Lessons from a "well seasoned" Saint

Autumn Landscape with Four Trees (1885) by Vincent van Gogh

Message for the Parish Magazine of St Giles-in-the-Fields, September 2023:

On the day the church remembers St Giles, the patron saint of leprosy sufferers, summer turns to autumn in the UK meteorological calendar. Seasonal change was a pet topic of the pioneering ecologist, ornithologist and priest Gilbert White. While many of his conclusions have since been disproved by modern science - such as his belief that swallows hibernate underground (rather than migrate) in winter - his observations about leprosy appear to be borne out, in part. 

The Life of St Giles in Scripture

Detail - Saint Giles from The Hermit Saints Triptych by Hieronymus Bosch

If we wanted to meditate on the Life of St Giles using scripture, which passages might we choose?

The different accounts of the Life of St Giles (summarised in a post at this link) offer a number of possibilities:

A Bouquet for Saint Giles

Saint Giles and the Deer by The Master of Saint Gilles, c1500 (National Gallery)

‘Saint Giles and the Deer’ by the mysterious ‘Master of Saint Giles’ originally formed one section of a multi-panelled altarpiece dating from the early 1500’s. 

The painting and its companion piece ‘The Mass of St Giles” depict two of the three most popular stories about the saint mentioned in the accounts of his life, the most recent of which being The Golden Legend, a famous medieval hagiography.

 

Both paintings can be seen in The National Gallery and their website allows us to zoom in to see minute detail. The commentary for St Giles and the Deer states: “The different types of plants and flowers in the wilderness are perhaps a reference to the legend that the desert flowered around Giles’s hermitage.” Tantalisingly no description of the flora or what it might symbolise is offered - nor in The Golden Legend or other versions of the Life of St Giles - so I have attempted to make an educated guess!