St. Zoe and the Altar of Worldly Comfort

When choosing my Confirmation saint, I had only one requirement – that the saint be someone no one else was likely to choose. I wanted to be different and have an intercessor all to myself. This led me to St. Zoe of Pamphilia – a New Testament mother of Maccabees.

St. Zoe lived in a pagan region around the year 127 AD in modern-day Turkey with her husband and two sons (also saints). The story varies depending on source but the meat of it is that they refused to sacrifice to a pagan god and were then tortured and martyred for their defense of the Faith. A particular version of the story that resonated with me said that St. Zoe wanted to sacrifice to the pagan god just to get their ruler and owner (they were slaves) off their backs and then they could worship the one, true God in secret. Her husband and sons talked her out it by reminding her that the reward and comfort of Heaven is better than any comfort on earth. When the pagan soldiers finally came to force the family to renounce their faith or die, they refused. First, St. Zoe’s husband was tortured and murdered and then her sons. Watching her sons being tortured was excruciating for St. Zoe and she almost renounced the faith. But it was her two sons who encouraged her to stay strong and that they would see her that day in heaven. She was then, also, tortured and murdered.

At sixteen, when I chose St. Zoe as my Confirmation saint, I had little in common with her – I was not a wife nor a mother and no one was trying to make me renounce my faith. I didn’t even strongly feel like God was leading me towards the vocation of marriage or motherhood, but I liked her name.

I first heard the name Zoe when the trio of brothers of the band Hanson’s youngest sibling was born and it stuck with me. The summer before I was confirmed, I learned what the word “zoe” means. A speaker at a Steubenville Youth Conference said that “bios” refers to the physical life of a person while “zoe” refers to God’s life within a person, or the spiritual life of a person. The bios dies and falls away, but the zoe remains forever. In that moment, I knew that what I wanted to be forever filled with was God’s life. I decided then and there to choose Zoe as my Confirmation name and then found St. Zoe to go along with that desire.

At the time of my Confirmation, I had more in common with the legend of my chosen namesake’s saintly progeny than with this holy woman herself. Yet I could not possibly foresee how much St. Zoe and I would truly share and how perfect an intercessor she would be for me.

When my faith falters, as it, regrettably, does more often than I’d like to admit, my children are usually the one who remind me to be faithful. My kids are only 2.5 and 1 years old and they lead me to Jesus in simple and profound ways – from kissing Jesus on my four-way medal, to asking me to sing “the Jesus song” (“Away in a Manger”) for bedtime, to crying when we have to leave church after Mass. When I am ready to sacrifice myself on the altar of worldly comfort, my children are always there to remind me of Zoe, the part of me that will never die and of the heavenly reward that awaits me.