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The Order of Saint Luke began in 1946 with a group of pastors in New York City, concerned about the worship life of the then Methodist Episcopal Church. For many years the Order was almost exclusively made up of pastors. In more recent years, the Order has grown to include increasing numbers of the baptized who are “lay” sisters and brothers. Wisely, I think, the Order has privileged Sister and Brother as the way we address one another and understand our relationship to one another in the Order. In short, we want to emphasize the simplicity and dignity of each member without distinction to other categories or factors. In the Order we seek to play down hierarchy of any sort.

I say this to preface a concern I want to raise. Resisting hierarchy, or privilege, or recognition should not, I think, cause us to flatten the topography of our community. To do so may be to fail to recognize the gifts and graces that reside among us. We are lay and clergy, United Methodists and other denominations, male and female, some academically trained in liturgy and some not, some professionals in other fields (medicine, law, etc.) and many of us ordinary people living out our daily lives in the places God has set us.

To that end, I want to share what I recently learned about Sr. Heather Josselyn Cranson, who teaches at Northwestern College in Orange City Iowa. She holds a Doctor of Theology Degree in liturgy and liturgical music from Boston University. I will let her share in her own words a recent opportunity she had to lecture in England.

"I wrote my dissertation on the mass and office for the Feast of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, a 12th century British monastic and founder of the Order of Sempringham (also called the Gilbertines). This order was for both men and women, and therefore was a bit scandalous, but it never spread beyond England, and under the Dissolution of the Monasteries it died out. Gilbert's office is a lovely example of medieval rhymed offices, which were particularly popular in England.

"Last February, I was contacted by a woman in England. She lived very near where Gilbert's first monastery was built, and she had instituted a series of yearly lectures to commemorate Gilbert on his feast day, February 4. She had read my dissertation (poor woman!) and she wondered if I would be able to come offer the second lecture next year. A grant from my college was able to make up for the lack of funding from her historical society, and I agreed. Later, she suggested that my whole family come, and Matt and Seraphina decided to come along, too.

"Since Gilbert is actually a distant relative as well as a person of academic and spiritual interest to me (his father's name was Jocelin), I was particularly anxious to see the place were my ancestors came from, and where Gilbert lived, worked, and died. Over the summer, my host and I realized that ancestors on the other side of my family came from Horbling, a town about a mile away from Sempringham. While in England, I was able to worship in a church literally filled with Brownes (my mother's ancestors). In this sense, the trip was as much pilgrimage as it was academic or touristic.

"My title was "Gilbert's Saints: The Norman and English Saints Surrounding the Gilbertine Order." I postulated that given Gilbert's split ancestry (his mother was English and his father was Norman), the sanctoral cycle of the order he founded might well contain saints from each of these groups. The paper is a closer look into who the order revered and possible why."

Sr. Heather is just back from this trip and lecture. We congratulate you, Sr. Heather, and rejoice in what you have added to a very specific period in the church’s liturgical life and prayer.

Sr. Heather is serving on the Order’s Daily Office Revision Team with responsibility for hymns in the daily office. She also serves as the Order’s necrologist, reminding us of those sisters and brothers who have died. She is also revising For All the Saints, our book of commemorations of the saints.

Brother Abbot Daniel