A Pillar in the Heart of Our School: Saint Lucy- the Genius of Simplicity

Last updated on: August 23, 2016 at 8:26 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

A Pillar in the Heart of Our School: Saint Lucy- the Genius of Simplicity 2016-08-23T08:26:15-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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One of the pillars of our school.

She was very young, not at all powerful, but she refused to bend to power and so became very powerful. She was blinded by a tyrant’s strengthless presumption. Lucy was strong, because she was humble.

No Christian would ever side with the proud over the humble, because our Lord showed us that the proud can never defeat the humble. That may frustrate Ayn Rand, but it is a fact of the moral universe. When might faces humility, the meek inherit the earth.

We need Saint Lucy just now. We need her humility, purity, and her vision. Lucy lost her eyes, because she could see when the tyrant could not. Dante used Lucy as his image of the short, simple road to God. CS Lewis made Lucy the child who could always see Aslan, his Christ figure, when nobody else could do so. Lucy sees what is real as opposed to what is false.

Don’t you wish our leaders had her vision? Don’t you wish that humility was valued? Lucy shows the way.

We know little about her except that she faced the Romans, they murdered her, and her memory is eternal. They gouged out her eyes and she opened her eyes in Paradise. Tyranny cannot win, but if you are only keeping score in this life, then it can look like winning.

I was a decent student and as a result intellectual answers came more easily to me than some. Like most people who are decent at things, I tried to make everything fit the thing I was decent at. Do football pros turn every problem into football? In any case, I tried to turn everything in my life into a mental puzzle that could be solved by reading, thinking, and talking.

Wrong.

Sometimes one faces an emotional or a political problem that is purely human. Some problems come from tyrants or merely the broken world and those cannot possibly be solved by any dialectic. You cannot reason your way to the truth with a Roman governor intent to kill Christians. Instead, you must stand, pure, holy, emotionally sound and reveal his vacuity by your wholeness. Lucy could do this hard task at a young age.

This was a hard lesson for me to learn.

Emotional problems cannot be solved by intellectual means anymore than intellectual problems can be solved by emotions. Some are skilled at passion and so try to turn every decision into a matter of the heart, but those folks are emotional tyrants . . . full of impotent presumption.

We need Lucy just now: she stood before power and won, because she was what she should be. You are Lucy if you do not grab power and instead look to God. You are Lucy if people are more important than power. You are Lucy if you always choose right and truth over short term lies for power.

Be Lucy.

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