Christmas Every Day

Earliest date for celebration of Danish Great Prayer Day

The Lutheran Church of Denmark explains it thusly:

Great Prayer Day (in Danish Store Bededag) is a special Danish festival. It falls on the fourth Friday after Easter Sunday, i.e. somewhere between mid-April and mid-May. When it was put on the Statute Book in 1686 by King Christian V it was meant to be a day of prayer, fasting and penitence. Nowadays most Danes associate the Great Prayer Day with hot wheat buns (in Danish: varme hveder). In recent years immigrants have revived the Great Prayer Day (or National Prayer Day) as a day of prayer for the nation and for peace in the world, and people from various church denominations gather to pray and worship together. The event is organised by the Church Integration Ministry the Evangelical Alliance of Denmark. 

When the Great Prayer Day was introduced in 1686 there were a number of other fast and prayer days too. The architect behind three of these days, including the Great Prayer Day, was Bishop Hans Bagger from Roskilde. By 1770 there were 22 holy days in Denmark. Struensee, at the time royal physician and a minister in the Danish government, became the man behind a reform that abolished half of these, e.g. the Third Day of Christmas, Three Kings’ Day, Candlemas and St John’s Day. 

 In the past, on the evening before the Great Prayer Day, the church bells announced its coming. On Great Prayer Day itself, all kinds of work and trade were forbidden. People were expected to fast until the church services were over and to abstain from travelling, playing and gambling as well as from other sorts of “worldly vanity”. The bakers, too, were not allowed to work. So instead of making fresh bread on Friday they began baking wheat buns on Thursday. These could be heated up the following day. Today baking is no longer forbidden on Great Prayer Day, but it still remains common to eat hot wheat buns the evening before.

1742

The first performance of Handel’s Messiah

Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759) was a German composer who settled in England in 1712. Though he began his career as a prolific producer of Italianate opera, he is best known for his oratorio, Messiah, about the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. Only a part of it relates to the Nativity and it was originally meant as an Easter piece, but it is now most frequently performed during the Christmas season.

The music was written by Handel, working without a commission, in a mere twenty-four days in 1741. The composer claimed that he was literally inspired: “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself.” His librettist Charles Jennens was less impressed, saying that Handel’s treatment of his text was “not near so good as he might and ought to have done…There are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah.” Jennens assembled his libretto from scripture and was intent on refuting the contemporary Deism with its notions of a watch-maker God who makes no interventions in human life, that was so popular among the intelligentsia of his time.

The first performance of Messiah was in Dublin where it was meant to raise money for the benefit of “the Prisoners in several Gaols, and for the support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen Street, and of the Charitable Infirmary on the Inn’s Quay.” The oratorio was extremely well-received by the audience. The contralto solo by the scandalous Susanna Cibber (she had fled England with her adulterous lover) prompted the chancellor of the cathedral to rise and shout “Woman, for this all thy sins be forgiven thee.” It was less popular at first in London but has come to be recognized around the world as the quintessential classical Christmas composition. Following an example set by King George II the audience customarily rises during the “Hallelujah” chorus. It is also common for audiences to bring their own scores and sing along with the choir.

Handel’s original version was written for a modest-sized orchestra and chorus but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became fashionable to stage the piece with massive numbers of instrumentalists and singers. More recently, attempts have been made to return to the smaller ensembles which Handel intended.

345

Persians martyr 120 Christians

Alvin Butler (1711-1773) was an English Roman Catholic priest who wrote a massive series of hagiographies known today as Butler’s Lives of the Saints. In it he chronicles the careers of hundreds of saints, some of them extremely obscure. In the following excerpt, Butler reminds us that even after the Roman empire had ceased to persecute Christians, other regimes were less tolerant. In the fourth century the mighty Persian empire of the Sassanid dynasty was a Zoroastrian stronghold and prone to regard foreign sects with suspicion and violence. Shapur the Great (309-79), whom Butler calls “Sapor”, was continually at war with Rome and perhaps as a consequence instituted a harsh campaign against Christianity:

Sapor being at Seleucia, caused to be apprehended in the neighboring places one hundred and twenty Christians, of which nine were virgins, consecrated to God; the others were priests, deacons, or of the inferior clergy. They lay six months in filthy stinking dungeons, till the end of winter: during all which space Jazdundocta, a very rich virtuous lady of Arbela, the capital city of Hadiabena supported them by her charities, not admitting of a partner in that good work. During this interval they were often tortured, but always courageously answered the president that they would never adore the sun, a mere creature for God; and begged he would finish speedily their triumph by death, which would free them from dangers and insults.

Jazdundocta, hearing from the court one day that they were to suffer the next morning, flew to the prison, gave to every one of them a fine white long robe, as to chosen spouses of the heavenly bridegroom; prepared for them a sumptuous supper, served and waited on them herself at table, gave them wholesome exhortations, and read the holy scriptures to them. They were surprised at her behavior, but could not prevail on her to tell them the reason. The next morning she returned to the prison, and told them she had been informed that that was the happy morning in which they were to receive their crown, and be joined to the blessed spirits. She earnestly recommended herself to their prayers for the pardon of her sins, and that she might meet them at the last day, and live eternally with them.

Soon after, the king’s order for their immediate execution was brought to the prison. As they went out of it Jazdundocta met them at the door, fell at their feet, took hold of their hands, and kissed them. The guards hastened them on, with great precipitation, to the place of execution; where the judge who presided at their tortures asked them again if any of them would adore the sun, and receive a pardon. They answered that their countenance must show him they met death with joy, and contemned this world and its light, being perfectly assured of receiving an immortal crown in the kingdom of heaven. He then dictated the sentence of death, whereupon their heads were struck off.

Jazdundocta, in the dusk of the evening, brought out of the city two undertakers, or embalmers for each body, caused them to wrap the bodies in fine linen, and carry them in coffins, for fear of the Magians, to a place at a considerable distance from the town where she buried them in deep graves, with monuments, five and five in a grave. They were of the province called Hadiabena, which contained the greatest part of the ancient Assyria and was in a manner peopled by Christians. Helena, queen of the Hadiabenians, seems to have embraced Christianity in the second century. Her son Izates, and his successors, much promoted the faith; so that Sozomen says the country was almost entirely Christian. These one hundred and twenty martyrs suffered at Seleucia, in the year of Christ 345, of king Sapor the thirty-sixth, and the sixth of his great persecution, on the 6th day of the moon of April, which was the 21st of that month.

St Richard of Chichester

RICHARD was born, 1197, in the little town of Wyche, eight miles from Worcester, England. He and his elder brother were left orphans when young, and Richard gave up the studies which he loved, to farm his brother’s impoverished estate. His brother, in gratitude for Richard’s successful care, proposed to make over to him all his lands; but he refused both the estate and the offer of a brilliant marriage, to study for the priesthood at Oxford. In 1235 he was appointed, for his learning and piety, chancellor of that University, and afterwards, by St. Edmund of Canterbury, chancellor of his diocese. He stood by that Saint in his long contest with the king, and accompanied him into exile. After St. Edmund’s death Richard returned to England to toil as a simple curate, but was soon elected Bishop of Chichester in preference to the worthless nominee of Henry III. The king in revenge refused to recognize the election, and seized the revenues of the see. Thus Richard found himself fighting the same battle in which St. Edmund had died. He went to Lyons, was there consecrated by Innocent IV in 1245, and returning to England, in spite of his poverty and the king’s hostility, exercised fully his episcopal rights, and thoroughly reformed his see. After two years his revenues were restored.

Young and old loved St. Richard. He gave all he had, and worked miracles, to feed the poor and heal the sick; but when the rights or purity of the Church were concerned he was inexorable. A priest of noble blood polluted his office by sin; Richard deprived him of his benefice, and refused the king’s petition in his favor. On the other hand, when a knight violently put a priest in prison, Richard compelled the knight to walk round the priest’s church with the same log of wood on his neck to which he had chained the priest; and when the burgesses of Lewes tore a criminal from the church and hanged him, Richard made them dig up the body from its unconsecrated grave, and bear it back to the sanctuary they had violated. He lived an ascetic lifestyle and was a vegetarian.

Richard died in 1253, while preaching, at the Pope’s command, a crusade against the Saracens. His tomb was in Chichester cathedral was the site of pilgrimage and miracles but it was plundered during the reign of Henry VIII when he was under the influence of Thomas Cromwell. The royal order for its 1538 destruction reads:

Forasmuch as we have lately been informed that in our cathedral church of Chichester there hath been used long heretofore, and yet at this day is used, much superstition and a certain kind of idolatry about the shrine and bones of a certain bishop of the same, whom they call Saint Richard, and a certain resort there of common people, which being men of simplicity are seduced by the instigation of some of the clergy, who take advantage of their credulity to ascribe miracles of healing and other virtues to the said bones, that God only hath authority to grant. . . . . We have appointed you, with all convenient diligence to repair unto the said cathedral church, and to take away the shrine and bones of that bishop called Saint Richard, with all ornaments to the said shrine belonging, and all other the reliques and reliquaries, the silver, the gold, and all the jewels belonging to said shrine, and that not only shall you see them to be safely and surely conveyed unto our Tower of London there to be bestowed and placed at your arrival , but also ye shall see both the place where the shrine was kept, destroyed even to the ground and all such other images of the said church ,where about any notable superstition is used, to be carried and conveyed away, so that our subjects shall by them in no ways be deceived hereafter, but that they pay to Almighty God and to no earthly creature such honour as is due unto him the Creator. . . . . Given under our privy seal at our manor of Hampton Court, the 14th day of Dec., in the 30th year of our reign.

1788

Death of Charles Wesley

Charles Wesley (1707-88) was one of the greatest contributors to Protestant hymnody in the English language and an able companion to his brother John’s evangelistic project.

The Wesley brothers were sons of a clergyman and attended Oxford University where their regular devotions and lives of service earned them and their friends the nicknames “Methodist” and “Holy Club”.  After an abortive attempt to spread the gospel in the American colony of Georgia, Charles and John returned to London where they both underwent conversion experiences in 1738. While John would undertake a massive program of itinerant preaching, Charles settled in London where he would write most of his 6,000 hymns.

Among the most popular of his compositions were “Arise, My Soul, Arise”, “And Can It Be”, “Christ, the Lord, is Risen Today”, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”, “Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending”, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”. On Christmas morning, 1739 Wesley was walking to church when he was struck by the beauty of the ringing bells. He was thus inspired to create a piece which he called “For Christmas Day” and which began “Hark, how all the welkin rings” — welkin being an antique term for the heavens. Over the years, a number of authors including Wesley’s fellow-Methodist George Whitefield and Martin Madan revised the poem until it gradually assumed the form of the hymn we now know as “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”.

1881

Basingstoke rioters attack the Salvation Army

“Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence. Clean straw for nothing.” The consumption of cheap liquor in the nineteenth century by what Oscar Wilde termed the “drinking classes” was a major social problem, a leading cause of death, marital breakdown, unemployment and violence. The temperance movement sought to make the manufacture, sale and use of alcohol illegal and the Salvation Army in England was in the forefront of this cause.

In September 1880 the Salvation Army arrived in the Hampshire town of Basingstoke proclaiming an anti-drink crusade that would “open fire on Sin and Satan.” Though their presence was welcomed by some Dissenting churches, pub-owners and brewers (major employers in the town) saw the Salvationists as a threat to their livelihood and many of their customers perceived a threat to their main source of enjoyment. Within a month sporadic acts of violence had been directed at those preaching teetotalism. In March of 1881 organized opposition appeared in the form of the “Massagainians”, sponsored by local brewers who gathered in mobs to confront Salvation Army marches. The hooligans greatly outnumbered the Salvationists and the police who had to call in reinforcements. Windows were smashed, a home was burnt, assaults took place and the Riot Act had to be read on a number of occasions. Eventually ten men were sent to jail for their violence but on their release they were treated as heroes by many in Basingstoke:

 They were fetched home in carriages with postillions. They had a band of hundreds of people to welcome them home, with flags flying and strings of flags across Winchester Street. Dinner was held for them in the Corn Exchange and each received a silver watch. The Corn Exchange was crammed full and the noise they kicked up was awful.

The town was clearly divided on the subject. In August 1881 the Magistrates were presented with two petitions: one signed by the Vicar of Basingstoke and 498 others, called for the Salvation Army marches to be banned as they were disturbing the peace and quiet of the town; the other, signed by the minister of the Congregational Church and 613 others, called for the processions to be properly protected. The violence continued on and off for a year before the brewers realized that their business was not going to be affected unduly.

The Annunciation to Mary

“And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph of the house of David: and the virgin’s name was Mary.” The story of the angel’s visit to Mary and her agreement with the divine plan that she should conceive a child by the Holy Spirit is the subject of Luke’s gospel 1: 26-38. It has been the inspiration for centuries of artists fascinated by the meeting between an angel of the Lord and a simple country girl. Among the more spectacular depictions are The Cestello Annunciation by Botticelli with Gabriel kneeling before the Virgin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini where Mary cowers on her bed. In the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, Veronese’s Annunciation (above) shows the angel wheeling into the Virgin’s room still in flight. Common iconographic elements are a lily, a dove or a ray of light.

Since the second century Christians have fixed the date of March 25 as the Feast of the Annunciation. March 25 was known as Lady Day in medieval England and was considered the first day of the new legal year.

St Cuthbert of Lindisfarne

Cuthbert (634-87) was an English Benedictine monk born in Northumbria during a time of strife between that Christian kingdom and pagan neighbour Mercia. He seems to have been a soldier in those wars before joining a monastery that practiced the Celtic ritual. When his monastery adopted the Roman approach, he moved to another establishment but finally accepted the decision of the 664 Synod of Whitby that standardized northern English worship on the Latin model.

By this time he already had a reputation for saintliness and miracle working so he was chosen by Theodore of Tarsus, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to become prior of the great Lindisfarne monastery and guide their shift to the Roman usage. He retired for a time to a life of contemplation but reluctantly abandoned that when asked to be bishop. After his death his tomb became the site of numerous miracles.

The story of St Cuthbert’s body deserves a book of its own. When the Vikings invaded in 875, the body of the saint was removed for safety and went on a seven-year journey through Cumberland, Galloway and Northumberland. In 883 it was placed in a church at Chester-le-Street, but was moved a century later to Ripon when another invasion loomed. On its way through Durham a miracle indicated that this was where the saint wished to finally rest. When William the Conqueror was laying waste to the north of England in 1069, Cuthbert was taken to Lindisfarne and then back again to Durham. In 1104, his shrine was transferred to Durham cathedral where it was discovered that the body remain uncorrupt (a sure sign of sainthood) and that it held the head of the martyr St Oswald. As the stained glass above indicates, this has become Cuthbert’s symbol. During the Middle Ages, his shrine was the destination of thousands of pilgrims. During the English Reformation when so many holy sites were destroyed in fits of iconoclasm, Cuthbert’s body was moved in 1542 to a secret location which, legend says, only a few Benedictines in each generation know of.

1314 Burning of Jacques de Molay and Templar leaders

One of the most cynically evil acts in French history was the unjust prosecution of the Templar Order by King Philip IV. The enormously rich order had become the principal banker of the French monarchy, a regime which had ruthlessly squeezed all other sources of revenue. Its vast holdings and secrecy had aroused suspicion in the populace which saw that the order had lost its crusading zeal since being expelled from the Holy Land in the 1290s. This provided Philip with the opportunity of accusing the Knights of all kinds of perfidy: heresy, demon worship, sodomy, collusion with Muslim powers; 127 charges in all. The leadership of the Order was subjected to torture until they confessed to the accusations, setting the stage for a public condemnation in which they were to be sentenced to life imprisonment, but where Jacques de Molay upstaged the proceedings and regained his integrity at the cost of his life. According to a medieval account:

The cardinals dallied with their duty until 18 March 1314, when, on a scaffold in front of  Notre Dame, Jacques de Molay, Templar Grand Master, Geoffroi de Charney, Master of Normandy, Hughes de Peraud, Visitor of France, and Godefroi de Gonneville, Master of Aquitaine, were brought forth from the jail in which for nearly seven years they had lain, to receive the sentence agreed upon by the cardinals, in conjunction with the Archbishop of Sens  and some other prelates whom they had called in. Considering the offences which the culprits had confessed and confirmed, the penance imposed was in accordance with rule — that of perpetual imprisonment. The affair was supposed to be concluded when, to the dismay of the prelates and wonderment of the assembled crowd, Jacques de Molay and Geoffroi de Charney arose. They had been guilty, they said, not of the crimes imputed to them, but of basely betraying their Order to save their own lives. It was pure and holy; the charges were fictitious and the confessions false. Hastily the cardinals delivered them to the Provost of Paris, and retired to deliberate on this unexpected contingency, but they were saved all trouble. When the news was carried to Philippe he was furious. A short consultation with his council only was required. The canons pronounced that a relapsed heretic was to be burned without a hearing; the facts were notorious and no formal judgment by the papal commission need be waited for. That same day, by sunset, a pile was erected on a small island in the Seine, the Ile des Juifs, near the palace garden. There de Molay, de Charney, de Gonneville, and de Peraud were slowly burned to death, refusing all offers of pardon for retraction, and bearing their torment with a composure which won for them the reputation of martyrs among the people, who reverently collected their ashes as relics.

There is an interesting legendary postscript to these murders. As he was being incinerated, de Molay uttered a mighty curse. He laid a malediction upon King Philip, the royal advisor Guillaume de Nogaret, and Pope Clement, prophesying that they would all die with thin the year. All did. De Molay is also said to have cursed Philip’s family, and very shortly all of his sons died without heirs, leaving the dynasty extinct. These series events are recounted in Les Rois maudits (The Accursed Kings), a series of historical novels written by Maurice Druon.

St Zachary’s Day

St Zachary (679-752) was elected pope in 741 and immediately became involved in a political dispute that had long-lasting consequences in medieval church-state relations.

In the mid-8th century the situation of the papacy was perilous. Italy had been almost entirely overrun by the barbarian Lombards and the power of the Eastern Roman Empire to protect its territory in the peninsula was waning. Moreover, the papacy was at odds with the Emperor over the newly-adopted policy of iconoclasm, the pope taking the position that the Byzantine government had no right to interfere in church matters.

Fortunately Zachary proved to be an able diplomat with the ability to charm the Lombard ruling class. Not only did the pope persuade the Lombards to halt their proposed invasion but he also convinced them to return territory they had already conquered. When the Lombards seemed ready to invade the Byzantine holdings around Ravenna, it was again Zachary who saved the day.

By this time it was clear to all that the arm of the eastern empire was no longer strong enough to protect Italy from barbarian incursions and a new protector had to be found. Zachary had always interested himself in the affairs of the most powerful force in the West, the Frankish kingdom. He had encouraged St Boniface’s attempts to reform the lax and corrupt Frankish church and to extend Christianity to the pagan tribes in the German lands.

In 751 he received a letter from Frankish nobles inquiring whether the title of king belonged to the one who had exercised the power or the one with the royal lineage. This was a way of asking whether the Mayor of the Palace, Pepin the Short, who was the de facto ruler, could depose the last of the useless Merovingian dynasty, Childeric III. Zachary, who saw the Franks as the future defenders of the papacy, gave the go-ahead to the coup by replying that the one with the real power should also wear the crown. Childeric was shorn of his long hair, symbol of his kingship, and placed in a monastery. Pepin was crowned king and founded the Carolingian dynasty whose greatest ruler was Pepin’s son, Charlemagne.

In sanctioning this deposition, the papacy signalled a turning away from the Byzantine throne and a turn to the west and the Franks. This move would be given symbolic force on Christmas Day 800, when the pope crowned Charlemagne as Emperor. Pepin had unwittingly given the papacy a chance to claim that political legitimacy originated with the popes, that they could make, or unmake, kings and emperors. This is an idea that caused centuries of turmoil in Europe but which also helped firm up the notion of a church-state separation which was indispensable to the development of political theory in western Christendom. Those seeking to understand the reasons why political life developed differently in the West than in Orthodox lands or in Islam should start with Pope Zachary.