Wren in the Furze for Boxing, St. Stephen’s, and Wren Day—Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival

                                            The Wren in the Furze by the Chieftains.

Today is the second day of the 12 Days of Christmas, a day with multiple personalities as we will see. 

The Brits and the residents of other former pink blotches on Queen Victoria’s globe like many Americans usually spend today, Boxing Day, storming the malls and shops on what is the busiest retail sales day of the year. Disgruntled gift recipients hit the refund and exchange desks while others spend the gift cards and even old fashion cash.   But unlike Yanks they do it on an official National Holiday as a paid day off.  Officially December 26 is just another Bank Holiday.  But Boxing Day is a treasured tradition with long and deep roots.

On Boxing Day an early Victorian middle class family gives the postman a small gift.  The urchin sweeping the snow will also get something for his efforts.

The celebration in the British Isles owes its origins to the aristocracy, gentry, and wealthy townsmen and their households.  The master would give presents to his servants and staff, who would also have the day off work.  Sometimes the master’s family would even serve meals to their inferiors!  Needless to say, this custom was very popular among the servants, and sometimes observed resentfully by those unaccustomed to either manual labor or generosity.

It is also a remnant of an ancient tradition that may—or may not—go back to the Roman celebrations of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, when there was a carnival-like turn around with slaves lording over masters for a day.  The tradition continued into the Middle Ages on into Elizabethan times, where it took on the wild excesses of street revelry.

That revelry doomed the whole season when Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans took over.  Eventually, Boxing Day restored a controlled dollop of the old festival.  The Church of England gave a religious cover to the day as St. Stephen’s Day. 

St. Stephen's Day celebrates the death by stoning in Jerusalem of the first Christian martyr.  This stained glass and other images also stoked anti-Semitic hatred which led to the 1296  Edict of Expulsion of the Jews by King Edward I of England which remained in force for more than 350 years. 

Stephen was the Deacon of Jerusalem the earliest days of Christianity known for his charities to the poor.  He was also the first Christian martyr, stoned to death for allegedly preaching the Trinity in the Temple.

The carol Good King Wenceslas is most closely associated with St. Stephen’s Day along with the street begging We Wish You a Merry Christmas.  It tells a story of a Bohemian ruler going on a journey and braving harsh winter weather to give alms to a poor peasant on the Feast of Stephen.  During the journey, his page is about to give up the struggle against the cold and drifting snow but is enabled to continue by following his master’s footprints.   

The legend is based on the life of the historical Saint Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia who was murdered and martyred in 935. Wenceslas was considered a martyr and saint immediately after his death, when a cult grew up in Bohemia and in England. Within a few decades, four biographies of him were in circulation which had a powerful influence on the High Middle Ages concept of the rex justus (righteous king), a monarch whose power stems mainly from his great piety and charity—an idea like chivalry honored more in bardic tradition than actually observed.

Wenceslaus, Duke of Bavaria, in legend waded through the snow to deliver firewood to a freezing peasant on St. Stephen's Day.  Although the nobleman got credit for this charity, his young page did all of the heavy work and almost floundered in his master's footsteps.  In some illustration the Duke is shown helping his servant, but most like this show him pressing on unconcerned.  Sometimes the page is poorly dressed for the cold in near rags.

In the Bank Holidays Act of 1871, Parliament recognized Boxing Day as a Bank Holiday—an officially recognized public holiday.  While time off from work was not originally mandatory, it has become nearly universal.

The holiday spread across the Empire and is still official in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other Commonwealth countries.  In South Africa it was re-named The Day of Goodwill in 1994.

Today small gifts are still given trades people and service workers, but in Britain the day has become all about shopping.  It is the biggest shopping day of the year and has been compared to American Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  Stores mark the day with huge sales.

It is also a day of sport.  Football—that’s soccer to Americans—and Rugby leagues hold full schedules of games, teams usually playing their most serious rivals.  There were also prestige horse races and for the country gentry mounted fox hunts—more recently due to a bitterly resented law, sans fox.  The toffs are no longer allowed to chase real fox, but still got to ride to the hounds chasing a scented bait, although even that may soon be banned.

In Ireland, the day is still officially called St. Stephen’s Day.

Irish lads parade and sing for food, drink, and coins on Wren Day.  In former time a dead wren pierced by a sprig of holly was sometimes carried.  Other times the bird was alive but caged  and could be released for especially generous gifts.

It is also known there as Wren’s Day.  Boys in homemade hats and costumes carry a caged wren—or in past days, a dead one pierced by a holly sprig—proclaiming it the king of the birds and begging for treats.  Once a fading country custom, in the cities men now reenact it—often as a pub crawl.

Paddy Moloney founded the Chieftains in 1963.  The earliest recorded incarnation of the group consisted of Moloney on uillean pipes, Sean Potts on tin whistle, Martin Fay on fiddle, David Fallon on bodhran, Mick Tubridy on flute and concertina, and Sean Ó Riada.  Others joined or played with the group since the ‘70’s.  The much revered Moloney passed away this year in October at the age of 83.

Today we turn to the Irish tradition with the legendary Chieftains.  Wren in the Furze was on their 1991 double album The Bell of Dublin which also included a slew of guest artists including Elvis Costello, Jackson Brown, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Marianne Faithfull, Nanci Griffith, Rickie Lee Jones, and Burgess Meredith as a narrator.  I dare you to keep your feet still during this romp. 

The Oldest Protestants—Those Moravians

Seal of the Moravian Church.

Readers of this blog are an educated and sophisticated bunch, which is why you flock to this page in unprecedented numbers.  In particular, many of you are very savvy about religion and religious history.  Which is why you probably know for a fact the Protestant Reformation began on that day in 1517 when the German monk Martin Luther allegedly nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral.

But, of course, you would be wrong.  Sixty years earlier on March 1, 1457 The Unitas Fratrum was established in the village of Kunvald, on the Bohemian-Moravian borderland, both part of the loose Holy Roman Empire.  Most scholars point to this event as the establishment of the first modern Protestant denomination who would come to be known to the world as the Bohemian Brethren and latter simply as the Moravians.

Some credit the Waldensians, who arose in 12th Century Italy, with being first.  But they had been all but wiped out as heretics and driven deep underground and were barely functioning by the mid 1450’s.  Yet Moravian tradition asserts that these underground Waldensians passed ecclesiastical authority to the new group.

The true roots of these Brethren were with Jan Hus, a celebrated martyr burned at the stake in Konstanz for heresy on July 6, 1415 by order of the great Church Council meeting in that southern German city.  Hus had let a popular movement in Bohemia and Moravia calling for reform in the Catholic Church.  Many of his proposed reforms were really just an appeal to return to the norms of the Orthodox Church which had been usurped in the region—liturgy in Czech, the language of the people; the laity receiving communion of both bread and wine; married priests; and eliminating indulgences and the idea of Purgatory.

Surviving followers of Jan Hus kept the Hidden Seed in secret.

Hus had received support from the Bohemian King Wenceslaus—the very king made famous in an English carol—and local nobles and was elevated to Rectorship of the University of Prague.  Both the King and Hus were caught up in the complicated politics in the church which was then riven by opposing Popes.  Eventually Hus was declared a heretic.  Several papal armies attempted to suppress his movement but were defeated, as was a rebellion by local Catholics.

But Wenceslaus eventually had to withdraw support in hopes of being crowned Holy Roman Emperor.  The Council at Kunvald settled the question of Papal legitimacy then exercised its new unified power by condemning Hus and smashing his movement.

The suppression of the Husites was so complete that many people to this day believe that Hus left no church, that he was a premature dead end.

But the beliefs of Hus were kept alive underground for generations.  This ability to lie low and rise up again would be a recurring theme and even become an article of faith—the Hidden Seed which could survive long periods of suppression and then spring to life once more.

From their humble beginnings in Kunvald, the Brethren spread rapidly over most of the Czech lands.  They quickly won over most of the landed aristocracy and the thriving burgers of the cities.  They won wide support by establishing schools in every village giving instruction in Czech as well a teaching Latin and German at the higher levels.  This spread literacy to an unprecedented degree across the region.  By the mid-15th Century—about the time Luther was getting started—it is estimated that 90% of Czech speaking Bohemians and Moravians were Protestant.

And their movement spread north to Poland where the Polish Brethren, who developed even more revolutionary beliefs that included unitarian theology, also flourished.

Alarmed, authorities in Rome decided finally to fight back by sending in the Marines—I mean Jesuits.  They first established their own schools to counter the ones operated by the Brethren.  But their schools only instructed in Latin.  A crusade against instruction in the vulgate followed. 

By 1618 the very Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias, sought to reassert his authority by imposing a Catholic as King of Bohemia and March of Moravia.  Fearing the loss of their rights, local nobles rebelled in the Bohemian Revolt, which was finally crushed in 1621.  The nobles were deposed or executed and Germans placed in their spots by the Hapsburg rulers of the Empire. 

The war, subsequent repression, and the Black Plague depopulated Bohemia which was reduced from more than three million residents to less than 800,000.  The weakened population could not resist.  The Jesuits seized the Brethren schools and forbad the teaching of Czech or its use as an official or court language.  The Brethren were forced underground and into exile by brutal suppression.  A similar fate befell their Polish cousins.

Small bands of exiles spread across Northern Europe.  Holland, a refuge for dissidents, became home to many.  Other scattered across the German principalities, out of reach of the Emperor. For a hundred years they survived underground and in exile, once again the Hidden Seed.

Early Moravian artist John Valentine Haidt celebrated the souls from many cultures around the world brought to Christ by Moravian missionaries.

In 1722 a small band of the Hidden Seed who had survived in deep hiding in Moravia, escaped the rotting Empire and accepted the protection of a local nobleman in Berthelsdorf, in present day Saxony in eastern Germany.  Under his protection they founded a village, Herrnhut which grew into a city as the exiles were joined by hundreds, then thousands of others.

On August 13, 1727 the exiles gathered at the parish church of Berthelsdorf with the encouragement of the nobleman, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, they united to renew the ancient Unitas Fratrum.  The modern Moravian church was reborn.

The Moravians thrived in their new home, not only collecting more members of their diaspora, but attracting the adherence of many German locals, particularly among the higher peasantry.  At least 30 more villages were founded and settled on the Herrnhut model which emphasized prayer and worship, and a form of communal living to assist the members in their spiritual growth. Christians from different confessional backgrounds were welcomed to participate in the discussions.  Christian education for children was emphasized the communities became centers of support, for the Moravian Mission work throughout the world.

In Europe small “renewal groups” were encouraged to function within existing churches.  These diaspora societies spread pietic Christianity as firm tendency in many national churches.

In fact the Moravians were really the first missionary Protestants.  They dispatched not only clergy, but pious and learned laymen with their families.  Within a mere 30 years Moravian missionaries were at work across the globe—the Caribbean, North and South America, the Arctic (Greenland and Iceland), Africa, and the Far East. They ministered not just to Europeans on those distant shores, but particularly to the native peoples and even to slaves.

In North America, the Moravians took a particular interest in the native nations.  As early as 1740 they were working among the Mohicans of New York.  The British colonial government, fearful that the Mohicans would ally with the French, expelled the Moravians from the colony, but some Mohican bands continued their congregations on their own.

About the same time Moravian settlers arrived in Pennsylvania.  Count Zinzendorf himself along with David Nitschmann established the settlement of Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, 1741.  Many Moravians settled in the area. They also ministered to the Algonquian speaking Lenape, also known as the Delaware.  This was some of their most successful work until peaceful villages of Moravian Lenape were forced into exile in Canada after the American Revolution settling around Morviatown, Ontario.

Historic Bethabara Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina's Old Town.

Other Moravians helped settle North Carolina, including establishing Salem, now part of Winston-Salem.  In 1801 they began an ambitious mission to the Cherokee which continued until that tribe was forcibly removed in the Trail of Tears.

The Moravians, often the only organized Christians on the frontier, played a key part in early American history.  But their pacifism and unconventional religious beliefs often made them targets for repression and prejudice with the arrival of Methodist and Baptist saddlebag preachers.  Their pacifism made them suspect in time of war as did their support of the Indians.

After the early 19th Century, the American Moravians became less missionary.  The Moravian denomination persists in this country with congregations in 18 states. The highest concentrations are in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. Bethlehem is the seat of the Northern Province and Winston-Salem of the Southern. There are probably less than 50,000 members.

Worldwide the modern Unitas Fratrum has about 850,000 members organized into 18 semi-autonomous Unity Provinces, seven Missionary Provinces, and dozens of missions.  By far the highest concentration of Moravians in the world is now in Tanzania, a tribute to its missionary roots.

Today Moravian theology, though pious, is charmingly simple and surpassingly liberal.  It is best summed up by their motto, “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love.”

No wonder isolated Moravian congregations in the South sometimes drifted to Universalism.  And the motto could be a distillation of William Ellery Channing’s fundamental Unitarian sermon, The Permanent and Transient in Christianity.