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July 28
Lucy Burns, Stanley Rother, Gerard Manly Hopkins, and Johann Sebastian Bach
David Barnhart
July 28, 2025
The Bach Museum in Ehrfurt, Germany, 2022. Own photo.
Today marks the feast days, in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches, of the church musicians Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel, Henry Purcell, and Heinrich Schütz. Today marks the death of Bach in 1750. It also marks the death of Antonio Vivaldi, in 1741.
Today is the birthday, in 1879, of Lucy Burns, badass suffragist and close friend of Alice Paul, who we remembered on July 9. In addition to organizing the National Women’s Party and picketing the White House, she epitomized the women’s rights’ struggle with police authorities since she spent a lot of time in prison, was force-fed during hunger strikes, and at one point was even stripped and handcuffed in a standing position in her cell for a whole night. The women imprisoned with her, in an “I am Spartacus” show of solidarity, stood with her all night long.
Today is also the birthday, in 1844, of Gerard Manly Hopkins, priest and poet, whose stunning natural imagery showed that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Today is also the birthday of civil rights activist Anne Braden, who we remembered on March 6.
Today also marks the martyrdom, in 1981, of Stanley Rother, a Catholic priest and missionary in Guatemala who was gunned down by a right-wing death squad. Though he had warning that his name was on a hit list, he remained with the people he served, making a reference to Jesus’s own words by saying, “the shepherd cannot run.”
Reflection:
Johann Sebastian Bach said:
“Harmony is next to Godliness.”
and
“All music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the soul's refreshment; where this is not remembered there is no real music but only a devilish hubbub.”
The Episcopal prayer for the day includes the following words:
“Be with all those who write or make music for your people, that we on earth may glimpse your beauty and know the inexhaustible riches of your new creation in Jesus Christ our Savior; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”
I couldn’t resist including this photo of a Bach figurine from the museum in Ehrfurt.
Lucy Burns, at a 1917 speech before the National Women’s Party, gave a masterclass on organizing and putting pressure where it is most needed:
“It was because we focused public attention upon the White House — it was because of that, ladies and gentlemen, that we all went to jail. It was not because we held a banner, it was not because occasionally when the public knew that arrests were going to be made, a crowd assembled to see these arrests. We were arrested because they wanted to break up the most effective method of propaganda for the national enfranchisement of women that the women of this nation have ver yet discovered.
We went to jail and we are glad that we did it because it was enormously worthwhile. It kept before the people of this country and of other countries day by day clearly the fact that the head of this government — this champion democracy of the world — was not only refusing the enfranchise women who were pleading at his gates but was arresting them and having them sentenced to ridiculous terms, not recognizing that if they were offenders at all they were political offenders and entitled to honorable treatment — that it was the last thing in the world for the head of a great Administration to put the stamp of a criminal upon honorable women.”
There is a famous photograph of Lucy Burns leading a women’s march in which she is carrying a banner with the phrase “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”
Prayer: Great Mystery, we see that spiritual force has bodily consequences. Your prophets often put their bodies on the line. Help us to recognize the spiritual in the physical, and to grasp that what we do to our neighbors’ bodies has spiritual consequences for ourselves. Amen.