Michaelmas: the original thanks-giving festival

St Michael

Yesterday, Saint Michael saved me from a terrible fate.

I could have wasted my Friday evening watching the Indian cricket team getting savaged by Australia. Instead, I attended a very pleasant Michaelmas service at my children's school. I was grateful for having been saved from hours of TV-misery, and was a little embarrassed that I had no idea what Michaelmas was. Such ignorance is inexcusable in this age of Google, and so, I Googled-up Michaelmas.

The interpretation I like best is that Michaelmas is an autumn festival. It is a thanks-giving to the earth for the bounty of summer, a moment of reflection as the earth and the spirit turn inwards for renewal through the winter. Rudolf Steiner - the inspiration behind the Waldorf school my children attend - thought Michaelmas and Easter were the year's most important festivals, yin and yang, each completing the other, together forming the circle of life. Looked at this way, Michaelmas is like Pongal, the harvest festival of South India; Michaelmas is Shiva to Easter's Brahma.

If Michaelmas is so important, why is it so little known? Competition, maybe? In Britain, the Anglican church replaced Catholic Michaelmas with the Harvest Festival. In America, two big-budget blockbusters, Thanksgiving and Halloween, sit in the same perceptual space. In Latin America, Santa Muerte is venerated in autumn, typically on November 1. The top Google search term associated with Michaelmas is secular: Oxford and Cambridge refer to Fall Semester as Michaelmas Term.

Why is the heroic warrior-angel Michael, who defeated proud Lucifer in battle and cast him out of heaven, associated with this introspective autumnal festival? It isn't obvious. The Archangel Michael might have been a Christian element layered onto a ancient and much-beloved pagan tradition, like Christmas. Regardless, St. Michael has done me a good deed this weekend. Today is his day. Happy Michaelmas!

St Michael vanquishing Satan

Meister Eckhart on Noble Work

"Our works do not ennoble us; we must ennoble our works"

- Meister Eckhart.

I came across these words at a corporate training program, and liked them enough to latch on. 

It is easy to think school teachers and nurses do "noble work", and that plumbers, fork-lift operators, and corporate appartchiks like me, don't. Meister Eckhart's perspective feels more helpful, and more true.

The difference between the United States of America and the States of a United Europe, explained on a taxi ride

NYC taxi

I was flying from New York to Frankfurt. I got a taxi in New York. My cabbie was a brown skinned guy with an accent.

"Where are you from?", I asked him.

"I'm from Queens" he replied.

"Really? From the Queens?"

"Yeah, man. I live in Queens." He didn't sound like a Queens native.

"How long have you lived there?" 

"Six months. But I'm from the Queens. I live in the Queens" he insisted. 

"And before the Queens?"

"Gautemala" he replied. "But all that was a long time ago, man. Now I'm from Queens."

I reached Frankfurt and got a taxi. Again, my cabbie was a brown skinned guy with an accent.

Frankfurt skyline

"Where are you from?", I asked him.

"I'm from Turkey", he replied.

"How long have you lived in Frankfurt", I asked.

"My grandfather came here in 1952. But I am from Turkey."

I heard this story years ago, at a business conference in Budapest, as an explanation for why the states of a united Europe will never morph into the United States of Europe. This was back in 2005, when the European project felt secure and looked like a stunning success.

It comes back to mind frequently because the future of Europe is so much in the news. For instance, the latest Economist has this story about Jose Manuel Barosso, the president of the European Commission, speaking of a the EU becoming a "federation of nation-states". I guess he didn't vet the idea with his cabbie.

Khalil Gibran on how Jeffery Johnson became a murderer

"Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world. 

But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,

So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also." 

I came across these words thumbing through The Prophet, and was ported to this story about Jeffery Johnson, the Empire State Building gunman. In it, Johnson’s mother talks about how she can’t comprehend how her kind-hearted little boy, “who loved the Boy Scouts and animals, and grew up into a patriotic and thoughtful man”, snapped and turned into a calculating murderer. Khalil Gibran’s uncomfortable thought is that the murderer was always in there, lurking inside the kind and thoughtful man.

David Brooks, the NYT’s conservative cloumnist, agrees with Khalil Gibran. Writing about Robert Bales, the American soldier who murdered sixteen sleeping Afghans in their family home, he quotes CS Lewis, who believed “there is no such thing as an ordinary person, each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.”