Welcome to St Mary's the Virgin
A Message from Fr. Neil
We celebrate a belovedly ‘English’ saint this week. Saint Crispin came to our collective conscience through Shakespeare’s rendering of Henry V’s rousing speech to his army before the battle of Agincourt and any speaker who refers to a ‘happy few’ or ‘band of brothers’ has ‘with us on [this] Crispin’s Day’ at the back of their mind whether they know it or not. Crispin of course, was not English at all, and any knowledge of what was in his time the Roman colony Britannia barely brushed his consciousness. He and his twin brother Crispinian (we have to assume their parents were not very imaginative people) grew up in Viterbo around fifty miles north of Rome in the early third century. Forced to flee after becoming Christians, they finally found a safe haven in Soissons. Here they either made shoes by day and preached Christ at night or the other way around; the sources are not precise on this, but all agree that cobbling and Christian teaching were their two main activities.
The brothers’ business was successful to the point where they were able to support themselves and give to the needy, something they saw as their Christian duty. Word spread quickly through the poorer parts of town, thence more widely and eventually reached the governor, one Rictus Varus. Apart from upsetting what was perceived as the natural order of things, Varus rebuked the brothers for their faith: after all, Diocletian the Emperor was lord of all the earth, not some jumped up Jew from two and a half centuries before.
Crispin and Crispinian refused to recant and were thrown into the River Aisne. The more expansive legends say they survived this and were sent to Rome where Diocletian beheaded them himself, but remain unclear on how they escaped drowning, given the millstones Varus had had put around their necks.
Deep in every Christian heart is the joy of knowing Jesus, who actually is Lord of all the earth, and it is surely this that kept the twins’ hearts true to him even as they were tortured. We are not called to always be happy, but whatever our circumstances we do always have the knowledge of God’s loving presence with us in our Lord Jesus, and whether we are happy or its opposite, something we never are is few: in Christ we are part of the greatest band of sisters and brothers existent.
Fr Neil.