Harriet Tubman, A Holy Worker Par Excellence

In yesterday’s DM we honored work as a forge of holiness.  And in recent DMs we remembered black heroes and sheroes of old.

Harriet Tubman (c. 1820-1911) is one of those sheroes.  Called the “Moses of her people,” she escaped from slavery and then committed herself to assisting others to escape.   

Called a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, she made about nine precarious trips south to free others–around 70 people in all, historians tells us.  

On these nine very risky journeys, she assures us, she never lost a single person in the process.

As an enslaved child in Maryland, she was already put to work at five years of age.  When 12 years old, she intervened when a master was beating a black man and in the process was hit with a metal object that rendered her with severe headaches and narcolepsy the rest of her life.

She served as a scout, spy, guerilla soldier and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War and is recognized as the first African American woman to serve in the military.  She would dress as an old woman and wander streets of Southern cities talking to slaves and gathering reconnaissance for the army that way. 

As a nurse she dispensed herbal remedies to black and white soldiers alike who were dying of infection and disease.

She worked with the army in Union-held portions of South Carolina and participated in one of the more daring raids of the Civil War–a nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June, 1863.  

She helped guide Union soldiers along mine-filled waters, and then coming ashore, they rescued 700 enslaved people from plantations nearby.  All the while, slave owners and Confederate soldiers were shooting at the rescue team.

After the war, she entered the battle for women’s suffrage, joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony in that quest.  

She also cared for her aging parents and worked with a writer to develop her autobiography. 

With very modest financial resources, she opened a Home for the Aged for impoverished Black people near Auburn, New York and died in that home of pneumonia in 1911.

We recognize in her accomplishments the same courage and bravery, vision and generosity, commitment to action for justice—in short, holiness–that we find in her sister Sojourner Truth and brother Frederick Douglass.

See Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work.

And Fox, Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth.

Banner Image: Mural, Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center, Cambridge, MD. Photo by Kirt Morris on Unsplash

Queries for Contemplation

What most inspires you in Harriet Tubman’s story?  Do you see it embodying parallel bravery of people like MLK, Jr. and Jesus and Alexei Nevalny and Sister Dorothy Stang?

Recommended Reading

The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time

Thomas Aquinas said, “To live well is to work well,” and in this bold call for the revitalization of daily work, Fox shares his vision of a world where our personal and professional lives are celebrated in harmony–a world where the self is not sacrificed for a job but is sanctified by authentic “soul work.”
“Fox approaches the level of poetry in describing the reciprocity that must be present between one’s inner and outer work…[A]n important road map to social change.” ~~ National Catholic Reporter

Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth

Fox’s spirituality weds the healing and liberation found in North American Creation Spirituality and in South American Liberation Theology. Creation Spirituality challenges readers of every religious and political persuasion to unite in a new vision through which we learn to honor the earth and the people who inhabit it as the gift of a good and just Creator.
“A watershed theological work that offers a common ground for religious seekers and activists of all stripes.” — Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice.