Light in the Darkest Hour (St. Lucy)

 

Light in the Darkness

Lucy of Syracuse, Martyr, 304

Home Eucharist for Advent

December 13, 2023 

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Rev 19:5-8; Psalm 131; John 1:9-14 

December 13 is the Feast Day of Saint Lucy, a martyr killed during the persecution of Christians under the Emperor Diocletian (304 CE).    She is associated with light in darkness, since her Latin name Lucia is very close to the Latin word for light, lucis. 

 

Twelve days before Christmas Day, St. Lucy’s Day is a mirror and foretaste of January 6’s great festival of light, Epiphany, twelve days after it.    In the Julian Calendar used before the Gregorian Calendar was introduced in 1582, December 13 was the day of the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.   St. Lucy is one of the few saints celebrated in reformation Scandinavia, and her day is marked by a procession of a young woman representing the saint.  She wears a crown of lit candles and is followed by young women (and now also young men) bearing candles.

 

Lucy refused a pagan marriage and gave her dowry to the poor.  Her jilted pagan bridegroom reported her to the authorities, who demanded that she sacrifice to the image of the Emperor.  When she declined, she was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in a brothel.   She replied by saying that God judges the intentions of our heart and not our actions when forced against our will.  When the soldiers came to take her away, they found that they could not move her from her house despite increasing heroic efforts on their part, and her death resulted.  In some retellings, ever true to the unfortunate assumption common to many medieval martyrologies that the e saint, St. Lucy dies by having her eyes gouged out before being beheaded.  But this is perhaps historically untrustworthy:  the late medieval iconic image of St. Lucy bearing a pair of eyeballs in her hand probably results from her being the patron saint of those suffering from blindness and eye diseases, rather than the manner of her death. 

 

Here is John Donne's poem for St. Lucy's Day when it was still the Winter Solstice.  It is about having lost a lover to death, and likens the grief and pain of this to the dark and dry season we are in, and prays that the celebration of light on St. Lucy’s day might help heal the grief and pain, and bring another chance for love.   

 

 

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.
by John Donne

 

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours [of light] herself unmasks;
    The sun is spent, and now his flasks
    Send forth light squibs [fizzling firecrackers], no constant rays;
            The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic [thirsty] earth hath drunk,
Whither as to the bed's-feet [swollen and withered], life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph [but an inadequate remembrance of them].

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
    For I am every dead thing,
    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
            For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
    I, by Love's limbec [distillation; potion], am the grave
    Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
            Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world.  Us two—oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
    Were I a man, that I were one
    I needs must know. I should prefer
            If I were any beast.
Some ends, some means—yea plants, yea stones—detest
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my Sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
    At this time to the Goat [the constellation Capricorn] is run
    To fetch new lust, and give it you:
            Enjoy your summer, all,
Since she [St. Lucy] enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her [the dead beloved one’s]  vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.