We’re celebrating Michaelmas today. Not just for my own Michael, but of course he is the grand excuse. This year, Michaelmas is ringing true, so we’re claiming it. The kids recently picked up a craft book at the library full of a year’s worth of beautiful ideas. Wax resist eggs for Easter, straw stars and cornhusk dolls over the summer. And for fall, Michaelmas dragons.
Michaelmas is is an old European harvest festival, falling on the feast day of Michael the Archangel. He is the captain of the heavenly armies, the protector against darkness, and the slayer of the dragon. His story comes from an image in the book of Revelation, and legends about Michael’s influence weave their way into the tales of all three Abrahamic faiths. Into difficult situations, he brings protection, judgement, and the ability to discern clearly. Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans celebrate the feast of St Michael on September 29th, near the equinox, so inevitably Michael’s story became linked with the turn of seasons.
It’s beautiful, really. As the days grow short, and cold and darkness creep in, Michaelmas offers us the chance to look into the face of our fears – sharp-toothed, clawed, and dangerous. It’s a time when we can talk about dragons without and dragons within. The Archangel Michael himself becomes a model for us. In his courage, we find heart. His shining sword becomes our own brave work in the world, our faith that action will bring clarity.
So, we’ll be eating dragon bread tonight. Yesterday afternoon, I made the dough while the kids drew pictures of dragons. Then I rolled it out, flat and thin, and spread it with pureed apricots, toasted hazelnuts and chocolate. (Such things must defeat darkness, if Harry Potter taught me anything.) At this stage, Blue decided that it was time to play in the garden. He’s been working on a mud pit out there and he thought it needed some tending. He took Plum outside, too, so that he could learn about making rivers and waterfalls. Beangirl and me put our minds together to shape the dragon. We rolled out long snakes of dough and twisted them together to form the body. She curled the tail like a snail and fashioned curved-up wings. I looped a coil of dough into a head. Later, Blue gave him pumpkin seed toenails and teeth, then painted him with eggwash to make him shine and then we baked him. We think he’s rather beautiful.
In Muslim tradition, Mikail is the archangel of mercy who provides nourishments for body and soul. Perhaps something of that story was embodied in our kitchen yesterday, too.
I suppose all this isn’t very Presbyterian of us – jumping on ancient pre-Protestant traditions, sharing superstitious stories of angels and fabulous beasts. But changing seasons need marking, and this seems like a tasty way to do it. More than that, though, I think fairytales are vital.
Fairytales encourage us to look for the adventure in life. They make us ask questions, and consider strange answers. What will happen next? Where might the path lead? Who will we be? All fairytales echo Mary Oliver’s beautiful question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Fairytales also help us look into the dark. Things go badly in fairytales. Things shift and change, and there are villians in the castle. Wolves in the woods. Dragons lurking somewhere, but where? You need to look to see them. And looking can be difficult. My friend Christiana Peterson wrote about this recently over on ArtHouse America. In an article called “Eliminating the Darkness,” she grapples with our reluctance to include darkness in our storytelling.
“We shy away from challenging topics, preferring instead to focus on happy retellings of nuanced Bible stories, to keep a sheen on a church life that doesn’t match the realities of home life, to follow the culture around us that tries to escape aging and death.”
She suggests that doing so fails to take our imaginative capacity seriously. Children don’t need to be taught to look beyond reality, but perhaps they need to be taught to keep at it. Look deeply enough and things look different. Look into the darkness and you will find the angel with the sword of light.
Christiana finds courage in the work of Madeleine L’Engle, referring to her bold claim in Walking on Water that the “world of the Bible, both the Old and New Testaments, is the world of story, story which may be able to speak to us as a Word of God.”
This biblical world of story is filled with every kind of story. And in each of these every-kind-of-stories, God is vibrantly there. That is the gift we have in our radical, diverse, messy, confusing, beautiful bible. We can talk about history. We can talk about dragons. Death and Law and Hope and Heros – everything is on the table. We can wonder what will happen next. Nothing is too frightening. God is already there.
I believe that stories renew our courage.
And that’s why we’ll be eating dragon bread at our table tonight. You can read a rather full and fascinating account of Michael’s legends here. But you’ll also need poetry, so I suggest some Malcolm Guite. You can read the rest of his Michaelmas sonnet here on his blog.
Archangel bring your balance, help me turn
Upon this turning world with you and dance
