St Boniface

Happy feast of St. Boniface!  Talk about a man who "filled every minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run".  He never stopped working and building and praying and studying for the Lord.

I love this saint because he is so straightforward. And clever!  He once chopped down an oak tree dedicated to Thor right in front of the wild, German pagans he was trying to convert.  And he turned right around and built chapels out of the wood!  This was to show them that the true God was not a God of fear and destruction, like Thor, but a God who wanted them to come to Him as sons and daughters.  To come and visit him in those chapels.  

Boniface left a beautiful, ordered, ecclesial career in England and set out to reach the wild people of Germany with Christ's message. And I find it very charming that he DID bring his books with him and he loved learning so much that it is said most poignantly that "he perished at the hands of marauding bands, slain over the book he was reading".  

Here are the comforting words from his own pen that have come down to us, who still need to hear them:

The Church is like a great ship being pounded by the waves of life's different stresses. Our duty is not to abandon ship, but to keep her on Course.

Amen!