The holiness of St Josephine Margaret Fortunata Bakhita is profoundly worthy of contemplation.
I want to write specifically about her name, because I've always been struck by how her name captures the story of her life and the story of God's love and the story of hope and redemptive suffering and of Heaven.
She was born around 1869 in Darfur into what she called "a very happy and carefree life," cocooned in a village of her family and relatives. None of the names we now call her was the name given by her parents, the name of her happy life. Nobody knows what that name was; it was lost when she was very little. At just seven years old, she was abducted by Arab slave traders and ripped away from her parents and childhood home forever. In the following seven decades, she never returned and never saw any of them again. The trauma of this rupture caused her to forget permanently her original name.
The trauma: You're seven years old, ensconced in the only home you've ever known, unconcerned like all happy children, until the day of the raid. Suddenly instead of the hum of daily life, there was screaming: the terror of children being snatched up by strangers and the anguish of parents helpless to stop it. There was violence: blood spilled, bones shattered, skin lashed, arms and legs chained painfully and tightly. Imagine the terror of being seven years old and carried away from your wailing parents by strangers speaking a different language, wearing different clothing, of being forced to march 600 miles barefoot.
The tiny traumatized girl could not say her own name, so the traders assigned one to her: Bakhita, Arabic for “fortunate.” They sold her repeatedly into various households across Sudan. She suffered unimaginable horrors and abuses to her body and personhood. She was carved with a razor and the wounds packed with salt to scar her. She was whipped and lashed nearly to death, more than once. She recalled that “not a single day passed without some wound.” This nightmare endured nearly 20 years, and then an Italian consul living in Sudan purchased her and brought her home to Italy with him. He eventually gave her to another Italian family, the Michielis, who made her their children’s nanny.
The trauma: You’re now a young woman who has survived in slavery almost your entire life. Even in the households where you are not lashed and whipped and razored and punched and kicked—even there, you are a possession, you are isolated from your own dignity. You are bought and sold as though it is actually possible to do so with human persons. The memories of the happy, carefree life must seem like a wispy dream. Imagine how often she wondered, What was my name? What was my real name?
The Michielis opened a hotel in Sudan and decided to relocate there permanently. They went ahead and left Bakhita in the care of the Canossian nuns in Venice. These sisters taught her for the first time about Christ; when she learned His name, she said she had finally met the God “who from childhood I had felt in my heart without knowing who He was.”
The Michielis sent for her when their business was established. She refused to go. The Canossians, her allies, refused to return her. They helped her take up a legal case. The Italian judge ruled that because slavery was not legal in Italy, the woman whom others had stolen and renamed and sold was now free again. What name do you choose? Not the one imposed upon you; what name do you choose?
She chose a new name for a new life: Josephine Margaret Fortunata, the Latin translation of Bakhita. In baptism and in law, she was set free, in every manner that a person can be freed.
She never pretended that slavery had not radically harmed her, or that grace had wiped away her suffering like dust from a windowsill. Her story was her story. Her suffering was real suffering. Her salt-packed scars were real scars. In her name, she chose redemption of her suffering. She chose the freedom of forgiving the traders, the enslavers, the false masters who had dehumanized her and stripped away relentlessly at her identity.
She quickly entered the Canossian order and spent the rest of her life freely offering herself to Jesus and Mary. In time, she helped train young sisters for mission work in Africa. All who knew her remarked on her gentleness and joyfulness. Many were amazed that the little nun with old scars could bear a heart so pure and light after surviving such horrors. Sister Josephine explained, “I am definitively loved, and I am awaited by this love, and so whatever happens to me, my life is good.”
But moments before she died in 1947, the nightmares rushed back: she cried out, “The chains are too tight! The chains are too tight! Please loosen them only a little!” Someone reminded her to think of Our Lady, whom Sister Josephine cherished, and her smile returned. Her last words were, “Yes! I am so happy… Our Lady, Our Lady.”
The triumph! A woman fully restored to herself, discovering who she was by discovering Whose she was. Identity brought to fullness by love. Suffering brought to joy by love.
Surely her parents and relatives were there to greet Josephine Margaret Fortunata Bakhita upon her entrance to Heaven, calling her once again by that precious name that—no matter how long it had been forgotten—had always been hers.
And Love Himself, calling her, calling her, calling her for all eternity: Mine.
Her feast is February 8.
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