Beware the Ides of March!

Greetings and Salutations!,

Well, there is all sorts of nuttiness going on this week, so let’s cover it in turn, shall we?

1) March Madness starts tonight! The NCAA men’s basketball championship is a field of 65 teams that play in an elimination tournament. 65 is not a nice number for such things, so before the real action starts on Thursday, tonight they will have two teams play to be the 64^th team starting Thursday. My beloved Syracuse didn’t make it in this year, amidst much controversy. There’s still time to fill out your bracket – here’s a link.

2) Besides being when the ‘meat’ of the basketball tourney starts, Thursday is also the Ides of March. Very simply, it just means March 15^th (or May, July, or October 15^th…or the 13^th of any other month). It was Shakespeare’s play ‘Julius Caesar’, a dramatization of Julius Caesar’s assassination on March 15^th, 44 BCE, that gives us its modern connotation. Because of the play, the ‘Ides of March’ means something tragic is about to happen. In reality, its just a way of talking about the old Roman calendar (which Caesar had just done away with in favor of the Julian calendar…talk about ego!).

3) Finally we have St. Patrick’s Day on Saturday. But what’s the deal with this St. Patrick guy, anyway? Well, as is usual with church figures from “way back in the day”, its hard to say for sure and people disagree on the details. But here is where the balance of thought lays these days…He was born in England and was kidnapped by the Irish when he was a teenager. After a few years in slavery he escaped and returned to his family. Later, he had a vision that convinced him to return to Ireland as a missionary. Let me say, by the way, that I give him a lot of credit for this move. I was raised in upstate NY. If I had been kidnapped by Quebec, and managed to escape, there’s no way I’d go back as a missionary. Anyway, Patrick was a missionary there for decades until his death. He lived in the 5^th century, although the exact dates of his birth and death are in dispute…partially because his legacy has likely been intertwined and merged with another Irish missionary from roughly the same time named Palladius.

And that’s all the news that’s fit to print for the moment. Looking forward to my next communiqué with each of you. Grace and peace!

Blessings,

Kevin