Templar Edification

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...

On the evening of 29 September every year, I light a fire in a rough-hewn shelter in the woods, and there my congregation and I celebrate Michaelmas, the Feast of St Michael and all angels. I confess it's one of my favorite pastoral traditions: the crackle of the leaves, the bite in the air, the sparks dancing upward from firelight to starlight. It is an ethereal time, when one can just begin to glimpse the form of things unseen. I have a special devotion to St Michael. I wear his image on a little silver shield about my neck, which I never take off. There he is, complete with flaming sword and leaf-shaped shield, in splendid Roman armor. And just as my shield bears his image, so his bears the image of the Cross. It is a reminder that no matter what forces may array themselves against us, the light of a single candle puts all the powers of darkness to flight. Put now out of mind the Precious Moments figures, the faeries with feathery wing. The angels of the Bible appear as giants a...