St. George and the dragon and me

Whatever you do, don't think of this as definitive. What I know about the saints you could barely fit in a communion cup. What I know of martyrs pretty much starts and ends with Stephen, whom we never really called a "saint" because saints were probably Catholics. 

Here's what little I understand. St. George was a military man, the son of a great soldier and a great soldier himself. When the Roman army, of whom he was a part, determined to rid itself of its Christians, the command was given that all its men make sacrifices to the Roman gods. St. George, who wasn't yet sainted of course, demurred, which cost him his head. (Trust me, the stories are far more colorful than that summary.)

St. George's martyrdom was vivid and memorable and was retold and embellished for a thousand years in the fertile imaginations of pious people. A million re-tellings makes it impossible to determine what is truth and what is myth, so a kind of cult grew up around St. George, stories blossoming into a glorious bouquet of richly embroidered tales. It's what we do.

There's a woman in that painting above. She's somewhat standard fare in the myriad ways St. George's story is told. Her place in the story is said to derive from a queen who, observing St. George's martyrdom (which was as bloody as you can imagine) determined that whatever it was that soldier had coursing in his soul was something she wanted something of herself. Thus, she converted to Christianity.

The dragon, from "St. George and the Dragon," is considered mostly symbolic, a force evil and ugly enough wear the robes of any villainous tribe or fellowship. Whatever it is you hate, that's the dragon. So here's how the story goes: St. George slays the dragon and the result is the conversion of those who observe his bold and righteous heroism.

The whole story is there in the rendition, a way of life in illustration. Even Islam honors St. George, as do most branches of saint-honoring Christianity, including, of course, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic. The template of his story is gloriously universal--and that's not a dig.

I bring him up because this country church was part of his legacy, an old late 19th century church just down the road from the town where I grew up. It still stands at a place we called "Six Corners," for, well, obvious reasons. It was St. George's Catholic church, a church home to a couple dozen kids I went to high school with--some of them good friends. 

I didn't know anything about St. George when I was in high school, and I really didn't know anything about St. George's Church either, except a legacy of skeptical notions from hundreds of years of Christian history morphed mostly into bigotry. The church in which I was reared drew its patterns of worship largely from a Dutch synod 300+ years old. Is it any wonder that we took our attitude toward Roman Catholics from the Reformation?

What's more, my father worked for and with a whole front office of Roman Catholics. My father was a Calvinist, and he despised their worldliness, their carousing, their vulgarity. That I remember too. I'm sure his antipathy increased his belief that they really weren't fellow pilgrims on the road to the Celestial City. 

They were "minnow munchers," Friday fish-eaters, and they worshiped graven images and actually prayed to saints, saints like St. George. Besides, who really knew what happened between priests and those women dressed like penguins? 

I wish I didn't have to confess all of that, but last weekend I drove past St. George's Church, Six Corners, and realized when I drove into the parking lot that it isn't a church anymore. It's been abandoned. The numbers got thin, I suppose, and the diocese determined that there were other Catholic churches in the area that were not out of reach of its members. Priests are scarce these days, you know. It probably better be shut down.

I found that empty church, locked up tight, profoundly sad.

Just a few years ago, we shared a lunch with people who were members of little Lutheran church that had closed up shop out in the country. Shutting the doors and hauling that building away shattered something beautiful in the hearty souls of men and women whose great-grandparents put the church up and worshiped there for all of their lives. 

I can't imagine that locking the doors was any different at St. George. When that wonderful old Cream City brick church closed, there had to be tears. 

It was tough to admit but impossible not to remember that once upon a time I knew absolutely nothing about St. George and very, very little about the kids I knew who called his church home. I studied with them, played ball with them, joked around with them--but I didn't know them, didn't know what moved their souls. What little I thought I knew was mythology created by 500 years of religious antagonism.

When I stopped in front of the church and took out my camera, a young man came out of the house next door so quickly I hadn't yet got out of the door of my car. He asked me what I wanted. That's his job. "We watch the place," he told me, once he saw the camera.

I asked him if it was open.

He looked at me, shrugged his shoulders. "We keep it locked," he said, definitively.

I wish I could have got in because somewhere inside that old building, I'm sure, maybe in a back corner somewhere, there's a dusty old confessional, a closet space maybe, a place in St. George's that this old Calvinist could have used.