Templar Edification

Doré brings us now to one of the most overlooked and misunderstood holy days upon the Church calendar: the Ascension! Here he illustrates Mark 16:19— So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat  down at the right hand of God. Luke tells us that 40 days after the Resurrection—40 ever signifying a time of new life and new birth in the stories of the Bible—the Risen Christ returned to Heaven, to the right hand of the Father, by being obscured in a cloud. For Romans this would surely have brought to mind King Romulus, supposedly taken to Olympus in a storm at the end of his mortal life. Jews would make the connection to the Shekinah, or cloud of divine presence, which descended upon both Tabernacle and Temple; as well as to the Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, coming on a cloud. In fact, this was not the simple return of God the Son to His previous abode, a heavenly hero welcomed home in triumph, but the culmination of His mission and last stag...

  Martinmas Most folks with an aptitude for history know that Veterans Day used to be called Armistice Day, commemorating the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918, when the armistice ending major hostilities in World War I took effect. Far fewer recall the reason why that specific date, 11 November, had been chosen to close out the most destructive conflict in human history up to that point. For this we must look to an older holiday, and to one soldier in particular. St Martin of Tours, also known as Martin the Merciful, was born in Pannonia, a central European province of the Roman Empire, in the early fourth century. His father was a tribune in the Legions, awarded the status of veteran and the 160 acres of Italian land that came with it. At the age of 10, Martin became a Christian catechumen against his parents’ wishes. Christianity had only recently been legalized, and remained far from accepted amongst the upper echelons of Western Roman soc...