The Aroma of Sanctity

It seems like such a long time since the Vicar has allowed us to write anything of substance on this blog; we’re so sorry if your lives have seemed strangely empty without us.  Luckily, the Vicar has kindly deigned to spend a minute or two in the Vicarage today, so we can finally get onto the computer.  That’s just as well, since we couldn’t let today pass without comment.

Yes, dear friends, it is the Feast Day of S. Peter Chanel, that most fragrant of Saints.  He was a 19th Century Missionary in the Pacific Islands, who worked hard in education and caring for the sick before being beaten to death with a club and having his body hacked to pieces with hatchets. 

Sadly, the perfume of saintliness does not seem to have spread to the Vicarage, which has only just stopped smelling of bins.  The Vicar, in her usual houseproud way, spent about two weeks moaning to anyone who would listen (and quite a few people who, sensibly, would not) about how the downstairs smelt like something was rotting in it. 

Guess why that was…  Something was rotting in it, namely half a lemon, which the Vicar had brought home from Church and then left lying about in the sitting room.  It was located and humanely destroyed by the Head Server.  For once, the Vicar was actually grateful, although this may be because the Head Server also found some tonic water and half a bottle of gin in the same place.

You’d think that the sweet smelling savour of the Vicarage would encourage the Vicar to stay home, but not a bit of it.  She’s been out gallivanting all weekend.  On Friday, which is her day off when she is supposed to spend quality time with us, she spent most of the day at some sort of exciting social event called Kairos.  We tried hard to prevent her from going (Martha was even sick on the hall floor), but it was to no avail.  Sunday was no better, as she was at the APCM (we think this is something like the YMCA, but we don’t know if those nice boys from the Village People were there).  But the worst of it all was Saturday, when she left the house at 5:30 am (no, we didn’t know that time existed either) and didn’t return until about 10:30 at night.

Actually, we didn’t mind being left alone, as we had a lovely young visitor in the afternoon who gave us lots of cuddles and let us watch the telly.  But we did mind the Vicar trying to claim that she was out doing valuable pastoral work on the Parish Picnic in Bayeux. 

This is clearly nonsense, as we know for a fact that Bayeux has a really good scratching mat, but nobody brought it home for us.

 

 

Anyway, we don’t believe that the Vicar did a stroke of work all day.  We have it on good authority from all the picnickers that she’s nothing but a layabout.

HOPE not Hate

We are black and white.  So is Britain.  Let’s keep it that way.

HOPE not hate 2008: Celebrating modern Britain

For Justice and Love

Today is the feast day of Saint Alphege (or Alphage, if you happen to live in Burnt Oak; or Ælfheah if you happen to speak Anglo-Saxon), Archbishop of Canterbury in the early 11th Century. 

He was captured and held hostage by Viking invaders, but refused to let his poverty-stricken people pay the ransom for his return, and therefore gave his life for them.

You can read the full story here, told by Fr. Percy Dearmer in a ‘ripping yarns for kittens’ kind of a way.

Alphege was martyred in Greenwich, not far from where we used to live in South London, and he is one of England’s great Saints.  Saint Thomas Becket prayed to him just before he himself was martyred in Canterbury Cathedral.  (Being Archbishop of Canterbury must be a dangerous job.  We shall refuse it when offered.)

Later on, Archbishop Lanfranc (boo!) tried to remove Alphege from the Kalendar, on the grounds that he was not a true martyr, having died for his people rather than explicitly for his faith.  But good old Saint Anselm (hurray!) argued that whoever is a martyr for justice and love is a martyr for Christ.

We are pleased to report that, despite being on the side of justice and love, we have not thus far been pelted with any strange missiles.  We did, however, spend a pleasant afternoon pelting sweet papers and bits of fish finger about the Vicarage.  Ah, happy days.

The Holiest Hobo

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Benedict Joseph Labre, also known as the Beggar of Perpetual Adoration.

He was born in 1748 in the north of France, the eldest of fifteen children of a prosperous shopkeeper. He was educated by his uncle, a parish priest, and was religious from a very early age. At the age of sixteen, he attempted to join the Trappists, Carthusians, and Cistercians, but each Order rejected him.

He believed God was calling him to a life of poverty and pilgrimage, as a mendicant or “Fool for Christ”.  He first walked to Rome, then to most of the major shrines of Europe, including Loreto, Assisi and Santiago de Compostela.  During these pilgrimages, he always travelled on foot and slept in the open or in a corner of a room.  His clothes were muddy and ragged, and he ate only what he was given through begging, often sharing it with others.  His only possessions were two rosaries made out of wild seeds, a New Testament, a prayer book and The Imitation of Christ.  He talked rarely, prayed often, and accepted abuse with humility.  In prayer, he would often swoon, and sometimes levitate or bilocate. He cured some of the other homeless people he met and miraculously multiplied bread for them.

In the last years of his life, he lived rough on the streets of Rome, often sleeping in the walls of the Colosseum.  He was a familiar figure in the city and became known as the “saint of the Forty Hours” for his dedication to the Quarant’ Ore (forty hours of devotion before the Blessed Sacrament).

In his final weeks, he collapsed outside the Church of Santa Maria dei Monti in Rome just after attending Mass, and was taken into a nearby house.  He died there of malnutrition on the Wednesday of Holy Week, on this day in 1783.

The spiritual writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton, in a short piece called “Integrity,” wrote:

“One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him.  In fact they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud: but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends.  And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of ‘perfection’ to his own life.  He cannot seem to make his own life fit in with the books.
Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him.  He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict Joseph Labre who wanted to be a Trappist and a Carthusian and succeeded in neither.  He died in some street in Rome.
And yet the only canonized Saint, venerated by the whole Church, who has lived either as a Cistercian or a Carthusian since the Middle Ages, is Saint Benedict Joseph Labre.”

 Who knows what saintliness and beauty lies at the heart of tramps, vagabonds and alleycats?  From Jesus Christ to Joe Hill and beyond, the holy hoboes of God move from place to place, disregarded by the world and suspected of madness or worse – but perhaps they bring a little light and love to the places where they stop.

The Vicar says that all this reminds her of a great TV programme called The Littlest Hobo, which she loved as a child despite the fact that (as she embarrassingly admitted in the newspaper yesterday) it made her cry every week.  We can confirm – sad but true – that she really does know all the words to the theme song.  Let’s just hope that she doesn’t feel moved to sing them at Mass this evening, as she really will cry – and probably so will everyone else…