Today March 22

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas of Flüe. I like him because I like secular saints (I am married, have 4 kids, and live in the world) and I like eccentrics -- and Nicholas was both! He was married, father of ten kids, a farmer, a member of the local parliament (as every adult male in Switzerland was at the time), en elected councilor and judge. He put in for his mandatory military service and rose to be commander. In the war against Tirol (Germany), he forbid his men to enter any convents. The nuns remained safe and unmolested. Further, he was ahead of his time (1417-1487) in condemning as immoral wars of aggression and the slaughter of non-combatants "inevitable in any major modern war" - Angelus Book of Saints.

But none of that is what made him a saint, at least in the eyes of his fellow Swiss. Something weird was true of him . . . he was one of the first known "inedics", that is, he took no food or drink. Really. It was not just a medical condition . . . it was rooted in his contemplative life and rigorous fasting. But he ate less and less until he ate nothing at all. It hurt him to eat (once, out of obedience to his bishop, he ate a piece of soaked bread . . . and it was agonizing for him) and yet he was no anorexic. He lived on and on, not as a skeleton but as a healthy man. The analytic Swiss had to test him themselves and, satisfied his fast was real, venerated him as a saint. He lived a continent marriage apart from his wife in a retreat in the mountains, not without her (heroic) consent. His kids had a hard time with it, calling him a "fanatic" and "irresponsible." My take on it is that his wife understood him better than they did, and, as the Angelus Book of the Saints says, "After all, she had never lost her husband completely."

The final chapter of his remarkable life was his role at the conference at Stans in which all the Swiss cantons met to discuss the hugely divisive issue of whether to admit the new cantons of Freiburg and Soleure (presumably won from Tirol after yet another war). The rural cantons were opposed and the urban ones, led by Zurich and Lucerne, were staunchly for it. They were at the point of civil war when the parish priest at Ranft (Nicholas' hermitage location) rushed to the conference to put forth the idea of the saint as arbiter. All agreed, such was their great veneration of and affection for him, to abide by his decision. Without leaving his retreat, but after a night of intense prayer, he suggested a compromise -- conditional admittance of Freiburg and Soleure -- and saved the confederacy.

He survived his achievement by six years, and died peacefully surrounded by his loving wife and children. It was the first illness he had ever had. Remarkable.