The young boy yawned as he rose from the bare floor of the crowded prison cell. He saw the old man, 66 years of age, standing by the window. The old man’s contemplative gaze fixed upon the dark blue of a morning sky through the window. The boy toed around those lying around on the floor, fellow prisoners, and tapped the old man.

“Grandpa, where are we going?” the boy asked.

“We’re going home,” his grandfather replied.

The grandfather hadn’t always been old. He was a young man, a doctor in his early 30s, who’d felt a terrible clawing in his gut one morning some decades back.

Mark Ji Tianxiang had treated plenty of patients, both rich and poor, during his years of medical practice. Many of those poorer patients, who couldn’t afford to pay for his services, had been treated by the doctor for free. Born into a Catholic family in China’s Jizhou District, having a brother who’d become a priest, he’d considered it his duty to Christ never to refuse the poor. A day had arrived when the patient he’d tend to would be himself.

He knew, very well, what the common treatment for stomach ailments had been. He’d thought nothing of prescribing it to himself. That treatment was opium.

Mark Ji poured the drug down into the chamber of a pipe, perched his lips around the lip of the pipe, and sucked in the air as he lit the bowl. Smoke plumed from his mouth and nose as he exhaled. The clawing in his gut ceased. The treatment had worked.

Other sensations came along. A sudden rush of euphoria. Relaxation which could hardly be described. Sinking into an oblivion free of all cares and worries. They seemed much like glimpses of heaven’s pleasures while still here on earth.

The doctor agreed to treat himself again, the very next day, just in case. He treated himself yet again the day after that, and again the day after that.

Years had passed. His wife and children had returned to their house, finding the head of the household sunk back on the chair in mindless oblivion, on all so many occasions. The shame of being among the ranks of ones considered “those men” was a difficult burden to bear. Mark Ji had prayed, many times, to be delivered from this habit. It was through Holy Communion and confession, that he’d hoped such grace would be granted to him.

It was in a church, razed during years of rebellion and purges in the century to come, that the doctor would dig his knees into the step in the confessional. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he’d say through the latticed openings of the partition. “It has been a week since my last confession.”

The confessor would listen to words of what had become a very familiar voice, confessing to that same sin every time like clockwork, and go on to tell him in the end: “I absolve you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

By that very evening, on so many occasions, Mark Ji would step into a smoke-filled den that was dimly lit by candlelight and wreaking of sweat. He would silently step past the silhouetted figures of strangers sprawled out all around him, squirming upon straw mattresses on a dingy floor, and plant himself down upon whatever open mattress he could find. He’d watch the smoke billow from the mouths of the men who were still conscious, anxiously waiting for that moment when that pipe would go on to be passed to him.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned” the doctor had said to his confessor, yet again. “It’s been one week since my last confession.” He proceeded to confess the same sin which he’d confessed the week before, and the week before that, for the last several years.

The confessor finally sighed. It was a day in which addiction was too little understood. Without a resolve to repent, to turn away from sin, confession is invalid. That priest finally decided that no such resolve could be found within the doctor. He told the doctor not to return to the confessional until this habit of his had been abandoned and refused him absolution.

Mark Ji’s heart sank. He firmly believed in God’s grace. His desire to love God with a fire matching those of the saints in Heaven, to be a better man, was there indeed. But that craving for more, most often beginning with a gentle whisper, a plea for “just a little bit,” always returned. That still small voice would persist, and grow more demanding, until his mind was obsessed. In violent siege this craving, so alien to the soul, overtook what willpower he thought he’d had. He was consumed. “Yes, father.”

He continued praying often and going to daily Mass, despite having been banned from Holy Communion. He’d remain kneeling in his pew while watching others, including family members, receive the Body of Christ upon their tongues. That he’d kept on going to Mass, as a mere spectator during Communion, wasn’t lost upon his neighbors. They would’ve called him a living saint had his cross not been considered such an embarrassment to them.

He likewise kept on taking opium, daily.

He was a man torn by desire to live out his life as a saint, and a consuming craving which possessed him, as though his limbs had been objects of a tug-of-war. He was versed in the lives of the saints to know that it was by embracing our sufferings and sacrifices, and not only our virtues, that we may mirror the life of Christ. He prayed for the gift of martyrdom.

For 30 years he was denied the sacraments.

The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, nicknamed the “boxers” due to the prevalence among their ranks of those who’d practiced martial arts, sought to rid China of foreign influence. They’d resented the losses of wars, and countless concessions to foreign powers which the Qing Dynasty had bowed to, over the prior decades. They likewise resented missionaries who’d converted so many of their fellow countrymen to a religion considered foreign. A full rebellion, led by these Boxers, poured out from the northern coastal province of Shandong to much of Northern China in 1900. In June of that year, the foreign diplomatic compounds of Beijing were under siege.

Sympathizers of the Boxer Rebellion in Jizhou District provided a list of names. Those named on that list were thrown in prison. Mark Ji’s name was on that list of known Christians. His prison cell, in many ways, resembled an opium den. His second son, two of his daughters-in-law and six of his grandchildren were likewise imprisoned.

Days of threat and torment followed. The prisoners were told to renounce their Christian faith or face execution.

Just deny Him, that whisper of familiar and enslaving craving urged. You don’t even have to mean it. Just tell them whatever it is they want to hear, so that you can go back home where your pipe is.

“But whoever denies me before others,” Our Lord once said, “I also will deny before my Father in heaven.” Providence had denied the doctor’s supplication for deliverance from his craving, for the reasons known to Providence. His request to die a martyr’s death would be granted. In his last few days of life Mark Ji, in a prison cell without his opium, denied his craving instead.

“Grandpa, where are we going?” his grandson asked.

“We’re going home.”

The imprisoned Christians were escorted to nearby grounds on July 9, 1900. Mark Ji begged his captors to execute him last of all. That way, no one else would have to die alone. He neglected to mention anything of his intention to encourage his family to remain steadfast, and to accept their crowns of martyrdom, before they executed him last of all.

His captors had found the request to be odd, but agreed.

“Lord, have mercy on us,” he began to sing as they were filed to the grounds. It was the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary that he sang. “Christ have mercy on us.”

“Holy Mary, pray for us,” he continued as the executioner raised his sword over the first Christian brought before him. “Holy Mother of God, pray for us,” he sang as his fellow Christian’s severed head rolled upon the ground. “Holy Virgin of virgins, pray for us.” His voice, sweetly singing the Litany, would be the last thing his grandchildren heard before their own executions. “Mother of Christ, pray for us.” It reminded all that they’d be reunited, in mere moments, and in a better place, that death was bearable. “Mother of divine grace, pray for us.”

He watched on as dozens of Christians parted with their heads, in exchange for their Heavenly reward. Finally, it was his turn.

St. Mark Ji Tianxiang was canonized Oct. 1, 2000, by Pope St. John Paul II. His feast is July 9. May he pray for us!