See Me - Angela Merici - The One Year Women in Christian History Devotional

1474–1540

As a girl, Angela had great hair. Everyone said so. But as she got more serious about God, she didn’t want to be seen merely as the girl with the golden locks. So she dyed her hair with soot.

That seems to have been a pattern for Angela’s life: seeing things differently, trying to follow God’s leading even if it challenged conventional thinking.

Orphaned at age ten, she lost her older sister a few years later, and then her guardian uncle. Yet she seemed to grow closer to God with each trial. At age twenty, with no close family left, she looked outward at her community—and saw girls in great need of education. So she set up a school in her home.

This was Italy at the end of the fifteenth century. The nobility sometimes educated their daughters, and some convents gave nuns training beyond their religious duties, but no one was teaching the town girls. Angela knew that if they ever wanted to be more than a pretty face, they needed education.

The vision expanded to neighboring towns. Angela imagined a whole team of women committed to teaching girls, and she took steps to make it happen. At one point, the pope, impressed with her work, asked her to take charge of an order of nuns who were nurses. Angela was so focused on her educational work that she said no—and a few years later she established a new teaching order, the Company of Saint Ursula (Ursulines).

There’s an undocumented story about Angela mysteriously losing her eyesight on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She went on anyway, “seeing” the sacred sites with the eyes of faith. On the return trip, her sight came back. The irony is that vision was never a problem for Angela Merici. She saw a need, she saw the value in the girls she taught, and she saw God’s footsteps in front of her, leading her forward in ministry.

How’s your vision? What has God been showing you? Is there wisdom you need to share with the next generation? Or are there steps to take in your own life to follow God more nearly?

Older women must train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good.

Titus 2:4-5