Many, many years ago, in a city called Sebaste, which was in Armenia and today lies inside Turkey, there lived a man named Blaise. Very little about him was ever written down. The oldest books keep only the bare bones: that Blaise was the bishop of that city, and that he died a martyr at the beginning of the three hundreds.

Everything else came to us from mouth to mouth, long afterwards. They are stories nobody can prove, and even so people have never been willing to let a single one of them go. Tradition says, for example, that before he was a bishop Blaise was a doctor. He looked after sick people all day long, and when he became a bishop he went on looking after them: their bodies now, and their hearts as well.

The Cave and the Animals

In those days it was common to arrest Christians. The story goes that Blaise climbed the mountain and went to live in a cave, praying alone and waiting for better days. And the legend says he was not nearly as alone as you might think.

Birds flew down and carried food to him in their beaks. Wild animals appeared at the mouth of the cave and waited there quietly, one behind the other, until the bishop laid a hand on each head and gave his blessing. The legend even says that while Blaise lived up there, no animal on the mountain ever harmed another. It is an old tale, the kind that will never fit into a historian's book, and yet it holds something true: near a good person, even fear grows calm.

The Boy and the Fish Bone

One day the hunters of Governor Agricolaus climbed the mountain and found Blaise in his cave. They tied the bishop up and marched him down the hill, right through the middle of the crowd.

On the way, tradition tells two things. First, a very poor woman came running to him in tears, because a wolf had carried off her piglet, and that piglet was everything she had. Blaise spoke to the wolf, and the wolf brought the little animal back alive and whole. Further down the road, a mother pushed her way through the crowd with her son in her arms. The boy had swallowed a fish bone. He had gone purple and he could not breathe.

Blaise had no medicine at all. He simply laid his hands on the boy's throat and prayed, asking God to let him go free of that tightness. The boy coughed, pulled in a breath, and was breathing again. That mother never forgot it, and neither did anybody else.

The Farewell

Blaise was taken away to prison. They asked him to stop being a Christian, and he answered that he could not, because it was the thing he loved most in the world. Tradition says that in the dark cell an old woman slipped in and left him two lighted candles, just so he would not be in the dark. Not long after that, around the year 316, Blaise was killed for his faith.

The Two Candles Today

More than seventeen hundred years have gone by, and those two candles are still burning.

Every February 3, in churches all over the world, the priest ties two candles together with a ribbon, crosses one over the other, and holds them gently against the throat of whoever comes forward, praying:

"Through the intercession of Saint Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you from every disease of the throat and from every other illness."

The line is usually long: grandmothers, children, singers, teachers, people with a cough and people in perfect health. Nobody there thinks the candle is magic. The candle is simply a way of praying with your body, asking God to look after one small everyday thing — the throat that talks and sings and laughs and says thank you.