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 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.
There are number of interesting and famous women of faith during
the centuries I could mention: Saint Macrina, Hildegard of
Bingen, Saint Clare, if I wanted to be a Czech patriot, Saint
Agnes of Bohemia, or Catherine of Siena, Hadewijch and Mechthild
of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, who willing put down her life
for her persuasion, and that’s just me getting into the Middle
Ages, there were of course many many others, and I should not
ignore the modern female saints like Mother Teresa of Calcutta
or Sophie Scholl. I could also stop and talk about Katharina
von Bora, a Protestant patron saint of pastors’ wives., or
Idelette de Bure, a poor wife of the Swiss reformer, Jean Calvin,
forgotten in life and mostly forgotten afterwards as well.
In the end, I have not chosen either of them. While thinking
about them and all other women throughout the ages, it occurred
to me how different is the male and female style of service,
and how these famous women were different from most other women
in their time. Most (not all) of them were quite extraordinary
themselves: daughters of kings, highest nobility, or otherwise
extraordinary women, not sharing their fate with their less
fortunate sisters. However, I believe, that those other women,
who were completely forgotten, have a huge lesson to teach
everyone of us these days, both men and women.
I was thinking how for a man, it is typical when seeing a problem
to be resolved, our first instinct is to get power so we can
control things and change them. And it really doesn’t matter
whether these are man we now mostly hate like Adolf Hitler or
Vladimir Lenin, and their ends were terrible, or people who
we adore, like Martin Luther King or perhaps in some weird
sense Gándhí. Even when they didn’t even fight for power for
themselves, and even if that power was not the formal one (like
in the case of Mr King), their first instinct was the same:
acquire the power and then use it for good. And too often it
ended up with that acquisition of power, and good ends were
forgotten.
For centuries, for millennia, women never had even an opportunity
to behave in such way, 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).
----
I was thinking a lot about
.. Problem ... inability to fix them ... depression ... how to deal
with it?
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.. https://youtu.be/-k3ABfmCr2I?t=56 Boromir TOO LONG
Moreover, most of them, given the ever-present misogyny of the
time, are hidden behind the much more famous men
And even those who famous on their own, like Hildegard of Bingen,
Catherine of Sienna, or our own Saint Agnes of Bohemia, were
daughters of kings or local nobleman, who are hard to follow by
us mere mortals.
If the only thing possible is the great thing, we are hopeless
if we cannot achieve that. What can I do? What can I do against
the genocide in Ukraine?
"Do something" allows everybody to participate and nobody has an
excuse. It is not your call to save the world, Jesus already did
that. Our task is to press on.
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Male way Female way
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conquer submit
take over link, encourage
radical change improving/do possible
start again focused on the goal
glory invisible
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