Templar Edification

The day upon which I’m writing this missive now before you, 21 May, marks for Eastern Christians the commemoration of the Roman Emperor Constantine, hailed as “Saint,” “the Great,” and “Equal to the Apostles.” Others have not been quite so generous with their praise. For centuries, the Roman Empire persecuted Christianity. Cast out from synagogues after a tragic parting of the ways, Christians had no resort to the legal protections offered by the Senate to ancient religions such as Judaism. Worship in urban centers literally went underground, as house churches became catacomb churches, celebrating the Eucharist atop the martyrs’ tombs. Recent scholarship has sought to downplay the severity of Roman persecution, in part due to the exaggerations of medieval hagiography [defn: the writing of the lives of saints], and in part as a reaction against American Christianity’s recent history of claiming victimhood whilst nakedly pursuing political power. Yet for generations, prominent churchmen ...

By: Reverend Grand Chaplain Ryan Stout One of the perks of being a Christian of a catholic disposition—by which I mean coming from a religious tradition that emphasizes liturgy, history, the sacraments and saints—is that I, as a grown man, get to continue proudly to believe in Santa Claus. Not only that, but the stories about Santa Claus only improve as one delves deeper into his legend. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. I have a vial of the oil from his bones. Perhaps I should back up a tick. The story of St Nicholas begins, as do so many good things, with a mother’s prayer. Nonna and Theophannes were a Greek Christian couple living in third-century Lycia, reckoned today as part of Turkey. They had everything they could want: wealth, respect, an honorable bloodline; everything except a child. Nonna’s prayers were answered late in life, and she bore a son, Nicholas, named for his uncle in the monastery. Alas, both parents would soon be lost to a plague, and the young Nicholas woul...

Holidays are often accused of being pagan, when in fact they are simply seasonal. Every culture that knows winter knows a winter feast; and a spring celebration; and a harvest festival come fall. Such are our shared natural responses to our shared natural world. They are pagan only in the sense that G.K. Chesterton used the word: as a synonym for human. Last month I spoke of the Loaf-Mass, or Lammas, a traditional Christian observance thanking God for the firstfruits of the grain harvest. This of course coincides most cleanly with the climate of northern Europe and the British Isles; other Christians would harvest at other times. And just as we solemnized the firstfruits, so now we salute the gathering of last sheaves at harvest’s end. In the Hebrew Bible, the Festival of Ingathering—also known as Sukkot, the Festival of Booths—corresponds to the end of Israel’s agricultural year. For 2023 this falls on 29 September  (Mon, Oct 6, 2025 – Mon, Oct 13, 2025) , a day that Christians ma...

May to me is without question the most beautiful month of the year. Growing up in Pennsylvania, autumn had always been my favorite season, yet since settling in Minnesota I’ve developed a new appreciation for spring—which doesn’t hit until May. Away recedes the ice and snow after six long months of winter, and up pop the sights and sounds and smells of fresh new life, new growth, new warmth. It is simply lovely. One of the themes to which I have often returned during my year as Grand Prelate has been to debunk the popular notion that Christian holidays are secretly pagan in origin. Halloween, Christmas, and Easter regularly come under fire as the year rolls ‘round, and I find myself pointing out that Christian observances are overwhelmingly Jewish in their origins, as well befits a religion centered upon worshipping a rabbi as our God. Besides all that, “pagan,” as G.K. Chesterton memorably wrote, is really just another word for human. Seasonal celebrations around the world share simil...

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...

     Every culture that knows winter knows a winter feast. And the themes of such feasts are dictated by the season: light in the midst of darkness, warmth in the midst of cold, generosity in the midst of scarcity, joy in the midst of depression, and life in the face of death. Winter festivals are acts of defiance, of subversive jubilation. That’s why we love them so. A December fire in the hearth sparks far more wonder than any summer grill.      The earliest Christians concerned themselves with but two holidays: Sunday, the day of Resurrection; and Pascha, the Passover of Our Lord, which served as Sunday for the entire year. The liturgical calendar which we know and love today, with all of its festivals and feasts, arose over time and grew out of these original two. The most glaring ancient omission from our postmodern perspective would appear to be Christmas.      Yet Christmas is not quite the latecomer some would have us believe. Christi...