7th Day of Christmas: The Christmas Tree Points to Christ

 Merry Christmas on this the 7th Day of Christmas!  

    It is true that we are nearing the end of the Octave of Christmas: Sunday will be both the tenth day and the great feast of Epiphany, which this year we officially celebrate three days before its traditional date of January 6th. The Christmas season itself continues for another week after that, and for some of us until February 2nd (see "What is the Christmas Season, and Why Does It Matter?")

    I once published a post at this point in the season entitled "Don't Touch That Tree!", in reference to all the Christmas trees unceremoniously cast out untimely and thrown to the curb at a time when the Christmas lights should still be burning bright. In this post I'd like to look at the Christmas Tree itself as an institution, a beloved Christian symbol and tradition which is sometimes attacked (erroneously) by self-styled debunkers as a pagan intrusion.  
We Christians need not be swayed by such nonsense.  First of all, even if there were historical evidence of evergreen trees being used in pagan worship, Christ can baptize all things for his use (for more on this point, see my post “Christ is King of All . . . Even the Holidays”).  Pagans prayed to their gods, for instance: should we avoid prayer for that reason?  Pagans offered sacrifice on their altars; do any of us put the offerings on a similar altar in the Temple of Jerusalem in the same category, much less Christ's Eucharistic Sacrifice on the altars of our churches? Certainly the same would apply to Christmas trees, if they had pagan origins.

    As it happens, however, evergreen trees were not worshipped or treated as religious objects among the Germanic and Baltic peoples of Europe, although they were sometimes used as symbols of eternity and the promise of Springtime rebirth.  This rather obvious symbolism was recognized in other parts of the world as well.  The pre-Christians of the German forests directed their religious veneration, at least as it applied to trees (is dendrolatry a word?), toward the deciduous oak tree. This oak-worship figures prominently in one popular story, in fact, about the origins of the Christmas Tree, which only makes sense if we distinguish between the two different kinds of tree.  St. Boniface, who left his native England to evangelize the still pagan Germans of continental Europe in the 8th century, famously chopped down a holy oak to which a young boy was being offered in sacrifice. In one version of the story, after the mighty oak fell a young fir tree could be seen standing behind its stump.  The Saint pointed to the evergreen, and told the onlookers (who were impressed that Wotan hadn’t zapped him out of existence) that they should henceforth direct their veneration to this tree, as a symbol of the True God in the Person of Jesus Christ.

Queen Victoria & Family around the tree

    The first actual historical references to Christmas trees (Boniface certainly did cut down the oak, but the rest of the story is historically dubious) come in the sixteenth century. It seems very unlikely indeed that almost eight centuries after the heathens of central Europe converted and gave up tree-worship their practices would somehow find their way into Christian homes.  Christmas trees were not known beyond some (not even all) German speaking areas, along with Latvia and Estonia, until very recently.  Christmas trees were rarely, if ever, seen in the English speaking world until a little over a century and a half ago, when Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert, who was German, introduced the custom to the British Royal family.  A print that first appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1848 depicting the Queen and family around their tree is generally credited with popularizing Christmas trees both in Britain and in North America.

    Today one sees Christmas trees all over the world; in recent decades the popes have put up large and beautiful trees near the crèche in St. Peter’s Square.  Saint John Paul II explained some of the Christian symbolism of the tree in his Angelus address on December 19th, 2004:

The feast of Christmas, perhaps the most cherished by popular tradition, is full of symbols connected with the different cultures. Among all, the most important is surely the Nativity scene, as I had the opportunity to point out last Sunday.

Together with the Nativity scene, as is true here in St. Peter’s Square, we find the traditional “Christmas tree.” A very ancient custom, moreover, which exalts the value of life, as in winter the evergreen becomes a sign of undying life. In general, the tree is decorated and Christmas gifts are placed under it. The symbol is also eloquent from a typically Christian point of view: It reminds us of the “tree of life” (see Genesis 2:9), representation of Christ, God’s supreme gift to humanity.

The message of the Christmas tree, therefore, is that life is “ever green” if one gives: not so much material things, but of oneself: in friendship and sincere affection, and fraternal help and forgiveness, in shared time and reciprocal listening.

St. Peter's Square decorated for Christmas, 2001 (Lawrence Journal-World)

Pope Benedict XVI elaborated on the same theme four years later:

With its loftiness, its green [color] and the lights in its branches, the Christmas tree is a symbol of life that points to the mystery of Christmas Eve . . .

Christ, the Son of God, brings to the dark, cold, unredeemed world in which he was born, a new hope and a new splendor . . .

If man allows himself to be touched and enlightened by the splendor of the living truth that is Christ, he will experience an interior peace in his heart and will himself become an instrument of peace in a society that has so much nostalgia for reconciliation and redemption.

There you have it: don’t let the nay-sayers wear you down!  We still have some Christmas left this year, so be of good cheer . . . and don’t touch that tree just yet!

Speaking of Christmas trees, here’s a beautiful tri-lingual rendition of “O Tannenbaum” by Andrea Bocelli:

6th Day of Christmas: The Season is Still Young!

 Merry Christmas!  Today is the 6th Day of Christmas: the Christmas Season is still in its first week.

The Nativity, by Gerard David

The trouble is, it may not feel like Christmas is just beginning.  For many years I have had a second job at a local retail store, in the seasonal department.  Retailers want to get "seasonal" merchandise on the shelves before the actual season begins, and try to get it out there before their competitors do. As a result, over the past century the commercial “Christmas Season” (now more often called the holiday season) has started earlier and earlier: we are putting Christmas merchandise on the shelves in September, and the Christmas-themed music (mostly about celebrating Christmas, or maybe just the “wonderful time of year”, rather than about the Nativity of Jesus itself) begins blaring out of the stores’ PA systems.  They stop receiving Christmas items in early to mid December, and begin selling down their supplies, because once "the holiday” is over (i.e., December 25th . . . what's that holiday called again?) they don’t want to be stuck with a lot of overstock (which means financial losses). The music and decorations are gone when the doors open for business on December 26th. In our post-Christian culture the commercial Christmas season and its advertising sets the tone for the culture as a whole, and so for most people Christmas, sadly, is now over.

But not for those of us who are followers of the Babe Lying in the Manger.  Today is only the sixth of eight days in the Octave of Christmas, all with the liturgical status of solemnity; beyond that, the customary “Twelve Days of Christmas” extend until January 5th, followed by the traditional date of the great Feast of Epiphany on the 6th; the formal Christmas Season itself extends until the Baptism of the Lord on January 13th.  Some Catholics continue to observe Christmas until the Feast of the Presentation on February 2nd, as did Pope Saint John Paul II, and also my lovely bride’s Polish forebears.  

Granted, keeping Christmas when it ought to be kept can be hard, especially when we have all been living and working in an environment reveling in the “holiday spirit” during what was supposed to be the penitential preparatory Season of Advent, and is now wearily going back about its business just when the real celebration is just starting.  Fortunately, the Church has given us the Liturgical Calendar, to keep us grounded in the Gospel and the real events of Salvation History.  There we find, as we do in the most of the observances of the last few days (the feasts of St. Stephen, Holy Innocents, and usually St. John on the 3rd day of Christmas, although this year the Beloved Apostle yielded to the Holy Family), that the Incarnation points to the Crucifixion, and it is only through the suffering and death of Christ that we come to the Triumph of the Resurrection. Our Celebration of Christmas, then, is not mere revelry in defiance of the cruelty of reality, or a vain attempt to deny it; it is true celebration because we know that, precisely because of that cruel reality, the Child born in Bethlehem has come to take us through the brokenness of this world and beyond to something “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

A few years ago I set out to keep myself focused on the True Season by posting something related to that particular day for every one of the Twelve Days of Christmas.  While I'm no longer engaged in bloggery on a regular basis, I’m keeping up that tradition by rerunning some of my old Christmas posts (with, perhaps, one or two new ones, such as yesterday's on St. Thomas Becket) .  Please feel free to join me . . . and have a very Merry Christmas!

5th Day of Christmas: St. Thomas Becket, Martyr

    

  Merry Christmas! Today we celebrate the 5th Day of Christmas, and also the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.     

     It’s striking how many martyrs' feast days we observe during the Christmas season: St. Stephen on the 2nd Day of Christmas, Holy Innocents yesterday; on Christmas Day itself the Church used to celebrate a second mass, not for the Nativity, but for the martyr St. Anastasia.  Today, on the 5th Day of Christmas,  we find ourselves celebrating yet another martyr, St. Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered by knights in the service of King Henry II of England on December 29th, 1170.

The murder of St. Thomas Becket

     St. Thomas has attracted the attention of numerous authors over the years: the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are journeying to his shrine; Jean Anouilh wrote a play about him, Becket, which became a successful film starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton (see clip below); Becket’s martyrdom is the focus of T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, and the saint has appeared in not a few novels.

     In Eliot’s play the soon-to-be-martyred archbishop delivers a Christmas homily in which he discusses this (seemingly) odd juxtaposition between the joy of the Nativity and the mourning of martyrdom:

Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once our Lord’s Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of his first martyr, the blessed Stephen.  Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means.  Just as we rejoice and mourn at once, in the Birth and the Passion of Our Lord; so also, in a smaller figure, we both rejoice and mourn in the death of martyrs . . . So thus as on earth the Church mourns and rejoices at once, in a fashion that the world cannot understand; so in Heaven the Saints are most high, having made themselves most low, and are seen, not as we see them, but in the light of the Godhead from which they draw their being.

     Eliot’s Becket here is echoing St. Paul, who tells the Corinthians that “the wisdom of this world is folly before God” (1 Corinthians 3:19).  Becket himself enjoyed quite a bit of success, in the eyes of the world, prior to becoming archbishop: he was a close companion to King Henry II, and the king’s Chancellor.  Henry nominated Thomas to be Archbishop of Canterbury in the hopes that he would subordinate the Church in England to the interests of the Crown. Instead, Becket threw away all the advantages that his friendship with the king brought him and became a champion of the independence of the Church from the Crown. He also seemed to embrace the spiritual life wholeheartedly, surrendering many of the comforts he could legitimately claim as archbishop and giving lavishly to the poor. Some people, at the time and since, have doubted the sincerity of his conversion, but others accepted it as genuine, and it's undeniable that Becket had numerous opportunities to compromise with the king, and so save his life, if he had chosen to do so.  The validity of his conversion received further support when the monks who prepared his body discovered that he had been secretly wearing a penitential hair shirt under his episcopal vestments.

Richard Burton as St. Thomas Becket conducts 

excommunication rite in the film Becket

     In recent years, as government and other powerful social institutions have been encroaching more and more menacingly on the Church, Christians have been turning increasingly to St. Thomas Becket (as well as St. Thomas More, another Thomas martyred by another King Henry three and a half centuries later) as inspiration and intercessor. We do well to remember that both Thomases lost their worldly battles against their respective Henries. And while it is true that Henry II did public penance for the murder of St. Thomas Becket just three years after the fact, Henry VIII never looked back after the execution of St. Thomas More. He never showed any remorse for the seizure or destruction of all the Catholic Church’s properties in England (including the very intentional destruction of both the shrine to St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury and the saint's human remains housed there as relics). Henry shed no tears at the eradication of the Catholic Church itself in his kingdom, and the British Monarch is still the head of the Church of England to this day.

     The point is not that we shouldn’t fight to defend the Faith and the Church: we should do so, with all our strength, and call upon the intercession of St. Thomas Becket and all the saints to help us.  We cannot, however, pin our hopes on achieving victory over the temporal powers of this world.  Thomas Becket is not a Saint because he defeated Henry II, but because he overcame the enormous temptations of power and comfort in this world and remained faithful to Christ, even in the face of certain death.  

     Which brings us back to where we started - the intimate connection between Christmas and martyrdom.  In the Feast of the Nativity we celebrate the birth of Our Savior, who was born expressly to die on The Cross, defeated (apparently) by the temporal powers of the day. Whether or not we win our battles against the Henries, Herods, and Pilates of this world (the wisdom of this world, remember, is folly), the battles that really matter in the long run are not “against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). We celebrate the birth of Christ not because he has conquered Caiaphas or Tiberius Caesar (both of whom, after all, death destroyed centuries ago) but because he has “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

    So, again, Merry Christmas! Gaudete, Christus natus est!

St. Thomas Becket, pray for us!

Egeria Voices chants "Iacet granum oppressum palea", a responsory for the feast of St. Thomas Becket (for a good discussion of this chant, go to this article on Chantblog) - text of the responsory below:

R. Jacet granum oppressum palea,
     Justus coesus pravorum framea,
     Coelum domo commutans lutea.
V. Cadit custos vitis in vinea,
    Dux in castris, oultor in area,
    Coelum domo commutans lutea. 

R. The grain of wheat lies smothered by the chaff,
     the just man slain by the sword of sinners.
     Changing his house of clay for heaven.
V. The vine-keeper dies in his vineyard,
     the general in his camp, the husbandman on the place of his toil.
    Changing his house of clay for heaven. 

4th Day of Christmas: Holy Innocents and St. Anthony of Lerins

 Merry Christmas! The Christmas season is well upon us, and today we see it in all its complexity: we’re still singing carols and chiming bells, while at the same time recoiling from the horror of King Herod’s mass infanticide at Bethlehem, as commemorated in today’s Feast of the Holy Innocents.  Today’s feast reminds us not only of enormities committed against innocent life in our own day, but also that the baby lying in the wooden manger has escaped Herod’s wrath only so that he might die thirty years later on the wooden beams of the cross.

St. Anthony of Lerins

    In past years my 4th Day of Christmas post has been a meditation on the Holy Innocents (here and here, for instance), but this year I’m taking a different approach: as I said in my post on St. Servulus two days before Christmas, lesser observances are often overwhelmed during great celebrations such as Christmas and Easter.  There are, in fact other saints commemorated today, whose memory can be completely buried under the combined weight of the Feast of the Holy Innocents and the ongoing celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord. One of those, St. Anthony of Lerins (also known as St. Anthony the Hermit), will be my main focus today.

   As it happens, St. Anthony would probably be just as happy to be ignored, if his life here on earth is any indication. He born in the year 468 AD at Valeria in the region that the Romans had called Lower Pannonia, but which at this time was controlled by the Huns. He grew up among holy men: he lived for a time with St. Severinus of Noricum after his father died in Anthony’s ninth year; when St. Severinus himself died a few years later, Anthony moved to the household of his uncle Constantius, who was the bishop of Lorsch in what is now Bavaria. When he reached adulthood he became a hermit in the area of Lake Como in northern Italy.  As is often the case with holy hermits, his sanctity attracted a large number of followers. Seeking to recapture a little of the solitude for which he embraced the eremitical life, Anthony moved on from there, eventually settling in Lerins in France, where he spent his final two years on earth . . . and where the would-be recluse became famous throughout the district for sanctity and miracle-working.

    In the story of St. Anthony of Lerins we see a couple of themes that connect him to today’s commemoration of the Holy Innocents, and to the Child in the manger in whose honor we are celebrating this entire liturgical season.  St. Paul tells us in his Second Letter to the Corinthians:

[The Lord] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

"The Adoration of the Shepherds", by Matthias Stomer

We see God’s propensity to work his power through weakness throughout salvation history, most clearly when the infinite Second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word, manifests himself in this world as a tiny baby lying in a feeding trough in a stable.  We also see it in helplessness of the Holy Innocents slaughtered at Bethlehem, and in the life of a simple man who wanted nothing more than to live a life of holiness with his Lord. Notice on this day when we commemorate the sacrifice of those children, and the sanctity of St. Anthony, that the power of King Herod who brought so much destruction to the little boys of Bethlehem, and of the fearsome Huns under whose rule Anthony was born, has long since disappeared; their names have become little more than bywords for cruelty and violence.

King Herod

    It’s not that the power of the Herods, Huns, and other worldly tyrants has had no lasting effect: it’s just that it doesn’t accomplish what they expect it to.  St. Paul again provides us with the key when he says: “We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28) We see this idea applied in the non-scriptural passage in today’s Office of Readings, a homily by St. Quodvultdeus (his name means “What God wills” in Latin) on the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, in which he addresses King Herod:

Yet your throne is threatened by the source of grace – so small, yet so great – who is lying in the manger. He is using you, all unaware of it, to work out his own purposes freeing souls from captivity to the devil.  He has taken up the sons of the enemy into the ranks of God’s adopted children.

God makes all things work for the good of those who love him, including the evil machinations of wicked men like Herod.  How much more so, then, the good things in the life of a holy man like St. Anthony of Lerins? God gives us his gifts not so much for our own sake, but so that we might use them in the service of others, to help free their souls, as the homilist above puts it, from captivity to the devil. St. Anthony was seeking a quiet life of prayer and contemplation, but God gave him the grace to desire such a life, and the power to perform miracles, so that he might sanctify the people among whom he was living.  Let us all pray for the grace to likewise embrace God’s gifts to us, and to use them for What God Wills.

The Slaughter of the Holy Innocents inspired a number of songs during the Middle Ages, of which only the Coventry Carol is still commonly heard today.  Below is a haunting version of this beautiful song by the Irish vocal group Anúna:

3rd Day of Christmas: The Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

Today, the Solemnity of the Holy Family, commemorates the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, but also reminds us that “the family” in general, composed of father, mother, and children, is itself “holy”, a gift of God.  St. Paul underscores the sanctity of the family itself in his letter to the Ephesians:

 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31-32)

"The Flight Into Egypt" by Bartolome Murillo

Devotion to the Holy Family had been growing for some time, but the formal feast was not established until 1921, in response to increasing threats to the integrity of the family as traditionally understood.  The trends that already looked alarming a century ago have now grown and metastasized in ways that would have astounded our great grandparents. The family as traditionally understood is tottering under open and sustained attack.

It is in this regard that we see an interesting connection to tomorrow's Feast of the Holy Innocents, which commemorates King Herod’s slaughter of all the male children up to two years old in Bethlehem after he learned from the Magi that the Messiah had recently been born there.  The two different feasts, in fact, are really different sides of the same coin.  Where the Holy Family of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus is a model of God’s plan for the family, the slaughter of the Holy Innocents underscores how far we fall short, right now, of that model.  It is likewise noteworthy that one of the few places in Scripture where we see the Holy Family in action is the same passage from Matthew’s Gospel that describes the Holy Innocents:

And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they [the Magi] departed to their own country by another way. Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Out of Egypt have I called my son." Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. (Matthew 2:12 -16)

Guido Reni, "St. Joseph With The Infant Jesus"

Joseph, like fathers and fatherhood itself today (and the crisis of the family is, to a great degree, a crisis of fatherhood), is often overlooked and forgotten. We know from Matthew’s Gospel, however, that God saw to it that his son would have a human father when he was born (see Matthew 1:18-25).  In the passage from Luke above he is clearly the leader of the family.  Like his Old Testament namesake, and the Wise Men from the East, he is warned in a dream, and takes action: he has the vision to guide and protect his family.

Even our separated brethren in the Protestant communities, who have sometimes feared that our devotion to the earthly parents of Jesus might distract us from the Savior Himself, are coming to a new appreciation of the example of St. Joseph.  In a recent post I quoted Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who said:

For several years, I’ve been convinced that the model we most need in this day is that of Joseph of Nazareth. In a day when fathers are seen as expendable, we should look at Joseph, who sacrificed his own future for his wife and child. In a world filled with orphans in need of families, we should look at the example of this adopting father who poured out himself to become a father to one who was of no biological relation to him.

The family in our day and age is badly in need of guidance and protection.  On this Feast of the Holy Family, we would do well to pray for the intercession of the head and guardian of that Family, that he help our own families, and the institution of the family throughout the world.

Music for the Feast of the Holy Family: "Once in Royal David's City" by The Seekers

 

2nd Day of Christmas: St. Stephen, Good King Wenceslas & The Power of Christ's Love

 Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay round about
Soft and crisp and even

 

Today, the Second Day of Christmas, we (like King Wenceslas in the well-known carol quoted above) celebrate the Feast of St. Stephen.  The song does not actually tell us anything about Stephen himself: it describes instead how Good King Wenceslas goes out on the saint’s day, in an act of Christian charity, to share his Christmas bounty with a lonely and poverty-stricken old peasant.  And, whether or not the incident recounted in the song ever happened, Wenceslas himself was real.  He is based on Wenceslas I, Duke of Bohemia (the title of king was conferred on him posthumously by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I after his death in 935 AD). Wenceslas’ grandfather was the first Christian duke of Bohemia, but it was Wenceslas himself who firmly established the Church in Bohemia in the face of still strong pagan opposition, and aligned the church in his homeland with the Holy See in Rome.   

    Wenceslas stands at the beginning of Christianity among the Czechs. Likewise, St. Stephen’s feast is at the start of the Christmas season, and St. Stephen himself at the very beginning of the Church; he was, in fact, the first Christian to give his life for the Faith after Christ himself, for which reason he is known as the protomartyr, that is, first martyr. We find a vivid account of his death in the Acts of the Apostles:

But he [Stephen], full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God; and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God." But they cried out with a loud voice and stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him; and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. And as they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

And Saul was consenting to his death.  (Acts 7:55-8:1)

The Stoning of St. Stephen, by Paolo Uccello

    Just as our Christmas joy is tempered by the realization that the child lying in the manger must someday hang on the Cross, St. Stephen reminds us, a mere day after the Feast of the Nativity itself, that following the Child of Bethlehem can mean our own Calvary.  Jesus himself tells us: “"Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account” (Matthew 5:11).  How is it, then, that his coming is “Good news of great joy” (Luke 2:10)? Because, as our Lord goes on to say, “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:12). Indeed, as we see in the account above from the Acts of the Apostles, St. Stephen doesn’t go to his death wailing and gnashing his teeth at the cruelty and injustice of it all, but gazing joyfully on his Savior in Heaven, and begging for forgiveness for his persecutors.  Countless martyrs since have done the same, up to the present day.  Christ our Savior didn’t come to save us from unpleasantness in this world, but to save for eternal happiness with him in the next, by rescuing us from our own sin.

    Which brings us back to Good King Wenceslas, who has more in common with St. Stephen than we might at first realize. It’s true that he established a strong foundation for the Church, and exhibited exemplary personal piety and charity; it is also the case that not everyone appreciated those qualities, including other nobles still sympathetic to paganism, as well as his brother Boleslav, who treacherously murdered him.  

    At the time, it must have seemed that Wenceslas was the loser, and that his scheming brother had won, just as St. Stephen seemed to be vanquished by his persecutors.  Today, however, over one thousand years later, Good King Wenceslas is still loved by the Czechs, and remembered as one of the founders of their nation, while his brother carries the odious sobriquet Boleslav "the Cruel."  Of more significance than his worldly reputation is the fact that Wenceslas is remembered by the Church as Saint Wenceslas, Martyr, whose feast we celebrate on September 28th. Saints Stephen and Wenceslas stand together among the "white-robed army of martyrs" whom we see in the ancient prayer known as the Te Deum, gathered before the throne of God, praising their Creator, and interceding for all of us.

 

   “Good King Wenceslas” is considered a Christmas carol, although it does not seem to have any direct reference to the Nativity of Our Lord.  It does, however, encourage us to emulate the saints, such as Stephen and Wenceslas, who conformed themselves to Christ, especially as exemplars of Christ's love [see St. Fulgentius of Ruspe's sermon from today's Office of Readings: St. Stephen - The Armor of Love]. The words with which St. Wenceslas encourages his cold and frightened page in the carol could easily be spoken by Christ himself, and addressed to every one of us:

"Mark my footsteps, good my page

Tread thou in them boldly

Thou shall find the winter's rage

Freeze thy blood less coldly."

Merry Christmas!

Anthony Warlow  O Holy Night  1991

The Christmas Conversion of St.Thérèse

 In the lives of the Saints we can find some amazing stories of conversion: the Risen Lord literally knocking his persecutor Saul to ground and blinding him, in order to raise him up as St. Paul; the rich and spoiled son of an Italian cloth merchant who needed a year in a dungeon as a POW followed by a near fatal illness before he cast off self-indulgence to become St. Francis of Assissi; the vain and vainglorious Spanish nobleman who had his leg nearly shot off with a cannonball, and then went through months of excruciating recovery, before he could begin to see God in All Things as St. Ignatius of Loyola.  How startlingly different, and yet how strikingly the same is the conversion of the little French girl Thérèse Martin, now St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, as she tells it her autobiographical Story of A Soul: 

     I had a constant and ardent desire to advance in virtue, but often my actions were spoilt by imperfections. My extreme sensitiveness made me almost unbearable. All arguments were useless. I simply could not correct myself of this miserable fault. . .  A miracle on a small scale was needed to give me strength of character all at once, and God worked this long-desired miracle on Christmas Day, 1886. . . 

     Now I will tell you, dear Mother, how I received this inestimable grace of complete conversion. I knew that when we reached home after Midnight Mass I should find my shoes in the chimney-corner, filled with presents, just as when I was a little child, which proves that my sisters still treated me as a baby. Papa, too, liked to watch my enjoyment and hear my cries of delight at each fresh surprise that came from the magic shoes, and his pleasure added to mine. But the time had come when Our Lord wished to free me from childhood's failings, and even withdraw me from its innocent pleasures. On this occasion, instead of indulging me as he generally did, Papa seemed vexed, and on my way upstairs I heard him say: "Really all this is too babyish for a big girl like Thérèse, and I hope it is the last year it will happen." His words cut me to the quick. Céline, knowing how sensitive I was, whispered: "Don't go downstairs just yet—wait a little, you would cry too much if you looked at your presents before Papa." But Thérèse was no longer the same—Jesus had changed her heart.

     Choking back my tears, I ran down to the dining-room, and, though my heart beat fast, I picked up my shoes, and gaily pulled out all the things, looking as happy as a queen. Papa laughed, and did not show any trace of displeasure, and Céline thought she must be dreaming. But happily it was a reality; little Thérèse had regained, once for all, the strength of mind which she had lost at the age of four and a half.

     On this night of grace, the third period of my life began—the most beautiful of all, the one most filled with heavenly favours. In an instant Our Lord, satisfied with my good will, accomplished the work I had not been able to do during all these years. Like the Apostle I could say: "Master, we have laboured all night, and have taken nothing."

     More merciful to me even than to His beloved disciples, Our Lord Himself took the net, cast it, and drew it out full of fishes. He made me a fisher of men. Love and a spirit of self-forgetfulness took possession of me, and from that time I was perfectly happy.

The Lord didn’t need to knock Thérèse down, beat her up, or have her shot in order to get her full attention; all he needed was to allow her to overhear a couple of stray comments from the father she loved so dearly.  That wounded her deeply enough to reveal to her the reality of her own selfishness, and to open her up completely to Christ’s Grace.  The meaning of conversion, after all, is to “turn around”, away from a way of life dictated by our own desires to one truly centered on God.

     Now, most of us need a wake-up more like the one which was granted to St. Paul or St. Francis; perhaps not quite as dramatic, but most of us, I suspect, are much more wrapped up in our sin than was little Thérèse Martin.  But that is precisely why the Little Flower’s conversion stands out: even someone who seems to be doing just about everything right is still in need of conversion, and not just in one instant, but continuously over a lifetime (and of course she did experience much greater suffering later in her short life). Sin will always be trying to turn us back. 

     St. Thérèse’s conversion story reminds us of something else.  There will always be opportunities for conversion.  We don’t need to go out looking for trouble, because we will all have ample opportunity to experience The Fall in our lives.  The more enmeshed we are in sin, however, and the higher the walls between ourselves and God, the harder our fall must be.  Wouldn’t it be better to come to Christ like Thérèse did, without too much collateral damage to ourselves and to others?

     Finally, on Christmas Day in 1886 St. Thérèse learned to turn her hurt and disappointment into generosity of spirit, her selfishness to selflessness.  What a wonderful reminder to all of us (myself very much included) that we need to ask our Lord for the Grace to do the same. O come, O come Emmanuel!