Colophon probably said all it wants to say about St Gertrude in 2007 (under her universal feast day, 16 November); but St Edmund of Abingdon pushed her out of the calendar yesterday, so we are keeping her feast on the anniversary of her death, which seems appropriate given that popular piety associates her with a prayer for souls in purgatory rather than anything else. Personally, I find the idea of a Benedictine nun "suffering a conversion" rather enchanting, and while I take a very British attitude to the revelations and raptures, which, to be fair, embarrassed Gertrude herself so much that she begged God to allow no outward manifestation of the graces he bestowed, her love of learning and graceful Latin style warm the cockles of my heart. Her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is well-known. Less well-known is her influence on St Teresa of Avila, Yepez and other great Carmelites or the fact that she is Patron Saint of the West Indies. She died at the age of forty-five or six, still marvelling that God had allowed so sinful a creature as herself to live on earth.

That last sentence shows how different some saints are from ourselves. We are very conscious of our rights, of our dignity. We react with outrage if those rights are infringed (it may help if a tabloid comes along to record our outrage, but not all are so "lucky"). Nothing wrong with that, of course, until we look at our Lord Jesus Christ and mark the dignity of the Man of Sorrows. Then we can begin to feel uncomfortable, feel that we are strutting about like the proverbial cock on a dunghill. It is difficult to combine modesty about ourselves with a proper sense of our own worth as children of God, created in his image and likeness. St Gertrude was shaped and formed by the Rule of St Benedict, and I think her sense of herself as simultaneously the worst of sinners yet redeemed by grace is attributable to her having absorbed the Rule's teaching on humility. Only the truly humble can keep the two in tension. Like Luther, she knew herself to be simul pecctor et iustus, or as Hopkins put it
I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
    Is immortal diamond.
Coal and diamond are both forms of carbon. I wonder which you and I are, don't you?