On Sunday August 12 we will celebrate the feast of St. Mary the Virgin transferring her feast day that falls on a weekday, August 15. We will also commemorate Jonathan Myrick Daniels, martyr of Alabama whose feast day in the church calendar is August 14. The Gospel readings for each of these occasions are the same interestingly enough: The text is Luke 1: 46-55 known famously as the Magnificat.
Jonathan Daniels entered The Episcopal Divinity School, a seminary in Cambridge Massachusetts in 1964 as the civil rights movement began taking on momentum and therefore heightened resistance. Daniels the next year asked for a leave of absence to travel to Hayneville, Alabama situated in Lowndes County (one of the nation’s poorest) to assist in registering African Americans to vote. He and several of his co-workers during a protest were arrested and taken to the squalid jail in Hayneville just off the town square. After several days they were released. On August 20, 1965 they walked to the Cash grocery store just around the corner from the jail to buy something to drink. One of Jonathan’s companions Ruby Sales, a sixteen year old girl, reached the top step to the store’s entrance first. She was met by a deputy sheriff, Tom Coleman, wielding a twelve gauge shotgun. Daniels stepped in front of Miss Sales to protect her and was shot and killed instantly by the close range blast. Despite numerous eyewitnesses Coleman was acquitted of manslaughter by an all white jury in the Lowndes County courthouse.
The addition of Jonathan Myrick Daniels to the Episcopal calendar of saints was first considered at the 1991 General Convention of the Episcopal Church. It takes the approval of two consecutive conventions for that to happen. I went to the jammed packed hearing held by the convention committee on liturgy. The room was electrified. On the front row sat Ruby Sales prepared to give testimony to the committee. There was a man, a priest, sitting next to me in a wheelchair. We introduced ourselves and soon I learned that he was one of Daniel’s companions in Hayneville on that fateful day who was also shot by the sheriff’s deputy. The blast paralyzed him from the waist down. He too would testify before the committee. He told me that there was still lead lodged in his spine. He said for years he bore this wound with pain, but on this day he said, “I bear it with joy.”
In Daniels’ letter to the Dean of the seminary requesting the leave to go to Lowndes County he mentioned that he was inspired by the words of Mary in the ‘Magnificat’, “He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. he has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Mary’s song is a song of civil rights; a prophetic song of revolution, of the reordering of society, one in which equality and justice and non-violence and dignity reign supreme. Her song, which governs Luke’s entire narrative, is God’s vision for the world set right. May it govern our lives as it did the life of blessed Jonathan, and may our lives bring to fruition God’s gracious commonweal in which all live under the rubric of true freedom, that for which our sacred scripture cries out….that all may be bestowed with the battle weary but venerable and victorious gift…. Civil Rights.
