A Season, Two Names, Two Starts and What Happened to the High Holydays and Sukkoth? 2026.

OK what's up with this?  Whyrya posting about Fall and Jewish stuff, arnchu supposed to post Lutheran stuff?  Here's why.  Past Elder, my original blog, started 22 February 2007 and its Blogoral Cycle (a joke on the term "sanctoral calendar" from the church calendar) takes particular note of how our church year comes from and fulfills the cycle of observances in the Jewish calendar. However in Fall, where the Jewish calendar is FULL of stuff, the Christian church calendar has NOTHING.  Yet this is precisely where, if it indeed comes from and fulfills the Jewish cycle, one would expect it to be full of stuff too!

Not to mention (I like to say that before I mention something) that in the world this season has two names and two official start times, and some unofficial start times too, and the church calendar has nothing special.

So what's up with that? Here's the 2026 version of my post about it.

I. About Fall.

The official start of Fall happens on 23 or 24 September.  Huh?

Well actually, that's just one of the official starts of Fall. Holy crap, what's up with that -- two official starts?  And we said there's unofficial ones too? And to a season with two names! What's up with THAT?  And that's before we even get to this post's actual What's Up With That?  Here's the deal.

A. About the Two Starts.

The first thing is, there's two Falls, the astronomical one and the meteorological one.  We just went over the astronomical one.  Astronomical Fall is determined by the relative amount of light and dark in a day, in turn determined by the relative position of the Earth and the Sun. Just like the word Man, which can mean either all human beings or just the male ones, the word Day is used sometimes for the whole 24 hour period or just the light part of it.

Astronomical Fall starts on the day, as in 24 hour period, with equal amounts of light and dark in it.  They're not exactly equal but pretty damn close.  That day is called the autumnal equinox, equal night in Latin.  The day when they are exactly equal is called the equilux, equal light in Latin. It happens a couple days later.  Howzat?  Because the equinox is not determined by a single point but the top of a sphere, the sun.

Fall goes to the day with the least amount of day light in it, called the winter solstice ("sun stand still", solstitium, sol or sun and sistere or to stand still in Latin). And some think Latin is not still with us! But we all note these daylight changes do not align exactly with the air temperature changes. That is because of the thermal latency of land and sea.

Judas H Priest, what is thermal latency? How many what's up with thats can we have in one post? Don't freak. "Thermal latency" are simply more Latin derived words for the phenomenon that while as the earth rotates toward and then away from the sun, thereby giving more and then less heat, it takes both land and water a while to warm up or cool off.

Meteorological Fall is determined by the changes in air temperature. Huh, if it's meteorology why ain't it about meteors? Holy crap another What's Up With That! Now ain't you glad you read my blog so you can know all this stuff? Meteorology comes from the Greek meteoros or "up in the sky",  and -ology or the study of something. Matter of fact, although weather forecasters take flak for having the only job where you get paid to be wrong, meteorology was started by Aristotle in a book by that name he wrote in 350 BC in which, with no modern instruments whatever but just being a keen observer and smarter than all hell, he described what is now called the hydrologic cycle.

Don't freak, more Greek derived words, here meaning water cycle, in which water is not just distinct from land but interacts with land in changing cycles in various forms; liquid, otherwise known as rain, vapour, otherwise known as fog, and solid, otherwise known as ice. Think that's just some musty ancient stuff, who cares? Think again, because our planet, though we call it Earth, is actually mostly water, and a planet with a lot of water over long periods of time loses hydrogen, which is part of water (H2O, remember?), which in turn leads to what is called the "greenhouse effect", which leads to more hydrogen loss, which leads to more greenhouse effect, and that is an entirely natural cycle.  Climate is going to change.  But, that change can be accelerated by what Man's activities put in the air.  Now, while we don't know exactly how these two affect each other, and while various points on the political spectrum act as if we do, they DO interact, and everybody is concerned as hell about that now or damned well ought to be.

Sound musty now? Old Ari was sharp as a tack, wish we had more like him now with modern instruments. Which is why, besides Blogoral Calendars and stuff like that, this blog goes on about musty ancient stuff -- because it helps us understand where in the hell we are right now and what "where we are right now" even is.

So, meteorological seasons are determined by average air temperatures, which lag behind the astronomical events of solstices and equinoxes that determine astronomical seasons, due to thermal water latency. Fall in this definition is from 1 September to 30 November. Well, in the northern hemisphere that is. Our planet being a sphere, when one side rotates toward the sun the other rotates away, so Fall in the southern hemisphere happens when our Spring does, and vice versa.

There's your two official starts, but in the US there's two unofficial starts also.  One of them is Labor Day, which became a federal holiday in 1894 and happens on the first Monday in September.  The other is set by your local school board, who as any kid or parent knows, is God, and determines when Summer ends by when school starts. When I grew up school started after Labor Day, the unofficial start of Fall, and after 1 September, the official start of meteorological Fall.  Now it starts in August sometime when you oughta still be swimming in the city pool and stuff like that, probably because they don't want any lawsuits so they have room for "snow days" in the Winter.  When I grew up a snow day meant you got up earlier, shovelled the crap outta the way and went about your business, leaving early because you drive slower, or should.

B. About the Two Names.

Oh yeah, about the two names for the same season thing, so we can clear up all the What's Up With Thats before we get on to the main What's Up With That. Guess what? More Latin. The original name was the Latin autumnus, and the modern languages derived from Latin, like French, all have similar words for it. But English isn't totally Latin derived, the Latin and Greek stuff is an overlay from the French-speaking Normans and their conquest of England in 1066 onto basically a form of German.  In German itself autumn is Der Herbst, which means harvest, and that is what the season was called in English too, Harvest.  It wasn't until the 1500s, when people were tending to live more in towns than in the country, that "harvest" in English became more the activity of harvesting and the season when it happens began to be called Autumn and Fall.

OK we saw the derivation of "autumn" from autumnus but where did this fall thing come from? Because the leaves are falling, and the amount of daylight is falling, and the year is drawing to its close. In the 1600s English colonisation of the Americas was in full swing, and both terms came over, but back in Mother England by the 1700s "fall" fell to "autumn" in usage, and that is why now Autumn is used in both places but Fall in mostly heard in the US.

Sukkoth is the easy part of this Fall stuff. It begins at sunset, the start of the Biblical day, on 15 Tishrei in the Jewish calendar. Expressing this date in the secular calendar, it will be somewhere from late September to mid October.  Ironically, the secular Gregorian calendar is religious in origin, being commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 to correct the drift of the Julian calendar so Easter would happen about when the first one did.  More about calendars in the next post, on Michaelmas.  Remember the Jewish calendar is a lunar one so things move when expressed in our calendar, and, the "day" starts at sundown.  In 2020 Sukkoth started sunset of 2 October.  It was sunset of 23 September in 2018, 4 October in 2017, 16 October in 2016, 27 September in 2015, 8 October in 2014, 18 September in 2013, 30 September in 2012, of 12 October in 2011, and of 22 September in 2010. The date being fixed in the Jewish calendar it will move in the Gregorian one.

God's pretty straight up about what he wants. Speaking of which, let's see what the real God, not the school board, wants regarding observances through the year and what all this stuff in Fall is.

II. Here's What God Wants For A Festival Calendar.

In the religion God delivered to the Jews in the Old Testament, he commands three major festivals: 1) Pesach or Passover; 2) Shavuot or Pentecost, also called Weeks; 3) Sukkot, called Tabernacles or Booths. These three are the Shalosh Regalim, the Three Pilgrim Festivals where all Jews go to Jerusalem.

And in the Fall, in addition to Sukkot, before it there is the High Holidays, more properly the Yamim Noraim or Days of Awe.  These are the Ten Days of Repentance, from Rosh Hashanah, the so-called Jewish New Year, through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year, commanded in the Law of Moses.  Then comes Sukkoth itself, which runs seven days.  Then comes the Eighth Day, Shemini Atzeret, when normal living indoors resumes (huh, what's up with that; hang on, we'll get to it below, or as we say, vide infra, Latin for "see below", a term once common in the scholarly apparatus -- you know, footnotes and stuff -- of scholarly works and which I for sure would use if I ever resume writing like a PhD).  We're not done yet; then comes Simchat Torah, Rejoicing in Torah, with the conclusion of the annual reading through of Torah and starting it right over again, and dancing that often goes on for hours.  LOTS of stuff in the Fall.  Or Autumn.

In some of the other posts, we saw the first festival, Passover, transformed by Christ at the Last Supper, or Last Seder, into what we call Holy Communion, the new and eternal testament of his body and blood, and ratified by his Death and Resurrection which we celebrate as an event in time on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Then we saw with the second festival God himself counts the commanded Omer and transforms the celebration of the giving of the Law at Sinai at Pentecost by the giving of the promised Holy Spirit to the Apostles, which we celebrate as an event in time on the day also called Pentecost.

Then, for the third festival, what -- the whole thing seems to, uh, fall apart!! Where's the transformed Rosh Ha-Shanah, where's the transformed Days of Awe, where's the transformed Yom Kippur, where's the transformed Sukkoth, where's the transformed Eighth Day and Rejoicing in Torah? And where's the dancing?

Nowhere.

The Christian calendar is entirely absent of such things. Fall, full of observances in Judaism, comes and goes with nothing until the secular Thanksgiving and then Advent which is a time of preparation for Christmas. So does the parallel fall apart here, or perhaps show itself to be irrelevant anyway if it exists at all?

No. Consider how Jesus gives himself. Christ has himself become our atonement, that to which the Day of Atonement led. The "Day of Atonement" is the historical Good Friday, once for all. Rosh Ha-Shanah too, the day on which creation was completed and God judges each person for the coming year, has been fulfilled in God's having re-created lost Man by making justification possible because of the merit of Christ's sacrifice. That is how we are now inscribed, not just for the coming year but for eternity. So these two are absent because they have served their purpose and been fulfilled.

But what of Sukkot? At Sukkot, one lives, or at least takes one's meals, in a temporary structure called a sukkah in Hebrew -- a booth, a tabernacle, not in one's actual home. This is to remember the passage of the people after the Passover and Pentecost to the Promised Land. Zechariah (14:16-19) predicts that in the time of the Messiah the feast will be observed not just by Jews but by all humanity coming to Jerusalem for its observance. That would be a pretty big event. It ain't happening. And a transformed Sukkoth in the Christian calendar ain't even happening either. So what is the deal here?

III. Here's The Christian Sukkoth.

Consider. Christ is our Passover, in whose blood we are washed and made clean, and the Holy Spirit has empowered the spread of this Good News beginning on that Pentecost recorded in Acts. But the end of the story, unlike the arrival in the Promised Land, has not happened. The real Promised Land is not a piece of geography but heaven itself, the ultimate Jerusalem. So, there cannot be a Christian Sukkoth because we are still in our booths, as it were, not in our permanent homes, still on our pilgrimage to the Promised Land, and what Zechariah saw is happening, as "the nations", all people, join in this journey given first to the Jews and then to all Man, the Gentiles.

Our Sukkot is our life right now, in our "booths" or temporary homes on our way to heaven! So this feast awaits its transformation, and that is why it is absent. The first two of the "pilgrimage festivals", the Shalosh Regalim, have been transformed, into the basis of not just our calendar but our life and faith itself, but the third will be heaven itself, toward which we journey as we live in our booths here on the way.

While we do not, therefore, have a certain observance of a transformed Sukkot in our calendar, being in our booths presently, we do have something of it as we go. Our nation, and others too, have a secular, national day of Thanksgiving at the end of harvest time, preserving that aspect of thankfulness for our earthly ingathering of the fruits of our labour. And in the final weeks of the Sundays after Trinity, which happen in Fall, we focus on the End Times in our readings, the great ingathering that will be for all nations when our Sukkoth here is ended, not just at death personally but finally at the Last Day.

Before the Conclusion, a word or two on Eastern Orthodox observance, in which some consider the feast of the Transfiguration takes the place of Sukkot, fruits are blessed to commemorate Peter's suggestion to build three booths, one for Christ, Moses and Elijah each.  Well, in the Eastern observance the "Blessing of the First Fruits" does give it a harvest connexion, but, Sukkoth is not about first but last fruits. And, in the Transfiguration Jesus turns down Peter's suggestion.  No booths.  Instead we see Jesus' fulfillment of the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah), and the appearance of all three persons in God, as he is about to go to Jerusalem for the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection.

Related to that, the Feast of the Transfiguration is celebrated in both the Eastern and the Western church on 6 August, not at all the time of Sukkoth. The West had the feast, but only settled on this date in 1456, when the Kingdom of Hungary broke the Siege of Belgrade and forced the Islamic Ottomans back. News of the victory made it to Rome on 6 August, and in view of its importance Pope Callixtus III put the Transfiguration in the general Roman church calendar on this date.

We Lutherans do not follow this, but follow a tradition which places the Transfiguration on the last Sunday after Epiphany, placing the event where it is in the course of Jesus' life followed by the Gospel readings of the traditional church cycle.

In our times however, 6 August has found two significances that relate to the Transfiguration, one of which is altogether spooky, which I have never heard anyone East or West mention.

6 August is the anniversary of the World Wide Web, when in 1991 the first server with the first browser and the first website went online, at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research; the acronym is from the name in French, it's in suburban Geneva), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (an Englishman!) making his ideas proposed 12 March 1989 a reality.  A reality which allows us to not build booths but go into the Jerusalem, so to speak, of life as never before.

6 August is also the anniversary of the first use of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima. It puts in stark contrast the world and God: one can approach a transfiguration by God shown in this event, or one can approach a transfiguration by Man shown in Hiroshima -- salvation is of the Lord.

IV. Conclusion.

At my wife's funeral, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, the secular Sukkoth, in 1997, the pastor concluded the sermon by saying: A few days ago most of us celebrated a thanksgiving that lasted one day, but Nancy began one that lasts an eternity.

So is the promise to us all. And that's what happened to Sukkot. And also to the rejoicing and dancing, not for hours, but eternity!

St Monica and Vatican II For Lutherans. 27 August 2026.

We Lutherans are about to celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 27 August.  Thing is, since there's been such a feast starting in the 13th Century, the Feast of St Monica is 4 May, and the Lutheran Reformation didn't have an issue with it.  But Vatican II did in the 1960s and moved it, so of course we follow suit as if Vatican II were held in St Louis.

Huh? Who cares?  Who is Monica, and why should I bother about this Monica anyway? The last Monica anyone heard about was Lewinsky or Seles! What difference does any of this make?  I mean, it's all adiaphora, right, so why trample on my Christian Freedom with all this dead weight from the past?

OK, Monica was the mother of St Augustine. Great, whozzat? Well, he is arguably the most influential Christian theologian ever. We'll leave whether that was for better or worse, as well as biographies of Augustine or Monica, aside here.  You can check that out in our next post, for 6 September, or at Section VIII of Eastern Church/Empire, Western Church/Empire, posted on 16 January annually on this blog.

Except for this essential: Augustine was quite non-Christian, anti-Christian really, held the most prestigious professorship in his time, and his conversion was brought about in part by the example and prayers of his Christian mother, Monica, which is why the church honours her.

When the church sets up a day in honour of someone, the traditional practice is to choose the day on which the person died, if known, since faith sees that as the day they were born into eternity. St Augustine's date of death, his heavenly birthday, is 28 August 430, so 28 August is his feast.  Simple.  But St Monica's date of death is not known, and when the person's date of death is not known, some other date of significance about the person's life is chosen.  Here's the story on hers.

St Monica's feast day was not a part of the overall observance of the Western Church for about three-fourths of its elapsed history to date, until about the time of the Council of Trent in the Sixteenth Century. However, it was long observed by the Augustinian Order. Geez, whazzat?

OK, the "Augustinian Order" is a rather motley assortment of religious associations rather than a clear cut single entity, all of them tracing their origin to St Augustine and his rule of life, or regula in Latin. That's what it literally is to be regular -- you live under a regula, or rule. Readers here may have heard of one such Augustinian. Guy named Martin Luther.

Anyway, in the Augustinian Order but not the church as a whole, there was, besides the observance of the feast of St Augustine on 28 August, another observance whose focus was his conversion to Christianity, which conversion in turn influenced the entire later church.

This Augustinian feast, the Feast of the Conversion of St Augustine, was and still is celebrated on 5 May. So they celebrated the single biggest human factor in bringing about that conversion, the example and prayers of his mother, St Monica, on the day before, 4 May. The Conversion feast never did make it into the overall Roman Calendar, but when St Monica's did, since her date of death is not known, the traditional Augustinian date was retained, 4 May. Simple.

And was retained in the Lutheran Reformation for centuries. Until the Revolution, er, Vatican II.

One of the stated aims of the "liturgical reform" at Vatican II was to pare down the historical hodgepodge of stuff into something more straightforward and accessible more closely resembling the practice of the early church. So they effectively banned the old order and came up with an entirely new order (novus ordo), sporting four "Eucharistic Prayers", several new options within each rite for other key parts of the Mass, a new lectionary of readings spread out over three years, and a new calendar.

Wonderful  --  a new hodgepodge crafted from an even wider spread of historical sources than the old hodgepodge that was supposed to be pared down! Oh well, it was the 1960s after all. I guess you gotta make allowances for that.

One small item in this was relocating the Feast of St Monica to 27 August, the day before the feast of her son. There's a logic to that. And as far as the institution of Christ and fidelity to Scripture goes, you can celebrate the Feast of St Monica on 4 May, 27 August, any other day, or not at all.

However, it's not the 1960s any more. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to learn or be taught that we honour St Monica not because of her physical motherhood of St Augustine but because of her example in the conversion of her pagan son, who went on to be one of the church's greatest saints, and that we do so on 4 May because in the religious order that looks to her son as their patron saint they had long celebrated Monica on 4 May, the day before they celebrated the conversion of her son their patron on 5 May.

See?  Takes one short paragraph tops, even for me.

Sorry, Roman church dudes. There already was a liturgical reform. It was to pare down all right, but in view of what contradicts Scripture, not in view of our ideas of what makes something more "accessible" or a presumed purity of the Patristic era.  It was to zealously guard and defend the worship of the church's existing order, not to invent a new one. It's called the Lutheran Reformation. You're a few centuries late to the party.

If the Roman hierarchy and associated academics are going to busy themselves with something other than preaching Christ and him crucified, and along the way explain the history of this movement, let them put off the period clothes, get married and raise a family and learn something of real benefit to their fellow man, like heating and air conditioning repair.

Yet, we and other Christian bodies now fall in line with them as if there had been no Reformation! The 1960s Roman novus ordo, with emendations and adaptations, is now the common property of pretty much all other heterodox Christian denominations with liturgical aspirations, rather than the traditional order of the Western Church.

And "our beloved synod" falls into line too, even those parts of it trying to remain true to our Confessions in the Book of Concord, which say we retain the usual readings and our services are for the most part the same as before. Then we moan and groan and wonder why other parts of our beloved synod seem to be heading off on all sorts of tangents, or rather, variations on the tangent of chasing after the success in attracting numbers of the American suburban "evangelical" megachurches.

We wonder how our people could be taken in by these false hopes and promises.  Yet, why should our people not wonder why these are not also valid options that we can Lutheranise, when we set Lutheranised "options" modelled after 1960s Rome before them as confessional, side by side with our common catholic history -- this historical mass or that Vatican II For Lutherans mass, this historical lectionary or that Vatican II For Lutherans lectionary, this historical calendar or that Vatican II For Lutherans calendar.

Why would they not listen to Willow Creek and Saddleback and Lakewood too with their false hopes and promises when we adopt and adapt the stinking filth of the Whore of Babylon as it toys with our catholic heritage? Having done that why would they not think it's all about options, personal preference, all OK? We let something in through the back door then wonder why it comes knocking at the front!

Even in a small matter like when a saint's day is observed the whole rotten Roman mess in the church is revealed, and its adoption/adaptation by other church bodies!

St Monica gave St Augustine physical birth, but her greatness for which we honour her is not her role in his physical but her role in his spiritual birth, his conversion, in this life. Therefore she is better honoured by leaving her day where it is for the reason it is there, and if you have to change something then finally insert the Conversion of St Augustine into the general Calendar, rather than moving her feast day from a day which does have inherent reference to her to the day before her son's feast on his date of death, which does not.

Jacking around with the feast of St Monica is a small example but it's typical of a big issue. Once again, the calendar, lectionary and ordo of Vatican II all miss the mark, even of its own intended reform. They are the products not of the Christian church, but one denomination, and that headed by an office bearing the marks of Anti-Christ -- regardless of its current occupancy by a nice guy of Italian descent from Argentina -- and now are the common property of all heterodox liturgical churches in the West, utterly irrelevant to Christ's Church and therefore should be utterly irrelevant to Lutherans.

Right along with Saddleback, Willow Creek and Lakewood, Rome no less than they offers "contemporary worship" whose forms derive from and express a content that is not ours and rejects ours, which content is derived from an agenda that is not ours and rejects ours, and therefore into which our content does not fit nor should we try to make it fit, and, when we do, we abandon that part of our mission which is to zealously guard and defend the mass, for the most part retaining the ceremonies previously in use, just as our Confessions state.

On St Bernard, Sacred Heads, ATMs and Other Stuff. 20 August 2026.

Well here comes 19 August and our LCMS Commemorations list says it's the Feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux.

Thing is, the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux is actually 20 August.

Whyzat? That's the day he died, and traditionally, the date of a person's death, faith seeing it as the date they were born to eternity, is used as their feast day, if the date is known and not taken by a saint who already died that day or by something of more importance. You die on 20 August, your feast day is 20 August. Pretty simple. It's a Christian version and continuation of Yahrtzeit, meaning "time of year" in Yiddish, when relatives remember a family member on the date of their death.

So what possessed the compilers of our Commemorations list to move it up one day? Hell if I know. I also do not know what possessed them to import several commemorations for Old Testament figures from the Eastern Orthodox calendar, but, they did and one of those is for Samuel on 20 August, so I guess they needed the day and had to boof Bernard. But to the day before, when he was still alive and not born unto eternity? Scholars. Oy.

Anyway, Bernard has a pretty good rep among notable non-Catholics, including Martin Luther and John Calvin. Which is pretty amazing considering:

1) He was a rip roaring kick-ass let's get serious about this Rule of St Benedict for monasteries type; in 1113, at age 23, he entered monastic life at the abbey at Citeaux, which was a reform movement of Benedictines founded on 21 March (the real feast of St Benedict) 1098, called the Cistercians from the Latin name of Citeaux, Cistercium, and was so into it that two years later he became abbot of a daughter abbey in 1115 at Claire Valee (Clear Valley), Latin clara vallis, later Clairvaux for short, hence his name.

2) He chose the "right" pope when two were elected (hey, what if he got the Innocent/Anacletus thing wrong?).

3) He saw one of his students, Bernardo da Pisa, elected Pope (Eugene III) largely on the basis of Bernardo's connexion to him, though he thought Bernardo too naive for the job, then used that naivete to function as a shadow pope.

4) His student-now-pope proclaimed a Second Crusade in reaction to the County of Edessa, a state established by the First Crusade, getting its butt kicked by the Muslims, then he got Bernard to promote it, whereupon the two main takers, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, got their butts thoroughly kicked, which completely tarnished the rest of Bernard's life though he insisted the failure was due to the Crusaders being a bunch of sinners.

5) At the Council of Troyes in 1129 he championed the Knights Templar, which secured their endorsement by the Roman Catholic Church and their transformation from a poor monastic military order, that provided security for those on pilgrimages to Jerusalem after it was retaken in 1099 in the First Crusade, into a multimillion dollar multinational banking and holding company, the world's first such company.

6) In 1139 Pope Innocent II declared the Knights Templar could go anywhere and be exempt from all authority or taxation except the pope's.

7)  Bernard's pathological asceticism -- a redundancy, as all asceticism is pathological -- gave rise to one of the more extreme forms of Mariolatry; given the mediaeval misconception that milk was blood in processed form, and given the mediaeval custom among the upper classes that breastfeeding was done for them by others ("wetnurses"), the Madonna lactans, which is paintings of Mary/Madonna nursing Jesus, became an analogue to the blood of Christ, and Bernard is said to have been hit by a blast of milk as he prayed before a Madonna lactans, and was given either wisdom or cured or an eye infection, depending on to which legend one listens.

8) His pathological asceticism -- a redundancy, as all asceticism, oh wait, we covered that -- also gave rise to the whole ideal of Christian knighthood, in particular his De laude novae militia (In praise of the new knighthood) of 1129, written for the first Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Hugues de Payens, which in turn gave rise to the late addition of Sir Galahad to the Arthurian legend, coming from the Old French so-called Vulgate Cycle, which then transformed the existing English legend into a quest for the Holy Grail by the celibate, ascetic, therefore "pure" knight, against the unworthiness of regular knights.

He does, despite all that and more, show some signs of knowing it all comes down to faith in Christ and what he did for us. Well that can happen even in the RCC, and in all fairness I gotta say maybe old Bernard was one of those. And me being a Benedictine never-was, the only thing worse than a has-been, lemme tell ya a little reform wouldn't hurt those guys at all.

Clairvaux was built on a tract of land known as a hangout for robbers, donated by Count Hugh of Champagne.  Apparently the land is well suited to retreat from society, whether said retreat is one's own decision or society's.  Since the French Revolution, Napoleon, etc, the abbey was abolished and made into a high security prison, which it still is.  Hideout to monastery to prison, you know I want to have fun with that, but the utter ironic ridiculousness should be sufficiently obvious with no help from me.  Clairvaux Prison is the current residence, since 2006, of Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez of Venezuela, whom you may know as "Carlos the Jackal".

Bernard is best known among non-Catholics because the hymn "O Sacred Head" is attributed to him. Now, let me be clear, O Sacred Head -- which everybody knows God sings as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden -- is among the greatest hymns ever written by anybody, any time, any where.

Thing is, Bernard didn't have a damn thing to do with it.

The text to the hymn comes from the last part of a long mediaeval poem called Salve mundi salutare (Hail, salvation of the world) which meditates on a number of Christ's body parts as he suffered on the Cross. The last part meditates on his head and is called Salve caput cruentatum. It dates from the 14th Century; Bernard lived in the first half of the 12th Century (1091-1153 to be exact).

The tune is even later. It was written originally as a love song by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). When Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676), one of the great contributors to our magnificent Lutheran hymn heritage (no clowning around here, he was great and it is magnificent) translated Salve caput cruentatum into German as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (the aforementioned version God now uses, OK that's clowning around) Hassler's love song got used as the tune (there is no textual reason for this parenthetical comment except to make three in one sentence and thus reflect the perfection of the Trinity; that's a monkish thing and I'm completely clowning around).

So, Bernard had nothing to do with O Sacred Head, and all this "attributed to" stuff is just crap that should be dropped.  What ought to be pointed out instead is that Salve mundi salutare, the source of O Sacred Head, was the basis for the first Lutheran oratorio, Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima.  Don't freak, I'll translate, and yes it's Latin, we didn't totally reject that, it means "most holy members (as in limbs) of our suffering Jesus".  It was composed by Dietrich Buxtehude in 1680.

So what to make of this? Bernard had absolutely nothing to do with O Sacred Head, either as tune or text, and for that matter, being thoroughly Roman Catholic as we saw above, makes a hell of a lot better Roman Catholic saint than Lutheran commemoration.  Rather than indulging in dressing up Catholic fantasies in a Lutheran version, just like some dress up megachurch fantasies in a Lutheran version, we make this of it:  the power of the Gospel, well meditated on in O Sacred Head, is such that the hymn does not depend on or even need pious legends and myths about its earthly authorship. And that the power of the Gospel, of which Bernard showed some signs of being aware, is such that it can penetrate even the largely pagan accretions laid over it by the RCC, in which Bernard was deeply involved. Thank God for the Lutheran Reformation, that we no longer live in times like Bernard, where church and state alike were choked by these accretions, and the Gospel can be rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered in our churches openly.

And hey, next time you write a cheque or use a debit card to draw money somewhere else on your bank deposits back home, rather than have to carry your stash with you and thus make yourself more attractive to thieves and robbers, thank the Knights Templar, who in 1150 created a system of letters of credit based on deposits that is the low tech forerunner of banking as we know it now! 

The Dormitory of Mary. 15 August 2026.

Yeah I know, it's the Dormition of Mary, aka the Assumption.

Dormition, dormitory -- all from the Latin for "to sleep". One of the dormitories where I went to university was called St Mary Hall, formally. It was just "Mary Hall" otherwise. Everyone went there whether they had a room there (I didn't) or friends there (I did) or not. Reason being, St Mary Cafeteria, or "Mary Caf" as we called it (the culture may include tendencies which may strike those unfamiliar with it as unduly familiar, even slightly irreverent). Thing is, it wasn't a cafeteria at all but an on-campus restaurant and gathering place.

What's up with that? Mary Caf was not the regular school cafeteria where those with a meal plan ate, which being a rural campus not in any town was just about everyone. Rather, it was where one ordered burgers and fries and stuff like that on one's own time, and dime. So why is a restaurant called a cafeteria when it really isn't? Well, the regular cafeteria wasn't called a cafeteria either, but a refectory, so the word was available. And the restaurant did have trays and a line.

Holy crap, what's a refectory? Comes from the Latin reficere, to restore, which gave rise to the word refectorium, a room where you get restored, ie eat. It's a monk thing, and being a Benedictine institution we were all about that. Now, in a real refectory, according to the Rule -- yeah I know, what's "the Rule", ok without modifiers that's the Rule of St Benedict for monasteries, geez do I have to explain everything? -- meals are eaten in silence, one guy reads from Scripture or writings of the saints (that's called lectio divina, or divine reading) and no meat from mammals except if you're sick.

However, true to the very heart of the most venerable tradition, Benedictine in particular and Catholic in general, that's how it is but it ain't really like that. As more and more "feasts" came in to the church calendar, the meals got better, and, by the time it took four digits to write the year, aka 1000 AD, the obvious solution was to eat the other, better, food in another room, and keep up appearances in the refectory.  So, not have your cake in one room, then eat it in another. Perfect.

And in a student refectory, where the teaching monks ate too, as distinct from the monking refectory of the monkatorium itself, there ain't no lectio divina, and ain't much of anything done in silence either.

So it don't get no more Benedictine than to have the refectory and Mary Caf, the official restoring room and the other one on the side. Hey, don't laugh, the Eastern Orthodox, as usual, amp it up even more. In their monkeries the refectory is called the Trapeza, always with at least one icon and sometimes a ruddy church unto itself, altar, iconostasis and all.

And they got this Lifting of the Panagia to end the meal too. What in all monking monkery is a Panagia? It's the prosphoron from which you take a chunk in honour of the Theotokos. What the hell izzat? The former is the loaf used in the Eucharist, the latter is Mary. After the service, the refectorian (don't freak, it's the monk who runs the refectory) cuts a triangle out of it, cuts the rest in half, puts it on a tray, the boys go over to the refectory with the tray in the lead.  Then after the meal there is a ceremony in which the refectorian says "Bless me, holy fathers, and pardon me a sinner" and the assembled holy fathers say "May God pardon and have mercy on you" (as if he had not already done so at Calvary, but I digress).  Then he says echoing the liturgy "Great is the name" and the boys chime in with "of the Holy Trinity", then comes "O all-holy Mother of God help us" and the reply "At her prayers, O God, have mercy and save us" (as if he had not already ... oh well).  Then accompanied by a dude with censer he offers it, then each, uh, holy father takes a piece between thumb and forefinger, runs it through the incense, and eats it.

Now that's some serious monking. Judas H Priest OSB, we're a bunch of Bavarians, or at least the joint was founded by them.  Hell, the closest we came to anything like that was to make sure you went back before they ran out for more of the good dark bread they bake. Closest I'm gonna come to any Lifting of the Panagia now is the lifting of the Panera. Besides, Panera's got wi-fi too I think -- for some digital lectio divina of course. I still don't like white bread, though, and will take a wheat or dark bread every time. Every time. And still call a dining room a refectory once in a while too. It's a spiritual thing of course.

So we had our refectory and our "cafeteria" named for Mary. Later, the food service would open a more night oriented spot, Der Keller, which means the cellar or basement in German, in the cellar of the old main building, though it took a new food service director who was a Baptist from Alabama to come up with the idea. Now that's my kind of Baptist! Also my kind of refectorian. Hell, with the secular and ecclesiastical sides of the 1960s both raging, he was more German and Benedictine at heart than the German Benedictines.

And Mary? Just as Gabriel said, full of grace, the Lord was with her; blessed is she among women and blessed is the fruit of her womb, Jesus. And if you're looking for an example, if your cost of discipleship is seeming a little high, there is no better example than her submission in faith to God, which she for all she knew at the time ran her the risk of execution as an adulteress, only to survive that only to see her son executed as a criminal. And if you're looking for direction, there is no better direction, rather than quasi-pious speculation about dormitions and assumptions, than she herself gave to those wanting her to sort things out one time at the wedding in Cana -- "Do whatever he tells you".

A Visit From a Different St Nicholas - and Alexandra. 17 July 2026.

17 July 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the murder of Nicholas II, Emperor of all the Russias, with his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, and their children in 1918 in Yekaterinburg, Russia.  Alexandra began life as Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, a Lutheran.   She's actually the second German Lutheran princess to become Empress of all the Russias.  The first was Catherine the Great, no less.  The aftermath of both of them shapes events to this day that are much in the news.  Here's the story, both of them.

The Chilling Legacy of These Murders.

The brutality of these murders would in time to come be visited upon millions of Russians, as the regime which ordered and carried them out blossomed into a world power. We hear much about the six million victims of one group specifically targeted by Nazi Germany, yet that was only roughly half of the total number of the victims of Nazi Germany. And if relatively little is said about the other half, even less is said about the total number of Nazi victims, and even less yet about the even greater number murdered under our ally against Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia under Stalin.

By the most conservative estimates, that number would be 4 million from direct repression and 6 million from the results of enforced economic theory, namely, collectivisation, for a total of 10  million. That is roughly equal to total estimates of Nazi victims, and nearly twice the number of their specifically targeted group. However more recently available material generally indicates a total of around 20 million, nearly twice by our ally of what Nazi Germany managed to attain in toto, and over three times the 6 million of their specifically targeted group.

The Soviet Union itself passed into history on 26 December 1991. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas and Tsaritsa Alexandra and the three of their children then found were buried with state honours in the Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul in St Petersburg. Why there?  The city was founded 27 May 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great and named by him after his patron saint, St Peter. It was the capital of Russia until the Communist revolution, then it was known as Leningrad under the Soviet regime, and its name was restored in 1991. All Russian Emperors since Peter the Great are now buried there.

At the burial, the then-president of post-Communist Russia, Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation, attended along with members of the House of Romanov, the Russian royal family. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia had declared them saints and martyrs in 1981. On 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church itself declared them saints, of a type called Passion Bearers. These are people who were killed but not specifically for their faith, and who met their deaths with Christian humility and dignity. This is not a judgement on his rule, rather universally regarded as weak and incompetent at best, but rather on the why and the manner of his death.

On 16 June 2003 Russian bishops consecrated the "Church on the Blood" in Yekaterinburg, the city in which the Tsar and family were murdered in the Ipatiev House, on whose site the "Church on the Blood", whose full name is Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land, now stands.  Seeing "Catherine" in the city's name? It's there, named at its founding 18 November 1723 after St Catherine, name saint of Catherine I (Yekaterina), Tsarina and wife of then ruling Tsar Peter I the Great, who died 8 February 1725, after which she became ruler like the next Peter and Catherine duo (III and II/the Great).  That's right, Catherine the Great, who also began life as a German Lutheran princess. Lots of stuff comes full circle in the cycle that includes Nicholas and Alexandra.

The regime which killed them has passed into history, but, there is still a Russian Orthodox Church, there is still a House of Romanov, and there is still a Russia -- The Russian Federation.

About 70% of Russians count themselves Orthodox Christians, though few regularly participate in church. Of Orthodox churches, 95% are Russian Orthodox, the traditional Russian religion overall. There are Lutherans in Russia, in large part due to the open immigration policies of Catherine the Great, the first German Lutheran princess to end up Empress of Russia.

So yeah, an Empress of Russia is actually a German Lutheran princess in origin.  Happened twice actually, both times pretty big deals with effects that endure now.  Here's the story.

How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia.  The Second Time.

Alexandra was born 6 June 1872 in Darmstadt in Das Großherzogtum Hessen und bei Rhein.  Don't freak, I'll translate, it's The Grand Duchy of Hesse and by Rhine.  OK but where izzat?  In west central modern Germany, that's where.  Its biggest and probably best known city is Frankfurt, on more correctly Frankfurt am Main (that's pronounced like "mine" in English) which means Frankfurt on the Main.  OK but what is the Main?  It's a river, a major tributary of the Rhine (Rhein).  Darmstadt was the seat of the grand dukes of the Grand Duchy, which is why Alexandra, as the daughter of the then-current ruling one, was born there. The current capital of the current German state of Hesse is Wiesbaden.

Anyway, the baby girl was given her mother's name.  So her mom's name was Alix? Well actually it was Alice, as in Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, a daughter of Queen Victoria.  That's right, Queen Victoria was Alix' grandma.  This we'll shortly see influenced both the beginning of her life and the end of it.  Her childhood nickname was Alicky, which would become a favourite term of endearment with her husband Nicholas too.  Alice was a remarkable woman, a huge fan of Florence Nightingale and worked to involve women in health care.  Ironically she died pretty young, at age 35 in 1878 in Darmstadt, of diphtheria which was overtaking the whole ducal house.

Alix died relatively young too, at 46, but her career as a noblewoman was not to be like her mother's.  Alice was much loved in both her native and her married lands -- they lovingly put a Union Jack over her coffin at her funeral in Darmstadt -- but Alix was never accepted as really Russian by nearly everyone from peasants to royalty alike.  The whole Russian thing with this German Lutheran princess, which would alter all subsequent history, started with her attraction to the heir to the Russian throne, Nicholas, and his to her.

So how would they even meet, you know, German, Russian?  You gotta understand that European nobility and royalty are mishpocha (don't freak, that's Yiddish for "extended family").  Nicholas and Alexandra are second cousins, and also third cousins, depending on which ancestral line you go through.  They met in 1884 and it was mutual from the start, and when they met again in 1889 there was no denying it.  Neither family wanted the match.  Grandma (Queen Vic) wanted someone else for Alix, and Nicholas' dad Tsar Alexander III, was dead set against any German or Lutheran marrying into the royal family.  But Alix stood up to Grandma, who actually kind of liked it that she did, and as Alexander's health declined he eventually gave in.

They got engaged in Germany (Coburg, to be exact) in April 1894 and Alexander died on 1 November 1894.  The Russians first saw their new empress-to-be (he became emperor on his father's death, she would become empress consort on marriage to him) as she came to St Petersburg with the family for the funeral.  "She comes behind a coffin" was heard everywhere.  Things were off to a bad start.  She and Nicholas were married right after, on 26 November 1894.  Alix at first was not too sure about having to become Russian Orthodox, but she eventually became an enthusiastic convert, and got a new name in the process, Alexandra Feodorovna.  Then things went right straight to hell.

During the coronation ceremonies a riot broke out when it seemed there wouldn't be enough to go around of the food provided for the public, and several thousand were killed in the stampede.  The French had a gala ball scheduled in honour of the coronation.  Nicholas and Alexandra were reluctant to attend given what had happened, but they were persuaded by court advisers to go through with it so as not to offend the French.  Which ended up offending their own people, who took it as a sign that their royalty cared nothing about what happened to them.  Then there's the matter of producing an heir.  Alexandra was having daughters, and under court protocol of the time the heir must be male.  Then when she finally had a son, he was born with haemophilia, a deadly disease for which there was no treatment at the time.

And, haemophilia was known to be passed on in, guess what, Grandma's (that's Queen Vic) line, so she was further thought a disaster for having brought the "English disease" as some called it to the Russian line.  Neither all her works of prayer and devotion, nor any available medical treatment, helped, and Alexandra became pretty much a recluse making sure her son had no injury.  In time she turned to this itinerant Russian Orthodox "holy man" and healer, Rasputin, and guess what, her son got better, and Rasputin gained influence at the court.

Rasputin was a supposed mystic, a type of religious lunacy.  Yes, her son got better, but as usual a little science clears up all the "mystical" bullroar.  The doctors attending her son were using a new drug widely thought at the time to be a new wonder drug.  Aspirin.  Yeah, aspirin.  It actually is a pretty good mild analgesic (pain reliever) but it also, and this was not known at the time, is an anti-coagulant.  Now, retarding the coagulation of the blood is exactly what you don't want to do in treating a haemophiliac!  So of course when she turned away from medical treatment and followed Rasputin's advice her son got better -- she quit giving him an anti-coagulant, nothing mystical or spiritual about it.

Rasputin's advice unfortunately began to extend to other matters too, and he supposedly had a revelation that Nicholas should go to the front -- the Great War, the War To End All Wars, which it didn't and is now just the first of "world wars" -- and personally take command of the military.  This left Alexandra to run the internal affairs of state, for which she was completely unsuited by both training and temperament.  So, all sorts of incompetent officials further made a mess of things.  Between the shortages due to the war effort and the Russian Winter everyone was miserable and many thought Alexandra was actually sabotaging things, being German and all.

Riots ensued, and the soldiers who were supposed to put down the rebellion joined it, and the next day, 13 March 1917, they established a provisional government called the Petrograd Soviet.  No, not communists or the Soviet Union.  Petrograd because this happened in St Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire, and soviet because that's the word for council in Russian.  This is known as the February Revolution.  Huh, you just said it was in March!  Yeah, in our calendar now but in what is now called the Old Style calendar used there and then, it was February.  The Tsar was told he must abdicate, and he did, first being kept with his family in the palace, then, for their safety the provisional government sent them to Siberia.

Things changed.  The provisional government was itself overthrown by the communists called Bolshevik (the word means "majority") under Vladimir Lenin on 7 November 1917 in the October Revolution (same deal about the calendars, it was 26 October in the Old Style calendar).  Their promises of "peace, land and bread" attracted many.  Alexander Kerensky, the major figure in the provisional government, was exiled and ended up living out his life in New York City.  The royal family did not fare so well, and at 0215 on 17 July, Bolsheviks, having disarmed their guard, shot the entire royal family to death, then smashed the rib cages of the tsar and tsarina with bayonets, stripped the bodies, burned the clothes, and threw the bodies in a mine shaft 12 miles away, then the bodies were pulled out, their faces smashed, dismembered, burned with sulphuric acid, and reburied.  There they remained until after the fall of the Soviet Union decades later.

(A personal aside -- my French teacher as a kid in the 1950s was an old Russian woman who was a young woman in a family at court through all of this.  They were among the exiles, and French being the language of the court, she earned a living as a translator in embassies and ended up in an apartment in her daughter's home.  French lessons came with tea and all the decorum of her youth.)

How a German Lutheran Princess Ends Up Empress of Russia.  The First Time.

Now there's a story too. Tsarina Alexandra wasn't the first German Lutheran noblewoman to end up Tsarina. Catherine the Great was originally the noble-born raised-Lutheran Sophie Friederike Auguste, nicknamed Figchen, or Little Frederica. Her father was the devout Lutheran Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who as a Prussian general was governor of Stettin, Pomerania, then part of Prussia, then part of the Holy Roman Empire.  Her birth city (Stettin) is in a part of Pomerania that is now part of Poland and called Szczecin.

Huh? How does Figchen end up Empress of Russia? Because her mother, Johanna, loved court intrigue and wanted it for her daughter, but she really ticked off Tsarina Elisabeth who threw her out of the country for spying for Prussia. The Big E liked Figchen though, and apparently liked the family, hell, she was going to marry Johanna's brother Karl but he died from smallpox before it could happen. Figchen ended up married to E's nephew and heir, Peter III, who was also Figchen's second cousin. But first she learned Russian, and on 28 June 1744 she converted to the Russian Orthodox Church -- against her father's orders, who went ballistic over it -- and was given the name Catherine. Then she marries Peter on 21 August 1745, and after Elisabeth died on 5 January 1762, Peter takes the throne.

He didn't last long. He pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War -- remember that, left Mother England in huge debt, to pay for which they taxed the hell out of the American colonies who ended up revolting and becoming the United States -- got friendly with Prussia, admired the Western Europeans, tried to make the Russian Orthodox Church more Lutheran, and had a mistress for whom Catherine was afraid he would divorce her. So he pissed off everybody, and when he went to his paternal ancestral Schleswig-Holstein (the area from which my ancestors the Angles left for Mother England, but hey), Catherine with her lover (fair is fair I guess) staged a military coup and Peter was arrested 14 July 1762. He wasn't too upset really, he just asked for an estate and his mistress, also named Elisabeth.

But three days later he was killed by one of the conspirators while in custody, though Figchen/Catherine does not seem to have been behind that part of things. So after Peter being Tsar for six months, his wife succeeds him. Some say she should have been Regent until her son, Paul, was old enough to become Tsar, but what the hell, the first Tsarina Catherine (Catherine the Great is technically Catherine II) succeeded her husband Peter I (aka the Great) in 1725, and anyway Catherine no longer Figchen ruled until she died, which was 17 November 1796, at which time George Washington was in his second term as President of the United States. Got all that? No wonder George didn't want anything resembling royalty here.  (We got 'em now anyway, political dynasties, sports and entertainment celebrities and all.)

Why Eating Runzas Is a Spiritual and World-Historical Experience.

And a damn good eating experience too.

In 1762, the year she came to power, Catherine issued a manifesto inviting non-Jewish Europeans to settle in Russia and farm using more modern European methods. It got few results, French and English preferred to emigrate to America, and another manifesto with more benefits was issued in 1763, attracting Germans since they were allowed to maintain their language, religions and culture, and were exempt from military service. This last was particularly attractive to Mennonites, but many German Lutherans, Catholics and Reformed also came, settling along the Volga River, hence the name Volga Germans, or Wolgadeutsche.

However these benefits, particularly the exemption from military service, were eroded and many Wolgadeutsche, especially the pacifist Mennonites, left for the midwestern United States, Canada, and South American places of German emigration. The midwestern US immigrants have given us people as different as US Senator Tom Daschle and and big-band leader Lawrence Welk. But most importantly, it has given us the Runza, a magnificent pocket sandwich of beef, onion and cabbage -- thank you Catherine!!

In 1949 Alex Brening and his sister Sally Everett opened a drive-in in Lincoln NE offering food of Wolgadeutsche derivation, which has since expanded to a regional chain, including one close to Concordia-Seward (NE) as every grad of there knows.  Besides the fantastic runza (get the cheese runza, Combo #2) they have one of the best burgers, fries and OR (get the half and half "frings") in the whole "fast food" industry, right up there with Five Guys. You can have a great meal, be a part of history back to Catherine the Great, proclaim your solidarity with ethnic self-determination and praise God for religious freedom as a Lutheran (or anything else) all at the same time! Makes me wanna go to the one a few blocks from me right now!

Lutherans In Russia Now.

Anyway, in this heavily Russian Orthodox land with notable German-born raised-Lutheran Tsarinas, there are Lutherans. Not a lot, but even so, not all in the same group (just like here). There is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia, which is a member of the International Lutheran Council (founded 1993), as are we ("we" being LCMS).  There's the Evangelical Lutheran Church - "Concord", a member of the Confessional Evangelical Lutheran Conference (founded 1996), whose American members are WELS and ELS.  And there's the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia and Other States, a member of the thoroughly heterodox Lutheran-in-name-only Lutheran World Federation (founded 1947),whose American member is the similarly characterised ELCA, and to which the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Ingria in Russia also belongs.

Also there's the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church.  It began with a Siberian named Vsevolod Lytkin, who converted from Soviet era atheism to Lutheranism in Estonia, then part of the Soviet Union, at age 20 in 1987.  In 1991 as the Soviet Union was passing into history Estonia became independent and Lytkin began missionary work back in Siberian, with support from our beloved synod (that's LCMS).  In 2003 the result of his efforts, the Siberian Evangelical Lutheran Church, became independent of the more liberal WLF-affiliated Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church.  Pastor Lytkin now serves as the bishop of the SELC.  While it is not affiliated with larger Lutheran bodies, in 2010 full recognition and fellowship was established between the SELC and LCMS.

Kind of all comes full circle, huh? That's what's cool about history.  It makes the circle clearer, sometimes even gives one a clue there is a circle, an interrelation, at all, amid all this stuff of life that otherwise seems like so much dust from the past.  And it makes where we are now clearer, which is why I get into all this stuff.

Crimea.

2014 was the 100th year since the start of the world war whose aftermath saw the end of the Russian Empire and rise of the Soviet Union (not to mention the end of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and pretty much the world as it had been known).

2014 was also the 60th since year the Soviet Union under Khrushchev made Crimea part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954.  Huh?  Isn't it just part of Ukraine, annexed by those bad Russians?  No, it isn't.  Crimea is a recent name for what for most of its history has been known as Tauris or Taurica.

Its recorded history begins in the 5th Century BC, as a Greek colony named after the native Tauri.  It came under Roman control from 47 BC to 340 AD.  After that it passed among the Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars and the Eastern Roman Empire (aka Byzantium).  In 968 Vladimir the Great of Kiev brought most of it under his control.  Well there you go, Kiev, in Ukraine, right?  Wrong.  In the Kievan Rus'; "Ukraine" means borderland or homeland.  Borderland or homeland of what?  The land of the Rus', that's what.  There's been a Russian identity here for over a millennium; nothing started with Putin.  It was here that Vladimir, after checking out Islam, Judaism and Roman Christianity, converted to Christianity in its Eastern Orthodox form from Byzantium, from which it passed to all of what is now Eastern Europe and Russia.

Then in 1223 the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan, the "Golden Horde", as they swept through all of Asia and eastern Europe, changed everything everywhere, including here.  Settled descendants formed what is called the Crimean Khanate, which lasted from 1449 to 1783 and was a vassal state to the Islamic Ottoman Empire based in what is now "Turkey".  Then Catherine the Great, the first German Lutheran born Empress of all the Russias, won the Crimea back from the Ottoman Empire in 1783, and there is stayed until 1917, when the last Tsar was overthrown, with his wife the second German Lutheran born Empress of all the Russias.

During the Russian civil war from 1917 - 1921 it was the scene of murderously bloody conflict as the Red Army (Boshevik) and the White Army (anti-Bolshevik) slugged it out.  The Reds won and in 1921 it became part of the Soviet Union and stayed that way until the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Huh?  Didn't you say it was transferred in 1954?  Yeah, and this is key -- the transfer was within the Soviet Union, from one of its 16 members (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) to another (the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic).  The action was taken 19 February 1954 unilaterally by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (council, remember) of the Soviet Union following its passage 25 January 1954 by the Communist Party.

This action violated Soviet law, specifically article 18 of its constitution which states any border change must have the approval of the member republic involved and no referendum was ever held, and article 33, which does not give the Presidium such power.  So they changed the constitution after-the-fact a few days later.  Yeah, illegal as hell under even Soviet law.  So much for "territorial integrity".  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 its former component became an independent nation and just a year later the Crimean legislature voted for independence but Ukraine stopped any referendum from being held.  When the armed regime change in Ukraine favoured by the EU to bring it under its orbit happened in 2014, a referendum was finally held and Crimea was restored to Russia itself 60 years after it had been illegally transferred by and within the Soviet Union.

That's the stuff the "media" doesn't tell you.

You wonder what a different world would be now had Alicky listened to Grandma or Nicholas listened to dad.  Or, if Alicky had decided confessing Lutheran faith was more important than literally anything else.

Nicholas and Alexandra's feast day follows the longstanding custom of using the date of earthly death, which is regarded as the day of birth into eternity, as the person's feast day, so it's 17 July.