Week beginning 11th July, 15th Sunday of the Year

‘It’s been a testing time’, is a common expression, often used when life has been a bit tough, but not so bad, really.

One saint, for whom the above expression would not have been an exaggeration, was our own diocese’s St Mildred of Thanet (Tuesday 13th / obit ca 725). The name, Mildred, means
‘peaceful counsel’, a name she lived up to.

The daughter of the local Kentish king, she was sent to a French convent for studies, where the impious abbess foresaw the personal benefits of marrying the young Mildred to a local prince. Mildred would have none of this, desiring instead to offer herself to God as a nun.

Anger overwhelmed the abbess who tried burning Mildred alive in an oven, only to find after three hours, that not one hair of her head was singed. There followed beatings and assaults, but still Mildred remained resolute, that her vocation lay in the cloister.

She escaped, eventually returning to Kent and landed at Ebbsfleet, where she left, embedded in a rock, the mark of her saintly foot. (St Augustine had previously landed here in 597, when he brought his mission to the Anglo-Saxons, at the bidding of Pope St Gregory the Great.)

She joined the community at Minster-in-Thanet, where she eventually became Mother Abbess. Greatly loved and revered as a living saint, she led by example, even during her final years when she endured a painful and lingering death, which she gladly united with Christ’s suffering and Passion.

A ‘Mother Theresa’-figure of her time, her fame and popularity within Kent eclipsed even that of St Augustine’s cult at Canterbury.

She is often depicted holding a church, which is both a salient reminder of her love and support for the 8th Century Church, but also an encouragement for us, to discern our vocations as saints, fearless in our pursuit of holiness and the desire to do God’s will as obedient servants of the Church.

Minster Abbey was re-founded in 1937 as a house of Benedictine nuns. www.minsterabbeynuns.org