Templar Edification

I find that life is better with holidays. Wouldn’t you agree? St Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome that holy days are a matter of adiaphora; that is, of something neither commanded nor forbidden. We can take them or leave them. Yet I find that special seasons and celebrations add a certain spice to life, as well as a yearly pattern of festival and fasting, of darkness and light, which brings a magic and a mysticism into our hearth and our home. Blame my mother. She was the one when I was growing up who cooked and baked and decorated for all the holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, the sacred and the secular alike. It made my childhood wondrous; my adulthood too, now that I have children of my own. And it certainly does improve one’s mood to ever have something to which one looks forward. As I’ve aged, my love for the holidays has only deepened. I still prepare for the big festivities a little too early and a little too long, but now I also champion...

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...