Me and St. Martin de Porres

Posted on August 15, 2002 in Courage & Activism Myths & Mysticism

Lynn sneaked a peek at my blog about her closet Catholicism while she was still at work. She mentioned that she’d read it as soon as she came home and then went out to pay the water bill and do some shopping at the grocery store. When she came back, she paraded into the office with her new prize: a votive candle of St. Martin de Porres. (California grocery stores stock such ritual objects because many Latino Catholics feel them to be as indispensable to the management of a home as salt shakers, dust pans, and plastic garbage bags.) The thing reminded me of a tall vermouth bottle sans the neck, with purple wax and a thread-thin wick shaped like a question mark.

On the back is this prayer in Spanish and English:

Most glorious St. Martin de Porres whose burning charity embraced not only your needy brethren, but even the very animals of the field, we salute and beg you that from your place of honor you would hear our petitions and intercede for us with our Lord Jesus Christ that we may be blessed with a deeper faith and a greater love of God. Amen.

St. Martin lived yet another of the weird lives that saints appear bound to lead. He lived in Peru some 400 years ago. He was the illegimate scion of the mating of a Spanish nobleman and a free black woman. He started his religious career young, at the age of 11, when he took a job as a servant in the Dominican priory in Lima, Peru. Martin could not, at first, become an actual member of the community because of his age and because he was black. He worked diligently, however, bringing order to the priory’s hospice and establishing an orphanage and a shelter for stray cats and dogs who he personally nursed back to health. Word got around Lima of his miraculous cures. His Dominican superiors, seeing the finger of God in Martin’s works, dropped the rule that prohibited black men from joining the order. Martin had crossed the color line, some 350 years before Rosa Parks did.

He’s often called “the San Francis of the Americas”. He often chastised himself as a hedge against pride, denying himself meat and referring to himself as “the mulatto dog”. Though he was famous in his lifetime for his miracle cures and revered by cultists immediately after his death, it took the Catholic church nearly 350 years to honor him. In 1962, he was canonized by John XIII as a kind of “saint for our times” and patron of race relations, perhaps as a nod to another Martin who was preaching and practising nonviolence on the North American continent.

My own connection to St. Martin de Porres began as something of a family joke. I have always loved to read about saints. An early project of mine was determining which of the many saints I was named for. My father thought he was being funny when he told me that I’d been named after a black man. It goes back to a time when I was five years old or so. We stopped off in Watts. A gigantic man came out of the store we were heading for and said “Hullo there!” I jumped and hid because he’d turned up suddenly. It became a family joke, a story that my father loved to tell, particularly after my progressive tendencies became more pronounced and known to him. (I was baptized in 1958, four years before St. Martin de Porre’s canonization. My mother tells me that she gave me the name because “Martin” was a popular middle name on both sides of the family. She believes that I was probably named for St. Martin of Tours.)

It was just another of my dad’s cruelties calculated to make me feel uncomfortable. I know he probably wanted me to balk at the thought of being associated with a black man. But as I read the life of this saint, I felt kinship. I was, myself, something of a family dog. My father used to call the real dog of the family his best son and tout the oversexed chihuahua/dachshund mix as my moral superior. St. Martin and I understood each other. St. Martin knew the importance of kindness that I craved. He became my emblem and my shield. I took him on as my patron, just to show my dad and because there was much about the man that was worth emulating. Even though I no longer call myself a Catholic, when I see images of him, I point to them and say “That’s St. Martin de Porres. I’ve named myself after him.”

Note: Some people may be appalled by my mention that Martin de Porres used a vulgar racial epithet to refer to himself. Within the context of his ministry, I believe, it was perfectly fine for Martin to do so and perfectly fine for me to mention that he did so. Martin’s choice of words might well be likened to those gays and lesbians who have seized the word “queer” as a type of social protest against their mistreatment. But please: don’t take this as license to call him or anyone else by that or any other awful name. We are allowed to deride ourselves, not others. Those who suffer from racism and other abuse understand the difference.

BTW. Today is coincidentally my father’s birthday. Happy birthday Dad. Your cruelty turned into a good deed. Perhaps you meant it to happen, but couldn’t you have done it in another way if this was the case? If there is a heaven and an afterlife, I know he can read this. I can wait until death for his explanation or apology in the meantime.