Happy Friday! It’s my birthday tomorrow so today we discuss May 7^th and also birthdays.

I feel like I’ve not covered a lot about saints recently, so you have two women of faith to read about today. The first is an obscure young woman called Joan of Arc who on May 7^th 1429 ended the siege of Orléans by pulling an arrow out of her shoulder and just getting right back on it. This is the first result about a woman on this Wikipedia page so really getting the party started here:

But perhaps the most interesting fact connected with this early stage of her mission is a letter of one Sire de Rotslaer written from Lyons on 22 April, 1429, which was delivered at Brussels and duly registered, as the manuscript to this day attests, before any of the events referred to received their fulfilment. The Maid, he reports, said "that she would save Orléans and would compel the English to raise the siege, that she herself in a battle before Orléans would be wounded by a shaft but would not die of it, and that the King, in the course of the coming summer, would be crowned at Reims, together with other things which the King keeps secret."

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08409c.htm

There is only one woman of faith who is specifically remembered on May 7^th, so thank you for coming through for me the Episcopal church, with Harriet Starr Cannon, who founded an order of Augustinian nuns and dedicated her life to helping others. Here’s a contemporary account of her order’s work in a Memphis in the grip of yellow fever:

That love should speak to our hearts ; as we read of these fruits of divine faith, our own love should kindle, and our faith should be strengthened; the supernatural world is brought very near to us; it seems more real, for a season, than this. There is another reason why some account of these things should be given. It is said by the skeptical theorists of our day, the philosophers of naturalism and materialism, that self-devotion in a religious life is a past idea; that it pertains to an overstrained and false enthusiasm; that women have no mission now to lift them above the average level around them

http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/csm/memphis1.html

Also, 8^th of May is Julian of Norwich day in the Anglican calendar, so this can serve as your reminder that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

Finally, not about a saint, and not about my birthday, but it’s about a birthday and it’s written by a woman and it always makes me laugh. Here is Nicole Cliffe’s Benedict Cumberbatch fan fiction:

NICOLE: And, of course, I was devoted to the memory of my late husband.

REPORTER: Yes, how long had he been dead at this point?

NICOLE: (firmly) Thirty years.

REPORTER: Such a long time for you to have been devoted to his memory, especially considering you are now only twenty-eight years old yourself.

http://the-toast.net/2014/07/02/benedict-cumberbatch-the-fan-fiction/

Have a great weekend! Enjoy the heatwave London!

Alex.