The Flamboyant Feast of Saint Lucy

by the Rev. Scott Walters

The other day, I had the bright idea (the adjective is carefully chosen) of crisping up a stale tostada shell in the toaster oven. I stepped out of the room for a minute, and when I returned, flames were reaching through the door of the tiny appliance, and feeling around angrily for the cookbooks on a shelf nearby. Miraculously, we didn’t even lose the toaster oven to my boneheadedness. If this were an actual miracle, it would have been an appropriate one for the feast of Saint Lucy (or Saint Lucia), which is observed on the 13th of December, which this year falls on a Friday.

Our friends Andrea & Ed Wills used to throw a fabulous Saint Lucy’s Day party, the highlight of which was Andrea appearing in the dining room in a white dress with a crown of lit candles on her head. Lucy’s legend isn’t as popular as Saint Nicolas’s, which is observed one week prior. This could be because of a reticence to tell children about a saint whose vision returned even after her eyes had been gouged out. Paintings depicting Lucy carrying her own eyeballs on a platter are less appealing than the jolly generosity of Saint Nick, who threw bags of dowry money through the windows (or down chimneys) of poor families. You see, the fate of unmarried young women was very bleak in Nicholas’s hometown of Myra back in the day.

What are Christians to do with stories like these, if anything? I’m of two minds. One of them says that imagination is a gift from God, and children, in particular, have a nimbleness with stories, moving easily back and forth between the fabulous and the real. Old folks like me would do well to learn from them, not so as to believe more unbelievable tales are literally true, but to remember how to receive the truth about ourselves in the form of a story. And part of this necessary skill is to question the message our stories convey at times, whether they happened to happen or not.

On this feast of Saint Lucy, I’ll risk voicing a Scroogian opinion that a fable about a martyr who carried her eyeballs around on a plate may do less harm to our imaginations than one about a saint who rewards good children with presents and puts lumps of coal into the stockings of bad ones. Because Jesus of Nazareth, whom the real Saint Nicholas served, was born into our world to upend the age-old deterioration of the loving, generous, forgiving God of grace into a divine performance reviewer in our fallen imaginations, making lists, checking them twice, doling out or withholding favor accordingly.

So, here’s a plan. Let’s celebrate gifts and generosity during this lovely, sacred time of year in whatever ways we can. If we give gifts with kindness and mercy and joy, expecting nothing in return, the practice may train our own imaginations in the ways of grace and the actual gospel of Jesus. And if you slip again in the mindset of works righteousness, do whatever you need to do — light a ring of fire on your head or in your toaster or carry a plate of eyeballs through your house — whatever it takes to shake you out of that old imposter gospel and return you to the flamboyantly (see what I did there?) good news Jesus was truly born into this beloved world to make known to us all.