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In my first informal hagiography, I will be examining the life of a saint who is very dear to me. A saint that encapsulates all that I love about the Catholic faith. The beautiful weirdness, the poetic perfection, the profound depth of Gods Love. Her story could not be more relevant in our current age. Most of this will be taken from Huysmans book on her, which I urge you all to read.
In the years preceding St Lydwines birth, the world began to collapse upon itself. Europe had been reduced to a charnel yard, and every nation bore the carnal signature of iniquity. The nobility waged endless war upon their kin, trading in hogsheads of blood, shed to purchase mere cubits of dirt. The land of Europe was scarred with muddy battlefields, fertilized in hemoglobin and gore, as the end of time was freshly declared with every breaking dawn.
The hundred-year war breaks out and rages between those eternal belligerents, England and France, and the pressure forges new saints and sinners, brilliant as diamonds. Joan of Arc heads to her opulent pyre, burning in zeal, as her old Master-at-Arms Gilles de Rais, once a hero, rapes and slaughters toddlers to the devil in his castle in Brittany. No two figures are more emblematic of the extremes of that century, both good and evil, then St Joan and the old Marshall of France.
In Iberia, the Christians and the Moors fight tooth and nail, the cross and the crescent, as anti-jewish pogroms erupt and send sons of Abraham to Sheol. In the East, the Greeks and the Turks disembowel and disfigure one another, as Christendom prepares to lose one of her eyes, a blinding loss that will not be recovered until the end of time. Religion was the whetstone, sharpening new and strange steal, wielded by old heresies and old feuds.
The scourge of God reincarnates in the East, Atilla reborn, in the figure of Tamerlane. His hordes ride and ravage the body of Asia, as he extinguishes half a tenth of all life on earth, and virtually destroys God’s Church in the East. With the cadavers of his victims, he constructs a ziggurat of fifty thousands skulls, “six times more than the people of Ninevah.” A Tower of Babel, yet far more perverse, as historical typologies return with new horror. He and his horde ride across the earth, constructing these macabre towers in Delhi, Baghdad, in Isfahan, and Damascus. A pale horse and a swart figure.
And in a land unknown, far to the west, across the great Atlantic, the Mexica have an ancient prophecy fulfilled. A great eagle descends with a Serpent in its beak, upon a throne of cactus. The Mexica people begin to erect their great city in Lake Texoco, the future site of towering pyramids, dedicated to dark and bloodthirsty gods. The pagan deities of Ninevah found new thralls after being forced from their land in the Middle East, new blood to be spilled from new ziggurats. But the Virgin takes notice too, and just as the serpent descends upon a cactus, so too would she manifest upon the threads of such a plant, when her face would herald the victory of her Son to Juan Diego.
And in Europe, the Angel of Death, rides out upon his chariot of vermin. Conquering the world under his black banner, taking ports and cities with his bubonic sickle, the greatest conquerer of the age. And a quarter of Europe falls to his touch.
Castles become sepulchers, whole cities aborted into stillborn mausoleums, as spiritual soldiers wage war against the darkness in their cloistered phalanxes.
Holy unity is fractured in the house of Peter. Two Popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome, the see of Peter fissured in two, as an aftershock quakes and produces a third. Hurling anathemas and curses, the three men divide the ecclesia, as tears fall from the cheeks of Paul in heaven. Even saints were split, the righteous divided and scandalized, as hermits proclaimed the end of time. Even the name, Babylonian Captivity, implied a return to the furthest recesses of Old Testament horror.
The parallels should seem obvious, the cadence and structure of the 14th century seem to rhyme with our own. This should give us hope, for when darkness begins to reign upon the earth, God raises saints in counterbalance. When the cruel albigensian leviathan took root upon the earth in the 12th century, did God not send us St Francis and Dominic? So too, when things seemed darkest at the end of the 14th century, God sent a saint to suffer for our sakes, St Lydwine of Schiedam.
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Lydwine arrived upon the earth on Palm Sunday.
Her mother had gone to high mass that day when the pains of labor contracted deep within her, and she hurried home to deliver her. The birth was painless and tranquil, when in the past her labors had been horrendous and physically costly. The signs could not have been more auspicious.
Names can herald a child’s destiny, a tradition most obvious in Christs own appellation, Yeshua, meaning Yahweh Saves. “The child received at the Font the name of Lydwine, Lydwyd, Lydwich, Liedwich, Lidie or Liduvine, a name which, under all its differences of spelling and sound is derived from the Flemish word "Lyden," to suffer, or would signify, according to Brugman, "great patience" in the German tongue.” A truly prophetic title, foreshadowing the unimaginable suffering the girl would willingly subject herself too for God and man.
As a child, the beginnings of that girl’s future holiness were evident to all. The young girl had a particular devotion to the Blessed Virgin of Schiedam, and she would get on her hands and knees to faithfully venerate the statue of her. One night she returned home late from her sessions with the divine Mother, and her other mother scolded her on her tardiness. She responded, “Do not scold me, mother dear, I went to salute Our Lady the Virgin, and she returned my greeting with a smile.” Lydwin would have been weened by stories of that statue in her childhood, the story which I will now recount.
“A little before the birth of Lydwine, a sculptor, according to Gerlac, and à Kempis, a merchant according to Brugman, came to Schiedam with a virgin in wood, which he had either carved himself or bought, and proposed to go and sell it at the fair held about the date of the Assumption at Antwerp. This statue was so light that a man could easily handle it, yet, when placed in the boat on which it was to be carried from the one town to the other, it became suddenly so heavy that it was impossible for the vessel to quit the port. More than twenty sailors tried to draw her from her moorings, while the people, who were looking on at this spectacle from the quay, laughed and jeered at their impotence. Mortified and exhausted, they ceased their efforts, never having known anything so annoying, and asking themselves whether this effigy of the Madonna might not possibly be the cause. Anyhow, they wished to be quit of it, and the merchant, threatened with a ducking, had to take back the statue, which immediately became light in his hands, and disembarked it amongst the acclamations of the crowd, whilst the boat, thus lightened, sailed gaily away. All cried, therefore, that the virgin had only acted in this way because she wished to place herself amongst them, and that, in consequence, they ought to keep her. They went to fetch the priests of the parish and the members of the trade guilds, who immediately acquired the statue and placed it in the church, where they founded a guild in its honour.”
It is truly amazing how these miracles can pour forth from the pages of history and inspire men into becoming saints. How the appearance of the Virgin can awaken something in the slumbering recesses of man’s immortal soul, and inflame a burning passion and love of God. This is the treasure of Marian apparitions. Before continuing, I would like to ask each of you reading this to share the story of the Miracle of the Sun in Fatima with someone you know this week. The power of that event has the capability to convert the world.
Lydwinne in her childhood displayed paroxysms of piety that were reminiscent of other great saints. Just as St Agnes refused to marry, so too did Lydwinne refuse to marry a suitor picked out by her father. She had promised herself at a young age to Christ and Christ alone. She begged God to make her ugly, to sullen her perfect beauty, so that she would never have to marry a man. I would like to now quote a passage from Husymans own book on the Saint’s life, the book which I am primarily using for this article, and a book I implore you all to read.
“In the end they resigned themselves to her wishes, but she remained uneasy at the knowledge of her beauty, and until she became ugly, as she wished to be, she went out as little as possible. She felt that all love which is bestowed on a creature is a fraud committed against GOD, and she implored GOD to help her to love Him alone. Then He began to cultivate her, to root out all thoughts which could displease Him, to hoe her soul, to rake it till the blood flowed. And He did more; for as if to attest the justice of the saying of S. Hildegarde, at once so terrible and so consoling: "GOD dwells not in bodies that are whole," He attacked her health. This young and charming body with which He had clothed her seemed suddenly irksome to Him, and He cut it in all directions, that He might better seize and mould the soul it contained. He enlarged this poor body by giving it the terrible capacity of assimilating all the ills of the earth, and burning them in the furnace of its expiatory sufferings. Towards the end of her fifteenth year she was hardly recognisable, for then, like an eagle of love, GOD precipitated Himself upon His prey, and S. Isadore's legend of the eagle which seizes its young in its claws and flies with them towards the sun, where they must gaze without flinching at the fiery disc under pain of being dropped, was verified in Lydwine. She faced without flinching the sun of justice; and the symbol of Jesus, fisher of souls, replaced her gently in His eyrie, where her soul grew and flourished in its shell of flesh, which was destined to become, before burial, something monstrous and without form. Behind her is outlined on the far off heights, the grand figure of Job weeping on his dung-hill. She is his daughter; and the same scenes are carried down the ages from the confines of Idumea to the shores of the Meuse, scenes of irreducible sufferings borne with inexhaustible patience and aggravated by the discussions of pitiless friends and by the reproaches even of her own people. There is this difference, however, that the trials of the Patriarch ended during his life, while those of his descendant ceased only with her death.”
She would get her wish.
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At fifteen years of age, “the fury of the love of her heavenly spouse fell upon her.”
A certain illness of unknown source began to color her ivory cheeks into a sickly Osirian green. Her dainty features began to hollow, gaunt and cadaverous. Suitors no longer came to visit her.
One winter morning her friend had pestered her into going ice skating. As she went off upon the face of the frozen lake, her balance was lost, and as she fell a sharp dagger of ice struck her right side, cracking her ribs inward. It was as if Longinus himself reached out and punctured the veil of space and time. It should not be lost upon anyone, the significance of this transformative event arising from frozen waters.
Her friends and family quickly brought her to her bed, as she wheezed and spat, and she would hardly ever leave that room again. Her own monastic cell. And a terrible assault on her poor flesh began. “On the Vigil of the Nativity of S. John the Baptist her torments reached their culminating point. She sobbed on her bed in a state of terrible abandonment, and at last she could bear it no longer; her pain increased and tore her so that she threw herself from her couch and fell upon her father's knees, who was seated weeping at her side. This fall broke the abscess, but instead of bursting outside, it broke within, and the pus poured from her mouth. These vomitings shook her from head to foot and filled the vessels so quickly that they had hardly time to empty them before even the largest was overflowing again. Finally, she fainted in a last effort, and her parents believed her dead.”
Thus began a lifelong experience of body horror that would make Clive Barker blush. If they are exaggerations or not, we do not know.
The wound under her rib swelled and festered, and the gangrenous flesh bred worms. They spread across her viscera, and her bowls began too ulcerate. Tumors and other polyps began to mutilate and twist her once perfectly proportioned limbs, warping her bones and bosom. Her nerves seemed to shatter, phantom pains assailing her temples, as if she was trampled by a steed of stallions, drawn and quartered, and drawing breath was as difficult as drawing blood from a stone.
And it was blood that seemed to pour from every orifice in her head, gallons, to the degree of that spilled on the battlefield around her. Willingly suffering in stoic harmony to counterbalance the sin of the age. Her liver and lungs decayed and withered. She accumulated illnesses like a Petri dish in a laboratory, even the Black Plague possessed her. As she willingly accepted the gift of the Angel of Death, that curse which ravaged the world.
“This incredible assault of physical calamities she endured for thirty-eight years, without enjoying an instant's respite or a single easy hour during that time. It is as well to draw attention to the fact that amongst the miseries which she endured were two out of the three scourges which came from the East and desolated Europe during the Middle Ages : the burning ill, a sort of gangrene, burning like a hidden fire in the flesh of the limbs and splitting the bones, until death ended the torture; and the black death, which, according to the observation of a contemporary doctor, "declared itself by continuous fever, external tumors and carbuncles, frequently under the armpit, and caused death in five days." There remained the third scourge, which also was the despair of these centuries, leprosy. This was missing from the list of torments experienced by this poor girl. GOD, who, in His Scriptures and in the lives of His Saints, appears to interest Himself in a special manner in the "mesel" or leprous, whom He cured and from whom He borrowed the repulsive figure to try the charity of His Saints, did not see fit to put His servant to this last trial; and the motive for this exception, which at first surprises us, is easily understood on reflection. Leprosy would have counteracted the Saviour's designs and rendered the development of Lydwine's holiness impossible.”
And all the while miracles occurred around her. Fantastic and otherworldly manifestations of the Paracletes touch. And the greatest miracle of all, the fact that her afflictions seemed to transform into the sweetest sights.
“It must be noted, too, that this question of the care which was given to her appears to have been considered in a very special manner by Our Saviour. He overwhelmed her with torments; He disfigured her, substituting for the charm of her clear countenance the horror of a face swollen out of all shape, a sort of lion's muzzle, ravaged by channels of tears and streaks of blood; He transformed her into a skeleton, and raised on this wasted frame the dome of a stomach filled with water; He made her, for those who look only on the outward appearance, hideous; but if He heaped upon her all these misfortunes, He intended that the nurses charged with dressing her wounds should not be disgusted and tired of their charitable offices by the odour of decomposition, which must perforce accompany such wounds. By a constant miracle He made of these wounds veritable censers of perfume; the plasters which they took off, teeming with vermin, sweetly scented the air; all that came from her had a delicate aroma; and He wished that from her body there should always emanate an exquisite atmosphere of shells and spices of the East, a fragrance at once keen and sweet, something like the smoke of cinnamon and spices.”
To understand what was occurring here, you must understand the Catholic idea of Mystical Substitution. These great saints willingly took on the torments of the age to expiate the sins of their generation. She took on this incredible torture willingly, as Christ did, in an ultimate display of love for her fellow man. God sends his righteous saints, to suck the black marrow from the world's bones, and sterilize the perverted dissipation, deep within their holy hepatic bosoms.
God performed countless miracles through this girl that are well recorded. She cured a multitude of individuals from their illnesses, while willingly bearing them herself. She multiplied food for the needy, while personally enduring a near constant fast. God’s angels brought her on visionary flights to the holy land and conjured divine vistas of paradise upon her pupils. She shed and protruded inhuman amounts of viscera and gore, that when removed from her had the aroma of perfume and honey. And when she died, her mangled body miraculously returned to a shape of beauty.
There is much spiritual treasure to be collected from meditating upon the life of this saint. We live in a world today that resembles her own. The Church is divided and nearing schism, the Pope scandalizes the faithful and war ravages the world. But hope should not be lost, we should accept the suffering for the gift that it is, a method of sanctification. Take solace in knowing that God has certainly sent great saints to our planet during this dark chapter, to wage spiritual war against the legions of hell and that every one of us is called to be as holy as Lydwin.
Lydwin reminds me of a few other great figures who came after her. Anne Catherine Emmerich for one. The church cannot lose sight of the mysteries of mysticism. May it be an antidote to the base operations and scandal that seem to emerge daily from the womb of Rome. But there is one other figure that seems to remind me of her. A great unrecognized saint, never canonized or recognized as such. Joseph Carey Merrick, the elephant man of Victorian England. Another figure who was so horribly mutilated and contorted, yet by all accounts remained cheerful and pious. A Christian to the bitter end.
Happy Easter friends.
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What an amazing story. Truely the saints who suffered for their age are praying for our age. We can only bear our crosses and pray for our age's sins. Happy Easter and God Bless!
Harrowing read. Lots about her condition and little, for the uninitiated reader, about her good works - as far as they pertain to today. Maybe a sequel is called for. That said, I agree with the main thrust of how I understand your argument, namely humankind’s urgent need to connect with Other. Thank you.