GruntGod 2.9.5: November 11th
What the Church Forgot It Was Celebrating
This is drawn from the revision of the Martin chapter in the second edition of God Is a Grunt.
Martin of Tours was buried on November 11, 397. His feast day — the annual celebration of his death and burial — has been observed by Christians in the Western church since the fifth century.
The Basilica of St Martin of Tours on November 11, 2016.
November 11 is also Veterans Day in the United States, Remembrance Day in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth nations, and Armistice Day in much of Western Europe. The date marks the end of World War I in 1918.
Most churches that observe Veterans Day have no idea that November 11 has honored a soldier-saint for sixteen centuries.
Most churches that will observe Veterans Day have also, statistically speaking, done very little to actually serve the veterans and military families in their congregations or communities. They will thank veterans for their service. They may have a moment of silence. They will likely not have thought carefully about what the church owes its military neighbors, what moral pain looks like and how to walk alongside someone carrying it, or why the church's posture toward soldiers has been so consistently inadequate — whether that inadequacy looks like civilian suspicion of military culture, or reflexive flag-waving that substitutes for genuine pastoral care.
Martin is a patron saint of soldiers, of the poor, of France, and of conscientious objectors. He is the patron of people who served and people who refused to keep serving when their conscience said stop. He held both of those things at the same time, in the same body, for most of his adult life.
He was a military brat who didn't choose to serve. He was a baptized Christian who kept serving after his conversion because his service didn't violate his conscience — until it did. He was a discharged veteran who spent decades doing unglamorous ministry among rural poor people the church establishment ignored. He was a bishop who lived in a cave instead of a palace and who lost a political fight he should have won and withdrew from public life when the institution failed him.
His feast is on Veterans Day.
I went to Tours for the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of his birth in November 2016. I stood at his tomb. I have thought about him a lot since.
Laura took this picture of me my first time to the Basilica in Tours, in July 2015.
The church is not short on theological resources for engaging its military members faithfully. It is short on the will to use them, and short on the honesty to admit why. Martin's story is one of those resources. His feast day is one of those moments.
