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March 9
Gregory of Nyssa and Tom Fox.
David Barnhart
March 09, 2025
Stourhead House and Garden, England, 2011. Photo by Angela Barnhart.
Today is the feast day, in the Episcopal Church, of Gregory of Nyssa, who died in 394. He was an early church theologian who made significant contributions to the Nicene Creed and the doctrine of the Trinity. Like Origen, he believed in universal salvation, and because he believed that human beings reflect the image of God, he argued against the institution of slavery.
Today also marks the death of Tom Fox, a Quaker peace activist who was abducted as a hostage and killed while working in Iraq in 2006. He was part of a Christian Peacemaker Team working with human rights groups.
This is also the birthday, in 1895, of Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African-American woman doctor in the United States.
Reflection:
Rebecca Lee Crumpler said
Selfish prudence is too often allowed to come between duty and human life.
Tom Fox answered the question, “why work in Iraq” with the following:
We are throwing ourselves open to the possibility of God’s grace bringing some rays of light to the shadowy landscape that is Iraq. We are letting ourselves be guided by something that is beyond rational, intellectual analysis. Gardens beneath which flow rivers can again be the dwelling place for the people of Iraq. Everyone whose government and corporations are playing a role in this land needs to throw open the book of their heart. They need to let their Light run before them as they bring redemption to those in power who are seeking to rule from a place of fear, violence and shadows. That truly would be the highest achievement.
Gregory of Nyssa wrote:
Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.
Moses’ vision of God began with light; afterwards God spoke to him in a cloud. But when Moses rose higher and became more perfect, he saw God in the darkness.
Gregory of Nyssa wrote of the way Christ imparts immortality and divinity to human beings:
He was transfused throughout our nature, in order that our nature might by this transfusion of the Divine become itself divine, rescued as it was from death, and put beyond the reach of the caprice of the antagonist.
Prayer: God in whose image we are made, give all humans the sense of reverence for this image so that they might never harm or oppress another. Amen.
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