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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on February 14, 2012, 10:13 am
Happy Valentine’s Day, Soul Friends!
We really liked this blog we’re sharing with you today and its story of the REAL Saint Valentine. Valentine was imprisoned, and subsequently martyred, in the third century. His crime? Performing illegal marriages! It seems that under the laws of the Roman Empire, Christians were deemed unworthy of the rights and privileges of legal wedlock because of their immoral lifestyle... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on January 4, 2012, 1:50 pm
 For most Americans, Christmas is long over. The holiday season that began when the mob stormed the gates of the mall very, very early on the morning after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”) ended on the day after Christmas, when disappointed crowds filled the stores to return gifts they didn’t like and buy what they really wanted. And that makes me sad.
Today is the eleventh day of the traditional twelve days of Christmas, which ends with the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. For Christians, these twelve days are supposed to be the heart of the holiday season—but those of us who try to keep Christmas going into early January are really at odds with the 21st century. I happen to be one of those people. And I’m still thinking about Santa Claus on this cold January morning!
This cultural conflict between the “secular” and the “religious” celebration of Christmas is a very old one. The Church has been railing against the materialism of the holiday for over a thousand years... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on December 30, 2011, 7:30 am
 Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about how the “real” Saint Nicholas evolved over time, and across three continents, into the ho-ho-ho-ing, milk-and-cookies-eating, reindeer-and-sleigh-driving Santa Claus we have come to know. What has struck me, over and over again, is how closely the evolving “myth” of Santa Claus has expressed the zeitgeist (“the spirit of a culture”) of his time and place. More than 1500 years, and several dozen human generations, separate the Greek-speaking Turkish bishop, Nicholas, and the Santa Claus who helped usher in the New Year in 1900. The original Nicholas would find it hard to recognize his own image—and yet, through all the distortions of the passing centuries, certain aspects of the myth remain faithful and true, still carrying into the world a message of generosity and bounty.
We start with a wonder-working Holy Man, a high-ranking member of the established Church, whose life was held up by that Church as an example of service to Jesus Christ and the Christian community... Read More.
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Posted by Ellyn Sanna on December 23, 2011, 10:21 am
As you come to the end of this Advent season, consider Rahner's final words of advice:
This is precisely the message of Christmas: that in reality God is close to you, just where you are. . . . He is there with tender affection. He says: Do not be afraid. Trust to this close presence; it is not emptiness. Cast off, and you will find. Relinquish and you are rich. Because Christ accepted human life, you too can dare to do what he did. . . . For he is both God and human: giver, gift, and reception; call and answer in one. . . . We would experience ourselves differently if God had not been born human. And if we have the courage to understand ourselves in a way which can only be done in grace and faith ... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on December 21, 2011, 8:36 am
 The Saint Nicholas that Clement Clarke Moore introduced to the world in his 1822 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (aka “Twas the Night Before Christmas”) is a far cry from the Catholic bishop who was still (mysteriously) visiting Calvinist Holland and a very long way, indeed, from the fourth century wonder-working saint from Turkey. Moore’s “right jolly old elf,” who flew over the rooftops of old New York in a “miniature sleigh,” pulled by “eight tiny reindeer” is a supernatural being with very little resemblance to a traditional Christian saint, although he is clearly identified as “Saint Nicholas,” or, simply, “Saint Nick,” several times in the poem. And the father of the house, awakened by the clatter on the snowy lawn, recognized “in a moment” that the jolly, fur-clad little man with his snow-white beard, a “nose like a cherry,” and a belly that “shook when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly” was Saint Nicholas, bringing gifts for the children... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on December 20, 2011, 8:44 am
 In 1609 the Dutch East India Company ship, Den Halve Maen (Half Moon) entered one of the greatest natural harbors on Earth, now known as New York Bay. Its English captain, Henry Hudson, sailed up the mighty river that bears his name as far as present-day Albany, claiming all the territory he explored for the Netherlands. In the decades that followed, the Dutch established the colony of New Netherlands--with its capital, New Amsterdam, at the foot of Manhattan Island.
The Protestant Dutch farmers and traders who settled New Netherlands--what is now northern New Jersey, the Hudson Valley, the City of New York, and western Long Island--brought their love of the old Catholic Saint Nicholas with them. Sinterklaas rode his white horse over the rooftops of New Netherlands and came down the chimney to leave goodies and toys in well-behaved children’s shoes on the eve of December 6, just as he had in Holland.
The Dutch colony peacefully changed hands in 1666 and was renamed New York by the British... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on December 19, 2011, 10:56 am
 By the time of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Saint Nicholas was well established as the great December gift-giver across a broad swath of Europe: from Holland and Belgium, across the flat north of Germany, and down into Austria and Central Europe. Across the continent, he was recognized as a tall, dignified, and white-bearded gentleman, dressed in the traditional red vestments of a Roman Catholic bishop, complete with miter and crosier.
Through the bleak, dark days of early winter, children looked forward, with excitement and a certain amount of anxiety, to a visit from Saint Nicholas on the eve of his December 6 feast day. The established custom was for children to leave their shoes by the fireside or on the doorstep, sometimes filled with a treat for Saint Nicholas’s horse, before they went to bed... Read More.
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Posted by Ellyn Sanna on December 18, 2011, 9:38 am
At Advent, we prepare for Christmas, one of the central holidays of Christianity. We walk a fine line when celebrating this holiday publicly, however, with conservatives often feeling that public dollars should be spent on celebrating a holiday that is part of America's cultural and religious heritage--while liberals works to be sensitive to the fact that we share our nation with many who do not celebrate the birth of Christ. It's a difficult line to walk; sometimes it's even a difficult line to see... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on December 15, 2011, 9:03 am
 By the year 1000, Nicholas was a well-known and popular Saint in the East, where he is still much revered in both the Russian and Greek Orthodox Churches. But his hometown of Myra was very much a part of the expanding and vigorous Islamic world at the turn of the first millennium, and his once-sacred bones lay almost forgotten in a disused cathedral in a thoroughly Muslim town.
In the year 1087, a group of sailors from the Italian port city of Bari took it upon themselves to reclaim (some say “steal”) the holy bones of Saint Nicholas from the “infidels” of Myra. A millennium later, his relics still lie in the great Romanesque Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Bari. Not long ago, physical anthropologists examined the almost-complete skeleton reputed to be the bones of Saint Nicholas and described them as being those of a robustly-built man in his sixties who stood about exactly five feet tall (a right jolly old elf?) and had a broken nose.
During the Middle Ages, tens of thousands of Western Europeans took part in a series of religious wars, known as the Crusades, against the Islamic rulers of the Middle East... Read More.
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Posted by Ellyn Sanna on December 13, 2011, 8:36 am
So far Rahner’s Advent ingredients have been:
- preparation
- time to be alone
- self-acceptance
So as we sit alone, preparing our hearts by having the courage to be truly present to whatever we find there in the dark silence, what next? Here are Rahner’s next words of advice:
You will discover how everything that emerges from that silence is surrounded by an indefinable distance, permeated as it were by something that resembles a void. Do not yet call it God! It is only what points to God and, by its namelessness and limitlessness, intimates to us that God is something other than one more thing added to those we usually have to deal with. It makes us aware of God’s presence, if we are still and do not flee in terror from the mystery which is present and prevails in the silence—do not flee even to the Christmas-tree or to the more tangible religious concepts which can kill religion... Read More.
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Posted by Billy Pilgrim on December 12, 2011, 9:05 am
 Many people may have at least a vague awareness that our modern Santa Claus has some close connection to a Christian Saint by the name of Nicholas. Even in the twenty-first century, he is still familiarly known as “Saint Nick,” often preceded by the descriptive “jolly, old.” The name Santa Claus itself (from the Dutch “Sinterklaas”) makes this connection pretty clear: “Santa” from the Latin Sanctus, meaning holy, and Claus, a Germanic-language nickname for Nicholas.
Saint Nicholas was, in fact, a real person. He was born into a wealthy Christian family in around the year 270, in what is now modern Turkey but was then a Greek-speaking province of the Roman Empire. The facts of his life are shrouded in antiquity and legend, but he was apparently a good and holy man renowned for his generosity and for his loving care of the people of Myra, a port city on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, where he served as bishop. At his death, on December 6,343, he was popularly proclaimed as a saint by the people of Myra, where his mortal remains became an object of veneration for centuries... Read More.
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Posted by Ellyn Sanna on December 9, 2011, 8:42 am
Rahner’s next ingredient in his Advent “recipe”:
Do not talk to yourself the way you do with others, the people we argue and quarrel with even when they are not there. Instead, wait, listen, without expecting any unusual experience. Do not pour yourself out in accusation, do not indulge yourself. Allow yourself to meet yourself in silence. Perhaps then you will have a terrible feeling. Perhaps you will realize how remote all the people are whom you are dealing with every day and to whom you are supposed to be bound by ties of love. Perhaps you will perceive nothing but a sinister feeling of emptiness and deadness.
Bear with yourself.
We don’t usually connect “terrible” and “sinister” feelings with Advent; feelings of remoteness, emptiness, and deadness are not ones we associate with the Christmas season! But if we’re honest with ourselves, haven’t we all experienced these sorts of feelings at some point or another during this season of joy and light?
When we do, we tend to push them away, to hide these feelings from ourselves... Read More.
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