God Bless Little Saints: St. Servulus

Little Saints  

God Bless the little saints.  One understandable drawback to the great liturgical feasts, such as the magnificent celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord at Christmas, is that we can overlook lesser observances in all the excitement. For instance, today (December 23rd) is the memorial of St. Servulus. He is worth remembering for his own sake. In addition to that, his life also gives us some very fruitful matter for meditation on the penultimate day of Advent, as we prepare for Christmas itself.

Let’s take a look at the story of St. Servulus. Here’s Butler’s Lives of the Saints (an account based on a homily by St. Gregory the Great):

St. Servulus  

December 23.—ST. SERVULUS was a beggar, and had been so afflicted with palsy from his infancy that he was never able to stand, sit upright, lift his hand to his mouth, or turn himself from one side to another. His mother and brother carried him into the porch of St. Clement’s Church at Rome, where he lived on the alms of those that passed by. He used to entreat devout persons to read the Holy Scriptures to him, which he heard with such attention as to learn them by heart. His time he consecrated by assiduously singing hymns of praise and thanksgiving to God.

After several years thus spent, his distemper having seized his vitals, he felt his end was drawing nigh. In his last moments he desired the poor and pilgrims, who had often shared in his charity, to sing sacred hymns and psalms for him. While he joined his voice with theirs, he on a sudden cried out: “Silence! do you not hear the sweet melody and praise which resound in the heavens?” Soon after he spoke these words he expired, and his soul was carried by angels into everlasting bliss, about the year 590.

Model of Heroic Virtue

Bob Crachit & Tiny Tim, by Fred Barnard, 1870

Servulus is certainly an admirable model of heroic virtue.  In spite of a lifetime of constant suffering, he radiated gratitude to his Creator. He devoted himself completely to God, as his name proclaims (Servulus means “little slave”). Moreover, despite his own absolute poverty, he was keenly aware of the need of others. But there’s more to the story of this saint and his feast day, coming as it does right before the celebration of the Nativity of Our Lord.  When I first read Servulus’ hagiography, in fact, a passage from Charles Dickens immediately came to mind.  

I was thinking of the scene in A Christmas Carol. Here, the Ghost of Christmas Present is showing Scrooge the Cratchit family’s Christmas dinner.  Scrooge’s underpaid clerk, Bob Cratchit, has just returned from church on Christmas day with his sickly, crippled son Tiny Tim.  After Tim is whisked off by his siblings to see “the pudding singing in the copper,” Bob has the following exchange with his wife:

“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content. “As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

Image of Christ’s Mercy

Tiny Tim sees himself as a living image of Christ’s mercy, reminding the faithful that the Nativity they’re celebrating is not just the birth of a baby, but the Incarnation of the God of Mercy as a Man. St. Servulus is also an icon, pointing out precisely who the Babe in the manger has come to be. He reminds us that in taking on human flesh, Jesus is taking to himself all that is human, excepting sin.  That very emphatically includes human suffering. It is often said that when God took on human form, he sanctified humanity.

Adoration of the Child, by Gerard van Honthorst, c. 1620


Likewise, since Jesus has participated in our pain and sorrow, through his suffering we can unite ourselves to the living God. St. Servulus puts flesh on the words of St. Paul: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Colossians 1:24).”  Small wonder that the suffering saint could hear the voices of angels even before he left this world for the next.

Good News of Great Joy


    In two days, we will be celebrating Christmas, the birth of our Savior, which is indeed, as the angels tell the shepherds of Bethlehem, “good news of a great joy” (Luke 2:10).  St. Servulus reminds us that He comes not so much to save us from the hardships of this world, but to save us through those hardships, so that we can be eternally happy with Him in the next.
    May your Christmas be a merry one . . . and God Bless Us, Every One.

Something Strange is Happening: Holy Saturday

Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep.

Those are the opening sentences in the non-scriptural reading in today’s Office of Readings, an “ancient homily on Holy Saturday.” It’s true that Holy Saturday is not quite like any other day in the liturgical calendar.  There is a pause after the intense liturgical activity of Holy Thursday and Good Friday.  There is a sense of expectancy, and, as the author of the reading above put it, “a great silence and stillness.”

     So it seems, to us.  If we read on, we see that the King may appear, to us, to be “asleep” but that is not really the case:

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, he who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won him the victory.

The period between Death and Resurrection is one of stillness and waiting in our world, but Jesus doesn’t rest.  And why would Christ, fresh from crucifixion and death, seek out Adam and Eve? Our homilist shows him telling out first parents:

I am your God, who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by my own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of my hands, you who were created in my image.

These words are addressed here to Adam and Eve, but they are also addressed to us, their descendants. God did not create our first parents “to be held a prisoner in hell.”  Nor did he create any of us for that purpose. Out of his love for all of us he is calling us away from Death:

Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.

O sleeper, awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell.

“The Harrowing of Hell” by Fra Angelico, early 15th century

The picture our homilist paints here of Christ is a reflection of what Jesus says of himself in the Gospels.  Consider this passage from the Gospel of Matthew:

If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?  And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. (Matthew 18: 12-13)

This is one of numerous passages that show us how intent Our Lord is on gathering us to himself. We often speak of ourselves as “seeking God,” but that’s not really the way it works, we’re deceiving ourselves. The Benedictine Mark Barrett in his book Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscape of Our Lives says:

Biblical images of God – shepherd, farmer, lover – always make God the one who is active.  He takes the initiative . . . God is the seeker, and we are the object of the search.  This is the strangest lesson of all.

Yes, something strange is happening.  While our world seems silent and still, under the surface Our Lord is working out of our view to bring back all his lost sheep. We might want to take some time during the quiet of Holy Saturday to meditate on Christ’s saving action, and prepare ourselves to return to him when the Resurrected Lord comes back for us on Easter Sunday.

(You can read trhe entire Ancient Homily HERE)