"The Blood of the Martyr"
Remembering Jonathan Daniels

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their heart. 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.”

These powerful words were spoken 2,000 years ago by a teenaged girl. They are the words of Mary, the song into which she burst when the angel appeared to her with the astounding news that God had chosen her to bring the Savior into the world.

Mary, despite her youth and lack of formal education, knew immediately what kind of Messiah she was to bear – not a political king, not a ruler of nations, not a commander of armies – but a Savior whose vision of the world was one of justice, one of peace, one of solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized.

Two millennia after Mary’s song was first sung, her words continue to inspire the followers of her son. Today we remember one young man in particular for whom Mary’s song was a call to action.

Jonathan Myrick Daniels was 26 years old and a seminarian at the Episcopal Theological School in Boston when Mary’s song led him to a string of events that culminated in his death, the death of a martyr that is commemorated on our church calendar on August 14.

Jon Daniels was born in New Hampshire, and became an Episcopalian as a teenager. He thought then about becoming a priest, but other things also vied for his attention. Perhaps he would be a doctor like his father, or an English professor – something he actually went to graduate school at Harvard to pursue.

But on Easter 1963, in the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Boston, Daniels had a profound conversion experience which renewed his desire to become a priest. He enrolled in seminary that fall.

Two years later, Daniels and his fellow seminarians, like much of the nation, watched in horror at the news from Selma, Alabama, where a peaceful demonstration by African Americans and Civil Rights workers was met with violence by police and vigilantes, a day still known as Bloody Sunday.

The demonstrators had been attempting to march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the death of a black Civil Rights worker, and to show support for voter registration.

Three days later, on March 10, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. announced that they would attempt to march again on March 12, and called on clergy and students from across the nation to come to Selma to join them.

The news of King’s call reached the students at ETS that evening, right before the daily service of Evening Prayer. Mary’s song, the Magnificat, was part of the worship.

“I had come to Evening Prayer as usual that evening, and as usual I was singing the Magnificat with the special love and reverence I have always felt for Mary’s glad song,” Daniels wrote later. “’My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. He hath showed strength with his arm.’

“As the lovely hymn of the God-bearer continued, I found myself peculiarly alert, suddenly straining toward the decisive, luminous, Spirit-filled ‘moment.’ Then it came. ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things.’

“I knew then that I must go to Selma.”

Within hours, Daniels and others were on their way.

The protesters made several attempts to march, and were repeatedly turned back. Soon many of those who had come from around the country to join the effort returned home. Daniels and his fellow student, Judy Upham, decided to stay. They received permission to continue their studies from afar, as long as they returned in May to take exams.

Daniels lived with a black family. One of his projects was an attempt to integrate Selma’s Episcopal Church. The first time he met with the priest, the rector told him it was the ushers’ responsibility to decide who would be admitted to services.

When Daniels and his black friends showed up, the ushers refused to let them in. After weeks of trying, they were grudgingly allowed to sit on the back row, forced to wait to take communion until everyone else had received the sacrament and returned to their seats.

In a letter to the Episcopal bishop of Alabama, Daniels protested this segregation of the sacrament, adding it was obvious that church officials did not want the white congregation to have to drink from a chalice that had been tainted and touched by black lips.

The bishop replied that Daniels and his friends “should wait humbly and thankfully for your turn at the Lord’s table.”

“There is a difference between humility and humiliation,” Daniels replied.

In May, Daniels did return to Cambridge to take his exams. Friends there, fearing for his safety, urged him not to return to Alabama.

“I have promises to keep,” Daniels told them. “I told my friends in Selma I would be back soon. They trust me. If I don’t return this summer, why should they ever trust any white man again?”

When Daniels returned, he concentrated his efforts on voter registration in Lowndes County, with a population that was 81 percent black. Not a single black person was registered to vote. One of his colleagues there was a Catholic priest from Chicago, Richard Morrisroe.

On August 14, Daniels and Morrisroe accompanied a group, many of them teenagers, to Fort Deposit to peacefully demonstrate in front of stores that refused to serve blacks. Soon a crowd of angry and armed whites gathered. The 29 protesters were arrested, then taken in the back of a garbage truck to the jail in neighboring Hayneville.

They were put in three cells with stopped up toilets, no bathing facilities and poor food. Bail was set at $100 each. Although someone showed up to pay Daniels’ bail, the group decided no one would leave until they were all freed.

Six days later, they were released without warning into the hot August sun. No one was there to take them home. As one group went in search of a phone, Daniels, Morrisroe, and two black teenagers, Ruby Sales and Joyce Bailey, went to get a cold drink at the one store in town that served blacks.

As they approached the store a man with a shotgun stepped out in front of them. Tom Coleman was a deputy sheriff.

“This store is closed,” he said. “If you don’t get off this property I’m, going to blow your brains out.”

Ruby Sales, 16 at the time, described what happened then. “The next thing I knew someone pulled me from behind. I heard a shotgun blast and I looked and saw Jon falling. I lay down on the ground, and then I heard another shotgun blast, and I saw Father Morrisroe fall on the ground. And he lay there moaning for help, and he was just moaning, moaning, moaning.”

Jonathan Daniels died immediately. For 30 minutes, Coleman, stood guard with his shotgun, preventing anyone from coming to Morrisroe’s aid. The Catholic priest did survive.

All who witnessed the shootings, and there were several, agreed that Daniels laid down his own life to save Ruby Sales. Coleman was acquitted by a jury of his peers.

Owen Thomas, one of Daniels’ seminary professors, offered this reflection on his life and death.

“Jon Daniels did not go to Alabama in self-righteous anger, despising the white citizens of Selma, seeking publicity and glory, hoping to do something dramatic like become a martyr. He did not go to escape the subtler and more difficult problems of racial discrimination in Cambridge or Boston.

“He went sorrowfully and yet gladly, as a Christian man who knew that he must stand with his brothers, both Negro and white; in their strife and suffering, to try to be a small channel for God’s reconciling love in a country torn by hate and violence.

“He had to go because he believed deeply that being a Christian means more than believing the right things.”

What meaning can be brought from the seemingly senseless death of Jonathan Daniels?

The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic priest who himself answered Martin Luther King’s call to come to Selma, tackled that question in the eulogy at Daniels’ funeral. His words are worth hearing again 44 years after Daniels’ death.

“When death occurs in circumstances of injustice and brutality, it leaves us appalled and dismembered,” Berrigan said. “How could such a thing occur? What is the meaning of this death? Does it have any meaning at all?

“The word of God says that the death of this man is martyrdom, a drama, a crisis, a summons to a change of heart, a death and resurrection, mysteriously joined to the destiny of all people; a death that sucks us into its vortex, its moment of truth, its bloodletting and cruel defeat, its terrifying call to conversion.

“The truth of such a death comes hard to us. We are unready for it; we are used to an easy faith: which is to say, easy lives and easy deaths. We expect faith to bless our somnolent hearts, to reduce our suffering, to prosper our bloodlines.

“But the Bible has another message for us: it calls us to a universal existence, to life in public, to responsibility for, and to, all people…The New Testament summoning to faith may be a call to martyrdom.

“Blood will have blood, we are told; the blood of Christ lays claim on the blood of man. All the idolatries and paganisms consecrated by the worship of blood, by the superiority of blood, by the blood that visits the unthinking brain and the unconverted heart – all these are destroyed when ‘a man lays down his life for his friend.’

“The blood of Jonathan Daniels, flowing in the dust of an obscure Southern town, has joined the great stream of the blood of Christ, the blood of martyrs, the blood of good men and women. Jonathan Daniels is joined to the bloody witness of black and white, of Jew and Gentile, of man and woman, crying out from beneath the throne of the Lamb, those who have been killed for the sake of their faithful witness.

“A martyrdom is a crossroads and a place of meeting, it is also a place of worship. We know that in the early Church, men spontaneously set their altars up at the places where good men had died in witness. Where the blood of good men had run, the Eucharist was celebrated, the blood of Christ was drunk.

“And in that place, men came to know their brother for the first time, slave and free, Jew and Gentile became one in Christ, drawn to one another by the blood that lay warm on the altar. In such a way, the witness of blood is a supreme witness to human unity.

“In the letting of their blood, such martyrs have been freed of the cowardice that plagues the blood of the living. And they may yet help to free us of the imperfection to which life itself condemns us. Being white, we cannot be black; being Episcopal, we cannot be Catholic; being affluent, we cannot be poor.

“But when a man has given his blood, he has literally given everything; more, he has been transformed into his gift. He becomes a universal man. His blood has reached further, and cried out more truthfully, than his word ever could.

“We may now, if we will, take into our hands the lifeblood of Jonathan Daniels where the gunshot released it. The living blood is offered to God, and to us, to transform our pusillanimity into heroism, our denseness into moral clarity, our dead words into prophetic speech, our inanity into faithful deeds.

Back to Top

Readings

Exodus 3:7-12

The Lord said to Moses, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.”

Galatians 3:22-25

The scripture has imprisoned all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Luke 1:46-55

Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord,
     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
      for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
          and holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm;
      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.

He has helped his servant Israel,
      in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
     to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Back to Top