And Today’s Saint Is….
Posted in General, On This Day on March 1st, 2011 by Eugene Finerman – 2 CommentsMarch 1st: Happy St. David’s Day.
In honor of the Patron Saint of Wales, it is customary to wear and eat a leek. This would also make David the patron saint of halitosis.
Living in the sixth century, David should have had a few legends in which he fought dragons and evil wizards. He was a contemporary of King Arthur, but David was apparently immune to excitement. His life reads like a human resource manual. The drab, charisma-free man would have been a disaster as a missionary, but he was ideal for doing a pew inventory. And that is exactly what Wales needed.
The impoverished, mountainous region had been inundated with refugees, the survivors of Roman Britain. Fleeing the Angles-Saxons, these Britons had lost their classical culture, their knowledge of Latin, even an awareness of vowels. They had regressed to a more primitive Celtic society. The Church feared that they would lose their Christianity too.
The methodical David prevented that by making the Church unavoidable. He founded churches and monasteries throughout Wales. These ecclesiastical franchises were the foundations on which society could stabilize and begin to rebuild. David’s bureaucratic nature may well have saved Wales. Without him, the dispossessed, despairing Britons might well have skipped off the nearest cliff. (Lemming does sound like a Welsh name.)
So remember St. David. He is the closest that a saint will ever get to a MBA.