It is Eleventh Night in Northern Ireland, an annual Protestant bonfire night, with street parties, marching bands, and displays of religious and nationalistic intolerance, including the burning of the Irish tricolour on giant bonfires (above). The night celebrates the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange over the Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
A derelict old packet steamer, the SS Exodus 1947, sailed for Palestine today in 1947, carrying 4,500 Jewish emigrants from France, most of them Holocaust survivors. They hoped to be able to settle there, but the British, who were administering the territory, intercepted the Exodus 20 miles from the coast of Palestine, and forcibly deported the emigrants to Germany, where they were interned in British-run camps. The spectacle of Britain returning Jewish survivors of the Nazis to prison camps in Germany was a huge propaganda success for Zionists campaigning for Jewish immigration to Palestine. Nine months later, in May 1948, the State of Israel came into being.
This is the feast day of St Benedict of Nursia, the patron saint of Europe and father of Western monasticism, who lived in the 6th century. Benedict’s rule for monastic life was one of the most important documents of the Middle Ages. Following his rule involved lifelong obedience, communal worship throughout the day and night, manual labour, and theological study. Its self-replicating pattern was a crucial reason why European Christianity survived the pagan invasions of the Goths and the Germanic tribes, and the collapse of the Roman Empire.
‘Speaking and teaching belong to the master; the disciple’s part is to be silent and to listen. And for that reason if anything has to be asked of the Superior, it should be asked with all the humility and submission inspired by reverence. But as for coarse jests and idle words or words that move to laughter, these we condemn everywhere with a perpetual ban, and for such conversation we do not permit a disciple to open his mouth.’ Rule of St Benedict
Today in 1924, the Scottish athlete Eric Liddell ran in the 400 metres race in the Paris Olympics. He had refused to run the 100 metres, his best distance, because a heat for it was held on the Sabbath. On the morning of the race, one of the team masseurs handed Liddell a piece of paper, on which he read, ‘In the old book it says: “He that honours me I will honour.”’ Inspired by the biblical quote, Liddell took the race at a sprint and was first to cross the line, breaking both Olympic and world records. His story is told in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire.
It is the birthday of Frederick Buechner, the American novelist, preacher and theologian, who was born in 1926. He made his name with his novel, A Long Day’s Dying (1950), and with his memoir, The Sacred Journey (1982), in which he observed that ‘all theology, like all fiction, is at its heart autobiography’.
Image: Alan in Belfast