Words 2.6

 Words Twice a Week        2.6

If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available, along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church.  Click here.

Ok – a couple of days late already.  Look – the Olympics are on and I can’t resist watching the things these people can do.  So here’s some days from the church calendar.  Can’t let Fanny Crosby’s go by.  I’ll see if I can get something about days from the earth/world calendar up before the week is over!

Some days from the church calendar -

Feb 10  Scholastica  She was born around 480 in Italy.  An old tradition says she was the twin sister of Benedict of Nursia (who created the Rule of St Benedict and the Benedictine Order.)  Scholastica is credited with founding the Benedictine nuns.

Feb 11  Fanny Crosby (Francis Jane van Alstyne)  She was a poet and composer.  Although blind either from birth or shortly afterwards, but she wrote 8000 hymns, including "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour", "Blessed Assurance", "Jesus Is Tenderly Calling You Home", "Praise Him, Praise Him", "Rescue the Perishing", and "To God Be the Glory" and 1000 secular poems, many of which were set to music.  Crosby memorized five chapters of the Bible each week from age 10, with the encouragement of her grandmother; by age 15, she had memorized the four gospels, the Pentateuch, the Book of Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and many of the Psalms.  In April 1846, Crosby spoke before a joint session of the United States Congress, with delegations from the Boston and Philadelphia Institutions for the Blind, "to advocate support for the education of the blind in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York". She testified before a special congressional subcommittee, and she performed in the music room at the White House for President Polk and his wife.  Among the songs that she sang as she accompanied herself on the piano was her own composition:

   Our President! We humbly turn to thee –

   Are not the blind the objects of thy care?

Feb 12  Charles Freer Andrews  Born on February 12, 1871, he was an Anglican priest and Christian missionary, educator and social reformer, and an activist for Indian Independence. He became a close friend of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi and identified with the Indian liberation struggle. He was instrumental in convincing Gandhi to return to India from South Africa, where Gandhi had been a leading light in the Indian civil rights struggle.  C. F. Andrews was affectionately dubbed Christ's Faithful Apostle by Gandhi, based on his initials, C.F.A. For his contributions to the Indian independence movement, Gandhi and his students at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, named him Deenabandhu, or "Friend of the Poor".

Feb 13   Absalom Jones    He was an African-American abolitionist and clergyman who became prominent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Disappointed at the racial discrimination he experienced in a local Methodist church, he founded the Free African Society with Richard Allen in 1787, a mutual aid society for African Americans in the city. The Free African Society included many people newly freed from slavery after the American Revolutionary War.  In 1794 Jones founded the first black Episcopal congregation, and in 1802, he was the first African American to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church of the United States. 

After becoming the first black and freedman to be ordained as a priest, and as the Constitution's deadline for abolition of the slave trade passed, Jones took part in the first group of African Americans to petition the U.S. Congress.   Jones died on February 13, 1818, in Philadelphia. He was originally interred in the St. Thomas Churchyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His body was relocated to Lebanon Cemetery and then to Eden Cemetery. In 1991, his remains exhumed, cremated and placed in a reliquary in the Absalom Jones altar of the current African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas (now located at 6361 Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia).  A cenotaph was placed at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania marking the site of his former grave.  Ok – hands up, how many people know what a cenotaph is?  Basically, it’s a gravestone marking an empty grave!  Why all that moving of the remains?  I don’t know.

That’s what I got for now…..

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