(The Nationalist, 22 December 2000)
Not a great deal is known about Saint Nicholas except that he was a bishop of Myra in Turkey in the fourth century. There are many fantastic legends about him which can be taken with a grain of salt, but the core of the tradition was that he was a generous but secret giver of gifts and a protector of the defenceless.
Tradition works in strange ways and his name, which in English is Saint Nicholas, is San Nicolaus in some other languages. Try to say San Nicolaus quickly and you come up with something like Santa Claus. The name Saint Nicholas is, in fact, the origin of Santa Claus.
His feast is celebrated on 6 December and it is on that day that Christmas gifts are given in The Netherlands. Throughout the church Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of children.
If San Nicolaus were alive today, in what ways would he exercise his particular gifts? It strikes me that he might be a visitor of the elderly and those who live alone. There are lots of lonely people, not all of them old, not all widows or widowers. There are also the single, the divorced, the separated, those estranged from their families, or those that life just seems to have turned against. It is entirely possible to be lonely in a crowd. Our suburbs, too, can be lonely places where people do not know even the name of the person living next door. The famous artist Vincent Van Gogh wrote, ‘Do you know what makes the prison of loneliness disappear? Every deep, genuine affection.’ Despite his brilliance as an impressionist painter, poor Vincent didn’t experience much deep, genuine affection and he ended his life in depression and insanity, followed by suicide at the age of thirty-seven.
Maybe we should just reach out, take the initiative and walk the first step towards the other. It could be a first step towards humanizing ourselves. We might be the ones to benefit from it. After all, what’s life for, what’s it about if it’s not for making friends, for loving and being loved? Reaching out could be one of those situations where we experience the truth of the saying that, ‘It is in giving that we receive.’