Yesterday, December 26, the day after Christmas, is celebrated as the Feast of St. Stephen. St. Stephen was stoned to death by the Jews for complaining that the widows in the community were not being fed. At his death he cried out to the Lord not to punish his murderers.
All I knew about this first of the Christian martyrs is contained in a folk tune called “Good King Wenceslaus”:
Good King Wenceslaus looked out
On the Feast of Stephen
When the snow lay all about
Deep and crisp and even.As the old song says, "Ye who now do bless the poor/Shall yourselves find blessing."
As it did yesterday, under a cold bright sun in Santa Fe.
The king sees a poor man walking through the snow, gathering firewood. He commands his page to bring the man flesh, wine and firewood so that he may have a feast to celebrate the saint.
The king goes out with his page “through the rude wind’s loud lament/And the bitter weather.”
The page begins to complain. “Sire, the night is darker now/And the wind grows stronger/Fails my heart I know not how/I can go on longer.”
The king tells him to walk in his footsteps in the snow: “Heat was in the very sod/that the saint had dented.” Wenceslaus became a saint because of this and other miracles.
And so they proceed to the poor man’s hut and deliver the food. The song ends, “Ye who now do bless the poor/shall yourselves find blessing.”
Here in Santa Fe, still called by tourists the Land of Enchantment, we just lost another homeless man, frozen to death on a concrete slab under a bridge. The brings the number of homeless deaths due to exposure to 34 despite the valiant efforts of the shelters here; my son Will died of exposure in Colorado seven years ago.
All this makes yesterday morning’s New Mexican lead story deeply gratifying to me: two little girls are pictured measuring out cookies for a Christmas feast at the Interfaith Community Shelter here.
Their mother explained that she brought her daughters because she believes in the importance of children learning to empathize with people who live very different lives from theirs, look different and are often ignored or treated as criminals. What a lesson for these ruthless times when seven thousand children have been murdered in Gaza by Israeli soldiers told by their leaders that the Palestinians are not humans.
The lesson this mother teaches her daughters is desperately needed all over the world. St. Stephen and the good king would understand.
And as the old song says, “Ye who now do bless the poor/Shall yourselves find blessing.”
I am sure these two little girls are blessed by their service.
Thank you for homily