ST. EUSTACE AND MOTHER NATURE

 A REFLECTION FOR THE 16TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST

Today's feastday is of St. Eustace and his family.  The life of this saint is replete with animals, and it is a good illustration of how the animals, despite being dumb beasts, act according to God's will and for our salvation.

 

The pagan Eustace was going hunting one day, and he chased down a magnificent stag.  But before he had the chance to shoot his arrow, he beheld that between the stag's antlers was an image of the crucified Saviour.  St. Eustace immediately put down his bow and converted to Christianity along with his wife and two sons.  Chosen to suffer for his new Lord and Master, his life was soon beset with many difficulties.  Among these, his wife was kidnapped by a pirate, one son was carried off by a lion and the other by a wolf.  Does that make the lion and this wolf "bad"?  No, they were carrying out the will of a Divine Providence that had other things in store for St. Eustace.  For as grief-stricken as he was by the loss of his sons, so much greater was his joy when he was later reunited with them and his wife in Rome.  Just as he had spared the stag, so did the lion and wolf spare his two sons.

 

With his family together again, St. Eustace was overjoyed.  But again, problems arose when the emperor tried to force him to sacrifice to the pagan gods.  When he refused, he and his family were thrown to the ravenous beasts of the arena.  And now here's a strange thing:  these animals had been deliberately starved so that they would attack and eat the Christians all the more ferociously.  But in the case of St. Eustace and his wife and two boys, they refused to attack them.  God intervened in their natural instincts, causing them to lie down at the feet of the condemned Christians.  The beasts did not argue with God, they did not insist on following their own will as many of us humans would do, they simply obeyed God as perfectly as only animals and saints seem to have the capability of doing.

 

This infuriated the emperor of course, but he had a final trick up his sleeve.  If God could create animals who would follow His divine will rather than their own, then he, Caesar, had created an animal that would do Caesar's will.  One of the emperor’s favorite methods of torture was a huge brass ox.  It was hollow inside, and had a trapdoor underneath it.  This was opened up, and the Roman soldiers crammed St. Eustace, his wife, and two sons up through the hole.  It was incredibly dark and hot and cramped in there, and the four Christians could hardly breathe, let alone move.  But they were happy that they were to die together as a family.  Finally, the soldiers lit a fire underneath the brazen ox, which became so hot it began to glow from the heat.  And yet the family of four managed to sing hymns to God until the heat inside the ox was so intense that they perished.  Did Caesar triumph by this display of power, that he too could create an animal that would do his will?   Of course not.  It was not a living beast, but a piece of sculpted brass.  And brass too, in its own lifeless way does the will of God by behaving according to its own nature.  When heat is applied to it, it gets hot.  A very simple law of physics perhaps, but a law nevertheless which God made, and not the emperor.  Their bodies may have perished, but their souls were released to heaven.  We cannot outwit the Almighty.

 

Nature was created for man.  We can abuse it or we can use it for the purposes for which God intended.  “It” has no choice but to behave as God created it.  We do have choices, and we must make them wisely.