Vincent van Gogh (above), the artist – and earlier in his life, an evangelist in a coal mining district – cut off his left ear this evening in 1888. Vincent was in the throes of a mental breakdown, and took a razor to his ear after quarrelling with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, who was staying for a few weeks in Vincent’s rented house in Arles, in the South of France. He wrapped the ear in paper and gave it to a young woman he knew, Gabrielle. A few months later, he entered an asylum in a former monastery in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he continued painting.
It is the feast day of St Gabriel of Beth Qustan, who in the 7th century was a bishop and abbot of the Monastery of Qartmin in northern Syria. Gabriel’s life story celebrates his practical help for the nearby villagers, his mission to the Arabs, and his works of wonder. One of these miracle stories concerned a colossal stone slab needed at the monastery for building work, but abandoned four miles away by an exhausted team of oxen. When St Gabriel ordered everyone in the monastery to help shift the stone, the monastery’s dead rose up from their graves to lend a hand. St Gabriel died today in the year 668.
Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons), was born today in 1805 in the town of Sharon, Vermont. By the time he was 15, during the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which was sweeping the American states, he started to experience the visions which led to his publication of the Book of Mormon. His first vision happened when he went to pray in the woods one day where he had left his axe in a tree stump. The heavens opened, God appeared and told young Joseph that his sins were forgiven, and that everyone without exception had turned aside from the gospel.
Today in 1987 Santa Claus was blessed during an audience with Pope John Paul II. Santa (actually Vilipekka Paukku) had travelled from Santa Claus Village in the Lapland region of Finland, and waited with 2,000 other pilgrims to meet the Pope. News outlets reporting the event revealed that Santa, who gave the pope a Christmas present, was actually a Lutheran.
Edward Schillebeeckx, the Belgian Catholic theologian, died today in 2009 at the age of 95. He helped reshape Catholicism at the Second Vatican Council, but in the 1970s and 80s the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, hauled him over the coals three times (hopefully a metaphor) because they suspected his books of heresy. In 1984 he was summoned to Rome and quizzed by Cardinal Ratzinger, who was then Pope John Paul II’s enforcer, but later became his successor as Pope Benedict XVI. Despite this rough treatment, Schillebeeckx’s writings were never condemned, although the issues he raised about how 1st century faith relates to 21st century life remain controversial.
‘I do not begrudge any believer the right to describe and live out his belief in accordance with old models of experience, culture, and ideas. But this attitude isolates the Church’s faith from any future and divests it of any real missionary power to carry conviction with contemporaries for whom the gospel is – here and now – intended.’ Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology
Image: Rijksmuseum / CC0 1.0