Templar Edification

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...

Thanksgiving is an awkward observance for most clergy, or at least those of a liturgical bent. This is because, quite simply, Thanksgiving is not a Church holiday; it is an affair of state. As such, we do not have a ready-made observance, no rubrics to follow. This leads to an improvised hodgepodge of Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve services, some certainly better than others, yet all of them blurring the line betwixt the secular and the sacred. Thus we must take care. Render unto Caesar, and all that. One could approach the story of Thanksgiving from several different angles. School plays often point to the Year of Our Lord 1621, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, both Strangers and Saints, shared a three-day harvest festival with their Wampanoag allies. Historians often point to 1863, the height of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Federal holiday commemorating the founding unity of the American nation. But an honest account of its origins, methinks, lies somew...

  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...

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...

  A Royal Christian Shield E. John Erfourth, (from) 04 AUG 2019 Figure 1  Observation 1 – 18 th Century   Art taken from “Ovason’s Secret  Architecture”, late 18 th Century.  Citing Edward Kohout,  “Mundane Astrology”, 2002:  “The progression of the signs is  from left to right with the sign of  Cancer upon the keystone.  A reason that the signs appear to  be going in the wrong direction is  that we are looking into the  “temple” from the outside.  A heraldic shield that depicts an  ox , an eagle , a lion and a man are  direct references to the fixed signs  of the zodiac, namely Taurus,  Scorpio, Leo and Aquarius.”  What else might these mean? Anything else? Like what? 1   Figure 2  Observation 2 – Present Day   Citing the Grand Lodge of   Washington State online:  “Royal Arch Masonry tradition teaches us that the symbols on the shield are representative of the ...

September marks the beginning of the liturgical year for the Christians of the East, and the de facto kickoff of educational programming amongst Christians of the West. In either case, this fresh start coincides with an ancient feast: the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on 14 September, known in English as Holy Cross Day or simply Holyrood. I will tell you here the story as it was told to me in Jerusalem. Our Lord Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, was crucified atop the rock of Golgotha, also known as Calvary, which both mean “skull.” This site was in fact a rock quarry located just beyond the walls of Jerusalem, along a well-traveled road—an ideal location for the public execution of criminals. This much is well known. What we might not realize is that Jesus and the two thieves on either side of Him were the last people put to death at Golgotha. The earthquake reported in the Gospels split a crack in the rock from the quarry to the Temple, a crack which pilgrims can still reach down and to...