Holy God, thou didst choose thy faithful servant Harriet Bedell to exercise the ministry of deaconess and to be a missionary among indigenous peoples: Fill us with compassion and respect for all people, and empower us for the work of ministry throughout the world; through Jesus Christ our Lord who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Bedell was a missionary to the Seminoles who did not work for their religious conversion. I fear Bedell’s ministry of works, but not conversion, point to salvation by human effort, rather than the grace of God. There is no doubt that she performed many acts of charity in her life. However, the underlying assumptions of her worldview make her unsuitable as an liturgical exemplar of Christianity.
Who ARE these people they are dragging out of the mists of history? It seems to me that this stuff that is getting posted day by day are perfect examples of an overactive committee of self-interested nice TEC persons who are doing their best to correct a gender imbalance they perceive operating in Christian history by willy-nilly adding as many women and social activists of a leftist orientation as they possibly can. And then some nice person writes a lame collect to go with it. Is T19/Kendallharmon.net posting this stuff just to ridicule an abysmally ignorant and utterly partisan current TEC regime? It certainly looks like it.
Many of the new “commemorations” make some of the medieval saints’ stories seem positively logical. “Holy Women, Holy Men” has some good additions, but the entire project was fatally undermined by its obvious and narrow-minded political goals. A great many of the collects amount to ugly, ungainly propaganda — a sort of syrupy progressive hagiography.
As with everything else in TEC, the calendar must bear the overpowering and noxious stamp of our ideologically rigid era.