St.Nick--We Got to Love Him

Nicholas of Myra will be celebrated this week. In North America, his day is not so special, but in other parts of the world, St. Nicholas Day is the day children get candy and fruit in stockings or shoes left out overnight.

Nicholas was bishop of Myra (in modern Turkey) around 375 or so. We don’t know many details about him, except that he was tortured and imprisoned during Diocletian’s persecutions. In one mythical story it is said he secretly left gold in the stocking of a poor maiden who could not marry because she lacked a dowry. He is known as the patron of seafarers and children, an odd combination, to be sure. The one thing that perhaps connects them is that both groups are dependent---one on their vessels in the midst of the gigantic waves, and the other on adults for their survival and growth. Thus we connect Nicholas to acts of benevolence and protection.

Last year I was part-time chaplain at both Northwestern University Canterbury and St. Gregory’s Episcopal School for at-risk boys in K-8 grades in urban Chicago. I wanted to make connections between these two groups, so I led some Canterbury students to St. Gregory’s to have St. Nicholas Day with the children. One NU graduate student looked very much like a Turkish bishop after we dressed him up for chapel. He led the children in a teaching on St. Nicholas, while other students filled with goodies the shoes that had been left outside the chapel. After chapel, the NU students helped the older class prepare for a Hip Hop Morning Prayer at which they were officiating the next week.

As chaplain at St. Gregory School I had hoped this visit from NU students, the first encounter with St. Nick for most of the boys, would be a special event for the school, as it was. But I had not counted on the college students being moved as well, as I later discovered that they had experienced an inner-city school for the first time in their lives. I am told by NU chaplain Liz Stedman that they still talk about that trip.

While St. Nicholas may be historically obscure, the acts done in his name, of giving and benevolence, powerfully speak to us today. While we may disdain the morphing of the bishop of Myra into a fat man from a mythical North Pole, brought to us from Dutch settlers as Santa Claus, we cannot deny the gifts, both temporal and spiritual, we have both given and received, that speak of love—enduring and divine. Nicholas of Myra fills a place in our hearts that calls us to give to others unconditionally. And if we connect that giving to the ultimate gift given to us by God, then the bishop of Myra, whoever he really was, lives again, showing us a path of peace.