Oscar Romero

Remembered in the Corona Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral as one of the Twenty Saints and Martyrs of our Time.  

In this quiet chapel, where the welcome smile

of a winter morning streams through lapis glass

lighting up sun gold slim pillar and wide stepped stone,

I meditate on the saints and martyrs of our time,

commemorated here where once Becket’s crown was laid.

Archbishop, poet, philosopher, minister, priest and nun,

long cherished in the hearts of all whose lives they embraced,

their loving spirits bright mirror of the divine.

They followed their Master far up the dangerous mountain path,

along the edge of the precipice, across the roaring torrent,

into a city of sad madmen, tyrants and thieves.

There, to reject neither the summons to deathbed or prison cell,

the trembling outstretched hand, the empty pleading eyes,

but to nourish the broken and the hungry soul,

to touch with love the outcast and the untouchable,

to break again the alabaster jar and anoint the weary feet.

They went to Bethlehem to greet the Christ Child’s coming,

they sat in the Temple amongst the wondering doctors,

in the wilderness they prayed for him and at his baptism rejoiced,

they walked and talked with him beside the Sea of Galilee,

they wept for him in the moonlit agony of Gethsemane

and in his footsteps trod their own Via Dolorosa.

He, their Child, their Teacher and their Lord. 

Verbum caro factum

Venite adoramus Dominum