Ambrose and the Bees in the Cradle

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There is a baby asleep in a courtyard, in the shade, in a cradle, with his mouth open.

And there are bees.

Not one bee. A swarm of them, a whole warm humming cloud, coming down out of the afternoon over the wall, and settling, softly, gently, all over the baby's face. They crawl over his cheeks. They go in at his mouth, and come out again. The nurse, who has just turned round and seen this, is standing perfectly still with her hand over her own mouth, and is considering, very quickly, every single thing she has ever been taught about what a nurse should do.

And the baby is sleeping like a stone.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is about Saint Ambrose of Milan, who is a saint of both the Catholic and the Orthodox traditions, and it comes from his own writings, from the great book of his friend Augustine, and from the life written by his secretary, Paulinus. A few of the things in it are what Paulinus reports and not what we can check, and we will say so as we go. The conversations, the weather and the grumbling of at least one nurse are our own invention, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

It is about the year three hundred and forty, and the baby in the cradle is a Roman, and his name is Ambrose.

I should explain what that means, because when we hear the word Roman we tend to picture a man in Italy with a toga and a sandal and an opinion about the senate. But the Roman Empire is enormous. It reaches from the cold grey coast of Britain to the hot yellow sand of Egypt, and the family of Ambrose lives near the top of it, in a city called Trier, on a river called the Moselle, in what is now Germany. It is one of the most important cities in the western half of the empire. It has a palace, and an arena, and a very large and very handsome gate, which is still standing today. And Ambrose's father, who is also called Ambrosius, which saves everyone a lot of trouble, is the most senior civil servant in the whole of Gaul.

The title, in Latin, is praetorian prefect. In plain English it means something like the person who actually runs everything while the emperor is busy somewhere else. Taxes, roads, grain, courts, supplies for the army, who gets a bridge and who does not. If you have ever had to fill in a form and then fill in another form to explain the first form, you were being governed in the Roman manner, and Ambrose's father was the man at the top of all the forms.

It is also a Christian family, which is worth saying. Only a few years before the baby is born, the Roman emperors were still arresting Christians, and now an emperor called Constantine has made it safe to be one. The family has a martyr in its history. They have a grown-up daughter, called Marcellina, who is already the kind of serious girl who spends a lot of time praying. And they have a middle child, called Satyrus, who is the kind of boy who will grow up to be everybody's favourite brother.

And then there is the baby. And the bees.

Now, this is the first story we have to be careful about, so I will say plainly where it comes from. It comes from Paulinus, who was Ambrose's secretary at the end of his life, and who wrote down his biography about twenty-five years after Ambrose died, because Augustine asked him to. Paulinus had it, he says, from the people who knew. We cannot check it. It is exactly the kind of story that grows up around a great man, and the old writers loved a sign at the cradle. So we will tell it as Paulinus told it, and we will not insist.

Here is what he says. The baby was laid down in the courtyard of the governor's house, in his cradle, and he fell asleep with his mouth open. A swarm of bees came, and covered his face, and went in and out of his mouth, so that it looked, for a while, as if he were eating honey in his sleep. His nurse saw it and was terrified. His father, who happened to be walking nearby with the rest of the household, told them all to keep back, and not to brush the bees off, but to wait and see what God would do.

And after a little while, the bees all rose up together, and flew off, so high into the air that nobody could see them any more.

The baby woke up, and was fine. And his father, Paulinus says, said something very quietly, which was: "If this child lives, he will be something great."

I have always liked that the father said if. He is a prefect. He knows how unlikely it is that any child gets to grow up. I think he said it the way a person says a prayer they do not want to jinx.

And the old writers, of course, noticed the other thing, which is that Ambrose grew up to be famous for his voice. His sermons were so sweet and so clear that people said they were like honey, and later ages made the bees into his emblem. If you ever see a saint in an old picture standing next to a beehive, he is probably Ambrose, and the patron saint of beekeepers is a very good thing to be, if you think about it, since the bees at least cannot disagree with you in committee.

Ambrose does not stay a baby, and the prefect does not stay alive.

When the boy is still quite young, his father dies, and the family packs up, and moves to Rome. This is a big change. In Trier they were the family of the great man. In Rome they are a nice, rich, very well-connected family whose great man is no longer there, which is a different thing.

But there is Marcellina, and she is magnificent.

She is a good deal older than the boys, and she is serious about her faith. On Christmas Day, in the year three hundred and fifty-three, she is received into a life of consecrated virginity in Rome by the Pope himself, Liberius, and she wears a veil, and she goes on living at home, praying and fasting and, I would guess, keeping an eye on her brothers. Ambrose remembers the day in a book he wrote years later, and he remembers the Pope's sermon, which compared her vow to a wedding.

I do not think it was a sad house. I think it was a house with two lively brothers in it, and a sister who prayed for them with a kind of firm affection, and who sometimes, when they came in late, was awake.

Satyrus and Ambrose study. They study grammar, which in those days meant the great poets, and rhetoric, which meant how to make a speech and how to win an argument, and law, which meant how to know what the government would do to you. Ambrose turns out to be excellent at all three. He is a natural. He can read a room, and he can find the exact sentence that a roomful of tired officials needs to hear.

There is one more thing Paulinus says about his childhood, and I will give it to you because I like it. He says that as a small boy, whenever he saw a bishop at the house, Ambrose would hold out his hand, the way you do for a bishop's ring, and say that they ought to kiss it, because one day he would be one himself.

His sister, Paulinus says, would smack his hand away and tell him not to be silly.

The old sources do not tell us what Ambrose said to that, which I think is an oversight.

So Ambrose grows up, and becomes a lawyer, and then something better. He becomes a very young, very capable, very honest government official.

The way it worked, in the Roman world, was that a clever young man with the right family got sent out to work for a senior official, and if he was any good, the official noticed him, and one day he was promoted. Ambrose is good. He works in a court at a city called Sirmium, in the Balkans, for a prefect called Probus, who is the sort of man who knows a talent when he sees one. And Probus, one day, as he is handing Ambrose his next assignment, says a thing that Paulinus remembers, and that has become one of the most famous farewells in history.

"Go," says the prefect, "and act not as a judge, but as a bishop."

Now, I have no idea what Probus meant by it. I expect he meant: be merciful. I expect he meant: be fair. It was a lovely compliment, anyway, and it was a very strange one to give to a man who was not yet a Christian in the full sense, as we will see in a moment. Nobody knew it, but the prefect was telling him the truth.

Because the job Ambrose is being sent to do is to be the governor of two provinces in northern Italy, and the city where the governor lives is called Milan.

Milan, in the year three hundred and seventy-four, is not what it is today. It is not the fashion capital of anywhere. It is the city where the emperor of the west keeps his court, whenever he is not off somewhere fighting a war, and it is an important, rich, grumbling, crowded, argumentative city, full of soldiers and officials and bishops and merchants. And it has a problem.

The problem is this. The Christians of Milan are quarrelling.

Now, if you know any of the history of the fourth century, you will know that what the Christians quarrelled about, a lot of the time, was a question that sounds extremely abstract and was actually the most important question in the world. It was whether the Son of God is truly God, the same in being as the Father, or whether he is something less, a very great creature made by the Father before the world began. The Church had settled this, at a great council at Nicaea, nearly fifty years before. The answer is yes: the Son is truly God. But the argument had not stopped. A party called the Arians, after a priest named Arius, still said no, and for decades, in many cities, the two sides had sat in the same churches and glared at each other.

For twenty years, the bishop of Milan has been a man called Auxentius, who is on the Arian side. And now, in the year three hundred and seventy-four, Auxentius dies.

So there has to be a new bishop. And both sides, naturally, want one of their own. And the whole city, Paulinus says, is in a state, and everybody is meeting in the great church, and shouting, and it is beginning to look as if somebody is going to get hurt.

And who is the governor? Ambrose. So he does what a governor does. He goes down to the church, to keep order.

Picture it. It is a big, loud, crowded room, full of people who are very angry and very sure. And in the middle of the noise, a tall, thin, clean-shaven man in a governor's robe comes in, and holds up his hand, and begins to talk. He tells them to stay calm. He reminds them that the good order of the city depends on them. He tells them that the church should be chosen in peace. I like to think he was a bit brisk about it. He is a civil servant, after all, and in his experience, if you speak calmly for long enough, most things sort themselves out.

And then, in the middle of his speech, somebody speaks up.

It is a child's voice, Paulinus says, from somewhere in the crowd. A small voice, high and clear. And it says: "Ambrose, bishop!"

And there is a silence.

Then somebody else says it. And somebody else. And then, as the old writer puts it, the whole crowd, Arians and Catholics alike, takes it up, and begins to shout it, all together. Ambrose for bishop! Ambrose for bishop! They want him. Both sides want him. For the first time in months, the whole of Milan agrees on something, and the something is the poor man in the governor's robe, who has just come in to keep the peace.

Now, we cannot say whether there was a child, or whether that is what really happened, or whether Paulinus has tidied it up. It is the kind of story that every church in the ancient world loved to tell about its bishops. But the part under the story is solid. Ambrose was a governor, and he was chosen bishop by acclamation, and he was not even baptised. Everything else we know about the man says that he was astonished.

I should explain that last bit, because it surprises people.

In the fourth century, it was quite normal for a person to be a Christian, and a believer, and an enquirer, and to put off baptism for years. Sometimes it was fear of sin after baptism. Sometimes it was just busyness. Ambrose, the son of a Christian family, with a Christian sister and a Christian brother, has been listening to sermons all his life and has not yet been baptised. He is what the Church calls a catechumen. And now, suddenly, the crowd is saying he should be bishop of Milan.

And he says no.

He says no very hard. Paulinus tells us a number of things he did. He went up to the judge's seat and began, against all his habits, to order torture and punishments, so that the crowd would think he was a cruel man and would not want him. It did not work. They shouted that his sin be on their heads. He tried a second way. He announced that he intended to live as a philosopher, in a rather unchristian manner, and that was no use either. And then he did the most sensible thing a man can do when he is cornered. He ran away.

He waited until night. He slipped out of the city, in the dark, and he headed down the road, and he walked for a long time, as fast as he could, towards Pavia, away from the people who wanted to make him a bishop.

And in the morning, Paulinus says, he found himself standing at one of the gates of Milan.

He had walked all night in a circle. He had been going the wrong way, or the right way, depending on how you look at it. I love this part of the story. It is very probably not exactly what happened, but it is such a human thing. Anybody who has tried to run away from the thing that they were made to do, and discovered that they were only running laps, will understand.

The crowd found him, and brought him back, and put a guard on him. And meanwhile, someone wrote to the emperor.

The emperor, in those days, is a hard, strong, quick-tempered soldier called Valentinian, and when the letter arrives, he is delighted. He had sent a good governor to Milan, and now the people want that governor for bishop. Everyone is pleased. The emperor says yes. The bishops of the province say yes. Even Ambrose, in the end, says yes, and I think the reason is the one that Paulinus gives, which is that he came to believe it was God's doing and not the crowd's.

So he is baptised, quietly, by a bishop of the right faith. And a week later, according to Paulinus, in the space of eight days, he is made a reader, and a deacon, and a priest, and then, on the seventh of December, in the year three hundred and seventy-four, he is consecrated bishop.

That is the day his feast is kept, to this day. Not the day he died, but the day they put him to work.

The first thing he does is give everything away.

Paulinus is clear about this. Ambrose has money. He has land, and silver and gold, and a fine household. He gives the gold and silver to the Church, to use for the poor, and he gives his land to the Church too, keeping only enough to see his family looked after, and he leaves the running of his house to his brother Satyrus, who gives up his own career to do it. His sister Marcellina, who had been praying for him all his life, comes to Milan, and lives nearby, and goes on praying. I like to think she looked at the whole business with a certain quiet satisfaction. She had, after all, been smacking his hand away since he was six.

And then Ambrose sits down to learn how to be a bishop, which is a bit of a problem, because he has never been one, and he has never studied theology, and he has never done any of it.

So he does what any good civil servant does with a new brief. He reads everything.

He reads Scripture, over and over, until he knows it by heart. He reads the great Greek writers of the Church, in Greek, Basil and Origen and the rest, and borrows from them quite freely, which in the ancient world was a compliment. He gets a priest called Simplician to teach him, a gentle old man who will one day be bishop after him. And he prays. And in a few years he is preaching sermons that people cross the city to hear.

And in the next twenty years, he becomes one of the four great teachers of the Western Church. Not bad for a man who started out as a lawyer who happened to be passing.

Now I want to tell you about two people who came to Milan, because they are very important, and because one of them is much more famous than the other, and I am going to start with the other.

Her name is Monica.

She is a woman from North Africa, a widow, and she has followed her grown-up son across the sea, because she is a mother, and that is what mothers do when their sons are living in some foreign city and not writing. She arrives in Milan with her son, and her first act, being devout and being new, is to do what she always did in Africa. She goes to the shrines of the martyrs with a basket.

In her country, it was the custom to bring cakes and bread and a little wine to the tombs of the martyrs, and to share a meal there, in memory of them. It was a loving custom. It was also, Augustine says later, the sort of thing that went wrong rather easily, as customs do, because a lot of people brought a lot of wine.

So she arrives at the church, with her basket on her arm, and the doorkeeper, a nice young man, stops her at the door. He is very polite. He says, I am sorry, but the bishop has forbidden this.

And here is the lovely thing. Monica does not argue.

She does not say, in Africa we have always done it. She does not say, who is this bishop. She just takes her basket, and says, in effect, all right, and puts it down, and goes inside and prays. And from then on she brings no basket of wine, but only a heart full of prayers, and what she has to give to the poor. Augustine says that she loved Ambrose from that day on, and did so, in part, because of the good he had done for her son.

Which brings us, of course, to her son.

His name is Augustine. He is about thirty years old. He is brilliant, and ambitious, and unhappy, and he has come to Milan because he has been hired as the official professor of rhetoric, which was a very grand job in the empire, and which means, in effect, that he is paid to be good at speeches. He is not a Christian. He is a restless, seeking sort of person, who has tried several philosophies, and found them wanting, and who is beginning, to his own considerable annoyance, to suspect that his mother may have been right all along.

And one of the first things he does in Milan is go and listen to Ambrose.

He tells us why. He did not go to learn about God. He went because everybody said Ambrose was the best speaker in the city, and Augustine, being a professional, wanted to see whether the reputation was true. He wanted to check the technique.

"I began to listen," he says, in effect, "not to learn what he said, but to see how well he said it." And then something happened that he had not planned. He says that along with the words, which he loved, came the things the words were about, which he had not been careful enough to keep out. He was listening to the style, and the substance got in.

And he tried to meet Ambrose, and couldn't.

This is one of my favourite parts of the whole story. Augustine would have loved to sit down with the bishop and ask him all his questions. But Ambrose is the most besieged man in Milan. There are crowds outside the door all day, people with troubles, people with petitions, people who need a word with the bishop, and Augustine can't get in. And on the days when Ambrose is not seeing people, Augustine tells us, he is doing the other thing he does, which is reading.

And the way Ambrose reads astonishes him.

Because in the fourth century, as you might expect, people read aloud. Everyone did. Reading was a thing you did with your mouth. And Ambrose, when he reads, sits there, at a desk, with a book open in front of him, and his eyes go across the page, and his heart searches out the sense, and his voice and his tongue are quite still. He reads in silence. Augustine is so amazed that he writes it down. He says he could never tell why Ambrose did it. Perhaps, he guesses, it was to save his voice. Perhaps it was so that he would not be interrupted every few lines by some bright person asking him to explain a hard passage. Whatever the reason, it was the first time Augustine had ever seen it done.

If you have ever read a book in bed, in silence, with a torch, without waking your family, you have done a thing that a famous philosopher once sat in a doorway and stared at, in astonishment, for ages.

And so the two of them talk, in the end, and Ambrose answers the questions, and his sermons open up the Scriptures in a way that Augustine had not known they could be opened. He had thought the Old Testament was crude, and Ambrose shows him that there are depths in it. He had thought the Church was only for simple people, and Ambrose shows him a faith that has room for a mind like his.

Over the next two years, Augustine's mind changes, and then his life. At Easter in the year three hundred and eighty-seven, in Milan, he is baptised, along with his son and his friend, and the old tradition says it was Ambrose who baptised him. Augustine does not say so in his book, but it has always been believed, and I see no reason to argue with it.

I will say one thing about this. It is not a small thing. One of the greatest minds in the history of the Church was turned toward God, in part, by a bishop who was not even sure he wanted to be a bishop, who read quietly, and who had a very good voice. And all of that came about because, one afternoon, a baby in a courtyard lay down with his mouth open, and God saw fit to send some bees.

I do not say the bees did it. I just think it is interesting.

I should tell you about the singing, because it is the other thing Ambrose is famous for, and it began in an emergency.

In the year three hundred and eighty-six, the emperor in Milan is a boy, Valentinian the Second, and the real power at court is his mother, Justina. She is an Arian. And she wants a church. She sends officials to Ambrose with a request, very politely put, that one of the great basilicas of the city, the one outside the walls, be handed over for the Arians to use at Easter.

And Ambrose says no.

He says it respectfully. He says that he cannot hand over to anyone the house of God. He says that a bishop is not allowed to give up what is not his to give. The emperor, he says, has many rights, and the palace is one of them, but the Church belongs to God. He is polite, and immovable, in a way that I think comes from having been a governor for so long. He knows exactly how far the emperor's power goes, and he knows what is on the other side of that line.

The court is not pleased. Soldiers are sent. The basilica is surrounded. And Ambrose goes into his own church, with a crowd of the faithful around him, and stays there. The people do not leave. They stay all night, and all the next day, and the next. They sit in the pews, and the soldiers sit outside, and everybody waits to see what will happen.

And here is the problem. It is a very long time to sit in a church with nothing to do. People get tired. People get scared. Some of them start to get cross.

So Ambrose, who is a very practical man, has a thought. He remembers that in the East, in the churches of Antioch and elsewhere, the people sing hymns and psalms together, back and forth, first one side of the church and then the other. It is a way of praying that keeps your mind awake and your heart steady. He has never tried it in Milan. He tries it now.

And the people sing.

They sing the psalms, and they sing hymns that Ambrose himself has written, short, simple, rhythmic, easy to remember, in verses of four lines, each line of eight syllables. One of them, Aeterne rerum conditor, begins: "Maker of all things, eternal, you who rule the night and day." They sing through the night, in the dark, in the long hours, with the soldiers outside, and the sound of it carries across the whole of Milan.

And Augustine, who is there, in the church, with his mother, says that she was among the first to stay up and pray, and that the singing, the voices flowing into his ears and the truth into his heart, made the tears run down his face, and did him good.

The emperor's soldiers, in the end, withdrew. And the hymns stayed.

This is the beginning of the tradition of congregational hymn-singing in the Western Church. If you have ever sung a hymn at Mass, or at the Divine Liturgy for that matter, with a roomful of people who were not all in tune, you are part of something that was, in a tense winter in northern Italy, a way of keeping very frightened people calm.

Ambrose, I think, would have been quite pleased to hear that. I can imagine him saying that he was only trying to keep them awake.

There is one more thing to tell about his working life, and it is the hardest, and I will be brief.

Some years later, the strongest man in the empire is an emperor called Theodosius, a good Christian and a great soldier. In the year three hundred and ninety, in a city in Greece called Thessalonica, there is a riot, and a general is killed, and Theodosius, in a flash of terrible anger, orders a punishment so harsh that many thousands of people die. It is a dreadful thing. Everyone knows it.

And Ambrose writes to him.

He does not do it in public, and he does not do it with a trumpet. He writes a private letter, and it is, I think, one of the finest letters of the ancient world. He says, in effect: Emperor, I am your friend. I honour you. I cannot hide from you what I think. What you have done is a great sin. And he does not demand a thing from Theodosius that Theodosius cannot give. He says: do what King David did. David also sinned, a terrible sin, and when the prophet told him so, he said, I have sinned against the Lord, and he repented. Do the same.

And Theodosius, the most powerful man in the world, does.

In the end, the emperor lays down his robes, and does public penance in Milan, with the other penitents, in front of everyone, and is restored to the Church. It is one of the most remarkable moments in all of history, when the strongest man in the world accepts correction from a pastor who has no army. That much is solid. Ambrose says it in his own letters, and Paulinus confirms it.

Some years later, a historian called Theodoret would write a much more dramatic account, with Ambrose standing at the door of the church and blocking the emperor's way. It makes a great picture, and a lot of people have painted it. But it was written decades afterward, and the real letter is quieter. I prefer the letter.

And so, slowly, the years go by.

Ambrose is bishop for twenty-three years. He preaches, and writes, and sings, and sits up late with the poor, and sorts out the quarrels of a city. His brother Satyrus dies, and he mourns him, and preaches a sermon at his grave that people read to this day. His sister Marcellina grows old, praying, in her house, and dies in her own time. And Ambrose himself grows tired.

In the spring of the year three hundred and ninety-seven, he is ill. He knows it is the end. The doctors cannot do much. People come to visit him, and some of them, it is said, ask him to pray to live longer. And Paulinus, who is in the room, writes down his answer.

He says that he has not lived among them in such a way that he should be ashamed to go on living. But neither is he afraid to die, because we have a good Lord.

It is a quiet, steady answer, and a very Ambrose one.

On the evening before Good Friday, he lies in bed with his arms stretched out, in the shape of a cross, and prays, and Paulinus sees his lips moving but cannot hear a sound. And at about the same time, in another city, a bishop called Honoratus, who is asleep in an upstairs room, hears a voice call him three times. "Get up, quickly. He is about to go." And Honoratus rouses himself, and goes down, and travels to Milan, and gives Ambrose the Body of the Lord, the last food of a Christian. And Ambrose receives it, and swallows it, and gives up his spirit, with the Good Friday still on his face, and goes home to God.

It is the fourth of April, and it is a quiet night.

And then he is carried to the great church, where all of Milan comes to see him. Paulinus says that on that Easter night, even the children who had just been baptised, in their white robes, saw him, and some of them said they saw a star above his head. I tell you that as Paulinus told it, and not as a thing I can vouch for.

But what I can vouch for is that the people came.

The poor came. The rich came. The Christians came, and the Jews, and the pagans, who had always found him kind. And they filled the church, and they sang, and some of them, I imagine, wept, and others laughed, because they were remembering something he had said.

He had been a baby in a courtyard with bees on his face. He had been a governor sent to keep the peace. He had been a runaway who walked all night and found himself back at the gate. He had been a bishop who gave away his gold, and sang the psalms through a siege, and wrote a letter to an emperor, and taught a restless professor how to read the Scriptures. And all of it, as far as anyone can tell, he had done because someone had asked him, and he had finally said yes.

That is, I think, a very Christian way to be great.

There is a church in Milan today called the Basilica of Saint Ambrose. It stands where he built one in the fourth century, and he is buried there, in the crypt, beside two martyrs, Gervasius and Protasius, whose bones were found in his own time. The church is old, and brick, and quiet, and in front of it there is a great courtyard.

The Church counts him, now, among the Doctors, the great teachers, of the West, along with Augustine, and Jerome, and Gregory. The people of Milan still keep his feast on the seventh of December, the day he became their bishop, and the opening night of the opera season at La Scala, in Milan, is held on that day, and has been for many years, which I find a delightful thing. A man who invented congregational singing, and the biggest night of music in the city is his feast.

The bees, I am sure, are still around.

Now, some notes for the curious.

Saint Ambrose is a real person, and a great deal of what we know about him is not a legend at all. We have his own letters, his sermons, his books and his hymns. We have Augustine's account of him in the Confessions, which is one of the great books of all time. And we have the life written by Paulinus, his secretary, who was there at the end and who wrote it about twenty-five years later.

Most of what happened in this episode is history. That he was born at Trier. That he was a governor of two provinces in northern Italy. That he was chosen bishop of Milan by acclamation while still unbaptised, and consecrated on the seventh of December, three hundred and seventy-four. That he refused to give up the basilica, and that the people sang. That he wrote to Theodosius. That he taught Augustine, and that he died on the fourth of April, three hundred and ninety-seven. Those we can stand behind.

What we cannot check is the bees, the child's voice in the church, and the night walk that ended at the city gate. Those are Paulinus, and we have told them as Paulinus told them. The dramatic scene at the church door, with the emperor turned away, we left out, because it comes from a historian writing much later.

And the things we invented are the conversations, the weather, the nurse, the banter of the siblings, the tone of the crowd, and the odd narrator's joke. All of them are meant in the spirit of the old accounts and nothing more.

If you want to read more, the best place to start is Augustine's Confessions, book six, where he first meets Ambrose. It is much the best thing, and quite short.

That's the story of Saint Ambrose for tonight. His feast is kept in the Catholic Church on the seventh of December, and the Orthodox Churches remember him as well, in the winter. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a little of what he wrote himself, in one of his evening hymns, which people sang in Milan fifteen hundred years ago, and which, in one version or another, they have sung ever since. It is a prayer to the maker of all things, who gives rest to the tired, and light to the dark. May the Lord who rules the night and the day keep you tonight, and send you sleep, and wake you in the morning to a world that is still held in his hands.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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