I hope – though you can never tell these days – that everyone has heard of Florence Nightingale, and that most people know of her work nursing wounded British soldiers at Scutari during the Crimean War. But I am sure that few know about her religious beliefs. They were not simple. She was reared in the Unitarian Church, but later became a member of the Church of England. She was a woman of prayer, and in an earlier age would undoubtedly have been known as a mystic. Shortly before her seventeenth birthday she wrote in her diary ‘On February 7th, 1837, God spoke to me and called me to his service.’

Eventually Florence decided that God was calling her to be a nurse. Her family was horrified. In her day, nursing was done mostly by disabled army veterans or by women with no other means of support. They had no training at all. It was common practice never to wash or change the sheets on a bed, not even when a patient died and his bed was given to a new patient. But Florence learned that in Kaiserswerth, in Germany, the Lutheran Order of Deaconesses was running a hospital of a very different kind, and she decided to go there to train. Back in England again, she used the influence of Sidney Herbert, a family friend and Member of Parliament, to be appointed supervisor of a sanatorium in London. Under her guidance, it turned from a chamber of horrors into a model hospital. The innovations she introduced were, for their day, little short of revolutionary. She demanded, and got, a system of dumb-waiters that enabled food to be sent directly to every floor, so that nurses did not exhaust themselves carrying trays up numerous flights of stairs. She also invented and had installed a system of call bells by which a patient could ring from his bed, with a valve attached to the bell which opened when the bell rang, and remained open so that the nurse could see who had rung. ‘Without a system of this kind,’ she wrote, ‘a nurse is converted to a pair of legs.’

Then war broke out in the Crimea and Sir Sidney Herbert, now Secretary of War, obtained permission for Florence to lead a group of 38 nurses there. Quite deliberately she chose as many as possible from Church of England and Roman Catholic convents: 14 Anglican nuns and 10 Roman Catholic nuns. She commented that if they were to have the stamina to do the work that awaited them, they needed more than physical strength. They needed spiritual resources. And indeed they did. Conditions in the Crimea were appalling. Blankets were rotting in warehouses while the men did without, because no one had issued the proper forms for their distribution. The lavatories in the hospitals had no running water, and the latrines were tubs to be emptied by hand. But no one emptied them, since official regulations did not specify which department was responsible for doing so. The result was that the hospital had a foul stench that could be smelled far beyond its walls. Many more men were dying in hospitals of infection than of wounds. The chief concern of many Army doctors was that the nurses might usurp some of their authority. Florence gradually managed to win the doctors over, and to reform hospital procedures, with spectacular results. And, as you will remember, she became famous for patrolling the wards at night, carrying a dim lamp, to make sure that all was well and no one was in need of help. She is still remembered as ‘the Lady with the lamp.’

Throughout this time, Florence herself relied heavily on her own faith, though often it was sorely tested. Eventually, it seems, God spoke to her again and said, ‘You are here to carry out my programme. I am not here to carry out yours.’ She wrote in her diary, ‘I must remember that God is not my private secretary.’ And when, on her return to England her health broke and she became a semi-invalid herself, she began an anthology of mystical writings, called Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen, and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale. It was her contention that mystical prayer is not just for professional religious people, for priests and monks and nuns, but is an essential part of the every-day life of ordinary people.

Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to [Jesus] and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her. [Luke 10.40-42]. Today’s Gospel makes hard reading for those of us who try to live lives of busy usefulness. We do our best to put our faith into practice. We spend long hours working away at this task or that. It goes against the grain to appear idle whilst others get on with the work. But we need to learn this lesson, that in our own strength we can only achieve a fraction of what we can do if we wait upon the Lord. For ‘those who wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.’ {Isaiah 40.31].  

It is, I think, no accident that St Luke places today’s Gospel reading, about Martha and Mary, immediately after Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, which we heard last Sunday. There the ones to be condemned are the priest and the Levite, hurrying no doubt to fulfil their liturgical obligations in the Temple and, as they see the robbed and wounded traveller, passing by on the other side. Those who place their duties to the Church before their obligation of love and care for their fellow men and women are entirely missing the point of the Gospel. But so too are those whose lives are all busy-ness without prayer and contemplation and a resting or waiting upon the Lord. All too soon, like Florence Nightingale’s other 14 nurses, the ones who were not nuns, they will run out of steam. Those other nurses became, as she put it, ‘worshippers of Bacchus’: in the face of the appalling conditions of the Crimea, they turned to drink, and failed to last the course.

A namesake of mine, E S Woods, who was Bishop of Lichfield from 1937 until his death in 1953, once wrote this: Men who desert their prayers in order to get more quickly to what they fondly call work, are like a stoker on a liner, who should put out his furnace fires and try to tow the ship himself.  Over half a century later the imagery is dated: ocean-going liners no longer have furnaces, or stokers. But the truth is still the same. St Benedict summed it up centuries ago in three words which have become something of a motto for the Benedictine way of life which was followed in this place for many centuries before the Reformation and which I would still wish to see as our motto today: Laborare et orare. To work and to pray. Benedict’s vision was not of work as prayer nor or prayer as work: both are mistranslations. Rather, he saw the Christian life as a rhythm in which work and prayer become so interwoven that it is impossible to tell where work ends and prayer begins, or vice versa. Without a rhythm of this kind, we are, frankly, quite lost as Christians. I have a fear – a real and terrible fear – that worship and prayer are becoming to those who call themselves Christians the things we do until and unless we have a better offer. And then the call of a holiday or an outing or the children or the grandchildren intervene – and worship and prayer are entirely forgotten. And that is a denial of the Gospel.

Forty seven of us have just come back from the most wonderful ten days spent together: first a week in the Austrian Tyrol and then an all-too-brief stay of two nights in Oberammergau to see the Passion Play. In Achensee we had a week of wall-to-wall sunshine, the most beautiful of locations and the most luxurious of hotels. In Oberammergau we had all the variety of living in local homes – including in rooms above a master cuckoo-clock maker, which made for some an interesting nocturnal experience – and in a place which seemed to specialise in every calorie-laden temptation in the world. It was holiday. Sheer holiday. But then we discovered this. A holiday which is also a holiday from God is no holiday at all. The highlights for most people were not the mountains or the lake or the architecture or the cuisine – wonderful though all of them were – but the moment when we broke bread together in a simple eucharist in a seminar room, and the time we spent together watching the story of our salvation being retold by the latest generation of villagers who have been re-enacting that story since the year 1634. We rediscovered ‘the one thing needful’ and it transformed all the rest of our time together. We rediscovered ‘the better part’. And I for one pray that it will never be taken from us – or from you.