Templar Edification

Our exploration of the woodcuts used to illustrate the classic Grande Bible de Tours, etched by renowned French artist Gustave Doré, takes us now from Crucifixion to Resurrection with: Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his  glory?"; Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the  things about himself in all the scriptures. -Luke 24:26-27 Cleopas and his companion are fleeing from Jerusalem. And in all honesty, it seems about the most sensible thing that they could do. We don’t know terribly much about Cleopas. Like most of Christianity’s first generation, he is remembered for whom He followed, loved, and preached—Jesus Christ—than for any incidental biographical details. Tradition holds him to have been a brother of St Joseph, and so uncle to the Christ. But who knows? As for his companion, well, they aren’t even named, but I find it reasonable to imagine her his wife. The two of them skedattle, and...

Last night our daughters informed me that they had finally grown too old for me to read to them at bedtime. Granted, the younger was in a grumpy mood, having generally gotten too little sleep over the holiday break. But as they are in fifth and seventh grade respectively, I can’t say that they’re entirely off-base. I knew this day would come. Our son was in seventh grade when he likewise asked me to stop reading to him, and I still view that as something of a bittersweet milestone. Together we had read about medieval Japan and World War I and chocolate factories and New England whaling and the Native American invention of lacrosse. I miss those bedside adventures. For as long as I can remember, books have been holy to me. Credit this to my parents, both lifelong educators, and especially to my mother, who read to me from day one—and who taught me to read on my own when, at three years of age, I grew frustrated with my inability to do so. Frugal as they were when I was growing up, my pa...

Our middle child has outgrown most of her old stuffed animals, yet two retain their prominence of place: her plush Krampus, and her plush Jersey Devil. Yes, the pastor’s daughter delights in adorable little demons, both of which I bought for her. In fairness, they’re really more fairy tale monsters than anything else: folkloric entities limited to St. Nicholas’ Day and the greater Philadelphia area, respectively. And in these particular renditions, they’re honestly quite cute. Creatures such as Krampus are often claimed to be heathen holdovers from pre-Christian times, but most of that is bunk. Pagans don’t have devils. They didn’t need them. Their gods were bad enough. Devils, by and large, are of Christian conception, and for good reason. The Hebrew Scriptures, which make up the bulk of the Christian Old Testament, are best taken not as a single work but as a library. They contain histories, mythologies, poetry, letters, liturgies, all witnessing to the relationship between God and H...

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...

40 days after the birth of Jesus Christ, the Church celebrates an oft-overlooked holiday that goes by many names. For Protestants, it is the Presentation of Our Lord. Catholics call it the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. For the Orthodox, it is simply Hypapante, “the Meeting.” Yet I confess my own preference for the Anglican name: Candlemas. We find the story of Candlemas in the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel, concluding that early section of canticles we sometimes call Luke: The Musical. 40 days after childbirth complete Mary’s period of ritual cleansing according to the Law of Moses. She may now travel to the Temple in Jerusalem in order to redeem Jesus as her firstborn Son. This harkens back to the tale of the Exodus, when God claimed the firstborn of Israel as His own, be they man or beast—“the males that first open the womb.” The number 40 always carries symbolic importance in the Scriptures; ancient peoples knew that it takes roughly 40 weeks for a pregnant woman to come to ...

The liturgical year of the Western Church begins anew at Advent, the season of four Sundays preceding the Nativity of Our Lord. It is a time of hope and expectation, of preparing our hearts and our homes for the King. In it, we await and we watch for light amidst the dark. When it comes to Yuletide celebrations, the Church often seems out of step with the surrounding culture. We laugh, a bit bitterly, regarding the appearance of Christmas decorations even before Halloween. My children cast covetous eyes upon those homes which have decorated their trees well ahead of Thanksgiving. And who could blame the advance guard? Perhaps you may be one yourself. It’s been a rough few years, a rough couple of decades. Who am I to begrudge someone their joy? If Christmas makes you happy, well, it makes me happy too. And we could all use some good holiday cheer both early and often. Yet Advent offers to us something a little different, something more than simply delayed gratification or finger-waving...

  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...

For 300 years Christianity survived as an illegal religion, sporadically persecuted by the might of the Roman Empire. This meant that a life spent witnessing to the Good News of Jesus Christ often culminated in a brutal and very public death. It’s not that all Christians were killed, of course; but it happened regularly enough, and especially to the most prominent in the community, to affect the entire life of the Church. Indeed, our word for witness, “martyr,” has become synonymous with someone who dies for their faith. And we had to make sense of it, didn’t we? For 300 years the followers of Christ were crucified, beheaded, lit on fire, and thrown to wild beasts. What then did all this violence and suffering mean to the people of God? Where could we find Christ in this? Eucharistic celebrations went underground, literally, as Sunday worship took place in catacombs beneath major cities, atop the bones of the martyrs. To this day, many Christian altars look rather suspiciously like...