Templar Edification

In the early centuries of the Church, Christianity tended to be rather selective regarding whom we would or would not Baptize. It wasn’t a matter of proving one’s worth; the grace of Christ is freely given to sinners, superabundantly, profligately. But people had to know what they were getting into. Jesus promises His followers a cross, after all, and for nearly 300 years Christians had been persecuted by the Roman Empire. The baptismal symbolism of death and resurrection—joined to Christ’s own death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again, and to Christ’s own eternal life already begun—would have been far more than mere sentiment in those days. Christians courted death simply by professing our faith in Christ. Indeed, many were killed while awaiting their Baptism, thus held to have been “baptized in their blood.” In ancient Rome, catechumens could expect a three-year period of preparation, prayer, and formal instruction for at least an hour a week. Jerusalem sped thi...

As 2 February marks the Candlemas, so 3 February brings us to the commemoration of St Blaise, a figure of some import in the Middle Ages who has fallen into relative obscurity today. Indeed, I wouldn’t bring him up in these pages save for the fact that some parishes (such as ours) continue a wonderfully quirky tradition in his honor: the annual blessing of the throats. Blaise was famous, among other things, for saving someone from choking on a fishbone. It became de rigueur to take a pair of tapers blessed at Candlemas the night before, to cross them under a person’s throat, and to pray that they would be delivered “from every ailment of the throat and from every other disease.” I confess that I continue this tradition in part to “keep Church weird,” an operative dictum of mine. Yet even I don’t light the tapers, as had been the elder custom, lest I touch off someone’s hairspray. This is but one example of blessings held throughout the Church year—bread blessing at Lammas, beer blessin...