The battleground is Great Britain as David of Wales goes up against F.D. Maurice of the Church of England. A bishop beloved by the Welsh vs. a social activist and theologian beloved by Anglo-Catholics. The winner advances to take on Julia Chester Emery.
In yesterday's match-up, a controversial pairing that brought together two ancient Egyptian ascetics, Antony of Egypt squeaked past Mary of Egypt 51% to 49%. People had a lot to say about this battle with a record number of comments recorded and if you thought your vote "didn't really matter," Antony prevailed by a mere 150 votes out of nearly 6,000 cast. He'll go on to face Basil the Great in the next round.
Speaking of voting, you should know that the Supreme Executive Committee keeps former President Jimmy Carter on retainer as an impartial election observer. This is just a reminder that Lent Madness suffrage entitles you to ONE vote per day. Big Brother (in the form of the technophile member of the SEC -- who used to work for IBM!) is watching. If you have more than one person (not including dog, cat, ferret, etc) in your household he/she/it can obviously also cast a vote on another device.
The elections so far have been clean but this is just a friendly reminder in light of yesterday's very close battle. So, your Christian duty this Lent is to vote. Just don't sin against God, the SEC, and the Lent Madness faithful and do it more than once.
David of Wales
The patron saint of Wales, David was a bishop of Menevia during the sixth century. Originally called to the monastic life, he ended up as a well-known church leader, teacher, and preacher. He founded numerous monasteries and churches throughout Wales and the surrounding areas. David also presided over two synods against Pelagianism (a heresy that denied the existence of original sin). The first synod was at Brefi around 560 and the second was at Caerleon (the “Synod of Victory”) around 569.
Legend has it that a miracle took place at the Synod of Brefi. While David was preaching a sermon in the village of Llanddewi Brefi, the place where he was standing rose up to form a hill, and a white dove landed on his shoulder. Commenters jest that the location of the miracle was already rather hilly, but the story is cherished as his best-known miracle. The white dove is seen as a symbol of his ministry. David is also associated with the leek, a symbol of Wales.
David lived a disciplined and ascetic life. His strict monasticism was modeled after the earliest Christian ascetics: hard manual labor without even the use of draught animals, silence, long hours of prayer, and a diet of bread and herbs without any meat and alcohol. No personal possessions were allowed.
Some accounts claim that David lived past the age of 100 years. His biographers described that the monastery was “filled with angels as Christ received his soul.” One biographer cited David’s last words to his community: “Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed, and do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.” This entreaty is remembered as a well known Welsh saying: “Do ye the little things in life” (Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd).
Through the leadership of David, many evangelists journeyed throughout the British Isles and Brittany, spreading the gospel.
Collect for David of Wales
Almighty God, you called your servant David to be a faithful and wise steward of your mysteries for the people of Wales: Mercifully grant that, following his purity of life and zeal for the Gospel of Christ, we may with him receive our heavenly reward; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Frederick Denison Maurice
Frederick Denison Maurice was born in 1805. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a barrister or lawyer. He was ultimately unable to receive his degree, because as a Unitarian and a dissenter from the established church, he refused to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, which defined the doctrine of the Church of England. Maurice moved to London, where he began to write in support of social reforms.
It was during his time in London that Maurice converted to Anglicanism. In 1830, he left London to study at Exeter College in Oxford. By 1834, he was ordained as a priest and four years later he wrote his seminal work The Kingdom of Christ, in which he held that the Church was a united body, transcending individual sects, denominations, and disputes. While Maurice’s work would ultimately be an early source of Anglican ecumenism, it also roused suspicion among more conservative wings of the church. In 1846, he became a professor of theology at Kings’ College, London.
European society changed rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century, as advances in industrialization ultimately led to the rise of a new middle class, which created new social tensions. During the same year that socialist Karl Marx famously called religion “the opiate of the people,” Maurice wrote, “we have been dosing our people with religion…when what they want is...the living God.” Later, inspired by the Revolutions of 1848, a wave of political upheavals across Europe, Maurice became one of the organizers of the Christian Socialist Movement, seeking to, as he said, engage in the conflict with “unsocial Christians” and “unchristian Socialists.” The Christian socialists sought to apply Christian principles to laissez-faire industrialism, advocating for a collective responsibility for the poor and those in substandard factory working conditions.
Unlike Marx, the Christian Socialists would advocate for the active involvement of the Church in improving the lot of the working class. Maurice’s book Theological Essays, published in 1853, ultimately cost him his job as a professor when it was viewed as being heterodox—too much at odds with the established Church. Using his existing knowledge and teaching experience to improve the lives of the working class, he founded the Working Men’s College to promote his ideals. Ultimately he returned to the academy, teaching in Cambridge from 1866 until his death.
Collect for F. D. Maurice
Almighty God, who restored our human nature to heavenly glory through the perfect obedience of our Savior Jesus Christ: Keep alive in your Church, we pray, a passion for justice and truth; that, like your servant Frederick Denison Maurice, we may work and pray for the triumph of the kingdom of your Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
-- David Sibley
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199 comments on “David of Wales vs. F.D. Maurice”
Maurice wrote, “we have been dosing our people with religion…when what they want is…the living God.”
and that did it for me. I enjoyed learning about both of them today.
I went on a pilgrimage to Wales a few years ago. It was wonderful. We stayed in the town of St. David and attended St. David’s Cathedral on Trinity Sunday. We visited a number of ‘thin’ places throughout the country – wells and very old churches. Back in the day, 3 (if I remember correctly) pilgrimages to St. David’s were equal to one pilgrimage to Jerusalem. My vote goes to David!
Heart (David) vs head (FDM) again for me today. Of course, those can be and assuredly are paired the opposite way for some! For my particular Lenten discipline, "be joyful" is the instruction I need to follow. And in some ways, I find FDM just a little too gratifying to my own politics: it's almost too delightful to learn of someone like him. That's on me, of course, not on him. But in favor of joy and against even the whisper of smug in myself, I vote David. (Also I've been to Wales and found it deeply moving, even as a feckless tween/teen. And I feel a sentimental attachment to the fictional Brother Cadfael.)
Yep, I can't let go of F.D. Maurice. We need more like that. Even though my name in religion is Brigid, and a good friend has St. David for a patron, I can't resist a leftie....
This just in from the "Really? Are You Still On That?" Department: The mysterious image from yesterday that was supposed to be Mary of Egypt really seemed more like dear little St. Agnes, who grew a hair leotard to protect her modesty when the bad guys dragged her out in public and tore her clothes off as part of their plan to humiliate and deflower her. But maybe it was Mary, in an ultrasuede scuba suit getting ready to walk on water. Now, off I go to get a life...
A tough choice. Politically and socially I side with Maurice, but this Celt has a warm spot in his heart for David of Wales. The Celt in me won.
This person of Welsh descent cast a difficult vote for F.D. I feel sure David will understand.
What a great quote: “we have been dosing our people with religion…when what they want is…the living God.” How true this is today, too!
Again this year I find it heartening to read so many thoughtful and caring comments.
I think Frances Perkins would approve F. D. Maurice!
No contest. F.D. Maurice changed my entire understanding of Anglicanism. He gets my vote every time.
"While Maurice’s work would ultimately be an early source of Anglican ecumenism, it also roused suspicion among more conservative wings of the church."
Hmmm. Ever and always thus?
As a proud Scot, trying to decide between a Welshman or an Englishman was a tough choice 🙂
David's written bio skewed the results towards Maurice, a person of all of us postmodernists can relate to more than a mytho-poetic figure David is portrayed as.
As a father of 4, I have to go with Augustine on original sin. Anyone who has observed infants and toddlers long enough knows it to be an empirical fact not a metaphysical theory.
As a mother, Montessori teacher, and Christian educator, I disagree! Any behavior less than stellar always seemed to me to have been learned. "Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven. " Doesn't sound like they're evil from the get-go to me!
I voted for FD Maurice, 19th Century prose and all. Here's a dynamite quote from him:
"My great wish is to show you, that the Anglican Church was led, not by reason of any peculiar excellence or glory in the members or teachers of it, but by a course of providential discipline, to put worship and sacraments before views, to make those acts which directly connect man with God the prominent part of their system, – that which was meant to embody the very form and meaning of Christianity, – and those verbal distinctions which are necessary to keep the understanding of men from error and confusion, as its accessory and subordinate part."
Here it is, all you who would claim that FDM is not Anglo-Catholic.
That is a great quote, thank you.
Morris, I mean Maurice, gets my vote because of his social reform, but it's a moot point since Julia Chester Emery is going to WIN the next round!
Hope voted today for the saint associated with doves and leeks. Mom made her look up "leek" in the dictionary since she first thought the guy from Wales was linked to "leaky doves," meaning birds who continually have to go to the bathroom. Sigh.
Oh how I would love to vote for David of Wales as I am a great proponent of doing the little things in life. But as a social worker I just have to go with Maurice. When I read an èarlier comment that he influenced George MacDonald I was absolutely convinced I had made the right decision.
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For you, David, saint of my partly Scotch-Irish heart.
I vote for ecumenism and Maurice. I think we need to remember that we are all one in Christ Jesus. I am certainly not de-saintizing David. He is a wonderful man upon whose shoulders we stand. But there is work to be done in the world, in God's name of course, and Maurice directs us to that path.
Maurice wrote, “we have been dosing our people with religion…when what they want is…the living God.”
The Living God ... oh, yes
Love it! “unsocial Christians” and “unchristian Socialists.”
What good is it to have a guy named Maurice in the bracket if no one speaks of the pompatus of love?
thanks for bringing me back in time. i loved that line in the song~!
David gets my vote. Anyone who stays on task for 100 years deserves it.
Wonder if the NSA is watching the vote as well as the former IBMer?
God bless and preserve Hope and Skye and their family. I wait for your wonderful posts, Mom. Thank you.
Looks like the Space Cowboy ( some people call me Maurice), stuffed the ballot box! Ah. The pompatus of love!
Oh, I am laughing so hard!! Pompatus of love!!!! What a great way to end this day!
Hi, I am not getting e-mail notices although I have entered my e-mail address many times. Now I have to slog through face book and get distracted.
Wow, this was a tough one for me: I'm an ecumenical ecclesiologist with a theology blog named for joy and a devotion to the Holy Spirit! (the dove, of course) I knew nothing about either saint coming in (except maybe, vaguely, that David was the patron saint of Wales), so I had no initial preference.
KEW's helpful comment made me contemplate the temptation to self-satisfaction when encountering a saint or bible story that confirms our political views, so that inclined me towards David. So did considering joy as an interior disposition, since my Lenten journey this year is leaning internal rather than external.
But finally my decision was based on the fact that David faithfully shepherded his community for so many years, aware that he was a model for them, so that his parting injunction could be one of imitation in the little ordinary things.