These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

20 – Augustine of Hippo, Christian thinker

Aurelius Augustinus, arguably perhaps the greatest figure in the Western church, was born at Thagaste in North Africa in 354CE, the son of a devout Christian mother, Monica and a pagan father, Patricius. He lived only five of his 76 years outside of North Africa. Schooled at Madaura and Carthage, his reading of Cicero’s protreptic work Hortensius inspired him at the age of eighteen – the same year when his father died and his own son Adeodatus was born – to pursue Truth. He taught briefly at Thagaste and then at Carthage and then in 383, perhaps to escape the suffocating presence of his mother, he took ship for Rome itself where he accepted an imperial post teaching rhetoric.

In the intervening years, in his quest for truth, he had read the Bible but without real interest and engaged as a hearer with the Manichaean sect. While in the end he ended his association with this group, their influence, positively or negatively, continued to inform his theological development for the rest of his life. After a short stay in Rome he accepted the imperial post of Professor of Rhetoric at Milan and his move there in 384 began for him a journey from Platonism to Christianity, from Milan to Cassiciacum to Ostia to Thagaste and thence to Hippo in North Africa.

In Milan he met the formidable bishop Ambrose who introduced him to (Neo) platonism and to Greek Fathers like Basil. In the garden of his residence at Milan he experienced his famous conversion, went on retreat to Cassiciacum where he wrote his Soliloquies, and thence to Ostia where he experienced his famous vision.

Following Monica’s death, he returned to North Africa and Thagaste via Rome and there determined to set up a retreat of sorts for like-minded men. A side-trip to Hippo – and the untimely death of his son – saw a life-changing experience where he was ordained, effectively by force, by the church there, made co-bishop and then, on the death of the bishop in 395, elected in his place.

As bishop he wrote much. Between 397 and 401 he wrote his magisterial Confessions in which he explored the personal life in the context of his own journey to faith. This work is widely regarded as not only a major text in the Christian canon but also in the Western literary canon itself. Over a twenty-year period – from 399 to 419 – he wrote the De Trinitate which has so influenced the development of this central doctrine in the Western church. From 411 onwards he began a series of anti-Donatist writings in which he developed his ecclesiological thought. Between 413 and 425 he authored the De Civitate Dei – perhaps it should have been titled A Tale of Two Cities! – in which he presented a way in which human history might be understood as a process in which people either turn towards God or away from God and into themselves. The content is somewhat drawn-out perhaps but the idea is magnificent. From 413 he began his writing against the teaching of the British Pelagius – whom he never actually met in person – and the so-called Pelagians, including the extremist Julian, bishop of Eclanum. His authoritative De natura et gratia in which he outlined his concerns with Pelagius’ own writings – though Augustine managed here to play the ball and not the man, for he clearly regarded him with great respect – and with presenting his notion of original sin [or guilt], that idea with which Augustine is clearly, rightly or not, so identified. The next few years saw other like writings, including the contra Julianum (in six books) and On Grace and Freewill. In his later years he developed and published his Retractationes in which he amended, modified and even dismissed some of his earlier views on a wide range of matters.

In 430, as the Arian Vandals besieged the city of Hippo the great bishop and Doctor of the Church died. When the Vandals finally entered and burned the city all that they left untouched were Augustine’s cathedral and his library.

 by Rev Dr David Mackay-Rankin

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

20 – William & Catherine Booth, reformers of the Church

William Booth, founder and first general of The Salvation Army, was born in relative poverty in Nottingham, England in 1829. By the age of 14 he was supporting his family by working as a pawnbroker’s apprentice which exposed him further to the reality of the lives of the poor.

Early spiritual influences came from the Broad Street Wesleyan Chapel and from contact with the preaching and methodology of American revivalist James Caughey. As an adolescent he led lay evangelistic efforts to Nottingham’s poor before moving to London in 1849 where he was involved in various groups within the Methodist Church. In 1861, aged 32, he left the Methodist New Connection to become an itinerant evangelist, commencing The Christian Mission in 1865, later re-named The Salvation Army.

Booth had an intense love for God. As a man, he was a risk taker with a strong commitment to continuous improvement. He was a person of ceaseless industry and innovation, with a passion to make the gospel accessible to the poor. This synthesised with a radical social conscience. He didn’t want to just bring the poor to faith in God (to get them ready for heaven) but he wanted them to experience redemption in the broader social and political environment. Furthermore, this vision of salvation was for the whole world, not just the slums of East London.

Booth’s commitment to social campaigns, such as the Purity Crusade of 1885 (a far-reaching campaign against teenage prostitution) was indicative of a growing activism around social issues. This was progressed further by the publication of In Darkest England and the Way Out, an ambitious plan to rescue 19th century England from her most pressing social woes.

In all this William was influenced and shaped by his relationship to Catherine Mumford, who he met in his early twenties. Catherine had grown up in a very protective Christian home where she had some long bouts of confinement due to ill health. In this environment she proved to be an assiduous reader and self- directed student, not only of the Bible (which she studied extensively) but also of a broader sweep of literature, including general and church history, spirituality and theology.

This immersion in text prepared her well for a future in which she took the step of preaching and speaking publicly based on her own conviction that this was something God required of her and being convinced herself that women had an equal right to speak. In this respect, Catherine made an important contribution to the ongoing expansion of the boundaries of women’s ministries in the broader church.

Like William, her gifts and capacities were recognised outside of The Salvation Army as well as inside it. A pre-eminent evangelist of the Victorian era, she was widely regarded as a deeply spiritual woman whose teaching was sound, convincing and enlightening.

There is no doubt that she exerted a huge influence in the shaping of the theology and practice of The Salvation Army, even though her death in 1890 came very early in the history of this fledgling movement. Writing fifty years after Catherine’s death, one Salvationist leader noted, “So much of the foundations of our Movement were built upon the character of this great woman, and so much of her beliefs, methods and teaching was woven into its early super-structure…”

William’s death in 1912, some 22 years after Catherine’s, was marked by a remarkable outpouring of public support and honour for the man who had risen from a life of poverty to create a worldwide movement that concerned itself with the salvation of the poor.

Written by by Major Christine Faragher

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Mary, mother of Jesus, witness to Jesus

Mary first appears in narratives woven around Christ’s nativity. Mary, a vulnerable young woman faces God’s surprising, frightening action with humility, receptiveness, and joy, embodied in her great canticle of praise, the Magnificat: ‘My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit doth rejoice in God my saviour’. She is the humble and meek one exalted by God; as the genealogies of Christ make transparent, she is the one in whom God remembers his servant Israel, as he promised in the words of the prophets.

Mary’s openness to God’s Word is imagined in medieval depictions of the annunciation found in the prayer books of the late middle ages. Gabriel comes to Mary as she reads in a domestic interior – her open volume lies on a prayer desk. As her hands spread wide in surprise, she hears the angel’s ‘Hail’. The heavens open, and on beams of divine radiance, the Holy Spirit (or a naked Christ-child) wings its flight towards the Virgin. Often the Spirit flies not towards her womb, but towards her ear. In her faithful listening she conceives, her body full of grace.

In Latin, Gabriel’s ‘Hail’ is Ave: put this up to the spotless mirror of Mary, and you see the word Eva – Eve. To sing Ave Maria is to celebrate God’s entry into the world of human nakedness, to see Adam and Eve’s embarrassed veiling of the flesh after their first disobedience reversed in the nakedness of a little child, the nakedness of a man born to die upon the tree.

According to the Gospels, Mary’s heart was pierced with sorrow at the foot of the cross. Mary’s closeness to her son in his suffering is powerfully imagined in Rogier van der Weyden’s famous Deposition, now in the Prado in Madrid. There, Mary faints in the arms of John and Mary Magdalene, her pallid body mirroring the form of Christ’s limp corpse.

Mary’s agony is the birth-pangs of the church. For at the foot of the cross, Mary is given a new son, John, and John a new mother, Mary, even as the water and blood of baptism and the eucharist flow from Christ’s wounded side. Here, in the midst of death, new life is given in the word spoken from the cross, a word that gives birth to a new family of adoption, the infant church.

In another Van der Weyden altarpiece – the Miraflores altar, now in Berlin – after the terrifying events of Good Friday, Mary sits, trying, perhaps, to seek solace again in the words she had once trusted to be true. The book is now closed. But in the end there is the beginning – the wounded Word, the alpha and the omega, surprises the faithful servant again, and Mary turns to see what she and the whole creation have always longed to see: her son, face to face.

Links to images:

Annunciation from the Hours of Jean de Boucicaut: 
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Heures_de_Boucicaut_-_f53v_%28Annonciation%29.jpg

Rogier van der Weyden, Descent from the Cross:
https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection

Rogier van der Weyden, Miraflores Altarpiece:
http://www.smb-digital.de/eMuseumPlus?service=direct/1/ResultLightboxView/result.t1.collection_lightbox.$TspTitleImageLink.link&sp=10&sp=Scollection&sp=SfieldValue&sp=0&sp=0&sp=3&sp=Slightbox_3x4&sp=12&sp=Sdetail&sp=0&sp=F&sp=T&sp=17

Matthew Champion

These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Florence Nightingale & Edith Cavell, renewers of society

Florence Nightingale

At seventy, Florence Nightingale wrote, “When many years ago, I planned a future, my one idea was not organizing a hospital but organizing a religion”. History remembered the woman who cared for wounded British soldiers in the Crimean War and is credited with founding modern nursing, but few know of her fifty years of amazing accomplishments after Crimea.

Florence was born in 1820 into a wealthy Unitarian family and raised Church of England. Her father educated her ‘like a son’ he didn’t have – in history, science, languages and philosophy. Brilliant and religiously absorbed, Florence was frustrated with her privileged life in Victorian England, with its divinely ordained class system of rich and poor, rulers and workers. She spent much of her childhood helping poor villagers around her family’s estates.

At seventeen, she received an audible call to serve God, but her family thwarted any attempt to follow this call. In 1849, she visited a Deaconess training center in Germany and discovered her dream – women training to serve the poor. Florence finally left home at thirty-three to become volunteer superintendent of a home for destitute governesses in London and left for the Crimea from there. When she returned twenty-two months later, she avoided public acclaim and retreated from public life. A grateful nation had established the Nightingale Fund in her honor, but she did not start the proposed nursing school. Haunted by dead soldiers, reforming army medical services was a more pressing task. When the Nightingale Training School for Nurses opened in 1860, Florence submitted proposals for its administration, but her focus was army reform.

Over the next fifty years, Florence was involved in reforming colonial policy and sanitation in India, work house reform, hospital design and location, preventative medicine and village health education. She developed hospital record forms to analyze patient information, introduced trained nurses to poorhouses, advised on indigenous health in British colonies and drafted the British delegation’s recommendations to the Geneva Convention. She helped change laws that restricted women’s rights to their children, property and divorce, and worked for paid employment for women, accomplishing all this through politicians who came to her home for advice and guided the reforms through Parliament.

Florence can only be fully understood by taking seriously her divine calls as the inspiration for her life and work. She once thought of founding a religious order and visited a Paris convent to learn the disciplines she followed through her life. Her secluded, disciplined lifestyle after Crimea created her own monastic structure. Florence wrote an eight hundred-page manuscript offering a new religion for the poor, challenging the belief that poverty was God’s will. The Divine Spirit is in each of us, she said, guiding us, with the help of “saviours”, beyond any predetermined destiny – she saw herself as a “saviour” for her time. Her theological ideas reflected the later disciplines of liberation theology, process theology, feminist theology and contextual theology, exploring topics like the concept of God, universal law, God’s will, sin and evil, family life, spiritual life and life after death. Her conclusions were in dialogue with the Church of England Broad Church movement whose Essays and Reviews challenged the church in the 1860’s. Florence’s writings are one of the British Library’s largest collections. She died in 1910.

Reference: Val Webb, Florence Nightingale: the making of a radical theologian (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2002.

Val Webb

 Edith Cavell – Nurse, Humanitarian and Spy

Edith Cavell was born in Swardeston, near Norwich. Her father was a priest in the Anglican church. The religious faith that she was brought up with, was to provide an important influence on her life. In 1900, she trained to be a nurse at the London hospital. In 1907, she was recruited to be the matron of a new nursing school in Brussels. This was a period of growth in the prestige and importance of nursing; a period which began with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War.

In 1910, Miss Cavell began one of the first nursing journals, L’infirmiere, which documented good nursing practices and basic standards. She became a teacher of nurses in different hospitals throughout Belgium and sought to improve standards of nursing.

In the Nursing Mirror, Edith Cavell writes:

“The probationers wear blue dresses with white aprons and white collars. The contrast which they present to the nuns, in their heavy stiff robes, and to the lay nurses, in their grimy apparel, is the contrast of the unhygienic past with the enlightened present.”

In 1914, the First World War broke out. At the time, Miss Cavell was in England, but she moved back to Belgium to her hospital which was later taken over by the Red Cross. As part of the German Schlieffen plan, the Germans invaded Belgium and in late 1914, Brussels was under a very strict German military occupation.

Many British soldiers had been left behind in the withdrawal of the Allied forces and were stuck in Brussels. Miss Cavell decided to aid the British servicemen, hiding them in the hospital and safe houses around Belgium. From these safe houses, some 200 British servicemen were able to escape to neutral Holland. At the same time, she continued to act as nurse and treated wounded soldiers from both the German and Allied side. The occupying German army threatened strict punishments for anyone who was found to be ‘aiding and abetting the enemy’. Yet, despite the military rule, Miss Cavell continued to help. Edith wrote: “Nothing but physical impossibility, lack of space and money would make me close my doors to Allied refugees.”

In mid-1915, nurse Edith Cavell came under suspicion for helping allied servicemen to escape; this was not helped by her outspoken views on her perceived injustice of the occupation. In August 1915, she was arrested and held in St Gilles prison. After her arrest, she did not try to defend herself but only said in her defence that she felt compelled to help the people in need.

After a short trial, the German military tribunal found her guilty of treason and sentenced her to execution. This surprised many observers as it seemed harsh given her honesty and the fact she had saved many lives both Allied and German.

For two weeks prior to her execution, Miss Cavell, was kept in solitary confinement, except for a few brief visits. On the night before her execution, she was visited by the Reverend Stirling Gahan, an Anglican chaplain. He recorded her final conversation. He records that Miss Cavell said: “Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness to anyone.” She is also recorded as having said: “I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me.”

On her last night, she wrote to her fellow nurses, saying: “I have told you that devotion will give you real happiness, and the thought that you have done, before God and yourselves, your whole duty and with a good heart will be your greatest support in the hard moments of life and in the face of death.”

Though diplomats from the neutral governments of the United States and Spain fought to commute her sentence, their efforts were ultimately in vain. After her execution, the fate of Edith Cavell was widely publicised in the British and American media. It was shown as more evidence of German brutality and injustice. Edith Cavell was portrayed as a heroic and innocent figure who remained steadfast in her Christian faith and willingness to die for her country.

Tejvan Pettinger