The Unstoppable Hope of Saint Polycarp
Today, February 23, is the Feast Day of Father Polycarp, my patron saint, commemorating the day he left this earth, the day those who loved him called his birthday.
I have always been moved by Saint Polycarp. Long before I had read many of the saint’s lives, I had read his letter to the church at Philippi and the second-century account of his martyrdom. I loved his compassion and strength; estranged from my own father, I thought, Here is a man who can teach me what a father is. Encountering Polycarp healed an old wound in my heart.
I wrote a novel about him, What Our Eyes Have Witnessed. In those pages, I included words that Polycarp had not said during his mortal years in Smyrna, but that I believe he said to me while I was praying, when I most needed to hear them. Words that I wanted to share with every reader who might encounter my work. “What did he [Christ] teach us?” my fictional Polycarp asks his disciples. Then, in answer, he gives the words that I was given:
“Nothing is broken that cannot be remade,
Nothing is ill that cannot be healed,
Nothing captive that cannot be freed.
We must live lives of unstoppable hope.”
I hold those words in my heart to this day. This was a man whose hope burned hotter than the pyre, whose love had already forged his heart into some metal no suffering could undo.
In our own history, outside the pages of the novel: When soldiers came to his door to arrest him (he was eighty-six years old), he faced them calmly and asked, “Would you like something to eat? Are you thirsty?”
While he served them, they gazed in dismay at this ancient, white-haired man with his kind eyes and wrinkled face—this man they had been sent to arrest and haul to the arena for public execution. They had tracked him here to a country farmhouse in the fields outside the city, where Polycarp had retreated at the urging of those he pastored; farmhands had been tortured to reveal where the old man was living. Now they had found him, and he was no fiend or terrorist or threat to the Empire that they could see, just a gentle old man feeding them bread and turnips from the garden. After they ate, he asked them if he could pray for an hour; they gave him two.
We know only a little of Polycarp’s life before that day. His followers said that he had learned the Gospel from Saint John, that as a boy he would sit at John’s knees and look up into his shining face when the old apostle told of the years when God had walked the land with his friends. As a grown man, Polycarp served as the bishop of a church in the Greek city of Smyrna in Asia Minor, where he preached mercy and compassion, and counseled people to relinquish the love of money. He urged believers to “cherish the things Jesus cherished”:
“Follow our Master’s example… Love one another as brothers, cherish one another, united in truth; give way to one another with the gentleness our Lord showed, despising no one. When it occurs to you to do some good, do not delay in doing it.”
When he was brought before the proconsul and urged to renounce his God and denounce his parish, handing over his loved ones, he replied,
“Eighty years and six I have served my Master, and he has done me no wrong. Why should I turn my back on him now?”
When he was sent to be burned, his executioners were about to nail his hands above his head, but they stopped—perhaps at the look in his eyes—when he turned to them calmly and said, ‘
“Leave me as I am. He who grants that I will endure the fire will grant that I will stand here without flailing about; the nails may make you feel more secure about what you’re doing, but I do not need them.”
They stepped away then, unsure how to proceed.
More Precious Than Gems, Finer Than Gold
Those who spoke afterward of Polycarp’s death wrote with awe of what they witnessed. They said the flames did not touch him but arched up around him, that he stood in a chamber of heated air with walls of fire; that his body began to blaze with light like metal being heated, and that the aroma that came from the pyre was not that of scorched flesh but of incense. It was as though the heat was not destroying his earthly body but refining it into his new, heavenly form. Not a day of death but one of birth.
After Polycarp’s spirit departed our world, the officials cremated the body. Sifting the ashes with trembling hands, his followers gathered what they could of his mortal relics. “These are more precious than gems and finer than gold,” they wrote, “and we have hidden them in a suitable place. There, gathering together in joy, the Lord will permit us to commemorate each year the birthday of his martyrdom, in memory of those who have triumphed and to prepare those who may.”
Steel-Blade Hope
When my daughter Inara was ill and near death, I thought of Father Polycarp and I wrote down what hope meant to me by that hospital bed that I prayed wouldn’t become pyre or bier for this daughter I loved:
“I have learned that hope, which I had thought small and delicate like a moth in the night, can be hard as steel, a blade in your hand.”
I believe it was just such steel-blade hope that Polycarp carried with him into the fire; I believe this is the kind of hope that my father Polycarp wishes me to have. May we all stride together through our longest nights with that kind of hope.
Stant Litore
Read More
Much of this post is adapted from the draft for Lives of Beauty, a book about the saints that I am currently writing with much toil, gratitude, and hope. You can support the project on Patreon (and read it, as it develops), if you would like to, here: www.patreon.com/stantlitore
The cover art shown is by Lauren K. Cannon, for What Our Eyes Have Witnessed, my alternate history/fantasy novel about a Polycarp who frees slaves, feeds the starving, and gives rest to the restless and ravenous dead in ancient Rome. You can find that novel here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1736212796 Or here: https://stantlitore.com/product/what-our-eyes-have-witnessed/
You can read Saint Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians and the second-century account The Martyrdom of Polycarp in the book The Apostolic Fathers, translated by J.B. Lightfoot.
May you each live lives of unstoppable hope.
(Disclaimer: I may earn a small amount if you click through and order any of the books above from Amazon. This helps keep me and my children fed! But if it’s What Our Eyes Have Witnessed that you want, you can also order the paperback from me directly. I hope you enjoy it!)
The Meaning of Stant Litore
“Nothing is broken that cannot be remade,
Nothing is ill that cannot be healed,
Nothing captive that cannot be freed.
We must live lives of unstoppable hope…”
…is also the meaning of the pen name Stant Litore. I told the tale behind that name here, in 2014, as a much younger man.
I still believe in it.
