Though I’m Welsh, I’d like to wish my readers a happy St George’s Day.
One of the few things we know about George is that he wasn’t English. According to Wikipedia he was from Anatolia, now modern day Turkey.
He was probably a soldier martyred under the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian in c. 304 AD.
George was made Patron Saint of England in 1347 by Edward II in preference to Edward the Confessor. He is also the patron saint of Canada, Catalonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Greece, Montenegro, Portugal, Serbia, the cities of Istanbul, Ljubljana and Moscow, as well as a wide range of professions, organisations and disease sufferers.
George merits a Festival, not only a lesser festival in the C of E calendar.
The Collect:
God of hosts,
Who so kindled the flame of love
In the heart of your servant George
That he bore witness to the risen Lord
By his life and by his death:
Give us the same faith and power of love
That we who rejoice in his triumphs
May come to share with him the fullness of the resurrection;
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Common Worship Daily Prayer p464
Update: Thanks to LG for pointing out this alternative prayer on Revd John Richardson's blog:
Almighty God, We have been taught by the legend of St George to fight against dragons and to rescue the helpless. Deliver us by the truth of the gospel from that great dragon who leads the whole world astray. Free us from our slavery to sin and death. And grant that your light may dawn again on this nation of England. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen
NJ was telling me all sorts of fascinating stuff over coffee today.
Apparently Diocletian pioneered modern bureaucracy and split the Empire into East and West.
One of the new semi-HQs was in York, where the Emperor Constantine was born – so he was English, in a way.
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4 comments:
But did he slay the dragon?
No. That was Jesus.
He might have slain a mini-dragon in a typological kind of way?
Yes, I'm sure your both right in a very real sense. (Anglicanly).
The old Wikiwhatnot went on about the dragon, I think.
Darch and Burns, Saints on Earth: A biographical companion to Common Worship, says of George:
"The slaying of the dragon is not connected whith his name until the 12th C, and it may be that the origin of this story is the Greek myth of Perseus slaying the sea monster." (p56)
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