麻豆约拍

From Rev鈥檇 Richard Coles, cleric and broadcaster:

As I鈥檓 sure you all know, it is the Feast of St Wulfric of Haselbury. A priest in 12th Century England he neglected his flock to go hunting and dancing and fighting, which he loved, until a beggar pricked his conscience and he gave it all up to become a hermit. Unfortunately his chain mail made kneeling awkward, so he prayed earnestly for a miracle and found his shears cut through it as if it were silk and - thanks be to God - he was able to alter the hem without too much trouble.

Rather a rubbish miracle, you might think, but typical of the lives of the saints of the Middle Ages, a rich fund of stories which I have taken to posting on Social Media every morning. This is not only because of the sheer delight of their adventures and misadventures - being taken up by clouds and dropped off near Daventry, reading at night by the light of a magically glowing finger, floating up to the roof of the Sistine chapel during an audience with the pope, that sort of thing 鈥� but because I think they tell us something important.

You may snort, as indeed, my correspondents often do: 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 actually believe this nonsense?鈥� No, of course not. I think they鈥檙e legends, no more literally true than Greek myth or the creation accounts in the Bible; but once you鈥檝e got over that, you may see, coming into focus, from people very remote from us in time and place and custom, something surprisingly powerful and enduring; something that called them from lives of ease and pleasure to lives of simplicity and service.

And if that seems hopelessly olde worlde, it endures, I鈥檇 argue in Comic Relief, when we wear red noses, and sit in baths of baked beans and dress as Mme de Pompadour (looking to you here David): because in a world of plenty where millions starve, where the weakest and most vulnerable among us are routinely neglected, where children are born not into hope for the future but a prison of want for present needs - nonsense makes sense.