Read an Excerpt

FOLK LIKE ME

THE READ-ALOUD BOOK OF SAINTS

Church Publishing Incorporated

CHAPTER 1

a song of the saints

I sing a song of the saints of God,
Patient and brave and true,
Who toiled and fought and lived and died
For the Lord they loved and knew.
And one was a doctor, and one was a queen,
And one was a shepherdess on the green:
They were all of them saints of God—and I mean,
God helping, to be one too.

They loved their Lord so dear, so dear,
And his love made them strong,
And they followed the right for Jesus' sake
The whole of their good lives long.
And one was a soldier, and one was a priest,
And one was slain by a fierce wild beast:
And there's not any reason—no, not the least,
Why I shouldn't be one too.

They lived not only in ages past,
There are hundreds of thousands still,
The world is bright with the joyous saints
Who love to do Jesus' will
You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
For the the saints of God are just folk like me,
And I mean to be one, too.

Lesbia Scott, 1929

"Here we are at the start of another school year!" People are always saying that, this time of year. And here is another bunch of saints to hear about, one per week. Some have silly names, and some died in strange ways, but all of them have some gift for us to keep tucked away, somewhere in our memories. The song says, "they were all of them saints of God and I mean, God helping, to be one, too," and when the poet Lesbia Scott wrote that, she knew that we can all mean to be saints, but can't often manage it, and it's the "God helping" part that makes the difference. This year, with God's help, may we all come closer to being the saints we mean to be.

august

OSWALD, KING of NORTHUMBRIA (605–642) king (August 9) (see Map 1)

You will need to know where Northumbria is, because it just keeps coming up in saints' stories, and part of the reason for that is today's saint, King Oswald. The borders of the actual kingdom of Northumbria changed with time and battles, but the general area is north of the Humber River in England, an estuary (that's a big river-mouth, actually) just above the old kingdom of Mercia, on the east side of the island of Great Britain and including, at the time of King Oswald, the region called Deira where the old royal cities of York and Bamburgh are, and as far as north as the Firth of Forth in Scotland.

Oswald was a Saxon, and he spoke a really old type of English, but the people to his north and west spoke a language called Gaelic, and they were generally grouchy with the Saxons since the Saxons had pushed them north to Scotland and west to Wales off their old lands. In fact, they even pushed other Saxons around, because when Oswald was just a boy, his father Ethelfrith was killed by another Saxon king (Saint Edwin, as it later turned out, whose story you can hear another time), so Oswald and his family themselves had to go off to Scotland to hide out.

There is an island off the coast of Scotland called Iona, and in those days there was a monastery there, run by Saint Aidan. From Aidan and these monks, Oswald learned Gaelic and he learned all about Christianity: so much, in fact, that he decided that when he finally got back to Northumbria, he wanted to tell people there all about it. First, he had to get old enough and strong enough to defeat his enemies in battle, and finally did, near the old town of Hexham, when he was thirty-three years old. And he brought Saint Aidan and some of his monks back with him, but they all spoke Gaelic, and Oswald's Saxons couldn't, so when Aidan preached, King Oswald himself translated the sermons to his thanes—that is, his free-born, land-holding companions who had sworn loyalty to him—and men-at-arms, and they say it was a "pleasing sight to see." Oswald was a good king, and for a long time there was peace, and churches were built all over Northumbria.

But then the Welsh king Penda attacked. Now, Oswald was a mighty warrior, and they say that when he fought, two ravens went along with him as scouts, but he was defeated that day. What really made everyone sure he was a saint was that as he died, he prayed for the souls of those men dying around him. Penda, being pagan, chopped Oswald up and tacked the bits to a tree (at a place in Shropshire called Oswestry—"Oswald's Tree"—today) as an offering to his gods, but Oswald's ravens guarded the tree until his people came to bury him properly. Poor Saint Aidan was just about heartbroken, and the battle went on for Northumbria ... as we'll see another time.

August: Week One

LAWRENCE (died 258) deacon and martyr (August 10)

Toward the end of the third century (A.D., of course: all Christian-type stories happened after Jesus was marching about in the flesh, so they must be A.D., and that would be in the 200s since centuries work the way that they do), the Roman emperors at the time had just about had it with the Christians. The emperor certainly wasn't a Christian yet—that wouldn't happen until about 313 A.D.—and he was worried at how many other people in the Empire were. Christians refused to think that the emperor was a god like Hercules, and they wouldn't worship either of them, or Jupiter or even little Venus Cloacina, the goddess of the drains. Christians said they had this one God who was in charge of everything, and no one else mattered. They paid their taxes and ran poor-people shelters and seemed harmless, but the Roman emperor was sure they were out to bring down his government.

So the Roman government made it illegal to be a Christian, and every time the crops failed or there was a plague or a fire in the city, some Christians would be arrested and blamed for it, and if they were citizens they would quietly get their heads chopped off, and if they were not, then they would get killed in "fun" ways in the arena to amuse the rather bloodthirsty crowds during festival time. So one time, in the capital of Rome itself, there was a big round-up of Christians, and one of the people caught was a big, cheerful young man, Lawrence (or Laurentius, in Latin), who was a deacon—an assistant to a priest—but not a Roman citizen yet, so the city prefect (something like a combination of mayor and chief of police) decided to pick on him.

"Hand over all your valuables!" he demanded in a bossy, prefect-y way, and Lawrence smiled and said that would take awhile, so the prefect told him to take his time, but be back with the goods or else! So Lawrence came back the next day with a big crowd of people from the local Christian mission soup-kitchen and homeless shelter and said: "Here is the church's treasure!" Well, that did it. They decided to have some fun with Lawrence and grill him on a gridiron, but Lawrence was so brave—and I suppose he knew he was headed directly for heaven—that after awhile he said: "You can turn me over; I'm done on this side." He died, of course, and his friends buried him and missed him very much, but they all went on being Christians, anyway, whatever the emperor said.

August: Week Two

TIKHON of ZADONSK (1724–1783) abbot (August 13) (See Map 2)

(They say we can also call him "Timothy" but Tikhon is more interesting, don't you think?)

When Tikhon was fourteen years old and living in Novgorod (that's in what's called western Russia today), he thought he would go to religious school and learn how to be a monk—that is, a man who never gets married and spends his life praying and working for the church and helping other people. Mostly Tikhon went to monk-school only so that he wouldn't be drafted into the Russian army, so he wasn't much of a saint yet! But he was very good at his studies and soon became a priest-monk who could preach and do communion and that sort of thing, and was so good at that that by the time he was thirty-nine he was a bishop (that is, a priest in charge of a big city and all its clergy of priests and churches and monks) of the Russian city of Voronezh.

Being a bishop is always a lot of work, and things in Voronezh were bad, so Tikhon had to work even harder than usual: the churches were a mess, the priests were doing everything wrong—and they liked it that way. By the time he had fixed everything, he was only forty-three years old but was completely worn out and had to retire to a little monastery at Zadonsk (now there's a great name!) to get to feeling better and to do some writing. They gave him a small retirement pension, most of which he spent on taking care of other people. He spent his time giving people spiritual advice, or helping them in other ways: it seemed as though he was almost as busy as when he was bishop.

People still remember some of the wise and funny advice he gave. For example, one time some men he knew complained that it was too hard to be good all the time, saying: "We're not monks! Why should we be expected to live like them?" Tikhon smiled as usual and gently reminded them that the Scriptures called people to love and serve one another "before there were any such things as monks or monasteries." Like most saints, Tikhon was almost always moderate, and forgiving, but also like many saints, he was quick-tempered about things that are really wrong: disrespect of God and cruelty to one another; he wouldn't stand still for either of those. And there you have the wise and funny Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk!

August: Week Two

MAXIMILIAN KOLBE (1894–1941) missionary and martyr (August 14)

He is called "the saint for the twentieth century;" let's see why that might be true.

Grown-ups always think that the time they are living in is the worst, that it has never been so bad as this and that things were better in the "Good Old Days." Don't you believe it! There are good times and bad times, but some of the old days were really "Bad Old Days." The twentieth century will always be famous for all the amazing machines that were invented and the great new ideas that were thought up, but some of the machines turned out to be terrible, and some of the ideas were so incredibly bad that for centuries afterward people will still be suffering because of them. But there will always be good people who recognize bad ideas when they see them and will fight against them, and one of these people was Maximilian Kolbe.

Maximilian came from Zdunskawola (such a cool place-name and just off the left of map 2, south of Warsaw, near the big city of Lodz) in Poland, and became a priest in 1918, when he was twenty-four and all of Europe was tired out after the First World War and everyone wanted to be modern and happy, but many people were still angry and miserable. Maximilian thought that maybe this would be a good time to remind people about the big ideas of Christianity—brotherhood, peace, forgiveness, that sort of thing—but he felt that he needed to be modern about his approach. So, he started a printing shop, and then a radio show, and he went all over the world preaching and listening and learning and explaining. When he went to Japan, he studied Buddhism to understand its connections with Christianity, and he started more newspapers and study groups all over East Asia.

Maximilian began to tire himself out, the way saints do, and he had to go home to Poland for a rest in 1936. When the evil Nazi army of Germany took over his country in 1939, he and his whole congregation were arrested for awhile, but as soon as they were released, they went back to work saving people whose lives were in danger. They sheltered about three thousand Polish people, most of them Jewish (the people those crazy Nazis hated most of all, because of one of those incredibly bad new ideas added to a bad old idea). Of course, Maximilian was arrested again in 1941 when they found out what his church had been doing, especially after he wrote in his newspaper that "no one in the world can change Truth."

You may have heard of the terrible death camps where the Nazis sent people they didn't like, to kill them right away or work them to death more slowly ... well, that's where they sent Maximilian Kolbe, to Auschwitz, one of the worst of those places. Maximilian did what he could to comfort his fellow prisoners, and finally, when one man who had a family had been chosen to die for some reason or other, Maximilian offered to die in his place. That very man lived to see Maximilian officially be made a saint, in 1982.

August: Week Three

LOUIS of FRANCE (1214–1297) king (August 25)

Nowadays, we know that it is a bad thing to start a war over religion, but back in the thirteenth century or so, everyone was doing it, especially the Crusaders: European Christians who galloped off to the Holy Land (you know, where events in the Bible took place: mostly Israel, Jordan, and Egypt nowadays) on their great big horses and really heavy armor to save Jerusalem from the Muslims, only to discover that the Holy Land had been pretty peaceful up until then, and that the weather there was too hot for heavy armor and big horses, and that the Muslims not only had better horses and better manners but they also ate a lot of sherbet and wrote poetry. All the same, many serious people in France and England, Germany and Italy, thought going on a Crusade was a good thing. One of those people happened to be an excellent king and, in general, a very good man who did what he believed was right: King Louis I of France

Louis was the ideal king, so if you ever plan to be a monarch, listen up! He really had faith: he sincerely believed in God and that God was the boss, not Louis. In Paris, King Louis built one of the most beautiful churches anywhere, called La Sainte Chapelle. The walls are almost entirely made out of dark red and blue glass, and the ceiling is spangled with gold stars. He also knew it was an awesome responsibility to be in charge of all the people of France, and he did his best for them. As a judge, he was fair, whether you were rich or poor, and he was merciful, too, even when punishing people who did wrong. Louis insisted on preserving everyone's rights, no matter who they might be or what they looked like. In dealing with other countries, he was astute (meaning no one could fool him) and respectful, working for peace whenever possible, but he was a good soldier when he needed to lead his troops into battle. You could always trust him to do what he promised. And, like Joan of Arc and most saints, he hated dirty and blasphemous language (swearing by God and that sort of thing) and he wouldn't allow it around him.

Louis went off on one of those Crusades and—you guessed it—he died far away from France. But people never forgot what a good man he was, or how great a king he had been, so they made him a saint.

August: Week Three

CAESARIUS of ARLES (470–543) bishop (August 27)

Back in the beginning of the Really Dark Ages of European history, also called the Early Medieval, the Romanesque, and so on and so forth, things were pretty rough, and they were about to get rougher. Attila the Hun had paid a visit to Italy as far south as Rome, and the Visigoths had followed him, grabbing everything they could grab, and then settled down and started fighting the other Goths for what they had. Things in France—or Gaul as it was still called—were beginning to look bad, too. The Roman emperor and his armies had moved east, way off to Byzantium, that is, Istanbul in the country of Turkey today, and all sorts of creepy bandits were loose in the countryside of western Europe. So it wasn't surprising that a few things started to slip: first, the water stopped running, because all the slaves who worked the plumbing had been stolen, killed, or run off because they hadn't been paid by the government in years and then—well, they couldn't lose electricity because that hadn't been discovered yet—but most of the schools closed, and pretty soon hardly anybody could read or write or add or subtract, so people got to be amazingly ignorant and easy to confuse.

Some people, thank goodness, hung on to their books and their wits, and helped out everybody else the best they could. One of these people—and an especially good one—was Caesarius of Aries, a citizen of what was left of Roman Gaul and a bishop, too. Arles was an important Roman city in the region called Provence, as you can see if you go there: you'll see the big Roman amphitheater left from the old days. Caesarius was a hard worker and a good preacher who used simple, logical language, didn't preach for too long, and got his message across. Another thing he did was start the first convent in Gaul: a place like a monastery but for women who wanted to pray and help people and never get married.

Caesarius had a sister named Caesaria (the Romans were always pretty unimaginative about names) who wanted to be in charge of the convent since she, like Caesarius, had managed to get a good education. They both decided that, since the nuns were going to be teaching children and helping out poor people who hadn't had much education, each nun should be able to read and write, and also that the nuns should be the only people to decide who was to be their abbess, that is, their nun-in-chief. So that's how they did it. Saint Caesarius was a broad-minded saint, for the Really Dark Ages!
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from FOLK LIKE ME by Kathryn M. Lucchese. Copyright © 2008 Kathryn M. Lucchese. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---