We Can Be Heroes or Women of Faith in the Post-Biblical era

We all have spent last couple of weeks following this series of awesome sermons about remarkable people of faith. I first thought that my task is the hardest one, to find one exceptional woman among millions of those who followed Jesus Christ in the post-Biblical times, but when listening to those sermons, it feels like I am not alone. Each one of us had a different task to pick one person from large set of candidates. However, I still believe that my task might be the most difficult one. Not only I am one of two preachers with the longest time period to pick from, but also the position of women was quite different during the ages than the one of men.

Let’s try to start from this start. I am persuaded that one of the strongest motivators in our lives is our resistance to pain. We all have some kind of pain in our life, and our effort to get rid of that pain may be one of the strongest decisive factors for us. When the pain reaches sufficient threshold we are willing to do almost anything to get rid of it, without regards whether what we are doing is right, Christian, or even legal in many times. We know how many alcoholics, drug abusers, and even adulterers claimed that they what they were doing fully knowing it is wrong, but the pain they were trying to drown out was so strong, they give in. As Richard Rohr, a famous Franciscan spiritual leader, once said, “if we don’t transform [our pain], we will transmit it.”

There are many different types of pain we can encounter in our lives, but I would like today only about one of them. Feeling of powerlessness. That feeling when we are facing ours or even more somebody else pain, and we cannot do anything about it, can lead many to serious depression, which we could try to oppose by going into some completely irrational and ungodly places.

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat
something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that
you know nothing about.” So the disciples began to say to
one another, “No one brought him anything to eat, did
they?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of
the one who sent me and to complete his work. …”

(John 4:31-34)

There is only one antidote against this feeling of hopelessness, because of course it is always about the lack of hope in the end, and that is to do something. Think for example about the current war in Ukraine. For anybody who spent at least a little bit of time following the current news in the past two years, the impression is so strong, that it can completely crush our life. If we know somebody who has some significant links to the war, and we have some people like this in this church, the feeling is even stronger.

For somebody the pressure is so high, they gave up their life and went to volunteer to Ukrainian army. I know about many Czech volunteers who are participating in some kind of charitable organizations which are helping people affected by the war in various ways. And of course, there are also many funds collecting many for supporting good work to those who suffer. Anybody has an opportunity to do something, and for your sanity, if this touches you, I would strongly suggest to do it.

For centuries, for millennia, women never had even an opportunity to behave to do much, and they had to develop their own strategy how to deal with the pain of the world as they see it (and many men, often the most successful ones, learned that lesson as well).

Which finally leads to one obscure woman I would like to talk about. Her name was Hannah More and she was living in the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of nineteenth century in England (specifically in Clapham). Move your mind to those times, think about novels by Jane Austen, and that for most women there was no chance how to achieve independently almost anything. Hannah More has one advantage above her sisters. She was engaged as was expected, but her betrothed was postponing the wedding for so long time (in the end more than five years) that in the end he decided to break the engagement and he got married to somebody else. I am not sure whether it was a legal requirement or just him being a decent man, given that after five years of waiting Miss More was almost ineligible to get another husband, he promised to her and paid an annual rent for the rest of her life, which allowed her to life a decent independent life. She never married, but used her life for changing her life.

She became one of the founding members of what is now called The Clapham Sect, group of faithful Christians, members of the Church of England, who were guided by their faith to change the society according to their faith. Some of her opinions and goals are now hard to accept, times changed a lot, but she certainly achieved a lot. Her biggest personal achievement was founding of the first systematic school system for girls, she produced hundreds of pamphlets for education of literate poor, and one of her less direct achievements that she organized a group of people supporting William Wilberforce and persuaded him to pick up the cause of the abolition of slavery.

When looking at her life there are couple of differences which I think can illustrate what I think is the main lesson we can learn for our life of everyday heroes.

Get power v. love and help

This is the basic difference in the life situations of man and woman in history. Well, actually, it is not only about women, because of course most of men in the past and mostly everybody today are not in the situation where they could leave everything and start changing the world.

Still the primary of our society, even when we are not considering violent solutions, is to achieve some amount of power, and then use it for changing the world. One of two video-clips I hoped to run during this sermon, but then I decided to cut them because they were too long, was from the first part of the Lord of the Rings, where Boromir asks to take the evil ring of the Dark Lord Sauron to defend his country against the same evil. I am not saying that all politics is always evil, we need more Christians and other people of good will in politics to get out of the marasm we currently find ourselves, but it worries me how much we rely on this one way how to change things, and how complicated and dangerous it is.

I am thinking about a Christian non-profit organization which used to work among young girls who were pregnant. They were organizing adoptions and care for pregnant girls trying to persuade them not to go with abortion. They used to have thos posters “Are you in a bad situation? We will help!” everywhere. Even though they were expressly Christian and opposing the mainstream attitude towards pregnancy and sexuality, they were quite respected and I believe they actually helped many girls in difficult situation.

I don’t know what happened, perhaps they considered their previous work too small, or something, but they changed their complete strategy, turned towards politics, and the results are in my opinion complete disaster. Head of the organization made couple of some rather unfortunate statements, some of them sound quite homophobic, they started publish position papers, which were including some unverifiable statements and some really bad statistics and bad science. Once respectable organization is now a joke, and many people I asked about them told me that it is just another proove that “those Christians” are only after power and money. Jews have term “Chillul hashem” (desecrating the name of the God), which I am afraid applies here.

Radical change and destruction v. Improving / do what’s possible

I didn’t want to get much into details about Miss More’s efforts, because some of them are now rather controversial. For example, education of girls was in her time so controversial idea, that for some time she was teaching just reading, not writing. We are in time of the French Revolution, and under the influence of Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, she decided to oppose the influence of the revolutionary propaganda by publishing hundreds of short stories for poor literate Englishmen (and Englishwomen, if she already managed to teach them reading) how they should be content with their life. Most of these books are now mostly ridiculous, but they illustrate her deep distrust to anything radical and revolutionary, even though many considered her to be revolutionary.

It relates to me with another tendency which I could see on many people who actually changed for better, and that is relentless focus on their goal and willing to let go everything else. One of the reasons why Martin Luther in changing the world was exactly this keeping focus on changing the Church and letting everything else to go. Many people then and later were angry with him for not opposing and perhaps even encouraging bloody suppression of the German Peasants’ War by the German nobility. Looking from the other side, it was the only possible way how to keep establishment supporting changes in the Church, and that was the one thing he felt to be called to.

To summarize, what are the lessons we can bring from observing life of our today’s heroine, Miss Hannah Moore?

  1. One thing I don’t know about Miss Moore is her prayer life, but of course, when talking about looking at the needs in the current society, a prayer is the first thing which should be on our minds. If our food is to do the will of the one who sent us, we should better be certain that he actually send us to resolve the issue we see, and that it is not only our attempt to glorify ourselves or to sooth our conscience.

  2. Do you want to help or do you want to change the world? The latter quite often end in some kind of disaster.

  3. Is your central focus you helping or are you willing remain unknown and link together and encourage other people who may in the end be famous for something you started?

  4. Are you focused on your thing and you are willing to let other things go if they jeopardise your thing?

  5. Are you persuaded that “small work” (“práce drobná”, the phrase of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk) is more fruitful and blessed than revolution and destruction?