Good day Saint Supporters!
So Bertha of Kent sent Olga of Kiev packing in our last matchup, which is probably fortuitous, as "VOTE KENT THS LENT!" is a great slogan, and honestly, I don't know what I would have done with Olga. So on to today's matchup, by way of an esoteric anecdote.
I studied theology at Wycliffe College, a famously low-church seminary. One day in chapel during Lent, our principal, George Sumner, was preparing to celebrate. Our sacristan (the luckless student in charge of worship) noticed that he was wearing a faded blue stole (blue being the colour for Advent) that looked like a rat had been chewing on it. The poor sacristan knew that purple is the liturgical colour for Lent, and did her best to enforce the rule.”
“Principal Sumner!”, she said, in a horrified whisper, “Your stole isn’t purple!”
“Really?”, he said in his Boston accent, pretending to examine the stole. “Well, it’s purple enough” and off he went into chapel.
While he didn’t say so, Principal Sumner was invoking the thought of Richard Hooker, one of our saints in the ring today. Hooker, an Anglican priest and theologian, lived in a time of intense conflict in the Church of England. Reformed clergy, influenced by the most extreme trends of protestantism as advocated by the likes of Calvin and Knox, were deeply hostile to priestly vestments and any other kind of worship that seemed Catholic. Conservative clergy looked to the past and wanted to continue some Catholic traditions carried over into the Tudor church.
Hooker was one of those peaceful fence-sitting moderates who seem so rare today. His response to these church debates was to invoke a Latin term, adiaphora, which means “things indifferent”. Essentially, Hooker said that whereas Jesus said we must do some things, like remember him during Communion, Jesus didn’t say anything about other things, like customs in worship, so do them if you like or don’t do them, whatever makes you happy. So Hooker wouldn’t have been greatly offended by a purple stole worn during Advent. Could any debates over worship in your home parish be settled by someone saying “Adiaphora!” in a loud voice?
Today we remember Hooker for a huge body of work, including guides on how to read and interpret scripture that we still follow today. I would say his main contribution was to chart the “media via”, the centre way in Anglicanism that keeps us united despite the differences in style and customs between our congregation
Whereas Hooker definitely lived and wrote (a lot!), Scholastica, on the other hand, is a rather shadowy figure who may or may not have existed. She was widely known and admired in the early medieval church, and several Anglo-Saxon writers told stories about her, including the charming one about how she prayed to God to send the rainstorm to keep her brother St. Benedict and his companions for a long chat and a (chaste) sleepover.
It was not long after St. Benedict’s pioneer rule for male monastic communities that the first communities for women began to appear in Europe. Given the celebration of virginity and chastity among women that stemmed from the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it’s not surprising that the first convents had strict rules about sexual morality and chastity. Scholastica seems to have been most well known to the early church as an example of chastity. Stories about her were written and used as tributes to real-life, noble born English women, like Hild, the 6th century Benedictine Abbess of Whitby, who played important roles in the growth of the church in England (see https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/whatley-saints-lives-in-middle-english-collections-life-of-st-scholastica-introduction).
I suspect today that Hooker will win the day over Scholastica because he’s a famous Anglican, and Lent Madness is, after all, an Anglican geek fest. However, spare a thought for the wise and pious Scholastica, who reminds us that the saints don’t have to be real to inspire us.
Here's the link for voting: https://www.lentmadness.org/2023/02/scholastica-v-richard-hooker/
Blessings this day,
Michael
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