It is the feast of Stephen, the day when Good King Wenceslaus (above) looked out on snow that was deep and crisp and even. In medieval Wales, people trying to grab some extra sleep on St Stephen’s Day were whipped out of bed with holly branches. The story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is told in the Book of Acts. He was stoned to death with the assistance of a man called Saul, who later became St Paul. The Church remembers Stephen the day after the birthday of Jesus partly because the annual celebration of saints’ martyrdoms were originally called their ‘birthdays’.
The English poet Thomas Gray was born today in 1716. His most famous poem, ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, a meditation on death and memory, was a bestseller when it was published as a pamphlet in 1751, and has remained popular ever since. Gray was a tentative poet, with only 13 poems published in his lifetime, so when he sent his draft of the Elegy to his friend, Horace Walpole, he modestly asked him to consider the poem only as ‘a thing with an end to it; a merit that most of my writings have wanted’.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Thomas Gray, opening lines of Elegy in a Country Churchyard
The supernatural horror movie The Exorcist was released today in 1973 and instantly became a cultural sensation. The movie, which tells the story of Regan, a demon-possessed 12 year-old girl who undergoes exorcism by two Catholic priests, was banned in some cities and regions, drew protests from Christian groups (Protestant and Catholic), but was wildly popular with cinemagoers. It is the 9th most financially successful movie ever, surpassing Star Wars, Jurassic Park and The Lion King, among others.
John Wesley, possibly grumpy with post-Christmas indigestion, wrote a letter to his brother Charles today in 1761 to say that some of his hymns were too sentimental. John had been singing from a new edition of Charles’s hugely popular pamphlet, Hymns for the Nativity of our Lord, and found to his irritation that the printer had taken out his favourite hymn, but left in a couple he had never liked. ‘They are namby-pambical,’ he said. It seems that Charles sent an equally robust reply, which forced John in his next letter to say: ‘I am far from pronouncing my remarks ex cathedra.’ It was one of the rare occasions when the two brothers were not singing from the same hymn sheet.
Our God, ever blest,
With oxen doth rest,
Is nursed by his creature,
and hangs at the breast.
One of Charles’s verses crossed out by John
Time magazine made Pope John Paul II its Man of the Year today in 1994. As well as quoting the American evangelist Billy Graham that the Pope would ‘go down in history as the greatest of our modern Popes’, it also revealed that in honour of the Pope, thousands of children, cats and cockerels in rural Kenya answered to the name of John Paul too.
‘Though the Pope’s corner bedroom on the third floor of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace has a view of the baroque wonder of St. Peter’s Square, it is almost as spare as a monk’s. The room contains a single bed, two straight-backed upholstered chairs, a desk. There is a small carpet near the bed, but otherwise the parquet floor is bare. The walls too are unembellished except for a few souvenirs, mostly icons. But these are eloquent by their very presence. They are from Poland.’ Time, 1994
Image: Lawrence OP / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0