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“What shall I write about?” I thought to myself… “I know - the one hundred and thirty-fourth day of the year (which it was,) is the feast of Saint Matthias; people won’t know much about him.” I then switched on the machine and opened the documents file to discover, as keen-eyed readers of this magazine will have recalled already, I wrote about Matthias this time last year. While I am understandably hesitant to tell you that if you dig out your archive copy and read my entry in that you will know all you will ever need to know about him, one of the issues about Matthias is how little there is to know: to quote the poem, ‘He takes on the twelfth place, Then disappears without trace,’.
This though, is one of the reasons I am as fond of Saint Matthias as I am. Obviously, I would prefer to discover more of his life story, but it simply was not recorded. He is the saint of the anonymous good. During the coverage of the celebrations to remember VE Day there were many interviews with veteran survivors of the terrible conflict that ended eighty years ago. Practically all of those interviewed reminded us, some repeatedly, that the people who ought to be gratefully recalled were not them, but the many, many others who did not return home, whether from far-flung postings where they fought or their shopping trips when a bomb fell. We will never know the stories of these people, yet it was their collective effort and sacrifice which ultimately brought the continent to peace.
Edmund Burke the late eighteenth century thinker famously said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good people to do nothing, (but if the quote is followed to its end he concluded, ‘nobody ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.’ So Burke was a Matthian at heart!) The converse of the quote is also true – if good people all do something, evil will not triumph.
As we celebrate peace then, and Matthias, be encouraged: just as legitimately as the grand recorded gestures, unnoticed or unknown deeds - even yours, also maketh the saint.
Fr Neil.
