Wheat in the Prison Granary

“For this we owe you, and give you, our deepest and fullest thanks — that by your letters you threw light into the gloom of their prison.”

Cyprian to Moyses and Maximus, elders, and to the rest of the confessors, his brothers: greeting. [c]

Celerinus has come to me, dear brothers — your companion in faith and courage, God’s own soldier in glorious engagements — and he set all of you, and every one of you singly, forcibly before my affection. When he arrived I saw all of you in him; and when he spoke, warmly and often, of your love for me, I heard you in his words. It is a great joy to me when word like that comes from you by a man like him. In a way I am there in prison with you too. Bound as I am to your hearts, I think I share with you the pleasure of God’s approval. The love each of you has for me joins me to your honor; the Spirit does not let our love be separated. Confession has shut you into prison; affection shuts me in there as well.

And I remember you day and night — both when I offer prayer along with many at the sacrifices, and when I withdraw and pray with a petition of my own — and I beg the Lord to bring your crowns and your praises to their full acknowledgment. But what little I can do is too weak to repay you. You give more when you remember me in your prayers. You breathe nothing now but what is heavenly and think of nothing but what is God’s, and you climb to greater heights by the very delay of your suffering; the long passage of time is not wearing your glory away but adding to it. One confession, made once, is enough to make a man blessed. You confess again every time you are asked to leave the prison and choose the prison instead, with faith and courage. Your praises are as many as the days; as the months roll on, your merits keep growing. The man who suffers all at once conquers once; but the man who goes on and on fighting with punishments, and is not beaten by suffering, is crowned every day.

So now let the magistrates pass by, and the consuls and proconsuls; let them boast in the insignia of their one year of office and in their twelve rods. Look — the honor of heaven in you has been sealed by a year of shining office too, and by now, its victorious glory going on and on, it has come all the way around the circle of the returning year. The sun rose and the moon waned, and they lit the world; but for you, the one who made the sun and moon was a greater light inside your cell, and the brightness of Christ, burning in your hearts and minds, lit up with that eternal and brilliant light the gloom of a place of punishment that to everyone else was hideous and deadly. [h]

Winter came and went through its months; but you, shut in prison, were enduring not winter’s harshness but the winter of persecution. After winter came the mildness of spring, glad with roses and crowned with flowers; but you had roses and flowers from the delights of paradise, and wreaths from heaven circled your heads. Now look — summer is heavy with the harvest, and the threshing floor is filled with grain. But you sowed glory, and you are reaping the fruit of glory. Set on the Lord’s own threshing floor, you watch the chaff burn in unquenchable fire, while you yourselves are the grains of wheat, winnowed and precious, cleaned now and stored away, treating the prison you live in as your granary.

Nor does autumn lack a spiritual grace of its own for the work of its season. Out of doors the vintage is pressed, and the grape that will later run into the cups is trodden in the vats. You are the heavy clusters out of the Lord’s vineyard, branches whose fruit is already ripe; trodden by the pressure of this world’s trouble, you fill your winepress in the prison that tortures you, and you pour out blood instead of wine. Brave enough to bear suffering, you drink the cup of martyrdom willingly. This is how the year goes round with the Lord’s servants; this is how the turn of the seasons is kept, with spiritual merits and rewards from heaven.

Fully blessed are those of your number who have walked these footprints of glory and have already left the world. They have finished the journey of courage and faith, and have reached the embrace and the kiss of the Lord, and the joy of the Lord himself. But your glory is no less — you who are still in the contest, who are about to follow your comrades into their glory, who have been waging a long battle and standing firm with a faith that has not moved or been shaken, putting on a spectacle in your courage every day before the eyes of God. The longer the struggle, the higher the crown will be. [l]

It is one struggle, but it is crowded with a whole multitude of separate contests. You conquer hunger, you think nothing of thirst, and by the sheer force of your courage you trample down the filth of the cell and the horror of the place of punishment itself. There punishment is beaten; torture wears itself out; death is not feared but wanted, overcome by the reward of immortality, so that the man who has won is crowned with life that never ends. What must your mind be like now — how lifted up, how large a heart — when things like these, and this great, are what you have settled in yourselves, when nothing is weighed but the commands of God and the rewards of Christ! At that point the only will left is God’s will. And though you are still placed in the flesh, the life you are living now is not the life of the present world but of the world to come.

What is left, dear brothers, is that you keep me in mind: that among your great and godly concerns you would think of me too, in your mind and in your spirit, and that I would be in your prayers and petitions — when that voice of yours, made bright by the purification of confession and praiseworthy for the unbroken constancy of its honor, reaches the ears of God, and, with heaven opened to it, passes up out of these subdued regions of the world into the realms above, and obtains from the Lord’s goodness even what it asks. [n]

For what could you ask of the Lord’s mercy that you do not deserve to receive? You have kept the Lord’s commands the way you have. You have held to the discipline of the good news with the plain strength of your faith. With the glory of your courage uncorrupted, you have stood bravely by the Lord’s commands and by his apostles, and by the truth of your martyrdom you have steadied the wavering faith of many. Truly witnesses of the good news, truly martyrs of Christ, resting on his roots, founded with a strong foundation on the Rock — you have joined discipline to courage, you have brought others to the fear of God, you have made your martyrdoms into examples. My very brave and dearly loved brothers, I pray with all my heart that you may always be well. And remember me.