The Easton Historical Society dedicated a flagpole in honor
of long time member Ken Martin on Saturday. Ken was a veteran of the SeaBees who served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. He brought his skills home to have a long career with the tree department. Ken helped out the Historical Society in a variety of ways in particular with a biannual bottle drive that raised over $10,000 for the Society. Ken is definitely missed.
After the ceremony the program said
we would have a collation. “What’s a collation?” the person sitting next to me
asked. Having been through two wars-the Revolution and the Civil as a living
history reenactor I knew it meant
refreshments, but I had no idea where the word came from. Turns out we can
thank a saint.
The story starts with John Cassian who lived from about
360-435 A. D.. This was so long ago that
no one knows whether he came from present day Bulgaria, Romania, or France. Cassian
was very devout and like lots of men of his age he went to the desert to better
talk to God. As a young man he spent time hermiting around Bethleham, but finding
it too crowded, he headed for the desert near Scete in Egypt. Unfortunately,
other religious folks beat him to it, and Cassian spent about 15 years moving
among the small groups of hermits that were coalescing into the first
monasteries. Eventually he wrote a book called Conferences with the Hermits of Scete.
At any rate, poor Cassian lived in a time when there seemed
to be a new heresy every day. His choice was Semipelagianism, but that need not
detain us here because Cassian avoided burning at the stake because his
position didn’t become officially heretical until a hundred years after his
death. However, Cassian left the desert to avoid getting caught up in a
completely different heresy. Arriving in Constantinople he got a job with the
Patriarch of Constantinople who hadn’t yet broken with the Pope in Rome to
found the Greek Orthodox Church. The Big P had broken with the Emperor of the
Eastern Roman Empire, however and sent Cassian to Rome to ask the Pope for
help.
.
While in Rome Cassian told the Pope about how all those
Egyptian hermits were banding together into monasteries. What the Pope did
about the Patriarch I have no idea, but he asked Cassian to start a monastery,
one of the first in Europe, in the city of Marseilles. This Cassian did about
415. He spent the last twenty years of his life there and his Conferences and another book called the
Institutions became the rule book
for early monastic life.
All this effort got Cassian official sainthood in the
Eastern Orthodox Church with the bummer Saint’s Day of February 29th.
In the West he was never officially canonized, but drew a better Saint’s Day,
July 23. You can visit his head and right hand at the church of St. Victor in
Marseilles, the descendent church of his original monastery.
So when do we eat? Or at least what has this got to do with
collations? Well, about 50 years after
Cassian’s death, St Benedict came along. Benedict picked up on Cassian’s monastery idea and founded the Benedictine
order. He wrote the Rules of St.
Benedict that still govern his order, the Cisterians, and the Trappists.
Benedict decreed that on fast days his monks could eat two
small meals (Robin Hood’s Friar Tuck was a Benedictine and over the centuries
the definition of “small” changed). Cassian fanboy that he was, Benedict also decreed
that a reading from Cassian’s Conferences
should precede the light meals. The Latin title of the Conferences is Collationes
partum in secetica eremo, hence the word collation. Believe it or not it is
also the origin of the Polish word for supper-kolacja. “And now you know the
rest of the story.”
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