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Spirituality of Truth -- Florence Nightingale
Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message
August 12, 2020
In the Episcopal Church, today is the Commemoration of Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, statistician, prophetic advocate for women’s rights, and mystic. She died on August 13, 1910, but since our saints’ kalendar already remembers Jeremy Taylor that day, we honor her today.
She was born in Florence Italy to wealthy English parents, who named her for the city of her birth. Before her, “Florence” was not a name given to women in English. She was raised Unitarian, but after several deep religious experiences where she said she “heard the voice of God,” she became an Anglican, though she continued to have doubts and reservations about part of the Creed until her death. She also pursued a career outside of the home (unusual for middle class and noble women of that era) as a nurse, inspired by women religious “deaconesses” in the German Lutheran tradition.
Her experiences as a field nurse during the Crimean war (1853-56), where most fatalities came not from battlefield deaths, but from infections transmitted in the field hospitals where the wounded were taken, led her to campaign for medical reform throughout the U.K. These included building an infrastructure supporting hygienic and effective treatment, with provisions for uncontaminated food and water, regular cleaning of bedding, adequate nurse-calling mechanisms to boost nurse visits while reducing needless and exhausting walking and stair-climbing, pre- and in-service training of nursing staff, as well as—especially noteworthy to us now in the era of Covid-19—regular use of facial masks and hand-washing to reduce cross-contamination.
She gave speeches and seminars throughout the U.K. using graphic displays of the statistics and science behind the practices she advocated. For her, spirituality supported science and science supported spirituality, because all true spirituality was based in considered truth, not wishful thinking. Her speeches are the among the first recorded use of pie charts and bar graphs. Reducing the death rate in Crimean war field hospitals from 42% to 2%, she became such a beloved public figure that “Florence” forever after has been a commonly used name for women in English.
Some object to her inclusion in the sanctorale because of her “heretical rejection” of some clauses of the Creed. I believe her inclusion is right and just, since it underscores that holiness is not something bestowed by the opinions one holds, but rather, by our willingness to follow the voice of God speaking to our hearts and serve others.
She was in the vanguard of promoting women’s rights, something reflected in letters she wrote in 1851:
“Women don’t consider themselves as human beings at all. There is absolutely no God, no country, no duty to them at all, except family… I have known a good deal of convents. And, of course, everyone has talked of the petty tyrannies supposed to be exercised there. But I know nothing like the petty grinding tyranny of a good English family.”
“What I complain of the Evangelical party for, is the degree to which they have raised claims upon women of ‘Family’—the idol they have made of it.”
She applied in 1852 this last criticism not only to the Evangelical party, but to the larger Church as well:
“The Church of England has for men bishoprics, archbishoprics, and a little work… For women, she has—what? I had no taste for theological discoveries. I would have given my head, my hand, my heart. She would not have them. She did not know what to do with them. She told me to go back and do crochet in my mother’s drawing room: or, if I were tired of that, to marry and look well at the head of my husband’s table. You may go to Sunday School if you like, she said. But she gave me no training even for that. She gave me neither work to do for her, nor education for it.”
Grace and Peace,
Fr. Tony+
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