What Will "Round Two" Hold?
My Protestant pilgrimage to Matanzas Inlet, the site where nearly 250 French Protestants were martyred in September and October of 1565, was a life-changing experience, but I sense it is not over. I prayed and commemorated and honored, yet I feel I can never return to St. Augustine, Florida, playing tourist and having a grand old time, without paying homage to the men killed for their faith. I have always felt that the memory of these slaughtered Protestant men still dogs the quaint Spanish city of St. Augustine, whispering of the injustice and slaughter that formed a foundation for Spain’s first permanent colony in what would become the United States.
When I return, I plan to also return to Fort Caroline, the reconstructed Huguenot fort in Jacksonville which I was unable to enter this year due to construction work. My plan for my next pilgrimage is to leave a cross at Fort Caroline as I did at Matanzas. I want to buy a French flag at the Fort Caroline visitor center and subsequently leave it at the massacre site fourteen miles south of St. Augustine. I have not yet decided if or what I will read, but I am sure the perfect suggestion will come. It is an eerie feeling, standing where hundreds of men died for their faith. As a “Reformation” Lutheran it gives me a shiver of solidarity when I think of gazing upon those dunes once more, but I would never consider failing to return. It is too bound up in my blood now. I am a witness. I am a commemorator. I will not forget.
(c) 2012 Joyously Saved
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