On a road trip south to visit family a few weeks ago, Robert and I took a 30-minute detour off our planned route to visit the small town of Hayneville, Alabama. Hayneville is a small town of fewer than 1,000 people, about thirty minutes from both Montgomery and Selma, in either direction. Hayneville is the kind of place you have to make a point of visiting; there’s not much there. I was there to visit the former location of Varner’s Cash Store (see the photo to the left, taken on my visit), which was where Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels was shot at point blank range in 1965 at age 26.
At the time, Daniels was a student at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Reared in New Hampshire, Daniels matriculated at Harvard University in 1961, and then in 1962, felt a call to ordination after attending an Easter service at the Church of the Advent, Boston. He enrolled at Episcopal Divinity School in 1963. In 1965, he learned of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for students to join him in Selma, Alabama, for a march to the state capitol to advocate for civil rights. During Evening Prayer at the seminary chapel, Daniels felt inspired by the words of Mary’s song, the Magnificat (one of the traditional Evening Prayer canticles), and he decided to go to Selma. In his words,
"I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary's glad song. ‘He hath showed strength with his arm.’ As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled “moment” that would, in retrospect, remind me of others--particularly one at Easter three years ago. Then it came. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.’ I knew then that I must go to Selma. The Virgin's song was to grow more and more dear in the weeks ahead.” (http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/228.html)
After responding to that call, and while in Selma, Daniels worked towards integration in the Episcopal church there, but he was met with much resistance by the congregation. On August 14, Jonathan and his companions (a white Roman Catholic priest and two black female activists) were jailed in Hayneville after picketing whites-only stores. They were later released on August 20. Immediately afterwards, they went to Varner’s Cash Store for soft drinks. As they approached the store, a white man, Tom Coleman, blocked the entrance holding a shotgun and cursing sixteen-year-old Ruby Sales, one of Daniels’s companions. As Coleman aimed his gun at Sales, Daniels pushed her out of the way, took the bullet himself, and was killed instantly. Coleman was later acquitted by an all-white jury and eventually served as an engineer for the state highway department, dying in 1997.
Jonathan Myrick Daniels is commemorated on the Episcopal church’s calendar of lesser feasts and fasts on August 14, the day of his arrest (Bernard of Clairvaux was already commemorated on August 20, the day of Daniels’s martyrdom). I have always been deeply moved by Daniels’s witness because his bravery in the face of the sin of racial injustice was enacted so quietly but with such great conviction. Although there’s a historical marker at the site of his martyrdom, you have to seek it out. There’s a poignancy to this understated site, nearly forgotten despite the powerful witness of a true Christian who shed his blood on that site. Few people know about this modern-day martyr who followed Jesus’s call to lose one’s life for his sake. And he was one of our own, a part of our own Episcopal Church within the lifetime of many of you reading this message.
It’s a beautiful gift of the liturgical calendar that Daniels’s feast day is celebrated just a day before Our Lady’s on August 15. It was, after all, Our Lady’s words, recounted in Luke’s Gospel, that first motivated Jonathan Myrick Daniels to leave the comfort of a New England seminary to wade into the minefield of civil rights activism in the South. The words of the Church’s liturgies have meaning, and there may be times, such as in the life of Jonathan Myrick Daniels, when a phrase from Scripture or an incisive prayer compels us to action. As Daniels himself said, he was praying in the “usual place” and saying the “usual” words of the Magnificat when an unusual call from God came to him. Nearly every day at Good Shepherd, we pray Mary’s words at Evening Prayer, and we’re reminded of the topsy-turvy justice of the Gospel, where the meek and lowly are lifted up and the proud are “scattered . . . in the imagination of their hearts,” where the mighty are “put down,” and the “humble and meek” are exalted. The hungry are “filled with good things,” and the rich are “sent empty away.” It’s not that God enacts revenge on the wealthy, mighty, and powerful, or that God’s “preferential option for the poor” excludes the rich. It’s just that, as God brings his justice to reign, those who have stomped on the powerless inevitably find themselves lowered and humbled. For justice to happen, that’s the way it must pan out. None of us can escape the power of God’s transforming love and formation without being humbled in some sense. Every failure or embarrassment of our lives is a small death. But some, like Jonathan Myrick Daniels, have paid the ultimate price by giving up even their physical lives for their neighbors and for the sake of their Christian beliefs. And in doing so, they have found eternal life. The witness of Jonathan Myrick Daniels challenges my own commitment to Christ. Could I have done what Daniels did? Would I have had that kind of courage? I certainly hope so, but it’s modern-day martyrs like Daniels who pose those questions of devotion to Christ most vividly to us.
As we continue to navigate one of the most polarized times in our nation’s history, we are daily confronted with the need to make our own moral decisions about how we will speak and how we will act and about whom we will follow. The witnes of Jonathan Myrick Daniels calls us to, first, believe in God’s unending justice, and second, to let our words and actions be true to the One we follow as Lord, the One who calls us to lay down our lives for our neighbors, to gain our lives by losing them, to become rich by becoming poor. This is the cost of discipleship. Many of the racial issues that Daniels faced in 1965 are still as salient in our own day, and we, too, are called to make brave decisions to give our own testimony to Mary’s Song. On the feast of St. Mary the Virgin, we celebrate our Lord’s salvific solution to the world’s sklerokardia (hardness of heart). God saves humankind by calling one of us to be the Mother of God. This is a topsy-turvy world indeed.
I hope to see you this Thursday at 7 p.m. for Solemn High Mass on the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin (commonly called the Assumption), when we’ll join with our friends from Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street. A potluck supper will follow. Come and celebrate the great inverting power of God’s justice, which sets us all free.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle