Aidan, Abbot-Bishop of Lindisfarne, Missionary to Northumbria, 651

The Gospel first came to the people of northern England in 627, when Edwin, king of Northumbria, was converted by a mission from Canterbury led by Paulinus, who became the first Bishop of York. Edwin’s death in battle in 632 was followed by a vigorous pagan reaction. A year later, his exiled nephew Oswald gained the kingdom and proceeded at once to restore the Christian faith in Northumbria.

During his youthful exile, Oswald had lived at the island monastery of Iona, where he was converted and baptized. Hence he sent to Iona, rather than to Canterbury, for a bishop by whose teaching and ministry the Northumbrians might come to faith in Christ. The first bishop sent from Iona was an austere man who left England after a time, having met with no success in his preaching, reporting to the Irish fathers at Iona that the English were an ungovernable people of an obstinate and barbarous temperament. During a conference held to decide whom the monks of Iona would next send to the English, Aidan, a monk of Iona, remarked to the previous missionary, “Brother, it seems to me that you were too severe on your ignorant hearers. You should have followed the practice of the Apostles, and begun by giving them the milk of simpler teaching, and gradually nourished them with the word of God until they were capable of greater perfection and able to follow the loftier precepts of Christ.” At these words, the monks realized that Aidan was the man to be made bishop and sent to the English. Thus Aidan, a man of great gentleness, moderation, and holiness, was sent as the new head of the mission to Northumbria. Aidan centered his work not at York but on the tidal island of Lindisfarne, which Oswald had granted to the Irish for their missionary endeavors.

Aidan and his missionary monks and the English youths whom they converted and trained diligently worked to establish and extend the Christ’s Church throughout the kingdom of Northumbria. The king himself often accompanied Aidan on his preaching journeys and translated his sermons into English, for Aidan was not fluent in the English language. Bede the Venerable writes of Aidan, that

“Among other evidences of a holy life, he gave the clergy an inspiring example of self-discipline and continence, and the highest recommendation of his teaching to all was that he and his followers lives as they taught. He never sought or cared for any worldly possessions, and loved to give away to the poor who chanced to meet him whatever he received from kings or wealthy folk. Whether in town or country, he always traveled on foot unless compelled by necessity to ride; and whatever people he met on his walks, whether high or low, he stopped and spoke to them. If they were heathen, he urged them to be baptized; and if they were Christians, he strengthened their faith, and inspired them by word and deed to live a good life and to be generous to others…If wealthy people did wrong, he never kept silent out of respect or fear, but corrected them outspokenly. Nor would he offer money to influential people, although he offered them food whenever he entertained them as host. But, if the wealthy ever gave him gifts of money, he either distributed it for the needs of the poor, as I have mentioned, or else used it to ransom any who had unjustly been sold as slaves. Many of those whom he had ransomed in this way later became his disciples; and when they had been instructed and trained, he ordained them to the priesthood.”

Aidan died on this day in 651, at the royal town of Bamburgh.

(Quoted passages are from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, translated and © Penguin Books, 1990.)

The Collect

O loving God, you called your servant Aidan from the peace of a cloister to re-establish the Christian mission in northern England, and endowed him with gentleness, simplicity, and strength: Grant that we, following his example, may use what you have given us for the relief of human need, and may persevere in commending the saving Gospel of our Redeemer Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Charles Chapman Grafton, Bishop of Fond du Lac and Ecumenist, 1912

Born in Boston, Massachusetts on April 12, 1830, Charles Grafton became an ardent supporter of the Oxford Movement within the Protestant Episcopal Church and wider Anglicanism. He graduated from Harvard University in 1853 with a degree in law but found himself drawn toward ordained ministry. He studied theology under William Whittingham, Bishop of Maryland, and was ordained to the diaconate in 1855 and to the presbyterate in 1858. After taking presbyteral orders, he served as curate at St. Paul’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Baltimore and as chaplain to the deaconesses of the Diocese of Maryland.

At the close of the War between the States, Grafton went to Britain, where with Richard Meux Benson and Simeon Wilberforce O’Neill he founded the Society of St. John the Evangelist (SSJE), also known as the Cowley Fathers.

On his return to the United States he became in 1872 the fourth rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston. A jurisdictional dispute concerning his overseas religious superior led to his withdrawal from the Society of St. John the Evangelist, and Grafton subsequently helped establish the American Congregation of St. Benedict and, along with Mother Ruth Margaret, founded the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity in 1888.

Chosen bishop of the Diocese of Fond du Lac, Grafton was consecrated on the feast of Saint Mark, April 25, 1889 in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin by the bishops of Chicago, Quincy, and Springfield. During his episcopate, Grafton led a expansion of the Diocese of Fond du Lac, contributing much of his own personal wealth and soliciting contributions from his wealthy friends in the East.

In 1900 he was chief consecrator of Reginald Heber Weller as bishop-coadjutor of Fond du Lac in a service that proved controversial. Both Tikhon (Vasily Ivanovich Bellavin), the Russian Orthodox bishop of the Aleutian Islands and North America (later Patriarch of Moscow and subsequently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church), and Antoni Kozlowski, bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church were present at the consecration. Grafton was photographed with these and other Episcopalian bishops wearing copes and miters, which were not widely accepted in the Protestant Episcopal Church at the time. Because of what was believed by many to be extravagant costuming of the consecrators, the photograph because known as the “Fond du Lac Circus.”

Grafton died on August 30, 1912 having served faithfully as bishop of Fond du Lac for twenty-three years.

The Collect (of a Pastor)

O God, our heavenly Father, your raised up your faithful servant Charles Grafton to be a bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The appointed readings for August 30 in the Book of Common Prayer (2019) are Psalm 146, 2 Samuel 17, and Philemon at Morning Prayer; and Psalm 147, Jonah 1, and Matthew 2 at Evening Prayer.

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The image of Bishop Grafton is taken from a photograph of a window in St. Mary’s Chapel, Nashotah House, Wisconsin.

The Beheading of John the Baptist

Saint John the Baptist, the Forerunner of the Messiah, preceded Jesus both in his birth and in his death. His way of life and his preaching closely resemble that of the prophets of the Old Testament, his message being one of repentance and preparation for the coming of the Messiah and his kingdom. At Jesus’ baptism John recognized him as that coming Messiah when he saw the Spirit of God descend upon Jesus. And like the faithful prophets of Israel before him, John did not hesitate to denounce immorality and evil in even the highest places of power, denouncing the incestuous union of Herod Antipas with his niece and half-brother’s wife, Herodias. Herod imprisoned him for doing so, likely also fearing that John’s denunciation might spark a rebellion against him by more zealous Jews. John’s death was brought about through the hatred that Herodias had for him and by Herod’s weakness. When Herodias’ daughter (traditionally named Salome, though her name is not given in the biblical text) pleased the king with her dancing at a feast to celebrate his birthday, he promised here that, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, up to half of my kingdom.” At her mother’s instigation, she demanded the head of John the Baptist, then languishing in prison at Machaerus by the Dead Sea. Despite his initial reluctance, he fulfilled his promise, and without giving John a trial of any kind, dispatched an executioner to behead him. Augustine of Hippo commented on John’s death and Herod’s perfidy, “We see how a pledge which was given rashly was criminally kept.”

The commemoration of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is found in the sanctoral calendar of the Church of England, both in the 1662 Prayer Book and in Common Worship.

The Collect

O God, you called John the Baptist to be in birth and death the forerunner of your Son: Grant that as John gave his life in witness to truth and righteousness, so we may fearlessly contend for the right, even unto the end; through your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The appointed psalms and readings for August 29 in the Book of Common Prayer (2019) are Psalm 144, 2 Samuel 16, and Colossians 4 at Morning Prayer; and Psalm 145, Obadiah, and Matthew 1:18-end at Evening Prayer.

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The Collect is from the 1736 Paris Missal and the 1985 Roman Sacramentary, translated by Philip H. Pfatteicher (New Book of Festivals and Commemorations: A Proposed Common Calendar of Saints). Proper lessons for this commemoration are Jeremiah 1:17-19; Psalm 71:1-16; James 1:1-12; and Mark 6:14-29.

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo and Teacher of the Faith, 430

Augustine, arguably the greatest theologian in the history of the Western Church, was born in 354 at Tagaste in North Africa. Born to a pagan father and a Christian mother, she attempted to given him a Christian upbringing, but without success. He attended school in Carthage, where he became a skilled rhetorician. During this time he took a concubine with whom he lived for a number of years and who bore him a son, Adeodatus (“gift of God”). In his restless search for truth, he was attracted to the Manicheans, followers of a radically dualistic religion of Persian origin. Sometime after 383 he left Africa for Rome, in hopes of advancing his career in the imperial service. There he taught rhetoric and continued his studies. In 384 he went to Milan to teach, where under the influence of the prayers and pleading of his mother, Monica, and the compelling example of the brilliant and courageous bishop of Milan, Ambrose, he was ineluctably drawn to the Catholic faith. He first renounced Manicheaism to take up the study of Neoplatonism, and then, under Ambrose’s influence, he entered a period of great spiritual struggle during which his doubts were dispelled. In his spiritual autobiography, The Confessions, a classic text of Christian spirituality, he writes of a pivotal moment in that struggle:

“I was carrying on so, crying acrid tears of ‘heart’s contrition,’ when I heard from a nearby house the voice of a boy – or perhaps a girl, I could not tell – chanting in repeated singsong: Lift! Look! My features relaxed immediately, while I studied as hard as I could whether children use such a chant in any of their games. But I could not remember every having heard it. No longer crying, I leaped up, not doubting that it was by divine prompting that I should open the book and read what first I hit on…I rushed back to where Alypius was sitting, since there I had left the book of the Apostle when I moved away from him. I grabbed, opened, read: ‘Give up indulgence and drunkenness, give up lust and obscenity, give up strife and rivalries, and clothe yourself in Jesus Christ the Lord, leaving no further allowance for fleshly desires.’ The very instant I finished that sentence, light was flooding my heart with assurance, and all my shadowy reluctance evanesced.”

Augustine was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387.

Monica died in southern Italy as she and her son were on their way back home. After his arrival back in North African in 391, the people of the city of Hippo Regius unexpectedly chose Augustine as a presbyter. Four years later he was elected and consecrated bishop coadjutor of Hippo, and from 396 until his death he served as bishop of the city, which was, after Carthage, the second most important ecclesiastical city in the province of Africa. During his episcopate he wrote tirelessly, producing treatises, letters, and biblical commentaries. His sermons, known to us from transcription made by his hearers, were masterpieces of rhetorical and homiletical art and were always centered on Jesus Christ.

Other of his writings were polemical, directed against the Manicheans and heretics and schismatics. The Manichaens had attempted to solve the problem of evil by positing a radically dualistic reality, in which an independent agency of evil was opposed to the good god. In refutation, Augustine affirmed that all creation is in its origin good, having been created by God, and that evil, far from being an agency independent of God, is the privation of good. Against the Donatists, a rigorist sect who had split from the Catholic Church after the persecution of Diocletian in the early fourth century, Augustine asserted that the Church was holy, not because her members could be proved holy (indeed, the Church is a corpus permixtum of the godly and the ungodly), but because holiness was the purpose of the Church, to which all its members are called.

Stirred by the pagan denunciations of Christianity in the wake of Alaric the Visigoth’s sack of Rome in 410, Augustine wrote his greatest work, The City of God. In it he writes:

“Two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by love of self, even to the contempt of God, the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The earthly city glories in itself, the heavenly city glories in the Lord…In the one, the princes, and the nations it subdues, are ruled by the love of ruling; in the other, the princes and the subjects serve one another in love.”

Augustine died on August 28, 430, as the Vandals were besieging his own earthly city of Hippo.

His relics were taken to Sardinia, and in the eighth century Liutprand, king of the Lombards, had his body translated to Pavia, where they remain enshrined in the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro.

taken from Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1980) and other sources;
quotation from The Confessions, translated Garry Wills

The Collect

Lord God, the light of the minds that know you, the life of the souls that love you, and the strength of the hearts that serve you: Help us, following the example of your servant Augustine of Hippo, so to know you that we may truly love you, and so to love you that we may fully serve you, whom to serve is perfect freedom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

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The appointed psalms and readings for August 28 in the Book of Common Prayer (2019) are Psalm 140, 2 Samuel 15, and Colossians 3:12-end at Morning Prayer; and Psalm 143, Obadiah, and Matthew 1:1-17 at Evening Prayer.

The image is of the oldest known icon of St Augustine, from a sixth century fresco in the Church of St John Lateran.

Monica, Mother of Augustine of Hippo, 387

Born in north Africa at Tagaste of Berber parents, Monica was married to Patricius, a Latinized provincial of Tagaste. By her patient persistence Monica won over her husband, who was baptized the year before he died. By Patricius, Monica was the mother of three children: Augustine, Navigius, and Perpetus. She is especially venerated as the mother of Augustine, later bishop of Hippo, and in her patient treatment of him through many years of anxiety ending in his conversion, she is seen as the model of Christian motherhood.

Most of our information about Monica comes from Book IX of Augustine’s Confessions. We learn that that when he was young, Monica enrolled him as a catechumen according to the custom of the day, but his dissolute life caused her so much distress that at one time she refused to allow him to live in her house. Advised by a presbyter of the Church that the time for his conversion had not yet come, she relented and gave up arguing with him, turning instead to prayer, fasts, and vigils, hoping that these would succeed where argument had failed. Eventually Augustine went to Rome, deceiving his mother about the time of his departure in order to travel without her. He went on from Rome to Milan, but Monica followed him. She was esteemed by Ambrose, the bishop of that city, who also helped Augustine towards conversion to Christ and a deep moral transformation, which took place in 386. As a consequence, Augustine renounced his mother’s plans for his marriage, determining to remain celibate, and with his mother and a few close friends he withdrew for a period to prepare for baptism. Augustine was baptized in 387. Monica and his friends set out on the journey to Africa with him, but she died along the way, at Ostia, where she was buried.

Augustine writes that his brother expressed sorrow, for her sake, that she should die so far from her own country. She said to her sons, “It does not matter where you bury my body. Do not let that worry you. All I ask of you is that, wherever you may be, you should remember me at the altar of the Lord.” To the question, whether she was not afraid at the thought of leaving her body in an alien land, she replied, “Nothing is far from God, and I need have no fear that he will not know where to find me, when he comes to raise me to life at the end of the world.”

Modern excavations at Ostia uncovered her original tomb, but her mortal remains were transferred in 1430 to the Church of Saint Augustine in Rome.

prepared from The Oxford Dictionary of Saints
and Lesser Feasts and Fasts (1980)

The Collect

O Lord, through spiritual discipline you strengthened your servant Monica to persevere in offering her love and prayers and tears for the conversion of her husband and of Augustine their son: Deepen our devotion, we pray, and use us in accordance with your will to bring others, even our own kindred, to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The appointed psalms and readings for August 27 in the Book of Common Prayer (2019) are Psalm 139, 2 Samuel 14, and Colossians 2:20-3:11 at Morning Prayer; and Psalms 141 and 142, Amos 8, and John 21 at Evening Prayer.

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The image of Monica is from Saint Monica’s Church in the Diocese of Trenton, from a study of the saint done by John Nava, the artist who created the stunning tapestries in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. Saint Monica is also depicted in one of the tapestry panels.