Before we begin

Observe the instructions below as you enter through the door

  • ·Laptop closed, every device off
  • ·Phones away, screens dark, headphones out
  • ·Let the room be quiet for the next few minutes

The work will still be here. Let us start somewhere else.

Who she was

Vibia Perpetua

Carthage · c. 181 – 203

Vibia Perpetua
Contemporary icon of Perpetua and Felicity. No likeness of either survives; the oldest known image is a mosaic in Ravenna, made three centuries after Carthage.
  • A young noblewoman, about twenty-two, married, nursing an infant son.
  • Arrested as a catechumen under Septimius Severus. She was baptized after her arrest.
  • She kept a prison diary — one of the earliest surviving texts written by a Christian woman. We have her own words, not a summary of them.
  • Her father came again and again and begged her to recant. She would not.
  • She was killed in the arena on the emperor’s birthday, 7 March 203.

Today she is the one who could not call a thing by any name but its own.

The practice

Truth Telling

hands on your lap · feet on the floor · a slow breath

Perpetua’s father wanted her to call herself something else. She could not do it.

  • ·Bring to mind one thing you have been calling by the wrong name
  • ·Say the true name of it, silently
  • ·Ask for the courage to keep calling it that
  • ·Nobody else needs to hear this

Spiritual Disciplines Handbook · Adele Ahlberg Calhoun · Part 6 · Incarnate the Love of Christ

breathe

“I cannot be called anything other
than what I am, a Christian.”

Perpetua · Passio Perpetuae 3, Carthage, 203

She had pointed to a water jar and asked her father whether it could be called by any name but its own.

Amen.

Open your laptops. Let’s begin.