Martinmas

Today was the feast day of St. Martin of Tours.   He lived in the 300s and became a holy bishop and founded the first monastery in France because people wanted to follow his austere lifestyle.   He was very successful in converting people living in rural settings and sort of set up the parish system of church government.

On of the more famous stories about St. Martin is how, while he was still yet a catechumen (not baptized), he passed a poor beggar in the freezing cold.  St. Martin took off his soldier's cloak and using his sword cut it in half to give one half to the beggar.  That night he had a dream where he saw Jesus Himself wearing the half of the Roman cloak and the angels asked Jesus where he'd gotten the cloak and Jesus said, ""Martin, as yet only a catechumen, has covered me with his cloak."  The next morning St. Martin ran to be baptized!

We celebrated today by reading several accounts of St. Martin's life.  There are many fascinating stories associated with him.  In one, he was trying to convert a wild tribe that worshiped a pine tree.  He sat underneath the leaning pine and said "cut it down and I shall not move."   They cut it thinking it would crush him and then the tree slowly turned and fell the other way saving St. Martin and leading to the people's conversion.    We read from these links here as well as from An Alphabet of Saints-

And there's a lovely story in The Children's Book of Faith-

And the children and I attempted to make a cake for the day- it's so far from excellent- but the children loved it!  (I was going to write St. Martin pray for us, but realized the green gel icing ran into a blob so Julia said, "just write St. Martin one one side and 'the beggar' on the other so we know which is which."  And we ended up not having red food coloring to tint the frosting so we used red sprinkles-  so it almost looks bedazzled)  : )