On This Day

Lord Almighty, blessed is the one who trusts in you. – Psalm 84:12 (NIV)  

“On this day, in 1709, a small group of Cisterian nuns was dispersed and exiled from their French convent,” I read on some “On This Day” list. Why did this little item merit a bullet point along with other seemingly more relevant events like the crash of the stock market (1929) or the formation of the Red Cross (1863) or even the heist of the Jewel of India by Murph the Surf (1964)? 

The nuns were forcibly separated because of their study of Jansenism. More a belief system than a doctrine, Janesists wrote that women had as much right as men to pursue a religious vocation; that following one’s own conscience was more important than following church rules; that God’s grace was more powerful than human actions, and that God was vaster than human comprehension and therefore beyond gender.  

Listen, the nuns were cloistered, meaning they had very little personal contact with the outside world, but they could pray and think and read and write. Even after they were separated, the women kept praying and thinking and reading and writing about the rights of women, and the necessity of morality over institutional righteousness, and the primacy of God’s grace, and the non-binary nature of the Holy. Their ideas persisted and continue to spread their influence more than 300 years later. 

On this day in the year 2025 is not the first day, nor, alas, the last, in which someone is going to try to silence your prayers, your thoughts, or your words about those same ideas. But don’t stop. Because what you are doing is changing the world.  

Prayer
Dear God, we place our trust wholly in You. Amen.

About the Author
Rev. Jennifer Garrison (formerly Brownell) is a writer, spiritual director and pastor living in the Pacific Northwest. Her published work most recently appeared in the book The Words of Her Mouth: Psalms for the Struggle, available from The Pilgrim Press.