These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Margaret of Scotland, faithful servant

Saint Margaret was canonised in 1250 by Pope Innocent IV in recognition of her personal holiness, faithfulness to the Church, work for religious reform, and charity, her Feast Day now being celebrated on 16 November. An English princess of the House of Wessex, she is also known as Margaret of Wessex, Queen Margaret of Scotland and sometimes called “The Pearl of Scotland”.

Margaret was born in exile in Hungary around 1045, daughter of Edward the Exile and granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, King of England and with her siblings, Edgar the Ætheling and Cristina, grew up in the Hungarian court.

When Margaret was still a child her father, Edward, was recalled to England as a possible successor to Margaret’s great-uncle, the childless Edward the Confessor, but died soon after landing. Margaret continued to live at the English court, her brother Edgar Ætheling being considered a possible successor. But when the Confessor died in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was selected as king. After Harold’s defeat at the battle of Hastings later that year, Edgar was proclaimed King of England. But after William the Conqueror’s victory, Edgar was taken to Normandy. He was returned to England in 1068, when Edgar, Margaret, Cristina and their mother Agatha fled north to Northumbria.

According to tradition, Agatha decided to return to the continent, but they were shipwrecked on the way and driven on to the coast of Scotland. Soon after, Margaret met Malcolm 111, and they were married by 1070.  She is believed to have had a moderating influence on this rather rough and uneducated man, and would read to him from the Bible. He so admired her devotion that he had her books decorated in gold and silver. One of these is kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. She and Malcolm had six sons and two daughters, whose religious instruction and other studies Margaret supervised.

Guided by Lafranc, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, she encouraged reforms in the Scottish Church, seeking to bring it in line with the Church of Rome. She encouraged synods and was present for the discussions which tried to correct religious abuses common among priests and lay people, such as simony, usury and incestuous marriages. Together with Malcolm, she founded several churches. She also sought to improve her adopted country by promoting the arts and education.

In her personal life, she spent much of her time in prayer, devotional reading, and ecclesiastical embroidery. During Lent and Advent she would rise at midnight to go to church. In 1072 she invited the Benedictine order to establish a monastery at Dunfermline in Fife, and established ferries at Queensferry and North Berwick to assist pilgrims. She was also known for her charity. Before eating her own meals, she would wash the feet of the poor and ensure that they were fed. Margaret was also a benefactor of Iona Abbey providing funds for a chapel in the Relig Oran (the graveyard were Oran, a companion of Columba, was the first to be buried). It is the only chapel that still stands on the monastic site.

Because of all this, she was considered as an exemplar of the “just ruler”.

By 1093 Margaret was close to death and died three days after hearing that Malcolm and their eldest son Edward had been killed at the Battle of Alnwick.  People still visit her tomb at Dumferline Abbey and her chapel in Edinburgh Castle.

Rev Pam Kerr

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Søren Kierkegaard, Christian thinker

Kierkegaard was at once a devastating critic and a passionate advocate of Christianity. He was a 19^th century Danish thinker, who wrote many books – often with very strange titles – in his own distinctive style and who continues to pose challenging questions to Christians today. Because of his intense focus on the individual person, he is often regarded as the ‘father’ of modern existentialism.

Born in 1813, he felt deeply the death of his mother, three siblings and his father within a short span of years. He felt that there was a curse on his family on account of a great ‘sin’ committed by his father. He felt a misfit in the society of his day and is often called ‘the melancholy Dane’. He broke off an engagement because he would not involve his fiancée in his unusual life and on his death-bed he would not receive holy Communion from a (Lutheran) pastor, ‘the king’s official’.

Kierkegaard was fiercely critical of the way Christianity was practised in Denmark, where the Lutheran church was the state church. ‘Even the cows in Denmark are Christian!’ He could not bear to think that people might live in the illusion of being Christian when they merely ‘played’ at Christianity. What matters is actually to be a Christian; it is not a system of thought simply to be given intellectual assent.

Kierkegaard attacked the very idea of explaining Christianity. He vigorously opposed the philo­sophical system of Hegel, both for its grand metaphysical systematising and for offering an explanation of Christianity at a higher level. Kierkegaard’s writing was a loud protest against this in the name of concrete existence; this made him one of the fore­runners of existentialism. Being based on the ‘Absolute Paradox’ (that God became human), Christianity is not to be explained. A person responds to it in faith and trust, staking one’s whole life on it, like ‘swim­ming in 20,000 fathoms of water’; not by intellectualising it and trying to prove its truth.

Kierkegaard never fails to challenge, even if he is sometimes shockingly over-stated. His style is deeply ironic, often caustic. If he were writing today, he might have said that faith is like bungy-jumping. This doesn’t say everything to be said about faith, but it does identify something essen­tial to it.

Christiaan Mostert

 

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Reformers, Saints, and Souls

At the end of the Christian year churches have four great celebrations, Reformation Day (31 October); All Saints’ Day (1 November); All Souls’ Day (2 November); and the Feast of Christ the King (the last Sunday before Advent).

Reformation Day is of course the day when Protestants especially remember the church-changing movements of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. At the heart of these movements was an emphasis on justification by grace through faith, on the centrality of Christ, and on the need for a constant appeal to Holy Scripture.

By any measure, the leaders of the Reformation were grand figures. Luther, Calvin, Knox, Bucer, Browne and the Wesleys were men of immense intellect, love of the church, pastoral insight and capacity for work. It is right to remember them with thanks and appreciation.

All Saints’ Day had its origin in the fact that the deaths of many martyrs and other faithful Christians were unrecorded. But various biblical texts remind us that we live within a communion of saints—the living and the dead; the known and remembered, and the unknown—and that it is right to remember that we, the living, share in the faith because it was handed down to us by these people. And so, in Syria and Rome in the sixth and seventh centuries, churches began celebrating with special prayers and services the faithfulness of those who had not been honoured on earth. As long ago as 835 these celebrations took place on 1 November. Take a trawl through your Bible, and see how many passages you can find that prompt us to remember the saints of old, the martyrs, “the cloud of witnesses” to our faith in Christ.

All Souls’ Day (not often celebrated in Protestant Churches, though perhaps it should be) reminds us of another New Testament theme. The key here is in the writings of St. Paul: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). If you still have your Bible out, take a look through Romans and Galatians, to find evidence of the strength of this theme. The celebration of Christian saints is indeed a good thing! But because Paul’s “all” means simply “all”, this theme is even better! In his commentary on 2 November 2008, Russell Davies calls this day “The Festival of All  Humanity”, because it represents “the widest circle that God draws to ensure that nobody is outside divine love and care.” Reformation Day and All Saints’ are in their own ways celebrations of our own “family” of faith. All Souls’ unites us with all people, because of its reminder that, as Russell noted, “nobody’s salvation stands outside the circle of God’s grace”.

Contributed by Peter Butler