"A light dropped into our lives..."
In the days of Europe's semidarkness, many small nations of the Dark Ages were struggling out of the first millennium after the birth of Christ. In the year 1016, in one of these countries, Edmund King of England died, and as so often happened, a foreign king rose to power in England. Edmund's family, including two infant sons, was hurried off to Hungary, there to seek refuge and grow up. One of these sons named Edward was to survive in exile; he grew up and married a princess. In their foreign home they gave birth to a son and two daughters. The eldest was named Margaret.
By mid-century, the English peoples demanded an English king again and the rightful heir to the throne, Edward The Confessor, returned from exile. With him came the royal family. Margaret at the young age of ten saw her homeland for the first time and for the next ten years she settled into the court of England.
During this time two significant events occurred in the English court which were to directly affect the life of this teenage princess. A man named Macbeth murdered Duncan and Duncan's son Malcolm was sent to Scotland for his own safety. This event was memorialized forever by Shakespeare in the 17th Century. Secondly, a man named Harold was chosen King of England to succeed Edward the Confessor. He immediately found himself in the midst of a war with England's Norman neighbors in France. In 1066, after the battle of Hastings, England once again came under the rule of a foreign nation and Margaret's family once again fled across the English channel to Hungary.
As luck, or God, would have it, a fierce gale drove their ship northwards and forced their royal vessel to take shelter in the Firth of Forth in Scotland and into the welcoming arms of Duncan's son, Malcolm, who was now King of Scotland. So at the age of twenty, Margaret began the third chapter of her life, now with the primitive peoples of Scotland at Dunfermline. It was a time of great poverty in Scotland and although people were nominally Christian, church life hardly existed. The great monasteries like Iona were in ruin and Scandinavian pirates haunted all their lives.
Margaret was kept distant from much of this, living a cloistered life. Taught by the Benedictine Monks, this tall handsome Saxon girl read Latin scripture, embroidered cloth and learned how to pray. In the year 1070, at the age of twenty-five, Margaret's sheltered life of contemplation was to end rather dramatically. Somewhat against her will, she was to marry the rough-cut, tempestuous monarch of Scotland named Malcolm, trading her quiet cloister for a bustling throne room.
In the remaining twenty-two years of her life this shy, rather unknown lady named Margaret was to so affect her King and his nation that this backward and rather unimportant country of Scotland with its "Celtic idiosyncrasies" was to take its rightful place in Christendom and forever become an influence on the church. Indeed, Margaret not only became a Queen of Scotland, but also a saint of the church, a light in the semidarkness of 11th-century Europe.
We know how she became a queen; how was she to become a saint? Let's look at some of the evidence her biographers present to us and try to piece together how this all came about.
Margaret reformed the church in Scotland in such a way that it had an ongoing impact on Christendom to this very day. The early monasteries such as Iona were rebuilt and a great religious renewal began to warm the hearts of all primitive Scotsmen. She worked through her husband, the King, for political reform, not only uniting separate clans, but also bringing England and Scotland closer together.
She softened not only this rather ferocious nation, but also the King himself. One writer tells us:
"He loved what she loved, rejected what she rejected.
He was civilized and changed forever; tenderness entered this
man."
Although Malcolm could not read or write, he used to secretly kiss the Holy Book she read, and often in her absence, had them ornamented with silver and gold and gems, then returned to Margaret to surprise her.
Margaret raised eight children, three of whom became kings. One son, David, ruled twenty-nine years and was revered by all his people as a saint himself. What many Celts like St. Aiden and St. Columba had accomplished through fiery energy in establishing Christianity in Scotland in earlier years, Margaret accomplished by caring love and gentle persuasion. We are told that she didn't so much reform her church as she did her people.
For example, there was a stone near Dunfermline, on which tradition says she sat and waited, so that anyone who was in trouble might come directly to her. Her charity was unbounded, we are told. Every morning at the first hour of the day nine orphans were brought to her, there to be fed by her own hand and with her own spoon. Another writer tells us that any destitute poor could come each morning to the Royal Hall, there to be cared for and waited on--not by just Margaret but by King Malcolm as well. Her duty, she said, was to see Christ in every person.
In the year of our Lord 1093, after hearing the news that her favorite son and husband Malcolm were killed in battle, Margaret died peacefully at the tender age of forty-seven. She was canonized by the church in 1250 and recognized as patron saint of Scotland in 1673.
Through these and surely many other undocumented stories we begin to see a saint at work, but what is a saint? One theologian says that saints are handkerchiefs dropped by God in his holy flirtation with the world. Saints are people who turn ordinary time into extraordinary time, secular ground into sacred ground.
Saints are men and women who become windows through which we see God. I believe that saints are charged to bring into the daily grind of our world a special gift--a unique revelation of God's nature to help us along our way. Their lives make a difference to all who touch them. Margaret is a saint because she revealed in a special way that tenderness is the way of God. Through her caring and compassionate life we see not only God's caring and compassionate nature, but our need for caring as well.
Most of us are involved in the daily routines of life--through our work and entertainment, through travel and with our acquaintances, we keep reasonably busy. Yet many of us find that deep meaning in life continues to elude us. One of the great disappointments of our times is that dreadful recognition of not feeling needed or not really belonging to someone or something. We become unable to reach out and care, or allow others to care for us.
Why is this so? Well, God only knows. Our fear of being rejected, perhaps the fear of our awkwardness in receiving care. Maybe our indifference and very loneliness block our ability to be intimate, to feel and show compassion with each other. One philosopher, Milton Mayeerhoff, says in a book, On Caring:
"The only way we can feel 'at home' in his world
of ours is not through:
dominating life as a king
explaining life as a philosopher or even
understanding life as a scientist
It is simply through caring and being cared for."
Margaret's message to all is that in caring we find true meaning in life, through compassion we are at home "in the world." St. Margaret cared--and dared to show it.
Whether in living through hard times of war and exile,
Whether in giving of her food to orphans each
morning of her life,
Whether in listening to anyone who came to
her on that special rock in the woods,
Whether in making a hard marriage work and raising eight children in a drafty castle,
Margaret--The Pearl of Scotland--offered to all, not only her resources, not just her talent, not only her time--but herself.
So let us on this special day pick up this beautiful handkerchief of God, this light dropped into our lives some nine hundred and thirty-nine years ago, and let us commit ourselves to more caring and make compassion a priority in life. Instead of saving ourselves, let's spend more of ourselves now. Let us drop our guard, risk some of our love, become just a bit more vulnerable with each other, so that we, like Margaret, may make a difference in our short stay in this world. Amen.
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