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January 25
David Barnhart
January 25, 2025
Own photo. Bolivia, 2009.
On January 25, 1890, Nellie Bly completed her travel around the globe in just 72 days, echoing Jules Verne’s fictional account in Around the World in Eighty Days. Bly was a journalist who had previously shocked the world with her investigative reporting on the treatment of women with mental health issues. She is a reminder of the importance of journalists and other truth-tellers in the work of liberation.
Today is also the Feast Day of Gregory of Nazianzus, an early church leader who had a major influence on the development of trinitarian theology.
In addition to being the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, it is also the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, which began on January 18 with the Feast of the Confession of Saint Peter. Most major Christian denominations observe it officially, though it is doubtful that most people who identify as Christian know it exists.
Reflection:
Gregory of Nazianzus wrote:
“God always was, and always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when giving the Oracle to Moses in the Mount. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily.”
Nellie Bly wrote:
I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly--a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.
Once there, she shared:
From the moment I entered the insane ward on the Island, I made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity. I talked and acted just as I do in ordinary life. Yet strange to say, the more sanely I talked and acted the crazier I was thought to be by all except one physician, whose kindness and gentle ways I shall not soon forget.
And also:
I asked some of [the patients] to tell how they were suffering from the cold and insufficiency of clothing, but they replied that the nurse would beat them if they told.
While treatment of mental health has vastly improved in the 130 years since Bly’s writing appeared, there are still massive disparities in treatment and the largest provider of mental health services in many states (including my home state of Alabama) is the prison system.
Prayer: Great Physician, heal those struggling in body and mind. Please destroy the systems of health exploitation that magnify and profit from human suffering, including the for-profit so-called “health insurance” conspiracy in the United States. Heal our society such that human well-being matters more than profit for shareholders.