By Graoully - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2770007
Vitrail représentant saint Arnould, chapelle Sainte-Glossinde
Stained glass representing Saint Arnould, Sainte-Glossinde chapel
(One of my 43rd Great-grandfathers)

"I could have been named after another forebear …"

I am blessed with a surname that sounds like a punchline from a Marx Brothers movie to most people. I believe that many immediately discount me due to my name's inherent joke quality. I admit to even discounting myself sometimes in the past. Why, oh why, couldn't I have been blessed with an innocuous name instead? Something even people with a lisp could comfortably pronounce? Something with more than one meager vowel?

Well, as sorry as my surname might seem, my super secret middle name seems exponentially more humiliating. I have insisted that my middle name is "Alice" because that name seems so much less embarrassing to proclaim. I've long emphasized that people should avoid assigning specific middle names to their children. Mass murderers, for instance, apparently by widely-respected international treaty, invariably have the middle name of Wayne or Leroy assigned at birth, as if their parents secretly hoped for the worst for them. I won't suggest that my middle name's worse, but I've always felt that it was certainly in that same class, that is, classless and losing status fast.

Further, I'd never found any family tradition for my middle name; no revered grandfather or fondly remembered patriarch ever had this name. When I grilled my mom about it—and you can believe I continually grilled my parents about it—the best response I ever received was that it sounded like it fit with my first and last name. To my ear, it fit with nothing, so her response punched a small but significant hole in my inborn respect for her judgment.

Recently, I was wandering back through the old Fambly tree when I stumbled upon a few ancestors with a variation on the middle name I'd received. They were even designated holy men by the early Catholic church, though one became deeply troubled that, as a leader, he might have been the cause of the violence that wracked his diocese during his reign as bishop of Metz. So troubled was he that he sought a curious absolution. He stood on a bridge over the Moselle River and pleaded to God for a sign. He asked that God confirm his innocence by returning the gold ring he had just thrown into the river. "Many penitent years later, a fisherman brought to the bishop's kitchen a fish in the stomach of which was found the bishop's ring. Arnulf repaid the sign from God by immediately retiring as bishop and becoming a hermit for the remainder of his life." (Wikipedia)

That was just one miracle this forebear performed. Just after he resigned from his position, a fire broke out in the palace that threatened to consume the whole city. My forebear stood before the fire and reportedly said, "If God wants me to be consumed, I am in His hands." He made the sign of the cross, at which point the fire immediately receded.

Two miracles under his belt, a third made him famous and sealed his sainthood. During a heatwave in July 642, "parishioners of Metz went to Remiremont to recover the remains of their former bishop. They had little to drink, and the terrain was inhospitable. When the exhausted procession was about to leave Champigneulles, one of the parishioners, Duc Notto, prayed, "By his powerful intercession, the Blessed Arnold will bring us what we lack." Immediately, the small remnant of beer at the bottom of a pot multiplied in such amounts that their thirst was quenched, and they even had enough to enjoy the next evening when they arrived in Metz. For this reason, he is known as the patron saint of Brewers." ibid

There's a saint whose beatification delights me! What was this saint's name? It was Arnoald, the Frankish Bishop of Metz, now an authentic saint in the Catholic church. His feast day is celebrated on July 18, but I prefer to celebrate it every day since I sort of share my middle name with him. My folks saddled me with Arnold as a middle name, and drinking a beer in homage to that beverage's patron saint might be good for my otherwise misnamed soul. It's not finding a discarded ring in a fish, but I can't complain. I could have been named after another forebear, like Bertha Broadfoot of Laon. I shudder to imagine what that legacy might have invoked.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz