June 18

It has been said, though I am uncertain by whom, that the family that prays together stays together. While that may be true, some times the family that prays together ends up doing it together professionally. Gervase and his identical twin brother Thomas were born in Maidstone, England in the twelfth century. Thomas was ordained as a priest on February 16, 1163. Subsequently he ordained his brother Gervase. The two brothers both ended up at the abbey of Christ Church, Canterbury. In the 1170s, Gervase assumed the duties of the abbey’s chronicler. Shortly after sunset on the 18th in 1178, as he sat in his office, Gervase was approached by five monks who reported to him that they had seen “two horns of light on the shaded part of the moon.” What they had witnessed was the impact of a meteorite on the moon (Today known as the Giordano Bruno crater). Some astronomers suspect that the force of this meteorite hitting the Moon is responsible for the slight oscillation of the Moon’s distance from earth.

Thomas would be a bit more familiar if I mentioned that his last name was Beckett and that he was assassinated on December 29, 1171. As St. Thomas Beckett, he really hit the big time and is today venerated as a saint and a martyr by both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.