We Can Be Heroes or Women of Faith in the Post-Biblical era
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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).
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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
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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.
Take over v. Link, encourage
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Masculine tendency is to conquer, take over, defeat enemies.
Another video I wanted to show was from a good Christian film
“Amazing Grace” from 2006 about William Wilberforce, and how
exactly Hannah More helped liberating slaves of the British
Empire. Instead of fighting to get herself to the front, she
linked together people who might be interested, and introduced
them to William Wilberforce, who as MP then struggled with the
future direction of his life after his conversion to Jesus. Given
her previous experience with publishing books for the wide
population, she helped to publish the autobiography by freed
black slave, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano” (1789), which was the first testimony about the horrible
life of slaves on the British plantations in Caribbean and which
helped to turn the public opinion about the slavery in Britain.
Till this day she is known for her other endeavours and her role
in the abolition of slavery is usually mostly ignored.
Is it more important to help or to be famous?
Radical change and destruction v. Improving / do what’s possible
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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.
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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?
