Saint George is the patron saint of England - but actually he wasn't English at all. His story is so steeped in myth and legend that it is virtually impossible to separate fact and fiction. The followers would write up fabulous accounts of his life, and so improving St George's reputation, but that did nothing to enlighten us about his real life. Apparently he was born in an area which is now in Turkey. Legend tells us that his parents were Christian. He became a Roman soldier but protested against Rome's persecution of Christians. As a result St George was imprisoned and tortured, but he stayed true to his faith and was beheaded.

He is not only the patron saint of England but also of many other countries and places in the world. He looks after a wide ranging array of professions too. The flag of Saint George - a red cross on a white background - is part of the Union Jack. 

I am not sure where I am. It is dark, cold and damp. My body aches in places I don’t remember existed. The worst seem the hands and feet, and one spot just below where the ribcage is supposed to be. My back stings and burns as if someone has ripped the skin off.  I find breathing really difficult and need long pauses between each breath. My skin is icy cold, but seems to warm up very slowly now with each breath I take. I am still very weak and stiff. Very slowly I feel as if I am becoming alive for a second time. Tentatively I try to move my limbs, but I encounter resistance. So I continue to keep still, attempting to regain awareness of my whole body once more, and try to think where I was before I woke up.

I am not sure where I am. It is dark, cold and damp. My body aches in places I don’t remember existed. The worst seem the hands and feet, and one spot just below where the ribcage is supposed to be. My back stings and burns as if someone has ripped the skin off.  I find breathing really difficult and need long pauses between each breath. My skin is icy cold, but seems to warm up very slowly now with each breath I take. I am still very weak and stiff. Very slowly I feel as if I am becoming alive for a second time. Tentatively I try to move my limbs, but I encounter resistance. So I continue to keep still, attempting to regain awareness of my whole body once more, and try to think where I was before I woke up.

All I remember is a terribly dark place with a landscape similar to ours here, except everything was in different hues of grey and black. And there was a terrible noise! Billions of shadows in human form were crying out to me, wanting a blessing and rest – just like on the mountain in another life. At first I did not understand what they were saying, but gradually I realized that they were trapped in this place and condemned to roam around without ever being allowed to rest. Their overseer kept them in constant activity, and although there was nothing to do they still had to look busy and occupied. This was going on relentlessly, since time was not measured. My heart went out to these spirits, and I blessed them. They sighed and evaporated like mist. So gradually the noise from those terrified unhappy spirits became less and then stopped completely. There were no shadows left. As a result I was attacked by the overseers who were unspeakably angry because I had not only taken away their work, but also the food of the Lord of the Underworld. That is the last thing I remember, but it felt good nevertheless to give those poor souls freedom and rest.

Anyway, I am here again now. Very slowly my senses start working again too. It smells like there had been a dead body in here, but that seems to subside slowly. There is also a lingering perfume of embalming ointment around. Was that me? Am I being brought back to life again? Never mind, I hear heavy steps from somewhere nearby. They seem to go back and forth, like a guard of some kind, sounding almost military. But then something strange is happening. I hear feather light steps and whispering sounds, as if another person is in this place with me. I try to move again, but something is happening to my face now: I feel pressure and movement. My face seems to have been covered; however the wraps are being taken away by very gentle hands. Carefully I move my head from side to side – it works. Then there is more activity around the rest of my body; very awkward and painful in some places, but by and by I can move my arms and legs too. Amazingly there is also a sliver of light, so I can see a tiny bit.

There are two figures in white with me here. I am still feeling very weak, so I stay where I am; still warming up and gently regaining control of my body. Although the light in here is very dim it still hurts my eyes. So I shut them again, but suddenly there is an incredibly loud and screaming sound, and at the same time there is brightness everywhere. I don’t even need to open my eyes to realize that the sun is up and the door is open. The person in white puts some clothes next to me and then patiently helps me to get dressed again. It all takes quite a long time. The dying do everything very slowly, and I am feeling as if I am working my way backwards to return to life again. So I start moving slowly but by and by I become master of my limbs and senses once more.

When I cast my eyes around I realize that the place in which I am is a burial place. On a slab of stone I see heaps of bandages. I ask the gentle persons in white about them, and they tell me that I had been dead for three days and two nights. Now I gradually can also recollect some of the things that happened before the nightmare in the black place. It was terrible, but now I am alive and gradually I am filled with unspeakable joy and gratitude for the gift of life that is given to me again. Then I move slowly forward to the spot where the light is coming from, and I am face to face with the most glorious garden I have ever seen. Paradise looks like this.

I move towards the entrance and hear someone weeping. When I look out there is Mary, and she looks at me as if I was a stranger. She seems to be deeply grieving. Then she asks me where they have laid my body. Good job I know now that I was dead, so I am not too shocked. I call her name, and she recognizes me. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that, because now she takes hold of me as if she were drowning. I have to remind her to let go of me so that I can move again. I tell her that I need to ascend into heaven. Then she questions me about what happened today.

Someone wrote a poem about this interview, so I shall share it with you:

Why do you look so different?
Because I had clothes divided
So someone brought another suit
And my old life subsided
I come from death’s dark abyss
None ever lived after this
So my face too
Changed its hue

What does the delight in this garden mean?
In a garden my suffering began
And to go back to Eden all humanity’s keen
So here I heal the division of God and man
And show how love death outran
So this garden too
Changed what is true

Why do you now hold me back so much?
I hurt from where I have been.
Wait – into the sky I need to ascend.
From there your pain I shall mend.
My hug will be power never seen.
Then of fire my body will be,
And many God shall see.

Recycling is the word! So I shall share with you the Passion through Mary’s eyes – and I am compelled to spare you nothing! So reading this is not for the faint hearted.

Dear Ruth, 

You are going to be extremely surprised to receive a letter from me, Mary, the mother of Jesus. I am writing several thousand years after your time.

I have had the most terrible and terrifying week of my life. It began with an excited and celebratory parade through the streets of Jerusalem. The main road was heaving so much with revellers that, short of letting Jesus get crushed to death, we had to find alternative transport. Fortunately Jesus knew someone in the city where we could borrow a donkey for him to sit on. 

Whether this was a good idea I do not know, because now we could move but they treated us like royalty: they hailed Jesus as David’s Son, carpeted the path before the donkey with palm leaves and we all felt rather awkward. 1,983 years later they will remember this day again as Palm Sunday. Usually they will not have a donkey in the play except the one on two legs who is carrying a cross that weighs probably half a ton. 

As many of you may know St Benedict was the one who wrote the widely used rules for the monastic life. No, it is not the Pope I am talking about, although there may well have been a certain affinity that led Cardinal Ratzinger to choose this name. I am talking about St Benedict of Nursia. He lived from the 5th to the 6th century in Italy. His sister, Scholastica lived in a convent not far from Saint Benedict.

One day Benedict visited her, and towards the end of the visit she asked him to stay the night with her. This was a very unusual occurrence, but Benedict refused because of the prayers he had vowed to say. Scholastica quietly prayed and a sudden heavy storm came which made it impossible for Benedict to leave. When he went on his way the next morning a dove flew past him and he realised that this was his sister’s soul, for she had died after he left. Then he was sad that for the sake of vows he did not want to spend time with his sister, and it was only the storm that kept him there.

I came across this story when I was looking for something else, and it taught me a lot about the handling of rules. We tend to think of Lent as a time when we make vows and choose rules to keep for the duration of this period. We try to give up sugar, wine, chocolate or coffee; or we try to eat sensibly and lose weight until Easter. Like St Benedict we make vows of some kind or another. Two different results frequently occur: one is that the attempt is abandoned after two weeks or so; the other may be that we become so inflexible that we cannot distinguish anymore between the occasions where we need to keep the rule and where to relax.

What does that say about our love for God? Do we love her less because we cannot keep our promise for a time? Does She care? It makes me think that this being we call God may have no concerns about whether we keep or break such a promise. In the Gospels there are a number of examples where Jesus breaks the Sabbath rules, and so teaches something extraordinary.

At the beginning of chapter twelve of St Matthew’s Gospel Jesus and the disciples are hungry while he walks through the cornfields on a Sabbath. So they pick ears of grain and eat them. Of course, as so often, the Pharisees do not like that and criticise them. Jesus concludes this exchange by stating that mercy is more important than sacrifice. This story is immediately followed by a similar one where they challenge him, in front of a man with a withered hand, whether it is acceptable to heal on a Sabbath. Jesus confronts their hardness of heart by stating that everyone would save a sheep stuck in a ditch on the Sabbath. He here asserts that a human person is worth more than a sheep and heals the man’s withered hand. For Jesus it is more important to care for women and men than to keep strictly to rules which should help and not hinder living together for God’s glory.

Thinking about what is acceptable in dealing with God I also remembered the story of King David when he danced before the Ark of the Covenant when it was brought back to Jerusalem. He got so carried away in his excitement and love for God that he became too indecent for Michal, the daughter of Saul, and she criticised him. David took his stand and Michal remained childless all her life (2 Sam. 6:14-23).

In ‘The Power of Myth’ Joseph Campbell puts this attitude in a different way: “You have to let go of the image of the [sacred]. Such an image of one’s god becomes the final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith ...”

I would like to put forward the notion that I found with my ‘friend’ Professor Jürgen Moltmann. He suggests that the act of ignoring the generally accepted rules by Jesus point to a certain environment and occasion in eternity. In that state of reality there is no more difference between the holy and profane, but the whole of existence is included in and illuminated by the grace of God’s Love.

Recently I went on a hike. It began with dismal weather: rain pouring down and a canopy of heavy clouds overhead. I could have decided that I could not bear getting soaked all day. Instead I persevered; and when the rain stopped and the sun appeared I felt God’s presence with me. This walk changed my life – at least for that day, and hopefully for many more to come. This turnaround in attitude, and being filled with something greater than myself, reminded me very strongly of St Paul’s conversion. So I shall give him a voice and see what he tells us.

“I, Saul, shall get you for telling us stories about a human person being G?D. As Jews we are not even supposed to say His Name and you say that he was Human! How dare you. I’ll make an end of these stories, and then the Jewish world is back to normal.”

Do you remember the weeks before Christmas? The waiting – looking for hidden Christmas presents in the cupboard; living one day for the next when you can open another little window on your advent calendar, if you had one? While I was preparing for this article God let me in on a secret. He allowed me to listen in on the conversation Mary had with Him when she became pregnant with His Son. The best I can do is to share it with you now.

“I am Mary. I just went into my room to pray. Then there arrived this beautiful stranger. He looked at me like no one has ever looked at me before. Surely he was a holy man, because when he embraced me I just melted. And it was as if he was giving himself to me in a way I had never experienced. Of course all my relatives have given me big hugs before, but this was completely different. It was as if I had been in heaven and seen God. Still more exciting, it was as if God had been inside me! Even telling it makes me glow all over again.”

In my series this month’s Saint is a very strange one. Almost nothing is known of Edmund. He is thought to be of East Anglian origin. His kingdom was devastated by the Vikings, who destroyed any contemporary evidence of his reign. As history dislikes nothing more than a lack of facts fictitious accounts of his life were written, and it was said that Edmund was the son of an obscure East Anglian ruler whom he succeeded as king when he was fourteen. In the large number of stories around his origins it was even alleged in some legends that Edmund was born at Nuremberg. Having been born and grown up in this town, it is even stranger that I have never consciously encountered his name or his story.

By tradition Edmund was tortured and killed after he refused the Danes' demand that he renounce Christ. The Danes beat him, shot him with arrows and beheaded him – in this order. Look at the picture at the top: doesn’t that remind you a bit of a hedgehog pinned to a tree? The story emerged that a wolf played security officer and shielded his severed head. When his casket was opened a long time after his death it was found that the arrow wounds were healed, the head reconnected to the shoulders, and the flesh quite fresh. Though this legend sounds rather weird and unbelievable, this story was the starting point for a popular cult of revering Edmund as a holy man. During the Middle Ages St. Edmund was regarded as the patron saint of England, and even in our time he still holds a number of patronages, one of which is ‘Patron Saint of Kings.’

I’m just a bag lady from Paddington Green
I lives ‘neath the arches, unheard and unseen.
I once craved a palace and got me a box,
I longed for the good life but just took the knocks.

I’m a lonely no-hoper, a blot on the land
A cause without meaning what don’t understand
Why you can’t beg a penny, while luggin’ yer bags
Cos they say you’ll just blow it on booze and on fags! 

Yes, I’m just a Bag Lady from Paddington Green
I live’s ‘neath the arches unheard and unseen.

Excerpt from ‘The SMart Review’, by Maureen Grayson

What do you do to fill your house with people? Usually one gives out invitations – by post, email or in person. I never thought about this before, but only complained that no one came to visit me. Then someone asked me: ‘have you actually invited someone to your home?’This is a very good question in many ways. After I have decided who I would like to come, and given the invitation, I begin behaving like Martha in the gospel. I worry about food, table decorations, tidiness in the living room and other fairly irrelevant details.

Putting myself in Matthew’s shoes, I wonder what his invitation was like. I don’t think there were all these things to think about in his time. For a proper meal in higher circles you reclined; that meant lying sideways on a narrow couch and taking your food from a low table in the middle. Sounds like utter luxury, doesn’t it? This is what Jesus came to when he dined with Matthew, apparently very soon after having called him as a disciple. What strikes me about the meal Jesus shared with Matthew and his friends is how unconcerned Matthew apparently was about the fact that Jesus did not at all belong to his kind of environment.

And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen.  Then He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” They immediately left their nets and followed Him.

Going on from there, He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets. He called them, and immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him. (Matthew 4:18-22 New King James Version)