The Day of Saints - Day 30, Mabyn/Mabena

A patronic wall hanging at St Mabyn Church

It is said that stained glass windows in medieval churches were placed there in part to illustrate spiritual stories for visitors at a time when the majority of people were illiterate, and when books were rare and expensive. These days, we mostly can read and have ready access to written materials, Bibles and so forth. However, looking up at stained glass is still a pleasure, and can lead to interesting questions.

Visiting many parish churches on my sabbatical research, I have seen new and old windows, the latest perhaps from the late 20th century and the earliest from the 14th. Depicted I have seen everyone from Adam to King Arthur, and numerous nameless or on the face of it story-less figures. However, thinking about saints, and often ones who have been taken as patrons for churches, I have had to read around or imagine what the life might have been. This has not been easy, as nearly all that remains is a mixture of imagination, exaggeration, adaptation and plagiarism, often painted over with a thick veneer of after-the-event folk-lore and sheer bunkum. There are also times, as with Saint Mabyn (or Mabena), when there is almost nothing there at all.

When I visited St Mabyn parish church, passing through the village on the way to somewhere else (see Day 20), I found myself delighted at the church and the sense of active spirituality I sensed there. However, in the days after I was unable to write anything which began to stick on Mabyn herself. More than a month later, I have put that to rights.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a well-known Swiss-born psychiatrist and writer on death and bereavement wrote many quotable things in her long life and career, but one that has stuck with me I once had printed as a laser transparency taped to the window of my chaplaincy office at the University of Sussex. It read,

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

I have taken the sense of this for the final couplet of the following sonnet written around the otherwise opaque (to me) life of Mabyn, and the supposition that she would have lived a life that allowed God's light to shine through whatever hardship or mistreatment she faced.

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Saint Mabena in window glass at St Mabyn Church

FOR MABYN

Vidimus - 'we have seen'*

September; slipping into soundless space,

To gaze, at first to breath, and wait again,

If unfamiliared eyes receive, will grace

Beckon beneath, within these streams of stain?

An unseen violence often makes a saint,

Melted, salted, snapped and wrapped in lead,

In dark constricting lines, obscured by paint,

Then framed and storied, somehow living dead.

Manhandled there, the work of too few hours,

Whatever, Saint Mabena, came to pass?

A life in holy pieces held like flowers,

Illuminates your peace behind the glass.

The light inside outside each spectral hue -

Her human vidimus between the two.

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* When a stained-glass window is being proposed, a small design called a Vidimus (from Latin "we have seen") is prepared which can be shown to the patron. (Source Wikipedia )