The Saint Before the Harvest
MASS Me exspectavérunt
LESSON Ecclesiasticus 51:13-17
GOSPEL St Matthew 13:44-52
HOMILIST Mt Revd Jerome Lloyd OSJV
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Some saints come down to us surrounded by chronicles, letters, foundations and the testimony of kings. Saint Lewinna comes to us almost without a biography. We do not know with certainty where she was born, the household in which she grew up, the precise year of her martyrdom, or the manner in which the fatal blow was struck. The earthly record has grown faint. Yet the Church remembers what matters most: she was a virgin; she belonged wholly to Christ; and she preferred death to the betrayal of her heavenly Bridegroom.
There is something profoundly fitting, therefore, in the Gospel chosen for her feast: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hidden in a field.” Saint Lewinna herself is like that treasure. Hidden in the soil of Sussex, obscured by the passing of thirteen centuries, almost lost to secular history, she remains precious in the sight of God. The world scarcely remembers her name; Heaven remembers the surrender of her life.
The tradition places her martyrdom in the latter part of the seventh century, during the archiepiscopate of Saint Theodore of Canterbury, which lasted from 668 until 690. Sussex was then the last of the principal Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to receive the Gospel generally. There were Christians within it, certainly. At Bosham, Saint Bede tells us, a Scottish monk named Dicul lived with five or six brethren in poverty and humility. Yet their pagan neighbours showed little interest either in their preaching or in their manner of life.
When Saint Wilfrid entered Sussex about the year 681, Bede says that the province remained in bondage to pagan rites. The soil had endured three years of drought. Famine had followed. In despair, groups of men threw themselves from the cliffs or into the sea. Wilfrid preached Christ, baptised the people, taught them even how to draw fish from their own waters, and on the day of their baptism a gentle and abundant rain fell upon the land.
That is the public history of the conversion of Sussex: the missionary bishop, the preaching, the baptisms, the rain, the foundation at Selsey. But the feast of Saint Lewinna allows us to glimpse another history beneath it: the history of the hidden soul who loved Christ before the multitude did; the solitary confession made before the public conversion; the blood placed in the earth before the harvest appeared.
Whether Lewinna died shortly before Wilfrid’s mission or within that same unsettled period cannot now be established with precision. We need not pretend to possess knowledge which Providence has not preserved. But this much is certain in the Church’s memory: while the old paganism still held power in this land, a young woman refused to belong to it. Before Sussex as a people bowed before Christ, Lewinna had already given herself to Him.
This is how God ordinarily prepares His victories. We notice the great conversion, the public restoration, the multitude at the font, the church newly built, the solemn procession and the ringing bells. God sees first the unknown act of fidelity from which all these things are permitted to grow. Before the visible harvest, there is seed hidden beneath the earth. Before the rain, there is sacrifice. Before the nation confesses Christ, one soul must be willing to confess Him alone.
The Collect calls Almighty God the lover of the purity of His saints, and praises the pure virginity of Blessed Lewinna. Virginity, in the mind of the Church, is not a mere absence. It is not emptiness, sterility or withdrawal. Consecrated virginity is possession: the possession of the heart by Jesus Christ. The virgin martyr has found the treasure and refuses to exchange it for anything beneath the sun.
The Gospel tells us that the man who discovers the treasure sells all that he has, not reluctantly, but “for joy thereof.” The merchant who finds the pearl of great price does the same. Christianity is not fundamentally the attempt to keep as much of the world as possible while adding a little religion to it. It is the discovery of something so infinitely valuable that everything else assumes its proper and subordinate place.
Saint Lewinna understood what modern man has almost entirely forgotten: that the soul has a price, that truth has a price, that purity has a price, and that eternal life has a price. Not because grace can be purchased—for grace is the free gift of God—but because the possession of Christ requires the surrender of every rival claimant.
Her virginity said: “My heart belongs to Christ.” Her martyrdom said: “Not even death shall make it belong to another.”
This is why the Introit places upon her lips the words of the Psalmist: “The ungodly laid wait for me to destroy me: but I will consider Thy testimonies, O Lord.” The martyr is not destroyed accidentally. She becomes intolerable to the world because she reveals that the world is not absolute. The pagan community could demand conformity; Lewinna appealed to a higher law. It could threaten pain; she believed in a greater reward. It could threaten death; she knew the Lord of life.
The martyr’s refusal exposes the weakness of every tyranny. The persecutor can command the body, confiscate possessions, imprison, dishonour and kill. But he cannot force the interior assent of the soul. He cannot make falsehood true. He cannot transform evil into good. He cannot enter that sanctuary in which the Christian conscience kneels before God alone.
The martyr therefore possesses a freedom which the persecutor can neither understand nor conquer.
In the Epistle, the saint gives thanks because God has saved her from destruction and delivered her from the evil time. Yet she died. How, then, was she delivered?
She was delivered because death is not the worst thing that can happen to a Christian. Apostasy is worse. Mortal sin is worse. The loss of sanctifying grace is worse. To retain the body while surrendering the soul would not have been deliverance but destruction. Saint Lewinna’s enemies could end her earthly life, but they could not separate her from the love of Christ.
This truth is difficult for an age which regards bodily survival, comfort, social approval and emotional security as the highest goods. We are trained to imagine that anything must be done to avoid suffering, exclusion, loneliness or loss. The martyr judges differently. She knows that there are things worth suffering for because there are things worth living for, and there are things worth dying for because there is a life which death cannot touch.
Most of us will not be required to shed our blood. Yet every Catholic must possess the substance of martyrdom within the soul. Martyrdom begins long before the executioner arrives. It begins when we refuse the small betrayal.
It begins when a young person guards purity though companions laugh. It begins when a parent teaches the Faith though the surrounding culture contradicts it. It begins when a priest preaches the whole truth though softer words would win applause. It begins when a Catholic refuses to repeat a fashionable falsehood merely to avoid awkwardness. It begins whenever we prefer the commandments of God to the approval of men.
No one suddenly becomes a martyr at the final moment. The final sacrifice reveals a thousand earlier choices by which the soul has learned to say: “Christ first.”
Our own land is again becoming missionary territory. It is not pagan in precisely the manner of seventh-century Sussex. The churches have not all vanished. The saints remain in our place names, the ancient towers still rise over villages, and the Christian past has not been completely erased. Yet a society may retain Christian stones while losing Christian faith.
The new paganism does not ordinarily bow before carved idols. It bows before appetite, self-invention, wealth, political ideology and the sovereign will. It tells man that he belongs entirely to himself, that the body has no divinely given meaning, that freedom consists in the absence of restraint, and that truth must yield whenever it causes discomfort.
Against this, Saint Lewinna stands in silence.
She tells us that we do not belong to ourselves. We were created by God, redeemed by the Precious Blood of Christ, marked in Baptism, nourished from the altar, and called to eternal union with the Blessed Trinity. The Christian life is not self-invention but self-offering. It is not the construction of an identity but the reception of a vocation.
Lewinna did not ask how much conformity she could offer to pagan Sussex while remaining privately Christian. She did not search for a formula by which Christ and the idols might coexist. She had found the pearl. Everything else had to be judged in its light.
This is the question her feast places before us: have we found the treasure, or do we merely know where the field is?
We may know the prayers, attend the ancient Mass, defend Catholic doctrine, admire the saints and lament the collapse of Christian civilisation. Yet none of these things will save us unless Christ Himself possesses the heart. A man may live close to the treasure and never sell anything to obtain it. He may praise martyrdom while avoiding every inconvenience required by fidelity.
Saint Lewinna does not call us merely to admire the past. She calls us to become the hidden beginning of the future.
She could not know that Wilfrid would come. She could not foresee the conversion of the South Saxons, the establishment of the See at Selsey, the churches that would rise across Sussex, or the generations that would invoke her name. She was not given the consolation of seeing the harvest. She was asked only to be faithful.
That is often the most difficult obedience. We wish to see results. We want assurance that our sacrifices will succeed, our children will keep the Faith, our apostolates will flourish, our churches will survive, and our country will return to God. Providence gives no such earthly guarantee. It asks us to plant, to water, to suffer and sometimes to die without seeing what will emerge.
The blood of the martyr is never wasted. It enters the treasury of the Church. It becomes prayer for generations not yet born. It is hidden in the field until God determines the hour of harvest.
Centuries after her death, Saint Lewinna’s relics were honoured in a church dedicated to Saint Andrew near Seaford. In 1058 they were carried across the sea to the Abbey of Saint-Winnoc at Bergues in Flanders, where her cult continued. The precise Sussex church has long been disputed, although Bishopstone has a serious historical claim. The uncertainty of the place only deepens the lesson of the feast. Men have forgotten where she lay, but God has not forgotten where she stands.
The world records power, conquest and wealth. The Church records fidelity.
Today we also commemorate the Vigil of Saint James the Great. The Apostle and the virgin martyr seem outwardly very different. James stood among the Twelve, witnessed the miracles of Christ and received the apostolic command to preach. Lewinna was an obscure woman in a remote and largely pagan kingdom. Yet both drank from the same chalice.
The proper Last Gospel of the Vigil gives us the words of Our Lord: “You have not chosen Me: but I have chosen you; and have appointed you, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain.”
Saint James brought forth fruit by apostolic preaching. Saint Lewinna brought forth fruit by hidden sacrifice. The one cast the Gospel net across nations; the other became the treasure buried in the field. But both were chosen, both were sent, and the fruit of both remains.
My dear brethren, Sussex was not converted merely because a bishop arrived. A bishop arrived because divine grace was already at work. The rain fell upon soil in which prayer, fidelity and perhaps the blood of a virgin had already been received.
So it may be again.
The restoration of the Faith will not begin when the world becomes favourable. It will begin when Christians become faithful. It will begin in hidden confessions, guarded purity, disciplined prayer, reverent Masses, courageous homes and souls who have ceased negotiating with the spirit of the age.
We may never see the rain. We may be asked only to enter the dry earth as seed.
But the treasure remains. The pearl remains. Christ remains.
Through the prayers of Saint Lewinna, may we cease counting the cost of belonging entirely to Him. May we keep the oil of charity in our lamps, prefer grace to life itself, and remain faithful when no harvest can yet be seen. Then, when the cry is heard at midnight—“Behold the Bridegroom cometh”—may we rise with this hidden daughter of Sussex and go forth joyfully to meet Christ the Lord.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
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