No Myth-Take
I have been thinking a lot about my patron saint, Great Martyr Barbara. In childhood and into my adolescence I was sometimes troubled by her hagiography- namely, its authenticity. As a girl, my skepticism arose from her story's parallels to the Rapunzel fairytale. Every account mentions the young woman's beauty and her isolation, and most mention her being confined to a tower. And while Rapunzel was rescued by a prince who scaled the tower using her tresses, Saint Barbara wandered out of her tower one day. The pagan beauty, living in comfort and ignorance of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, then came across Christians. Now here the story sharply deviates from saccharine bedtime stories. (Let's not forget that the saint is adorned with a martyr's crown). As Lives of Saints were my bedtime stories, I soon learned of Saint Barbara's torture and death after her clandestine conversion to Christianity. Some hagiographers paint the the details in blood. Her body is n...
