Life
Bavo was born near Liège, Belgium, to a Frankish noble family that gave him the name Allowin. His father was Pippin of Landen, the Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia.
Wild as a youth and selfish, he was known to have sold servants to local nobles as slaves. He contracted a beneficial marriage, and had a daughter through it. He was a soldier; however, he led an undisciplined and disorderly life. Shortly after the death of his wife, Bavo decided to reform himself upon hearing a sermon preached by a monk, Saint Amand. Bavo was struck after the sermon at the emptiness of material objects and donated his wealth to the poor after he converted to Christianity at Amand's convent. Bavo traveled with Amand for some time in his missionary work through France and Flanders. On one occasion, Bavo met a man whom he had sold years before. Wishing to atone for this earlier conduct, Bavo had the man lead him by chain to the town jail.
He built an abbey on his grounds and became a monk. He distributed his belongings to the poor and lived as a recluse, first in a hollow tree, later in a cell in the forest near the Abbey. He died at St. Bavo's Abbey in Ghent, in today's Belgium.
Read more about this topic: Saint Bavo
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)
“These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)