Daily News Journal Column 8/26/18 Many churches have a guy like this. In my church, it was the late father of a member who still has the tiny animals his dad carved out of peach pits, and the strange shaped walking canes whittled from sticks and tree limbs. In my mother’s church it’s a member of her old Sunday School class, the BYKOTA class. They named themselves this because that was their slogan: Be Ye Kind One To Another (Ephesians 4:32). And so, naturally, this little old fellow in their class started carving every piece of wood he could find into acorns, turtles, frogs, top hats, bulldogs, etc., etc., and on each piece was the slogan’s initials: BYKOTA. Class members get a new one at each Christmas party. Actually, it’s quite effective in reminding one of the scriptural admonition, since it’s pronounceable and short: BYKOTA. Some of the class members even turned it into a farewell known only to them: BY – KOTA! What interests me is thinking of those folk, how many generations from now, who find these little acorns and turtles in their great grandmother’s dresser drawer with those cryptic initials (Do you want it? Not me. How bout you? Naw, give it to Melvin. He keeps everything.) What will they think? Will they be able to decipher it? Not all periods of Christian history have had the same attachment to words of wisdom like are represented in BYKOTA. Through a complicated series of developments (traced in Peter Brown’s “The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity” 2015) we learn that it took generations after the granting of legal status to Christianity by Constantine and Theodosius before you can discern any kind of wholesale BYKOTA spirit among the ruling classes in any of the successor Christian kingdoms of the west. We see it begin in a dispersed way during the rule of the Frankish King Dagobert I (629-634) during the time of the Merovingians. Dagobert was more than a century after Clovis, first Catholic king of “Francia,” and it was the presence of the Irish monk Columbanus (543-615) and his monastic successors who began a new era of courtesy and kindness among the ruling elite of early northern France. The difference was that prior to Columbanus the Gaulish, Franco-Gothic successors to the late Romans had lived and worked by the same “personal code” as their predecessors. “High talk and taking down one’s rivals by malicious tales had been the characteristic trait of great bishops and of the swaggering courtiers, warlords and great landowners of the Frankish kingdom.” (Brown, 192) In Columbanus’ new “rule” the nun in charge of the cellar (food supply) should, for example always answer requests “with mild words and without any roughness in response, so that the sweetness of her heart may be revealed by the answering of her voice.” (ibid.) The extremely strict and ascetic rules of Columbanus were intended to tame the unruly behavior of monks, nuns and rulers alike. “Day to day life was to be conducted through gently uncontentious interchanges….these pointed inversions of the codes of the new aristocracy radiated outside the convents and monasteries.” In Dagobert’s world, there was a bit of a revolving door between the monasteries and the Merovingian court, and as the standards for monkish behavior changed, life among the noble classes began to change as well. The pious habits of the monastery began to “convert” the code of behavior at the royal court as well, and improved life for all, over time. I don’t know if they carried any carved acorns around with them, but I do know that the stories we tell ourselves and words we pledge to live by are what change us from within to without. The Merovingian courtiers even came to address one another not as my lord, sir, your honor, etc., but, peccator, Late Latin for “sinner.” And that’s how the world changes. One peccator at a time. BYKOTA. Steve “Peccator” Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. of Murfreesboro and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com