12 Blessings of Christmas
Church Christmas Tree
Stevan Dohanos
December 27, 1952

Grateful for the studded snow tires that anchor my car to the frozen earth, I follow the old dirt road as it crosses an icy creek, then winds through the snowy woods that extend for miles through the Vermont mountains.

It’s an incredibly beautiful day. Spotting the simple, 200-year-old Quaker meetinghouse in a sunny clearing ahead, I carefully slow to pull off the road, then stop by the freshly plowed path to its door.

To the north, there’s the sound of wood being chopped. To the east, a dog barks. But here there is only silence. As it has for nearly two centuries, this simple country church sits in a profound stillness rich with a sense of Presence. Leaning back in the sun, I relax for the first time in weeks.

This is my favorite time of year. My car is loaded with freshly cut pine boughs, candles, baskets of pine cones, dried seed pods, and lemon balm, plus garlands of balsam that I’ll use to drape over the door and decorate the deep windowsills of the old meetinghouse. But as I sit here in the warm sun, the rich fragrances of woods and meadow hold me in my seat—and remind me of the joyful blessings that will be woven into my life over the next several weeks.

1. The Blessing of Community

The Blessing of Community
Tree in Town Square
Stevan Dohanos
December 4, 1948

During the holiday season, the entire world seems in harmony: Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, Buddhists remember the enlightenment of Siddhartha, Jews recall the miraculous temple lamp that burned for eight days, Muslims welcome the new year based on the lunar calendar, and even nontheists join the expression of goodwill with colored lights and electric Santas that wave to passersby.

Down the mountain in the village of Bristol, the Christmas season begins on the first Saturday of December when villagers sweep the snow from their steps, light the village Christmas tree, and members of three churches around the village green hold their annual Christmas Bazaars.

“It looks like an old-fashioned Christmas card,” chuckles my friend Laurie Kroll. “Wreaths and greens are everywhere. St. Ambrose has a silver tea on one side of the green, First Baptist has soups and sandwiches for lunch on the other side, and the Federated Church around the corner has Santa.”

The members of each church have been knitting and baking for weeks to produce an abundance of foods and crafts, and each church becomes a small marketplace with tables of homemade jams and pickles, knitted hats, fruit-studded braided breads, and every kind of holiday ornament imaginable. It’s a fundraiser, sure—”One year we made enough to buy a new vacuum,” Laurie remembers—but more than that, it’s a time of coming together and remembering what we share.

2. The Blessing of Giving

Thinking about my friends in Bristol, I realize that there are probably few of us who won’t admit that gift-giving has strayed far from its humble beginnings of homemade crafts and food—particularly when we have to cart piles of wrapping paper and plastic packaging to the recycling center after Christmas or pay our credit card bills in January.

A few years ago, this really got to ecology author and activist Bill McKibben, who lives a few hills over from me near Ripton. “A bunch of us in what was then the Troy conference of the Methodist Church, were thinking that there was a lot of waste at Christmastime—all those batteries!” Bill recently messaged me. “But when we started talking with folks about new ways of celebrating Xmas, we quickly found out that there was something deeper here. People really dreaded the approach of Christmas, because it had all become too much—and they were incredibly receptive to the idea of doing it differently, with an emphasis on gifts of service.”

Bill and his friends persuaded a number of families to commit themselves to doing things for those with whom they normally exchanged gifts—walking an elderly aunt’s dog when the temperature drops into the single digits, for example. Bill subsequently wrote a book called Hundred Dollar Holiday, in which he proposed spending no more than $100 per family at Christmas. The result? Less running back and forth to the mall, less time spent desperately looking for hot toys and sales, less time tuned out with electronics—and more time spent sitting by the fire with family, sharing a potluck with friends, or taking a long walk outside, alone in the freshly fallen snow.

The 12 Blessings of Christmas The Saturday Evening Post

The hard life of a circuit preacher in the 1860s.

Is America losing its faith? Recent polls show less than half of us belong to any organized religion. The percentage of Americans regularly attending church is even smaller (about 25 percent), and this figure continues to drop.

We seem to have come a long way from the early 1800s, when European visitors remarked how much religion influenced the conduct of Americans. The country seemed immersed in the Christian ethic back then. Its cities were crowded with churches; its art and literature filled with references to God, salvation, and the Bible.

Yet the religious influences in American society were probably not as great as they seem now. In many American communities, church membership never rose much higher than 50 percent. And though the national average reached 75 percent by the 1950s, it had been climbing slowly from the turn of the century. In those days, ministers and pastors had been alarmed at the poor church attendance which, they argued, had been caused by science, the modern novel, and Ford’s new Model T.

In those years, Rebecca Harding Davis regularly contributed articles to the Post about the changes she’d seen in her 73 years. In 1906, she wrote that nothing reflected the change in modern America like the decline of Christianity as her grandparents had practiced it. Recalling her youth in western Virginia in the 1830s, she wrote, “The dominant fact about a man at that time was his religion. … It was the important fact then about every man—as it is not today.”

An open-air, gospel camp meeting of the 1840s.

Religion then possessed every man’s thoughts, partly because there was not much else to possess them. Living was simple and cheap. … Each individual worked his way alone upon his narrow path. There were no guilds or leagues or unions to absorb his thoughts. Hence his brain was busied with his own little life and the two agents at work in it—God and the devil. You felt them near you at every turn. You heard of them every moment of the day.

The God, of whom our forefathers talked … was no awful or unknown Creator. … Blacksmiths and ditch-diggers talked as familiarly of [God’s] acts and intentions, as if they had been in His cabinet of advisers when the world was made. They gave Him the human qualities that were most admirable in their own eyes—chief of all, an unreasoning will, and inexorable, merciless justice.

This grim Deity was a real fact to these people. Religion in their souls was not so much a glad, absolute trust in a loving Father, or a brotherly kindness for their neighbors, as a perpetual terror and fearful expectation of judgment.

Strange, horrible ideas grew up out of this ignorance and fear, and made their lives miserable. One of these was the unpardonable sin: an undefined, nameless crime that God never pardoned, even when the sinner had borne eternities of hell. In almost every village there were slow-witted men or starved, anemic girls who believed that they had been guilty of this mysterious crime.

To her grandfather, Christianity was a matter of dogma; to her peers it was a matter of deeds. The older generation believed it could avoid hell only by holding fast, without question, to certain doctrines. Its grandchildren were more likely to ignore creeds “and strive for a life of honesty, purity and brotherly love.”

But the religion of her grandfather was far from heartless and demanded more than belief alone. It directed him to take care of his family and neighbors.

Foreigners counted for nothing to him, but he was loyal to the death to his kin and to his neighbors.
These old forebears of ours built no hospitals, but should one of their neighbors fall ill with typhus they all took turns in nursing him, day and night, for weeks.

If he died and his children had no kinsfolk, they took them home and brought them up as their own. It was simply a matter of course then that these things should be done. There was scarcely a family in our village which had not its orphan child—’to bring a blessing on the house.’

What this faith lacked in flexibility, it made up for in durability—an essential quality in faith for people with hard lives, few comforts, and little security. And if these men didn’t always extend charity to strangers, at least they required integrity in themselves.

Rebecca Harding Davis, 1831-1910.

Our stern old grandfather was as merciless to his own sins as to those of his neighbor. He never had heard of graft. He wronged no man of a penny.

He might berate his old wife, but he was true to her. You heard of no divorces then. His life was narrow and hard, perhaps, but it was clean and true. He had an intense, jealous love for his own kin … but I confess he had not much for outsiders. None of his hard-earned money went to the help of unknown strangers.

He strove with God without ceasing all of his life for the salvation of his own family. It was a common custom for these old fathers and mothers to rise long before the day to wrestle alone in prayer for their boys and girls.

There was, too, more outward reverence shown then by children to parents than there is today. [A father] was apt to impress upon his boys several times a day his conviction of his divine right to rule them. There was seldom any intimacy between them, however deep the affection might be. [And] often, with the purest and highest motives, [these fathers] made home so bare of comfort or pleasure that their sons were driven outside to find it.

American religion had grown more compassionate, Ms. Davis believed, because less was demanded of it. Life had become easier. Americans now lived with prosperity and peace their grandparents had never known. Fewer tragedies and disasters forced them to seek explanation or solace from religion.

But when tragedy returns, as it did on September 11, 2001, so does the need for faith.

The Decline of Old-Time Religion The Saturday Evening Post

Robert,

Wayne, New Jersey

About Face The Saturday Evening Post

I taught history for nearly 18 years and have been a lifelong student of the subject. Here is the truth: 52 of the 55 signers of America’s Declaration of Independence were orthodox, deeply committed Christians. The other three all believed in the Bible as the divine truth, the God of scripture, and His personal intervention. It is the same Congress that formed the American Bible Society. Thomas Jefferson stated on the front of his well-worn Bible: “I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus. I have little doubt that our whole country will soon be rallied to the unit of our Creator.” He was also the chairman of the American Bible Society, which he considered his highest and most important role. Jefferson often attended midweek services in the Capitol building when he was president.

Please, Saturday Evening Post, stay true to your roots and tell the truth about our history.

Bob,

Hayden, Idaho

Keep the Faith The Saturday Evening Post

In his 1796 address as he left the presidency, George Washington exhorted Americans to “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.” The father of our country died a few years later, but not before giving his young nation words to live by.

Face of America: George Washington at Valley Forge The Saturday Evening Post

Jefferson’s no-skin-off-my-nose attitude is so thoroughly modern that it’s hard to remember just how radical his view was in its day. Despite the fact that America was colonized partly by settlers looking to practice their beliefs without discrimination, the Founders still lived in a world where government-sanctioned and supported religion was the norm, where differences of faith and conscience could lead to seizure of property, bodily harm, and worse. By guaranteeing freedom of worship as a basic Constitutional right for all Americans, Jefferson and the rest of the Framers were attempting something entirely new. Almost miraculous, in fact.

Consider that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written and ratified by a group composed exclusively of white, male landowners (many of them slaveowners), most with ties to just one specific religion — more than 50 percent of the Founding Fathers were affiliated with the Episcopal church, according to some historians. Not exactly the diverse dream team you or I might have chosen to safeguard the religious freedom of a new nation.

But that’s exactly what they did, and in the first lines of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …” Known forever after as the Establishment Clause, this pronouncement — and the entire amendment — has over time proven to be a versatile tool that does more than separate church and state. It protects America’s faithful and faithless alike, providing both freedom of religion and freedom from it, as appropriate.

To be sure, the Founding Fathers couldn’t foresee how their efforts would one day help to make America the most religiously diverse nation in the world, nor anticipate how the Establishment Clause would come into play on future issues, from the teaching of evolutionary theory in schools, to the displaying of the Ten Commandments in public buildings, to the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance.

For more than 200 years, the balance between religious liberty and the rule of law has been constantly renegotiated. To understand how that balance has been maintained both then and now, we need to look back at the influences that shaped the Founders and the documents they created to serve their country and — ultimately — us.

Founding Faith

Christ Church in Philadelphia contains the Liberty Window, which depicts the opening prayer in the first Continental Congress.
Courtesy of Christ Church Philadelphia, Photo by Will Brown

The traditional idea of the Founding Fathers as conventionally pious Christian gentlemen is a myth, of course. But neither were they actively hostile to religion. John Adams, to pick one, remained a regular churchgoer throughout his long life. Jefferson, meanwhile, was skeptical of religion, yet revered Jesus as a great moral philosopher, even assembling a personal edition of the New Testament with scissors and a glue-pot, retaining the ethical teachings of Christ while editing out the miracles. (You can see the Jefferson Bible today at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)

The time was ripe for change. This was the Age of Enlightenment, when advances in the sciences forced philosophers to reconsider humanity’s place in the universe. Educated men of the day, including Jefferson and other Founding Fathers, were attracted to Enlightenment ideals and beliefs, including Deism: the notion of a Creator whose existence could be deduced from His handiwork, but who took no active part in human affairs — God as absentee landlord.
Another Enlightenment ideal that exerted a powerful influence over the Framers was the social contract. “Social contract theory holds that government doesn’t descend from on high, but from voluntary agreements among ordinary citizens,” says Gary Kowalski, author of Revolutionary Spirits, an account of the philosophical foundations of the Constitution. This all but flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which held that government derived its authority from God, from the top down.

As if that wasn’t enough to lay the ground for revolutionary change, there was also an upswell of religious devotion among the colonial populace, with Evangelicals preaching that all men are created equal, and that each person’s value is determined not by social class, but by moral behavior. Sound familiar?

The Declaration of Independence, then, served not just as the founding document of the American Revolution, but as a balance of the influences of the Founders and the average citizen. It asserted our unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator. But this truth was not handed down in a mystical vision; rather it was self-evident, revealed by rational observation.

The declaration makes no further mention of God. The Founders strove to emphasize that separation from England was an expression of human rights, rather than Divine Right. “The Founders believed that religion could be a healthy force in society — if it were exercised within a zone of personal autonomy,” says Kowalski.

There were practical reasons, too. Different Christian sects held majorities in different colonies — some as established churches, with taxpayer support — and religious language that appeared to favor one faith over another might have jeopardized the early union entirely. “In some respects, we bungled into religious liberty,” says Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center and author of several books on religion in public life. “Early on, the religious divisions in the colonies gave us little choice. So, in a way, we have religious diversity to thank for religious liberty.”

Footing the Bill

Like the declaration before it, the Constitution is also relatively free of religious-speak. It does not solicit God’s blessing; instead, it begins with an invocation of “We, the People.” Indeed, the Constitution’s only mention of religion is negative — in Article Six, where it expressly commands that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

“The lack of God-language in the Constitution is not an oversight,” Kowalski says. “It provoked protest among more orthodox Christians, who thought that government needed some divine sanction.” But in the end, a majority voted to keep the Constitution faith-neutral. Meanwhile, some signatories felt that the Constitution did not go far enough to guarantee basic human rights. In response, James Madison proposed a number of amendments; of the ten that comprise the Bill of Rights, the First demarcates our religious freedoms in the plain language of the Establishment Clause which, incidentally, only applies to the federal government. Several states still had established churches, while others prided themselves as havens of conscience. The Establishment Clause split the difference by throwing the issue back to the states. Those with established churches could continue to favor them, while disestablished states were free to remain so.

The true vindication for the Establishment Clause came over the years, as a sense of common American identity began to grow, and states with official churches began, one by one, to disestablish them by acts of legislature.

Moving the Frontier

Since its beginnings, America has been extraordinarily religiously diverse. Although it’s true that, as of 1800, the majority of white Americans were Protestants of some kind, that formulation misrepresents the religious landscape of the time and the strained, even hostile relations between various congregations. The American Protestant identity — the tendency of many mainline denominations to downplay their differences and to think of themselves as “Protestant” first and foremost — only developed as immigration and expansion allowed for growth among minority faith groups. The years 1800-1850 saw U.S. population quadruple as Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews arrived from Europe, and as the country acquired territories from France, Spain, and Mexico, making their inhabitants — mostly Catholics — into newly minted U.S. citizens.

Today, as then, the country is experiencing a boom in immigration; and again, immigrants are bringing their faiths with them. Islam is considered to be one of the fastest growing religions in America. According to at least one survey, there are more Buddhists in America now than Evangelical Episcopalians. Some projections indicate that by mid-century, Protestant Americans will be the ones in the minority, a notion that makes many anxious, even now.

Over our country’s history, different groups have been singled out as threats to national unity. In the 1800s, Catholics were the bogeyman of choice. Anti-papist preachers warned that we were losing our country to those who did not share American values. Catholics, they claimed, could never be real Americans; they owed their true allegiance to a foreign tyrant and alien laws, and were too superstitious and backward to ever blend into our society.

If that rhetoric has a familiar ring to it, it’s because those same words have been used recently against other immigrant religious groups, particularly Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “Every time we come to a period in our history when we are traumatized, when we are afraid, this anxiety returns us to the idea of recovering the America that’s been lost,” says Haynes. But Catholics managed to assimilate within a generation or two, and the American Catholic Church proved to be a different sort of institution than the European church, simply because of the cultural and political conditions on the ground. Just so, there’s reason to believe that Islam in our democratic, pluralistic society will be unlike Islam practiced elsewhere.

Homegrown Hallelujahs

In the 19th century, new denominations founded in the United States would prove vital to the cause of religious freedom — both for their minority status and for doctrines that brought them into conflict with the legal system.

In 1879 the Supreme Court ruled that civil laws trumped the Mormon doctrine of polygamy as a religious duty. Nasty lawsuits and countersuits raged for years, threatening the continued existence of the church itself. In the end, American identity proved so important to the Mormon church that it officially revised its religious doctrine to bring it in line with U.S. law.

But there have been times, too, when the law favored the dictates of religious conscience. In 1943 the Supreme Court reversed a ruling that originally upheld a Pennsylvania school board’s expulsion of Jehovah’s Witness schoolchildren who refused to salute the flag, but not before the controversy touched off a firestorm in communities across the country, where Witnesses were beaten, run out of town, or even jailed for sedition.

In recent years, the Mormon Church has cast itself as a defender of traditional marriage laws, leading the opposition to marriage rights for gays and lesbians. And by their very unwillingness to engage in secular politics, Jehovah’s Witnesses have done the nation a great service in helping strengthen the protection of religious practice from government intrusion.

Moving Backward, Moving Forward

While the First Amendment keeps government out of religion, it also protects against the flip side: the injection of religion into government, using the political process to pursue essentially moral goals. To be sure, many of our great social movements — abolitionism, temperance, women’s rights — had religious foundations, beginning with the idea of inalienable, God-given rights. But in trying to reform American society, some movements misstepped, promoting a particular, and even particularly extreme, religious viewpoint under government auspices. Prohibition, for instance, was enacted in 1920 under pressure from a movement led by Protestant sects. Many of the measure’s opponents were also people of faith, who believed that government shouldn’t meddle in moral issues.

We’ll probably never see Prohibition return; but other battles keep flaring up. In 2004 atheists challenged the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion because it contained the words “under God.” (The motto “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency has recently come under fire for the same reason.) The Scopes trial of 1925 challenged a Tennessee law banning instruction in evolutionary theory. Eighty years later, the Kansas Board of Education voted to return creationism — calling it “Intelligent Design” — to the classroom. (The vote was reversed in 2007.)

Today, many Americans are confused and angered about the principle of separation, Haynes says. “For people afraid of losing our identity, it only pushes them to be more hostile to the First Amendment. That’s dangerous because that principle is the core condition for religious freedom that protects the rights of all.”

Proper understanding was just one of the areas addressed at a recent conference on the future of religious freedom in America, cosponsored by the First Amendment Center. There, policy experts identified several concerns for the future, including the consensus that free exercise of religion needs more protection still — especially for minority faiths; ways to prevent future backlash against certain religious groups — especially Muslim Americans in the wake of 9/11; and the need to provide more First Amendment education.

“The challenge is to reaffirm our commitment to religious freedom in a way that allows us to address our differences,” says Haynes. “It will take a real engagement, as individuals and communities, to find a way to protect the rights of people of all faiths and no faith. I think we can do it, but we can’t do it just by hoping for it.”

Or praying for it.

Faith in America The Saturday Evening Post

Religion and politics, faith and government, church and state: They’re strands of our national DNA, and a bit of a paradox — separate yet intertwined. Our freedom to practice any faith (or no faith) without interference from government is a freedom guaranteed by our government. As a nation, we’re far from achieving a perfect balance on church-and-state issues, or even always appreciating how the First Amendment helps maintain that balance. But we’re learning. As writer Jack Feerick shows us in our “Faith in America” feature, just as our Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom has evolved over the years, so we as a people have evolved with it.
I certainly learned a lot from this story, about how different religious groups (or groups who hold to no religion) have challenged and shaped our laws, and how the interpretation of our laws has changed over time. For instance, I always thought that once our Founding Fathers ratified the Bill of Rights, it pretty much laid down the law on separating church and state nationwide. But I was surprised to find out individual states still had established, taxpayer-supported churches well into the next century. Then again, the Framers of the Constitution might be surprised to learn that their efforts would one day make us the most religiously diverse nation in the world, so I guess we’re even.

As we head into a season whose hallmarks are ones of thanksgiving, peace, and goodwill toward others, it’s always inspiring to see examples of people, particularly families, who act according to the dictate of conscience and reach out to those less fortunate than themselves. It’s a theme you’ll find in “Henry’s Christmas,” by author Gary Svee (in our Fiction section), and even more poignantly in our second feature, “Tis the Season for Giving Back.” Reading these true stories of men, women, and children doing good for others, I felt my heart glow — you will, too. It’s more than inspiring, it’s enough to restore your faith in humanity.

Stephen C. George
Editor-in-Chief, The Saturday Evening Post
s.george@saturdayeveningpost.com

Taking It on Faith The Saturday Evening Post

Maybe reaching that milestone was enough. He barely ate anymore — a piece of toast or fruit was a meal — and if he walked up the driveway once or twice, it was major exercise. He still took rides to the temple with Teela, his Hindu health care friend. People there helped him from the car into a wheelchair, and inside he’d greet the kids in the after-school program. At the ShopRite, he used the cart like a walker, gripping it for balance. He chatted with the other shoppers. True to his Depression roots, he’d buy bread and cakes from the “50 percent off” section. When Teela rolled her eyes, he’d say, “It’s not that I need it — it’s that I got it!”

He was a joyous man, a marvelous piece of God’s machinery, and it was no fun watching him fall apart.In his office now, I helped him move boxes. He would try to give me books, saying it broke his heart to leave them behind. I watched him roll from pile to pile, looking and remembering, then putting stuff down and moving to another pile.

If you could pack for heaven, this was how you’d do it, touching everything, taking nothing.

“Is there anyone you need to forgive at this point?” I asked him.

“I’ve forgiven them already,” he said.

“Everyone?”

“Yes.”

“Have they forgiven you?”

“I hope. I have asked.” He looked away. “You know, we have a tradition. When you go to a funeral, you’re supposed to stand by the coffin and ask the deceased to forgive anything you’ve ever done.” He made a face. “Personally, I don’t want to wait that long.”

I remember when the Reb made his most public of apologies. It was his last High Holiday sermon as the senior rabbi of the temple.

He could have used the occasion to reflect on his accomplishments. Instead he asked forgiveness from this flock. He apologized for not being able to save more marriages, for not visiting the homebound more frequently, for not easing more pain of parents who had lost a child, for not having money to help widows or families in economic ruin. He apologized to teenagers with whom he didn’t spend enough teaching time. He apologized for no longer being able to come to workplaces for brown bag discussions. He even apologized for the sin of not studying every day, as illness and commitments had stolen precious hours.

“For all these, God of forgiveness,” he concluded, “forgive me, pardon me …”

Officially, that was his final “big” sermon.

“Grant me atonement” were his last three words.

And now the Reb was urging me not to wait.

“Mitch, it does no good to be angry or carry grudges.”

He made a fist. “It churns you up inside. It does you more harm than the object of your anger.”

“So let it go?” I asked.

“Or don’t let it get started in the first place,” he said. “You know what I found over the years? When I had a disagreement with someone, and they came to talk to me, I always began by saying, ‘I’ve thought about it. And in some ways maybe you’re right.’

“Now, I didn’t always believe that. But it made things easier. Right from the start, they relaxed. A negotiation could take place. I took a volatile situation and, what’s the word … ?”

“Defused it?”

“Defused it. We need to do that. Especially with family.”

“You know, in our tradition, we ask forgiveness from everyone — even casual acquaintances. But with those we are closest with — wives, children, parents — we too often let things linger. Don’t wait, Mitch. It’s such a waste.”

He told me a story. A man buried his wife. At the gravesite, he stood by the Reb, tears falling down his face.

“I loved her,” he whispered.

The Reb nodded.

“I mean  … I really loved her.”

The man broke down.

“And … I almost told her once.”

The Reb looked at me sadly.

“Nothing haunts like the things we don’t say.”

Later that day, I asked the Reb to forgive me for anything I might have ever said or done that hurt him. He smiled and said that while he couldn’t think of anything, he would “consider all such matters addressed.”

“Well,” I joked, “I’m glad we got that over with.”

“You’re in the clear.”

“Timing is everything.”

“That’s right. Which is why our sages tell us to repent exactly one day before we die.”

“Wait. How do you know it’s the day before you die?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Exactly.”

Saying Sorry The Saturday Evening Post

Before the next race, as the horses began lining up, Mitch watched with interest as the old priest stepped onto the track. Sure enough, as the fifth-race horses came to the starting gate, the priest made a blessing on the forehead of one of the horses. Mitch made a beeline for a betting
window and placed a small bet on the horse. Again, even though it was another long shot, the horse the priest had blessed won the race.

Mitch collected his winnings and anxiously waited to see which horse the priest would bless for the sixth race. The priest again blessed a horse. Mitch bet big on it and won. Mitch was elated. As the races continued, the priest kept blessing long-shot horses, and each one ended up coming in first.

By and by, Mitch was pulling in some serious money. By the last race, he knew his wildest dreams were going to come true. He made a quick dash to the ATM, withdrew all his savings, and awaited the priest’s blessing that would tell him which horse to bet on.

True to form, the priest stepped onto the track for the last race and blessed the forehead of an old nag — the longest shot of the day. Mitch also observed the priest even blessing the eyes, ears, and hooves of the old nag.

Certain that he had a winner, Mitch bet every cent he owned on the old nag. He then watched, dumbfounded, as the old nag came in dead last. Mitch, in a state of shock, made his way down to the track area where the priest was. Confronting the old priest, he demanded, “Father! What happened? All day long you blessed horses, and they all won. Then in the last race, the horse you blessed lost by a Kentucky mile. Now, thanks to you, I’ve lost every cent of my savings — all of it!”

The priest nodded wisely and with sympathy. “Son,” he said, “that’s the problem with you Protestants. You can’t tell the difference between a simple blessing and last rites.”

—Thomas Stockton

Off-Track Blessing The Saturday Evening Post