November 11th is "Martinmas Day" – the feast of St. Martin of Tours.

It's a day full of old traditions, fun, and superstition. One belief was that if one stood in the back of the parish church on this day, one could see an aura around the heads of those who would be gone before the next Martinmas.

Another story had it that once when St. Martin was on his way to Rome, he met up with Satan. He promptly changed the devil into a donkey, and rode him into the City. The donkey spoke to him, and in palindromes, no less: "Signa te signa. Temere me tangis et agnis," he said; and "Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor." ["Cross thyself, you plague and vex me without need; for by my efforts you are about to reach Rome, the object of your travel."]

So who was this Martin?

He was a real paragon; and he could be called a "conscientious objector for the centuries."

He prayed, "O Lord, if I am still necessary to my people, I do not refuse the labor: Thy will be done." But what he did refuse to do, finally, was to fight.

This seemed out of character, given his family situation. Martin was born in a Roman province (Pannonia, now part of Hungary) in or about the year 315. His father was a military man, an officer in the Roman army who had risen from the ranks; and, with his wife, a worshiper of the old Roman gods. Many were at this time, although the persecutions of Christians had finally come to an end.

But young Martin yearned to learn the lessons of Christianity, and to be baptized. So, when he was barely ten years old, he secretly went to the house of a priest and begged for instruction.

Within a few years, while still a catechumen, Martin was "drafted." All he wanted was to be a soldier for Christ, but the Romans apparently had a law that any son of a soldier would become a soldier himself. This soldier-to-be was so reluctant that he had to be held in chains until the induction; after that, he believed it his duty to serve. At the same time, he lived insofar as possible the life of a monk–even after he, too, was raised to officer's rank; and even though he was made part of an elite ceremonial unit, whose members wore gorgeous uniforms and had light duty.

It was his warm uniform–and what he did with it–that first got him noticed. When he was about twenty, he was riding home one bitterly cold night (and the stories say he had already given away most of what he was wearing to people who, he thought, needed it more than he did), when he saw an exceedingly old and poor man, who was almost without any clothes at all, and about to freeze to death. Martin immediately jumped from his horse, took off his luxurious cloak, and cut it in two with his sword. Wrapping one half around the starving beggar, he returned the other half to his own shoulders, and rode off.