Hastily Assembled Angels

by the Rev. Katherine Bush

“Hastily assembled angels” is a turn of phrase from a poem by Shane McCrae. It’s a lovely poem, but I’m not building on its themes, just stealing the phrase. It’s a good phrase to describe a group of people we commemorated earlier this week in the Episcopal Church: the Martyrs of Memphis, also sometimes called Constance and her Companions. The women in this group included Constance, Thecla, Ruth, Frances, and Hughetta. 

The too-short version of their extraordinary story is that they came to Memphis to teach (Latin, English, piano, French, and math), taking up positions in and leadership of St. Mary’s Episcopal School. In the 1870s, successive waves of what was then a very mysterious Yellow Fever hit Memphis and the area around it. The worst wave was in 1878, when so many fled or died that Memphis lost its charter as a city for a while. These women, among others, stayed. They had the opportunity to leave; in fact, they were actually ordered to leave by some in authority. And they stayed. They shifted from serving as teachers of young girls to essentially becoming intensive care nurses in an infectious disease ward. Over the course of several weeks that fall, four of the original group of women died, a fifth – Hughetta – caught the disease, but survived. 

Hastily assembled angels, indeed. One angle of their story that always strikes me is how dramatically their lives detoured. Almost overnight, they had to figure out how to transform spaces, and work, and themselves. Scrapping and scraping together resources, reaching out to those most in need against a tide of self-protection and “every man for himself.” They turned what they had and who they were into enough when it might have been all too easy to believe that they didn’t have enough or weren’t already enough to meet this terrible challenge.

There are times and occasions when we can plan and train, when we can move incrementally and strategically. And then there are times when we must hastily become angels. And if you’re thinking that hastily is one thing, but that the “angelic” title is a stretch for the likes of you and me, remember that the word for angel comes from a Hebrew word for messenger. These companions who stayed offered medical care, food, shelter, and tangible support. And just by staying, they became messengers of God’s abiding presence. They were messengers, angels, just by showing up without having to say a word. 

If asked, I’d be willing to bet that a lot of us have encountered some hastily assembled angels, someone who was in the right place to offer us a glimpse of love and grace – whether or not that was the job they signed up for. And, knowing the likes of this community, I’m also pretty sure that, whether you know it or not, you have been a hastily assembled angel for someone else along the way. It doesn’t have to be in a time of plague and pestilence (though we’ve known a bit about that too), it can just be a regular old weekday when we’re to summon quickly a little bit of compassion or patience or encouragement to share with another companion.