life during this season.
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| Our Church Speaks: Josephine Bakhita |
Josephine Bakhita
The Paradox of Poverty
Josephine Bakhita's life
is a testament of God's faithfulness
in the darkest circumstances.
is a testament of God's faithfulness
in the darkest circumstances.
She was born in Darfur, Sudan, among the Daju people. Her first years were happy, but at age eight she was kidnapped by Arab slave traders. For twelve years, she was bought and sold multiple times, forced to convert to Islam, and subjected to cruel beatings and scarification. Bakhita later recalled that a day did not go by when she did not receive a wound of some kind. Her body bore 114 scars from her time in slavery. The trauma caused her to forget her birth name, and she was ironically given the Arabic name Bakhita (meaning "fortunate").
Eventually, Bakhita was purchased by an Italian government agent and brought to Italy, where she served as a maid for an Italian family. While the family was traveling out of the country, Bakhita was sent to live with nuns in a monastic community in Venice. Bakhita recalled that "those holy mothers instructed me with heroic patience and introduced me to that God who from childhood I had felt in my heart without knowing who He was." Bakhita refused to leave the convent, and her case was challenged legally. The courts ruled that her servitude was illegal and she was to be free. Her first decision as a free person was to join the monastic society that had introduced her to Jesus. After Bakhita was baptized, she served at a convent in Schio, northwest of Venice. During her forty-two years in Schio, she earned a reputation in her community for her gentle voice, profound faith, and life of prayer.
Scripture
"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the
Kingdom of heaven."
+ Matthew 5:3
Meditation:
The Paradox of Poverty
The word that our English Bibles translate as blessed in the beatitudes of the Gospel of Matthew is the Greek word makarioi, which means something akin to happy, fortunate, enviable, or congratulatory.
In this beatitude,
Jesus is making a paradoxical statement
about His new reality:
it is those who are run down,
worn out, beaten up, or ground to dust
that will end up reigning in His Kingdom.
When you realize that you are weak, that you are poor, that you need the lowest, most base form of charity, that you don't have what it takes, that you aren't enough, that you're not going to make it, that you're dependent, that you need help — then the beatitude applies to you, and you are blessed because, in Jesus, God does help you.
Q: What do you contribute
toward your salvation?
A: Your need and your openness
to receiving help.
It's like the line in the old hymn "Come Ye Sinners": "Let not conscience make you linger, / Nor of fitness fondly dream; / All the fitness He requires / Is to feel your need of Him."
The Gospel paradox of poverty is that,
through the Gospel,
the most needy, dependent people
end up with all the riches in the end.
It's not the comfort of capitalism,
where if you outcompete
your rich neighbor, you get blessed.
It's not the comfort of Marxism,
where you overthrow
your rich neighbor and
take his stuff to get blessed.
It's not the comfort of therapy,
where you must learn coping
mechanisms to deal with the
poverty of your spirit
in order to feel blessed.
It's not the comfort of
traditional religion,
where you must overcome
your spiritual poverty with willpower
and discipline to be rewarded
with God's blessing.
None of these can offer the poor
and the poor in spirit
what Jesus can offer.
In Jesus, God has become poor and poor in spirit, and He has done so to lift you up in resurrection and to give you the riches of His Kingdom — as a free gift.
Young, enslaved Josephine Bakhita was the epitome of poor in spirit, and it was a cruel thing to nickname her "fortunate / lucky." However, in the Gospel paradox of poverty, she knew the love and blessing of salvation through Jesus. She ended up keeping the name because, in Jesus, she really was fortunate after all.
Prayer
O God, almighty and merciful, You healed the broken heart of your daughter Josephine Bakhita and turned her sorrow into joy: Let Your Fatherly goodness be upon all whom You have made. Remember in pity all those who are this day destitute and forgotten in slavery and human trafficking. Bless the multitude of Your poor. Lift up and liberate the bodies and souls of those who are cast down. Mightily befriend innocent sufferers, and sanctify to them the endurance of their wrongs. Though they are perplexed, save them from despair. Grant this, O Lord, for the love of Him who for our sakes became poor — Your Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
pgs. 26-28
Bonus Book:
by Jen Norton
Bonus Podcast:
Bonus Articles:
Additional Advent Resources:
Many blessings of peace and presence,
Rev. Mike “Sully” Sullivan
