#st. james

[momentsbeforemass]

Santiago

(by request)

A few years ago, I went to Santiago de Campostela. To the Cathedral that marks the end of the legendary pilgrim’s way known simply as “The Camino.”

Don’t be impressed. I did it the easy way. By driving from Portugal.

Atop the main altar at the Cathedral is a larger-than-life-size statue of St. James. In a Baroque sanctuary dripping with gold and silver, the ornate statue of St. James stands out.

The treasured relics of the Apostle could not be in a more precious container.

But that’s not where they are.

The actual relics of St. James are at the bottom of a cramped flight of stairs, worn smooth by the feet of centuries of pilgrims. In a simple shrine in a narrow crypt.

Underneath the main altar. And a world away from the bejeweled splendor overhead.

I love beautiful churches. The glories of the great cathedrals and the beauty of Catholic art and worship are some of the things that God used to draw me to the Church. And still uses to draw me closer to Him.

But there was something wonderfully poetic about the simplicity of the actual resting place of St. James. I remember thinking, as I stood there in the little shrine, “we have this treasure in earthen vessels,” (which is today’s first reading).

It was a wonderful visual for the extravagance of God. How God treats not just His Apostles, but all of His beloved. How God treats you and me.

God pours out His love. God pours out His care. God pours out His compassion. God pours out His very best into our hearts. Into the simple, flawed, fragile vessels of you and me.

Not even asking whether we’re good enough. Not waiting until we’re perfect.

But looking at us with Holy love. Wanting so much for us. That He can’t wait.

God pours out the greatest treasure – God’s love, God’s forgiveness, God’s very best – into our hearts. The moment we turn to Him and take our first halting steps towards Home.

Today’s Readings

[frenchcurious]

L’avantage de travailler dans le quartier de St. James’s à Londres est que j’ai régulièrement l’occasion de voir beaucoup de belles vieilles voitures britanniques dans les rues. - source Paul Hier.

[archinform]

Open House Chicago 2024 - Day 1

October 19-20, 2024

Sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Center

Cathedral Hall, University Club of Chicago, 76 East Monroe Street

1909, Martin Roche, architect, Frederic Clay Bartlett, stained glass windows

Murphy Auditorium, 50 E. Erie Street

1926, Benjamin Marshall and Charles E. Fox of Marshall and Fox, architects

St. James Cathedral, Huron and Wabash Streets

1875, Edward Burling, architect

Lawson House, formerly Lawson YMCA, 803 N Dearborn Street

1931, Perkins, Chatten, and Hammond, architects; Edgar Miller, designer of the Chapel

[dogwise]

Alter in St. James' Church, Hamburg, Germany

[hiljametsa]

Troparion for St. James, tone 4.

As the Lord’s disciple you received the Gospel, O righteous James;

as a martyr you have unfailing courage;

as God’s brother, you have boldness;

as a hierarch, you have the power to intercede.//

Pray to Christ God that our souls may be saved.

[christliche-kunstwerke]

St. Jakobus der Apostel, ca. 1612-13 von Peter Paul Rubens (Öl auf Holz)

[eopederson2]

Fountain, St. James Cathedral, Seattle, 2014.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

SAINT OF THE DAY (July 25)

James, the brother of John the Evangelist, was the first Apostle to be martyred. He was beheaded by order of Herod of Agrippa.

The Gospels tell us that the two brothers left their father Zebedee and followed Jesus as soon as He called out to them.

James was one of the three Apostles who were particularly close to the Lord. He was there with the Lord, his brother John, and Peter at the Transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemane.

He is known as "James the Greater" to distinguish him from the other Apostle by the same name.

The title has little to do with his function or the people's regard for him. Rather, it was a term indicating that he was the elder of the two.

He is the patron saint of Spain and of pilgrims.

In northwestern Spain, he is venerated at Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrimage site that is still very popular today.

—

Santiago de Compostela or Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia in northwestern Spain.

The city has its origin in the shrine of Saint James the Great, now the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, as the destination of the Way of St. James, a leading Catholic pilgrimage route since the 9th century.

In 1985, the city's Old Town was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD – Today is the Feast Day of St. James.

Since mediaeval times, Dubliners held an annual drinking festival in the Saint’s honour. Fittingly, Guinness chose St. James’ Gate as the site for their brewery. St. James is the patron saint of hatmakers, rheumatoid sufferers, and labourers. St James the Greater was one of the first disciples of Jesus and is believed to be the first of the 12 apostles to be martyred. He was the son of Zebedee…

[jcksphotos]

Fields

[andrasthehun]

Walking the Camino de Santiago

March 11, 2023 It felt like, rightly or wrongly, we should take a trip. Everyone we know was going somewhere. It is winter vacation time for many of our friends as they “get away” from winter. The winter travelersmade me think: what type of past trips have we enjoyed the most, anytime? And the one that stood out was walking the Camino de Santiago in the Fall of 2012. We walked from Leon to…

[natasa-pantovic]

Amazing Sacred Fruit #performance by Rieko Whitfield singing & Ġulja Holland painting at the exhibition A New Gothic Malta

[b-etter]

It's by the sea and at nights end

That's when the sin and swill begin

That's when he had that certain light inside his head

For every whisper he would scream

For every draught he'd share a drink

For every sorrow there's a light from our St. James

[aprillikesthings]

The Legends of St. James the Greater [citation needed]

Because I'm doing the Camino de Santiago next spring, I've been reading stuff about St. James the Greater, because the stories around him are why the Camino exists in the first place.

And, oh my god, they're Something Else. Because nearly everything I read is either 1. extremely unlikely 2. kinda wince-inducing. at best.

I want to make it clear: I don't think it matters, at this point, how much of his post-Biblical legends are factually true, in regards to walking the Camino. People have been making sincere pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela for so long that bits of him might as well be there, yeah? It's became a sacred place devoted to one of the first of Jesus' apostles whether his actual bones are there or not. Also, quite frankly, many of the legends aren't any more or less believable than anything in the Gospels themselves. Disclaimer over.

Things that were recorded soon enough after they supposedly happened that they are the likeliest to be true:

He was one of the first apostles of Jesus, along with his brother John. The two brothers (plus Peter) were witnesses to some of the more notable parts of Jesus' life and ministry. He was also the first apostle to be martyred; beheaded by sword on the order of Herod in 44 AD. (His beheading is in Acts 12:2, just one sentence: "He [Herod] had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword.")

After that...things get...weird.

Legend has it that he traveled all the way to what is modern-day Spain to preach the Gospel there, and that after he came back to Jerusalem and was beheaded, his body was miraculously taken by angels and set in a boat that washed up on the coast of Spain. During a wedding. Which spooked a horse and rider. Who fell into the ocean. And then emerged miraculously unharmed and covered in scallop shells...and that's part of why scallop shells are symbols of St. James and pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Yeah, okay.

"Oh thank God, I'm not lost." And yes, lots of people get some variation of this as a tattoo. (I know I probably will, ahaha.)

(That all said: there's an Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Jerusalem that claims to have his head. So maybe the angels only took the rest of him. Who knows? Not me.)

At some point his relics were moved to the location of what is now Santiago de Compostela by some disciples of his (from his earlier visit to Spain? I think?), and the fact that the relics were there was revealed to a hermit by a field of stars in 814. He reported this to a bishop, who told the local king, who built a chapel on that site and is said to be the first pilgrim to Santiago. The chapel became a church in 829, the church was burned down by the Moors in 997, and in 1075 the king started building a cathedral there (it was finished in 1211). In the 900's pilgrims started arriving from all over Europe, and once the cathedral got started their numbers increased dramatically. Both St. Francis of Assisi and Margery Kempe did pilgrimages to Santiago, for instance. Margery did it multiple times, bless her.

But here's the thing: somehow nobody noticed the whole "his body is in Spain" thing until that hermit? And just coincidentally, this was a time when the Catholic church was trying to stamp out the remnants of a particularly popular heresy that had started in Spain. Just saying.

But wait, there's more!

Another thing that was happening in the 800's and for, y'know, a LONG time after (seriously it went on from 711 to 1492); was Christians and Muslim Moors fighting over Spain.

The Christians of Spain named St. James as their patron and protector, in part due his miraculous help in a battle that, uh, never actually happened. The date of the battle is given as 843 or 844, but somehow was never recorded until 300 years later. (Are you sensing a theme here, because I am.)

St. James is therefore sometimes portrayed as Santiago Matamoros, aka St. James the Moor-Slayer. A lot of medieval imagery of him portrays him on horseback, slaughtering people. 😬 Many of the old churches along the Camino include this portrayal--and some of those churches were originally mosques. Oof.

CAN IT GET WORSE? YES.

Look, I'm just going to copy/paste from the wikipedia page on this one: "The iconography of James Matamoros was used in the Spanish colonization of the Americas as a rival force to the indigenous gods, and protector of Spaniards from the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He was depicted as a conquistador."

I mean, thankfully; I won't run into much of that in Spain. But...euggghh.

Anyway.

I kinda feel bad for the actual James, who was just a fisherman working with his dad and brother before becoming one of Jesus' close friends. James was just A Guy! The other apostles apparently found him and his brother kind of annoying! He sometimes had a bad temper! The stories about him in the Gospels just make him sound so human.

There are two common portrayals of our man James all over the Camino: St. James the Moor-Slayer, and St. James as a pilgrim, wearing a floppy hat and robe and holding a walking stick. Much nicer.

Now that's a guy I'd walk across Spain for.

[cynthiabertelsen]

Peregrinations and Pilgrimages: Legendary Scallops

A long time ago, I read a novel about a young woman who made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. The story captivated me, true.  But more than that, the legend of the scallops stayed with me, with its magical aura of place, embodying the enduring desire of people to journey on pilgrimage, eternally seeking. The Codex Calixtinus (more HERE about this, also called Liber sancti Jacobi, Book of…

[thetravelcocktail]

Secret London

Hidden courtyard in St. James…