Creative History

  If you lived in England during the 11th century then the world around you was full of mysterious omens and ominous portents.  God was not some far distant and hands-off deity, but rather, He interacted with you and with everyone you knew in a very hands-on sort of way that directly impacted your daily life and the entire world in your midst. In the year 989 at the dawn of the second millenium--when the world around you was already in the midst of a messianic apocalyptic fervor--a young boy of no more than six, or seven years of age, sighted a strange shooting star in the skies over London.  It was so bright; so large and so startling that the boy, and probably everyone else in England who saw what would become known centuries later as Halley’s Comet, at that time, remembered what they saw for the rest of their lives. That young boy’s name was Elmer.  In his adult life he would go on to become a Benedictine monk and would be known to history in medieval annals a...