Today is my brother Fred’s birthday.
It is also the feast day for St. Helena (the Emperor Constantine’s mother, and the most prominent active Christian of her day), who is the patron of the Order of St. Helena – who’s breviary I am using. I’m exploring the possibility of Associate status with them. So it’s a first class feast for me these days.
Helena is not in the calendar of the Episcopal Church. William Porcher DuBose is remembered today on that calendar. I found myself quite taken with what I read about him.
In “Brightest and Best” Sam Portaro writes that DuBose, who was born in 1836, was “one of those persons born seemingly ahead of his time … At the heart of his faith DuBose held a tenacious and fundamental belief in the Incarnation, the premise that in Jesus Christ God places before us not just the image of what it means to be human, but the very person who fulfills God’s intention for humankind. Dubose would have had little patience for our spirtualizations of Jesus that make him an oddity, the exception rather than the rule of what we are to be.” (more…)
