“I know that, if I do what I think God wants me to do,
he will take care of my family.”
~ Bl. Franz Jägerstätter
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Free College, Fatherhood, and Financing Martyrdom
14 DecDignity, Defiance, and Mirth: A Plan for Dying Well
14 Nov
“Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing, and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.
~ Flannery O’Connor
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Reasons to Send Your Catholic Kids to Protestant Colleges
24 Sep
“As far as possible parents have the duty of choosing schools that will best help them in their task as Christian educators” (CCC 2229).
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Saintly Avengers: The Seven Champions of Christendom
31 Aug
Consumed for Christ: St. Alexander of Comana
11 Aug
“Oh, the Charcoal Burner has tales to tell!”
~ A.A. Milne“It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.”
~ Neil Young
Planning a cookout? If you don’t have a gas grill, you’ll be stocking up on charcoal briquettes. But what if you lived in an age before Kroger and convenience stores?
In the old days, you’d be doing business with the local collier – that is, somebody who dealt in coal and probably manufactured it himself. It’s an ancient skill that involves carefully stacking wood in a conical shape, covering it with soil or sod, and then slow-burning the heap to oxidize it. The charcoal burner, as he’s also called, has to stay close to his pile to maintain an optimal level of heat – not letting the flame go out, for example, and not letting it turn into an outright conflagration. Thus, the process is typically messy, arduous, and isolating. Imagine a loner hanging around a smoky mound all day, poking at glowing embers, tamping down a blaze here and there, and then handling the end product before lugging it to market.
Get the picture? You might buy your coal from that guy, but you probably won’t be inviting him to your cookout.
You’d also be unlikely to choose that guy as your bishop, but today (August 11) we celebrate just such a man. St. Alexander of Comana was a third-century charcoal burner in the region of Pontus – now northeastern Turkey on the coast of the Black Sea. He was a nobody, grimy and living on the fringe. Perhaps he was even a bit intimidating, as those who live on the outskirts of acceptable society often are. Folks avoided Alexander, and they disparaged his sooty countenance and career.
But his outward grubbiness obscured an inward purity and piety. In fact, Alexander was quite a scholar, and he’d purposely taken up a lowly occupation to avoid acclaim and to focus on spiritual pursuits.
The saint’s true character came to light when the Comana community sought a new bishop and enlisted the aid of St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (“Wonderworker”) – a story recorded by St. Gregory of Nyssa in his life of Thaumaturgus. A variety of candidates, esteemed for their poise and social status, were presented to St. Gregory for his approval. Yet Gregory, concerned more about virtue than human vanity, rejected the lot. Comana’s leaders were indignant. “If you order that we pass over persons picked from the city,” they jested, “we will accept a man from the crowd for the office of priesthood. Then you must summon Alexander the charcoal maker to preside as priest.”
It was a bluff St. Gregory couldn’t resist, and he asked that Alexander be brought forward immediately. The gentry laughed derisively as the filthy man approached the saint, but Gregory swiftly discerned that the humble laborer was in fact a holy man well equipped to serve as spiritual shepherd. Alexander was made bishop on the spot, and his subsequent wise pastoral administration amply justified St. Gregory’s confidence and prompt consecration.
It’s a terrific yarn with built-in lessons about attending to interior qualities instead of judging exterior superficialities – in others as well as ourselves. What’s more, there’s a clear poetic resonance between Alexander’s later role as bishop and his prior ascetic practices. He was basically a recluse that made charcoal, and what is charcoal used for? It’s for heat and light and the preparation of food. Those are the very things we expect to receive from the Church and her pastors: the warmth of Christ-centered community, the enlightenment of truth, and the sustenance of the sacraments. By all accounts, St. Alexander was an exemplary episcopal conduit of those gifts, and it’s likely his prior years of solitary prayer and study around his woodpiles helped prepare him for that ministry.
But there’s even more here, for charcoal has also been utilized in the torture and killing of Christ’s faithful. Just yesterday we celebrated the feast of St. Lawrence, Roman deacon and martyr, also from the third century. He famously rounded up the poor to present to Emperor Valerian who’d demanded the “treasures” of the church. It was an object lesson lost on the emperor, and he directed that Lawrence pay for his insolence by a slow, agonizing death: roasted alive over white hot coals.
Bishop Alexander avoided the gridiron, but he did suffer martyrdom by fire during the Diocletian persecutions. Here, again, his coal-burning past presaged his ecclesial future, although Alexander’s actual martyrdom was simply the culmination of a lifetime of selflessness and sacrifice – an immolation, of sorts, of anything that would keep him from Christ. It’s essentially what we hear in today’s Gospel: “Sell your belongings and give alms,” Jesus tells us. “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”
The Lord goes on to direct his disciples to “light your lamps and be like servants who await their master’s return.” Following Alexander’s example, we must do likewise.
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A version of this meditation appeared on Catholic Exchange.
German Lesson in a Graveyard
7 Aug
“Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life.”
~ Caryll Houselander
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A Patron for Codependents: St. Samson of Dol (d. 565)
28 Jul
“We can live without drugs and alcohol, but…people are more complicated than substances.”
~ Dr. Kristi Pikiewicz
St. Samson was a big deal. Born in Wales, educated by monks, and seemingly destined for leadership, Samson was “perhaps the most important British missionary of the 6th century,” according to David Farmer, and “an excellent example of the wandering Celtic monk-bishop.” He established new abbeys, reformed older ones, preached the Gospel boldly, and ably led the flocks entrusted to him.
Although he pined for a hermit’s life in the wilderness, Samson ended his days in Dol, Brittany, where he established a monastic missionary outpost and served as an irregular episcopal ordinary. We might not be very familiar with St. Samson in the States, but his feast (July 28) is celebrated throughout the British Isles and beyond, and there are numerous European parishes named for him. A stellar saint, to be sure!
But I’m guessing there’s a shadow side to his story that’s easy to overlook.
After his initial formation and ordination in the abbey of Llanwit, Samson transferred to the community on Caldey Island where he took up duties as cellarer – a kind of steward of the monastery’s foodstuffs and drink. This is significant, because Caldey’s Abbot, St. Pyr, seems to have had a bit of a drinking problem – and the cellarer would’ve been the first to know about it. The annals tell of Pyr getting so snockered one night that he stumbled into a well and died as a result of the fall. And since such spectacular episodes of intoxication are highly unlikely to be isolated events, Abbot Pyr probably had been battling the bottle long before his mortal mishap.
Now, Pyr’s lack of temperance and unseemly end might cast some doubt on the suitability of his saintly designation – a title ascribed to him by tradition rather than formal canonization. We have to remember, though, that those who struggle with substance abuse and addiction are still called to become saints and, what’s more, can become saints. Truly, everyone can become a saint – even me, even you – and God gives us the grace to do so.
But besides questions related to Pyr’s habits and holiness, what fascinates me about his story is that the abbot’s propensity to over imbibe must’ve been an open secret in the cloister. Sure, Samson the cellarer knew, but so did everybody else – how could they not? A monastery is an intimate family, after all, and the abbot is the dad – in Pyr’s case, a dad crippled by addiction. How did Samson and his confreres deal with that?
It seems to me that it could very well have been a classic case of codependency.
Codependency is a controversial term these days, but it was all the rage not that long ago. It can apply to almost any flavor of dysfunctional family system, but it’s especially associated with alcoholic homes.
I know of it firsthand because my dad was an alcoholic. Like so many in that situation, I was clueless about the chaos at home and its connections to the booze. The family strife, the erratic behaviors, the cover-ups and pain – I naturally assumed that it was all normal. That it was what all families experienced. Why would I think otherwise?
Then my mom talked to me one night about something called Al-Anon – an organization that provides support for folks who live with alcoholics. She’d been in touch with them and was getting involved, looking for help. “There’s also a group for teenagers,” she told me. “Maybe you should consider going.”
I never did. Somehow, I still managed to get through high school and college, and then launched into the adventure of my own adulthood. I moved here and there, became a Catholic, dated off and on, and tried my hand at various pursuits. But there was definitely a gnawing void within – I was hurting, in agony.
At some point, somebody (my mom? a co-worker?) got me to read Janet Woititz’s 1983 book, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and it was a game changer. What she described – the enabling, the duplicity, the stress, the craziness – really resonated. It prompted me to finally reach out for help – like my mother did so many years before – and I was able to separate my problems from my dad’s. He continued to struggle with his addiction, alternating between sobriety and drinking the rest of his life (rest in peace, dad), but I got to the place where I could see it as his struggle, not mine.
I loved my father, although sometimes I regret not loving him better – not to mention plenty of other regrets. Most of the time, however, thanks to writers like Woititz and a host of counselors, I can focus on the present and today’s challenges – the ones associated with being a husband, father, worker, and would-be saint. That’s plenty to deal with, and I’d like to think that my efforts honor my dad and the best parts of his legacy that live on in me.
St. Samson seems to have gone through a similar transformation. Whatever brand of codependent exigencies that preceded Pyr’s tragic demise, Samson stepped up and set a new course afterwards. He took up the abbot’s crozier and attempted to clean house at Caldey, but the community’s dysfunctional patterns were too entrenched and, in the words of Farmer, Samson “accordingly resigned the abbacy in disgust.” That action freed him up to seek out new opportunities to exercise his gifts, which led to the many foundations and apostolates he became associated with.
Clearly Samson strived to become the spiritual father that the impaired Pyr couldn’t quite manage. He left the brokenness of his past behind and forged a new path, striving to draw everyone he encountered closer to Christ. It seems that wherever he went, flourishing followed, and the honor in which his name is held to this day is testimony to how God worked in and through him.
“Ask and you will receive,” Jesus assures us in the Gospel today, “seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Those are precisely the promises that enabled St. Samson to move on from his unhealthy roots to a more glorious future.
They’re the same promises that we broken folk can rely on today.
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A version of this meditation appeared on Catholic Exchange.
