The Creation Spirituality Lineage Calling All Social and Environmental Activists, Mystic Explorers, Justice Makers, Cosmic Thinkers, Earth Keepers   Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox  Watch for Matthew Fox's video meditation -- now appearing every Monday!  Harriet Tubman, A Holy Worker Par Excellence   03/12/2024 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. Harriet Tubman, 1895. Photo by Horatio Seymour Squyer, National Portrait Gallery. Wikimedia Commons 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.  Trailer of the 2019 movie Harriet, starring Cynthia Erivo. Focus Features. 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, 1963.    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.  Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, Auburn, NY, U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Wikimedia Commons.   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.