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.

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, I was thinking for some time I would be talking
about Saint Zdislava of Lemberk, or Catherine of Siena, Hadewijch
and Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, who willingly 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
women in very special positions in life, 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.

There is even a strange phenomenon of what people seem to do
when feeling powerless facing significant challenge. It seems
that for many people this feeling of being powerless is one of
the strongest motivators, much stronger than the interest in
the thing itself. I read a couple of articles by psychologists
warning in the beginning of the current war in Ukraine, that this
feeling of powerlessness may lead to widespread support of weird
extremist solutions.

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).

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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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