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September 2
Simeon the Stylite, Frank Laubach, and Mabel Vernon
David Barnhart
September 02, 2025
An image of Saint Simeon the Stylite from a Syrian altarpiece, 4th c. Photo from the Bode Museum in Berlin, 2022.
Today marks the death, in 459, of Saint Simeon the Stylite, who was born in 390. Simeon was an ascetic monk who became famous for spending 37 years on top of a pillar. He began by simply standing upright for days at a time in prayer, taking Paul literally when he says to “pray without ceasing.” Simeon first climbed a pillar, in part, to get away from the people who would constantly interrupt his prayers to ask for advice. A community formed around him. Over time, his followers built him taller and wider pillars, until his final pillar grew to fifty feet high. He would counsel people in the afternoons, and sometimes preach to the crowds who gathered. He did not believe asceticism was for everyone, but instead preached moderation. People continue to perform similar feats today for various reasons — making themselves into human billboards for their causes during a hunger strike, for example, or living in trees to protect them against deforestation.
Today is also the birthday, in 1884, of Frank Laubach, a missionary, peace activist, and literacy advocate who came up with the slogan “each one, teach one.”
Today marks the death, in 1972, of Mabel Vernon, suffragist and peace activist who organized a long picket of the White House called the “Silent Sentinels." After President Woodrow Wilson pretended that he was supportive of suffrage but had to wait until the women convinced more people of their cause, they saw through his pretense of allyship and applied direct pressure on him to act.
Reflection:
Mabel Vernon said:
“We have a right to believe that the government at last recognizes the untenable position it has maintained when it has declared that we fight for democracy–and refused democracy to those at home; when it sends millions of men to fight for it in Europe and imprisons and tortures women who struggle for it here.”
Alfred Tennyson imagined the prayer of Saint Simeon the Stylite in poem:
Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,
For I was strong and hale of body then;
And though my teeth, which now are dropt away,
Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard
Was tagg'd with icy fringes in the moon,
I drown'd the whoopings of the owl with sound
Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw
An angel stand and watch me, as I sang.
Frank Launbach wrote:
“Disillusioned by all our other efforts, we now see that the only hope left for the human race is to become like Christ.”
and
“The fashion today is to place God in court and give Him a trial. We have had such a lust for “debunking” every good and useful man in history that even God cannot escape. It is one of the unfortunate by-products of the quest for truth, plus an unlovely hunger in humanity for scandal. It is a species of jealousy. We dislike to believe that anybody else is quite as good as we are, not even God. As for me, I choose to stop following this current, to stop posing as the judge of the universe. If it brought any good results I might continue, but to date it has carried me out into the desert and left me there.”
and
“There is a well-known fable of heaven and hell. In hell they sit on both sides of a table, but their arms are straight and stiff, so that they cannot get the food to their mouths. In heaven they sit around the same kind of table with the same straight arms, but with one difference—they feed one another across the table. That fable is not true of heaven and hell, but it is true of our earth now. All hunger is because we are too selfish to feed one another. Our thoughts and even our prayers have been too self-centered.”
I think it is interesting that on this day we have two examples of a devotion to continuous prayer: Simon the Stylite and Frank Laubach, separated by centuries but close in philosophy and outlook.
Prayer: Giver of all gifts, help us to experience all of creation, and our very lives, as a gift of love that is made richer as we give it all away. Amen.