Pentecost: Ordinary Women: Florence Nightingale

A couple weeks ago, in this series, we met Clara Barton, one of the women who inspired me as a child. Another woman who fascinated me was Florence Nightingale. Born to a life of privilege in England, she nonetheless become the ‘lady with the lamp’ during the Crimean War. Nightingale’s work formed the basis of nursing as we know it.  

Florence was born May 12, 1820 in Florence, Italy to William Edward and Frances Nightingale. Her father had only inherited his great-uncle’s estate and name (Nightingale) five years earlier. She was their second daughter. The family returned to England in 1821, where they lived at Embley Park in Hampshire, with a summer home at Lea Hurst in Derbyshire. As members of the aristocracy, they also spent the social season in London.

In an unusual move, her father taught her history, philosophy, literature, and mathematics. She was also fluent in French, German, Italian, Greek, and Latin, and even engaged in political discussions with her father.

Her religious upbringing was in the Church of England, although some sources list her as Unitarian. As a teenager, she felt called by God, noting in her diary, “On February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service." By 1844 she began to believe that her calling was nursing. During a tour of Egypt in 1850, she wrote, “I like Him to do exactly as He likes without even telling me the reason…Today I am thirty--the age Christ began his mission. Now no more childish things. No more love. No more marriage. Now Lord let me think only of Thy Will, what Thou willest me to do. Oh Lord Thy Will, Thy Will.”

For Florence, religion strengthened people to do good works and she encouraged her nurses to attend church calling them “handmaidens of the Lord”. She noted, “Religion is not devotion, but work and suffering for the love of God; this is the true doctrine of Mystics.” She also believed that “To be a fellow worker with God is the highest aspiration of which we can conceive man capable.”

Although her father encouraged her learning, the family was not as enthusiastic with her choice of nursing as a profession. Eventually she convinced them and enrolled in two weeks training at the Institution of Protestant Deaconesses in Kaiserswerth, Germany in July 1850. She returned a year later for 3 months. At the Institute she learned the nursing skills of the time and hospital organization.

Three years later, she was superintendent of the Institution for Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances in London. This hospital for governesses gave her a chance to hone her administrative skills and improve nursing care for the patients as well as conditions for the nurses themselves. 

When the Crimean War started between Russia and the Ottoman Turks in October of 1853, Britain and France entered the conflict as allies of Turkey. British journalist William Howard Russell reported that the wounded lacked supplies and that care was incompetent. Faced with public outcry, the British secretary of war Sidney Herbert, a family friend, wrote to Florence Nightingale asking her to take nurses to the hospitals at Sutari. Nightingale left England with 38 women on October 24, 1854. They arrived on November 5 and five days later casualties from the Battle of Balaklava (memorialized in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade*) and the Battle of Inkerman overwhelmed the hospitals. A measure of the catastrophic nature of the battles is that of the 600 soldiers in the Light Brigade alone, 127 were wounded and taken to the hospitals. Another 118 were killed and 60 taken prisoner. Less than 200 men still had horses at the end of that fateful, and misguided, attack.

There were, as Russell had reported, not enough supplies available. Nightingale bought equipment using monies provided by the London Times. Under Nightingale’s command, sanitary conditions were established. Soldiers’ wives were put to work doing laundry, while the nurses cleaned the wards. As Clara Barton did a few years later, the nurses wrote letters for the soldiers. Florence earned the title “Lady with the Lamp” by visiting the patients at night (as depicted in this lithograph of The Lady with the Lamp from 1891 by Henrietta Rae). Her work paid off with lower mortality rates. She returned to the Crimea several times, even after falling ill herself from conditions there. When the Treaty of Paris ended the conflict on March 30, 1856, she remained at Scutari until the hospitals closed. She was hailed as a heroine upon her return to England in August of 1856.

Nightingale continued to work on reforming healthcare and nursing after the war. At a meeting with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in September of 1856 she presented her records about the military hospitals, staffing and supply problems. This resulted in reform in the military medical systems. Faced though she was with death and pain, Nightingale said, “And she noted, "Live life when you have it. Life is a splendid gift-there is nothing small about it.”

In 1859 she began the Nightingale School of Nursing at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. By standardizing nursing training and procedures, Florence made nursing a respectable form of employment for women. She realized that women, “dream till they have no longer the strength to dream; those dreams against which they so struggle, so honestly, vigorously, and conscientiously, and so in vain, yet which are theirs.” She had a vision herself of a world where women could follow their dreams.

She also published Notes on Nursing: What it Is and What it Is Not, which has been in continuous world-wide publication since 1859. Florence died in 1910 and is buried in the family plot at St. Margaret’s Church, East Wellow, Hampshire. The Episcopal Church has designated August 12 as her feast day in Lesser Feasts and Fasts.

Throughout her life, Florence Nightingale lived out the Parable of the Grain of Mustard Seed. “He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.’” (Matthew 13:31-32) She even stated, “So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.” In the face of family, political, and military opposition Florence Nightingale planted a seed that blossomed into a new vision for nursing. Her work inspired women, and men, across the world to pursue that career. Her innovations in nursing were used during the American Civil War by other nurses like Clara Barton, and her legacy continues today.  

What 'mustard seed' idea do you have that you have never acted on? 

More info about Florence Nightingale:

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/library/glossary/nightingale-florence

http://satucket.com/lectionary/Florence_Nightingale.htm

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Florence-Nightingale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale 

https://everydaypowerblog.com/florence-nightingale-quotes/

*The Charge of the Light Brigade, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Half a league half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd ?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,
Flash'd as they turn'd in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army while
All the world wonder'd:
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right thro' the line they broke;
Cossack & Russian
Reel'd from the sabre-stroke,
Shatter'd & sunder'd.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
While horse & hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro' the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Pentecost: Ordinary Women: Ruth & Naomi

We are continuing the series on Ordinary Women. Women through whom God acted. Women like you and me. Today we go back 4 millennia to a time not long after the Exodus ended and the Children of Israel entered the Promised Land.

Ruth and Naomi are an amazing pair of women. The Bible book is named for the younger woman, but without her mother-in-law, she would not be known. It was the older woman, Naomi, who bore the brunt of the loss of husband and sons in a foreign country. It was Naomi who decided to return to her hometown of Bethlehem hoping that the Mosaic tenet to care for widows and orphans would apply to her. It was Naomi who allowed Ruth to return to Israel, even though she was a foreigner. It was Naomi who encouraged her to seek out Boaz and force his hand. It is Naomi at the end of the Book of Ruth who names the child Obed. Naomi, despite her grief clung to some dim hope that God would help her.

Most people know the story-or think they do. They know that Ruth told someone “where you go, I will go…your people will be my people…” If you did a poll many would respond that she was talking to a man because that citation is often used at marriages. They may not know that she was speaking to Naomi, her mother-in-law, or the circumstances that led to the conversation.

In the Biblical Book of Ruth, we hear that “in the days of the Judges” there is a “famine in the land”. It was then that Elimelech, “a certain man of Bethlehem…went to sojourn in the country of Moab [with] his wife and his two sons.” (Ruth 1:1) Elimelech and Naomi go back across the Jordan and settle somewhere in Moab. Elimelech dies and “she was left with her two sons”. (Ruth 1:3) The the sons meet and marry women of Moab but after 10 years they, too, die. 

Naomi then hears that “the Lord had visited his people and given them food” (Ruth 1:6). She sets out for Bethlehem. She tells her daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth, to go back to their families. Orpah does eventually turn back, but Ruth ‘clung to her’ and recites her famous lines. “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried. May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you!” (Ruth 1:16-18)

Naomi gives in, and the pair travel to Bethlehem. It would not have been an easy journey for two women alone, and likely they joined some caravan going in the right direction. Upon arriving in Bethlehem Naomi bewails her fate, saying “Call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.” (Ruth 1:20)

In chapter 2 of the Book of Ruth we learn how Ruth goes to the fields around Bethlehem to glean (gather the leftover bits of grain at the edges of the fields) and encounters Boaz. Boaz, it turns out, is actually a distant kinsman of Elimelech (and son of Rahab of Jericho). He takes an interest in the stranger. This prompts Naomi to send Ruth to ‘lay at his feet’ during the threshing. Obediently, the young woman does so and Boaz says, “I will do for you all that you ask…I will do the part of the next of kin for you.” (Ruth 3:10-13).

Sure enough, in the morning, at a meeting of the town elders, Boaz offers a fellow kinsman “a parcel of land which belonged to our kinsman Elimelech…if you buy it you are also buying Ruth the Moabitess, the widow of the dead, in order to restore the name of his inheritance.” (Ruth 4:3-5) The other man defers his right to Boaz who then marries Ruth. Ruth then has a baby. Then “the [village] women said to Naomi, ‘Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next of kin…he shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him.” (Ruth 4:14-15). “They named him Obed; he was the father of Jesse, the father of David”… and subsequently the ancestor of Jesus.  

What can these two women of faith teach us? Ruth remained faithful to her mother-in-law and together they persevered through hardship. Naomi trusted the word of God, spoken in the law given to Moses. She used that law to her benefit to ensure the future for Ruth and for herself. By gaining a son-in-law and then a grandson, she was assured of being cared for.

Naomi’s griefs from the deaths of her husband and sons were healed in the new life of her grandson. She may have let herself feel despair when returning to Bethlehem, but she didn’t let it stop her from acting to secure Ruth’s future.

Have you ever persevered through hardship and seen good come out of it?

Would you have had the strength to do as Naomi did and journey back home, hoping that something good might happen? 

Pentecost: Ordinary Women: Clara Barton

Welcome back to our look at Ordinary Women, who were called by God to act bravely and make changes that impacted their world, and the lives of others for generations. We met Frances Perkins, who was instrumental in labor rights and Social Security. Last week, we visited the world of Esther, queen of Persia who stood up to racism and saved the Jewish people.

Today, we meet Clara Barton. From the very first time I learned about her, I have been fascinated by this woman who risked her life on the battlefield to help wounded men during the Civil War and who started the American Red Cross. I was probably in 4^th or 5^th grade when my grandmother sent me a biography of Barton. Her courage is inspiring. Early on, Barton realized, “we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10) She followed the path God set before her, even through danger and opposition.

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on Christmas Day 1821 in Oxford, MA as the youngest of 5 children. Her first experience with nursing was as a girl when she tended her older brother who had a head injury. At 15 years old, Clara became a teacher and in 1948 founded a free public school in New Jersey.

After that school board replaced her with a man, she moved to Washington DC, where she became a clerk for the U.S. Patent Office. Surprisingly, she was paid the same as the men in the office. She noted, “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”

Then came the Civil War. Barton was appalled by the conditions for battlefield hospitals. Starting in 1862, she traveled with the Union Army bringing surgical supplies, cooking, and tending the wounded. The tale is told of Barton holding an injured soldier when a bullet ripped through her sleeve and into the man, killing him. She later pondered, “I have never mended that hole in my sleeve. I wonder if a soldier ever does mend a bullet hole in his coat?”

One essential service Clara performed was to record personal information of the soldiers. She wrote to family members of missing, wounded, or dead soldiers. Even after the War, she continued this task as Lincoln’s General Correspondent for the Friends of Paroled Prisoners. She could not do this alone and formed the Bureau of Records of Missing Men of the Armies of the United States. With her team of 12 clerks, she researched the status of tens of thousands of soldiers. In 1869, her final report to Congress noted that although 22,000 missing soldiers had been identified, she thought there were at least 40,000 more.

Barton then traveled to Switzerland for rest. It was there that she learned of the International Red Cross. She helped this group in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War. Upon returning to the United States, she lobbied for the formation of an American branch, which happed when President Chester Arthur signed the Geneva Treaty in 1882. Originally the organization focused on disaster relief during the Johnstown, PA flood and after hurricanes in South Carolina and Texas.

Clara Barton had her own vision of what the Red Cross should be, which put her in conflict with others in the growing organization. In 1904 she resigned. She died 8 years later in Glen Echo, Maryland at 91. 

She supported equal rights and was willing to help anyone regardless of race, gender, or station. She lived out the Galatians 3:28 reminder, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Her tireless work brought aid and comfort to men on the battlefield, to families in disasters, and helped provide supplies for first responders during her life and beyond.

Clara Barton inspired me when I first read about her as a child. She did not let being a woman in the mid 1800’s prevent her from following her path. She persevered, trusting that “God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished…” (Philippians 1:6)

Have you read about someone whose work inspired you?

Is there someone who you would like to emulate?

Do you have a vision for helping in some way that you haven’t acted on?

Sources and further info:

https://www.biography.com/people/clara-barton-9200960

https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/clara-barton

https://www.redcross.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/clara-barton.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Barton

Pentecost: Ordinary Women-Esther

As we delve into the lives of some Ordinary Women for the next few weeks, we’ll consider some Bible women and some saints, like Frances Perkins last week. This week, our focus is on one of the two Bible women who has a book in the Bible that bears her name.

Esther is an unusual book to be in the Bible because nowhere is God’s name specifically mentioned. Some commentators doubt that Esther was a real person. The same, of course, is said of other men and women in the Bible. There are some who categorize the Book of Esther as a comedy. Not a comedy that makes you laugh. Esther is a comedy of improbabilities, based on the characteristics of the Hebrew culture.

How could a young Jewish girl, who’s uncle is known to be Jewish have hidden her ethnicity? How did she gain the favor of the king to the extent that he raised her above all others in the harem? Why did the King ‘happen’ to look up and extend the royal scepter to give her entry to his presence? Why was Haman so obsessed with Mordecai that he hated all Jews?

Let’s think about all this for just a minute. If Esther wasn’t a real person, then perhaps this story is an elaborate parable or allegory about God and us? Maybe it’s about being " as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)

Esther certainly was wise beyond her years. Rather than condemning Haman right from the start, she invites both the King and Haman to a banquet. Then she has a second party. Only then, after Haman is sufficiently prideful, does she throw herself on the King’s mercy.

“So the king and Haman went in to feast with Queen Esther. On the second day, as they were drinking wine, the king again said to Esther, ‘What is your petition, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to the half of my kingdom, it shall be fulfilled.’ Then Queen Esther answered, ‘If I have won your favor, O king, and if it pleases the king, let my life be given me—that is my petition—and the lives of my people—that is my request. For we have been sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be killed, and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men and women, I would have held my peace; but no enemy can compensate for this damage to the king.’ Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther, ‘Who is he, and where is he, who has presumed to do this?’ Esther said, ‘A foe and enemy, this wicked Haman!’ Then Haman was terrified before the king and the queen. The king rose from the feast in wrath and went into the palace garden, but Haman stayed to beg his life from Queen Esther, for he saw that the king had determined to destroy him. When the king returned from the palace garden to the banquet hall, Haman had thrown himself on the couch where Esther was reclining; and the king said, ‘Will he even assault the queen in my presence, in my own house?’ As the words left the mouth of the king, they covered Haman’s face.” (Esther 7:1-8)

Esther carefully choses her words. She states that if the Jews were only to be enslaved, she would not have spoken. It is only because their death was decreed by Haman’s racism that she asks for the King to intervene.

According to Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers, “The idea of the serpent as symbolizing wisdom, seems to have entered into the early parables of most Eastern nations. We find it in Egyptian temples, in the twined serpents of the rod of Hermes…Here we learn that even the serpent's sinuous craft presents something which we may well learn to reproduce.” The priests of Pharaoh battled with Moses before the Exodus using snakes. Moses’ rod became a snake, devouring the Egyptian serpents.(Exodus 7:11-13) I would note that the serpent is also important in Meso-American cultures. Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent is prevalent as an embodiment of the sky and a helper presenting Maya kings with visions. Many other cultures as well have snake symbolism in their history.

In the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary we read, “Alone, the wisdom of the serpent is mere cunning, and the harmlessness of the dove little better than weakness: but in combination, the wisdom of the serpent would save them from unnecessary exposure to danger; the harmlessness of the dove, from sinful expedients to escape it. In the apostolic age of Christianity…there was a manly (sic) combination of unflinching zeal and calm discretion, before which nothing was able to stand.”

St. Paul, notes that he was shrewd, yet guileless, to win converts to Christ. “To those without the Law I became like one without the Law (though I am not outside the law of God but am under the law of Christ), to win those without the Law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men, so that by all possible means I might save some of them. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.” (I Corinthians 9:22)

In learning to be ‘shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves’, we might do well to consider our battles before we act. Our actions are always to point toward God, yet sometimes we need to be circumspect about how we do that. Sometimes we need to ‘become weak, to win the weak’. Esther was not weak. Indeed, she showed great courage in being a whistle-blower about the great evil Haman planned. Esther had to confront her fears, and face the possibility of death at the worst, or just disbelief. She prepared for her test by prayer and fasting for three days, in concert with all the Jews in the city. (Esther 4:16)

Esther, the Jewish exile in a foreign court, pretended to offer a simple invitation to a feast. However, she was using wisdom from God to save her people. We may think we have to act immediately to confront an injustice. Perhaps, like Esther, we would be well served to pause and pray first. Then we can act wisely, yet with sincerity.

In the early church, the Philippians are urged to “become blameless and pure, ‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’ Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky.” (Philippians 2:15)

As we seek wisdom to deal with situations, we must look to God first. The first part of the Matthew 10:16 verse says, “I am sending you out [as sheep among wolves].” It is God who sets the course. It may seem to be dangerous, but we can trust that God is with us in and through it all, just as God worked through Esther’s courage to save the Jews in Persia.

Is there a current situation where you need to be both wise and circumspect?

How can you be a child “of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation”?

Pentecost: Ordinary Women-Frances Perkins

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at some women who are our faith fore-mothers. Some are famous, some are in the Bible, some are almost forgotten. Jerome Blanco, writing for Life for Leaders notes, “From beginning to end, the Bible suggests a straightforward and happy truth, that the seemingly ordinary world we spend our days in is not marginal to God’s story, but central to it…And this means everything to me, as I live out my everyday life, most elements of which I can only consider ordinary. Because the collection of our ordinary lives, lived out as creatures in the created world, are somehow what God deemed worth making, worth taking part in, worth redeeming, and ultimately, worth dwelling with.” 

This week, in honor of Labor Day, we’re meeting Frances Perkins. I recently heard about her and wanted to know more. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her as his Secretary of Labor. She was the first woman to hold a cabinet position in the United States and remained the Secretary of Labor for 12 years (longer than any other appointee). In that position she helped with the creation of the New Deal and especially with Social Security.

She worked for laws setting minimum wage, pensions, unemployment insurance and child labor laws. We are all beneficiaries of that work. She was born Fannie Coralie Perkins in Boston on April 10, 1880 and died in 1965. Her life is evidence that an ordinary woman, doing ordinary things can have broad ramifications.

While at college at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Perkins majored in physics, and minored in chemistry and biology even though they were not the typical ‘feminine’ subjects of the time. Her focus changed during her senior year when she took a course in American economic history from Annah May Soule. All students were required to visit the mills in Holyoke, Massachusetts.

Perkins was appalled at what she saw, and later said, “From the time I was in college I was horrified at the work that many women and children had to do in factories. There were absolutely no effective laws that regulated the number of hours they were permitted to work. There were no provisions which guarded their health nor adequately looked after their compensation in case of injury. Those things seemed very wrong. I was young and was inspired with the idea of reforming, or at least doing what I could, to help change those abuses.”

In 1910, as Executive Secretary of the New York City Consumers League she focused on the need for sanitary regulations for bakeries, fire protection for factories, and legislation to limit the working hours for women and children in factories to 54 hours per week.

Perkins foresaw the Depression while working with, then Governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt as NY State Industrial Commissioner. Rising unemployment concerned her, “We have awakened with a shock to the frightful injustice of economic conditions which will allow men and women who are willing to work to suffer the distress of hunger and cold and humiliating dependence. We have determined to find out what makes involuntary employment.”

When FDR was elected president, he appointed Perkins Secretary of Labor. She noted, “I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.” After leaving the Department of Labor in 1945, Perkins wrote The Roosevelt I Knew, a best-selling biography of FDR published in 1946. President Truman appointed her to the United States Civil Service Commission. This was followed by a career of teaching, writing and speaking until she suffered a stroke.

Perkins is our faith fore-mother not just because of the important things she did, and also because she recognized “the door might not be opened to a woman again for a long, long time, and I had a kind of duty to other women to walk in and sit on the chair that was offered, and so establish the right of others long hence and far distant in geography to sit I the high seats.”

Frances Perkins is recognized by the Episcopal Church in Holy Women, Holy Men as a ‘saint’. Her feast day in Mother’s Day. Perkins was simply an ordinary woman who used her God-given gifts to improve life. She listened to her heart and to God and made a difference. 

Perkins reminds us, “There is always a large horizon…. There is much to be done …. I am not going to be doing it! It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”

What is God and your heart calling you to do?

Is there a small or large change you can make to brighten the lives of others? 

You can read more about Frances Perkins