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Saturday, April 27, 2024
January 4, 2024
Jack Montgomery
Analysis
Culture
Religion

January 4th: An American Saint, and a Monk on a Pillar.

Christmastide is not over, and the Christmas tree should still be standing – but if it’s starting to look a little dried out (careful with that, by that way) don’t worry; it is the Eleventh Day of Christmas, and Twelfth Night is right around the corner.

We have two feast days to choose from today: one for Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, born in New York in the 1774, just a few short years before the American Revolution, and Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder, a Syriac monk born all the way back in the 4th century.

THE FIRST AMERICAN-BORN SAINT.  

St. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of a Church of England priest, and was raised Anglican herself. She and her husband, the son of a Scottish loyalist, came from humble enough beginnings, but enjoyed solid success, both financially and socially.

St. Elizabeth was always drawn towards charitable work, in particular with The Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. She was tested, however, when the Quasi-War between the United States and France, and a British blockade of France, disrupted her husband’s import-export business, driving him into bankruptcy, and costing the couple their Manhattan home. The stress destroyed her husband’s heath, and though the couple traveled to Italy to try to revive his constitution, they were unsuccessful, and he died in 1803.

It was the kindness shown to the young widow in Italy, a staunchly Catholic country, that prompted St. Elizabeth’s conversion to Catholicism. It was not a popular move – many parents withdrew their daughters from an academy she ran for young ladies when they heard of it – but she did not waver. Moving to Maryland, she established a Catholic girls’ school in Emmitsburg, and later a first-of-its kind religious community dedicated to caring for the children of the poor: the Sisters of Charity.

Mother Seton, as she came to be called was not destined for a long life. She passed away after a long and reportedly unpleasant battle with tuberculosis, aged just 46, in 1821, but never lost her faith.

“You think you make sacrifices. Look at the sacrifice of Calvary, and compare yours with it,” she explained.

Her own sacrifice was recognized over a hundred years after her death, when she was canonized as the first American-born saint in 1975.

THE FIRST STYLITE.

The other saint whose feast day falls on January 4th is a more colorful, and perhaps more universal character, being venerated not just by Catholics but also the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and some Protestant churches, as he lived before the schisms that divided them.

Born a simple shepherd’s son, Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder was drawn to Christianity from a young age, joining a monastery before he turned 16 after being deeply moved by the Beatitudes – sayings of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew.

He gave himself over to a life of prayer and fasting too rigorous for even the monastery, he removed himself to live a solitary life in a small hut, and, when that became too easy, on the slopes of a mountain in modern-day Syria.

The Desert Fathers had pioneered similarly austere lifestyles in the Scetes desert of Roman Egypt from around the 3rd century, but St. Simeon would achieve new heights of asceticism – quite literally – when he came down from his mountain and climbed the ruins of an ancient pillar, or stylos, in a bid to escape the pilgrims who had disrupted his contemplative life by coming to seek his advice.

News that he was living on a small platform atop this 10-foot pillar, sustained by small amounts of food handed up to him by local boys, had quite the opposite effect, however, and he became famous. So famous, in fact, that the desert monks suspected his strange living situation and extreme fasts might signal pride, and they bid him to come down.

When he immediately began to comply rather than resist them, however, they understood his humility was intact, and they stopped him, instructing him to remain where he was.

St. Simeon eventually moved to an even taller pillar, 50 feet high, and despite living constantly exposed to the elements and eating and drinking but little, he lived a long and remarkably productive life. He regularly preached to crowds who came to see him on his perch, nurtured proteges, and wrote letters. Some of the text remains with us today.

He died only in 459 A.D., aged close to 70, hunched over in prayer. He had lived atop his pillar, the remains of which still stand near Aleppo – damaged, sadly, after jihadists took control of the site – for almost 40 years.

Many “pillar monks”, known as stylites, followed his examples, and the strange huts they built atop their broken pillars can sometimes be seen in paintings and even photographs of ancient Graeco-Roman sites.

At least one stylite monk is still following St. Simeon’s example, high up in the mountains of Georgia. What a legacy!