The 2011 Service to commemorate the life and work of Florence Nightingale was held at Westminster Abbey at 6.15pm on Wednesday 11 May. This Service also celebrated the professions of nursing, midwifery and of all staff, both qualified and unqualified, working in these services.

The Foundation was honored to have HRH Princess Alexandra, Patron of the Foundation, attend the Service.

Over 2100 nurses, midwives, healthcare professionals and guests attended the event.

The Address was given by David Chapman, Education Development Executive, former Headmaster, Embley Park School, and Principal, Hampshire Collegiate School (UCST) and the Choir of Westminster Abbey sang at the Service.

The traditional Procession of the lamp was led by Joanne McCormack, a Florence Nightingale Foundation Scholar. She was escorted by student nurses from Queen’s and Ulster Universities, Belfast and the Open University. On arrival before the alter she handed the Lamp to Florence Nightingale Scholar Steven Robertson. He then passed the lamp to Florence Nightingale Scholar April Brown. This represents the passing on of knowledge from one nurse to another and highlights the diversity of care given by nurses for the benefit of humanity.

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"Florence Nightingale 1820-1910"

Address delivered in Westminster Abbey, 11th. May 2011
and written especially for the Annual Florence Nightingale Foundation Commemoration Service.

"From the Church of England and other deadly sins, Good Lord, deliver us." Thus wrote Miss Nightingale.

In spite of the undoubted welcome you would afford her, Miss Nightingale will not be with us today: she has not attended a church service since she was a little over thirty years old and I doubt she will deviate from that principle after all this time. "God is no more in church than He is in a ballroom" is her view. She specifically forbade her burial in this royal church and left instruction for her grave to be marked anonymously "FN 1820-1910"

Notwithstanding all of that, I was honoured to be asked to address you in this place, at this the first such service since the one hundredth anniversary of Miss Nightingale’s death. However, I think there is little doubt that the very idea of a Nightingale Service in her honour she would view as distasteful in the extreme. So, out of respect, I will attempt to do what she always wanted her nurses to do: reflect on her example.

In spite of what I have already said, Miss Nightingale was a woman with an all-consuming faith in God, born of a truly modern and comparative approach to the universal search for that God in all traditions: Christianity, Islam Buddhism.

This is, perhaps, not so surprising in the light of the fact that Miss Nightingale was born and brought up a Unitarian, not a Christian, but a dissenter and a radical thinker; educated as such by her father. Until that last day in 1910 she never believed in the literal truth of Christ’s Resurrection. This made her a philosophical and indeed social outsider in Victorian England, a position that made her, in turn, a radical challenger of the Establishment.

Actually, for the Unitarian, Christ’s example is made all the more powerful by His humanity; for Miss Nightingale, He was still destined to become our Great Example.

"Christ," she writes," said I am The Resurrection and the Life�speaking of the Eternal Christ and not of the outward fact. The image of Christ may still be fashioned anew in us.." So, for her, Christ might be reborn in all or any of us; and Christ had been put in the world, in the first place, to bring home the notion of the moral government of God-and that reveals itself for her in working towards the perfection of human society, selfless devotion to making a difference, for the better, in this benighted world.

She writes: "If God has a plan by which everyone is to be brought to perfection, what part is left to us? Everything...it is we who have to do it...Mankind is to create Man, that is the perfection of mankind. If I did not think that I was working as part of a scheme of God to bring us all to perfection I should shirk work..."

To make that difference, she set a determined and rigorous example, by which much was demanded of a Nightingale nurse in terms of self-denial and in work ethic.

Not Nurses but Angels.

But it was never easy and she was always haunted by the spectre of personal failure.

Only God’s apparent willingness to walk with her always, comforts her: and to make sense of her mission she constantly meditates like her great examples, Julian of Norwich and St. John of the Cross; like other mystics, hears the Voice of God. She was deeply impressed by the assertion that God sees us as perfect and wants us to strive through work to bring a similar perfection to our earthly lives. And she certainly believed God spoke to her; notably at Embley, imposing on her at the age of just seventeen, her mission of service. And this, I believe, is where her lack of compromise is rooted, whether with her family, the church, suitors or government ministers. In a very real sense, she had faith that she would be given all the correct answers herself! They would be God-given, if only she maintained the integrity of her relationship with God.

Miss Nightingale here makes a virtue of being an outsider from human society�it sets her free to walk with God alone and to stake the whole adventure of life on seeking to change things for the better for her fellow man. The typical Victorian says "The Poor are always with us": Miss Nightingale thunders, "Why?"

When Miss Nightingale was asked to become one of the first voices ever recorded on wax cylinder, hear what she says:

"When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life...."It is my legacy that matters, she says, not I myself. I will stand or fall by my work and the difference it is judged to have made to mankind. Hence the retreat into anonymity whenever possible; the desire to lie, like St John of the Cross, in an unmarked grave. She refused national recognition because it was fundamentally irrelevant to her concept of existence.

That is why she will not be joining us today!

BUT what does she really want us to learn from her example? Just four suggestions:

• Listen to your voices
• Set your sights high
• Don’t compromise
• Believe you can make a difference

She loved the sentiment behind this prayer of Francis Drake:

"Disturb us, Lord...
Because we dreamed too little;
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, Lord
To venture on wilder seas...
Where, losing sight of land,
We shall find the stars".

She would applaud our amazing progress in scientific knowledge and the standard of medical research - but she would be horrified by our loss of moral and spiritual direction, the drive that is born of vocation.

What Miss Nightingale has left us in terms of hospital design or nursing science is only a very small part of what we are here to celebrate. She would not believe, for example, that hospitals even existed today. To her they were only a pathway to a perfection in which the sick poor would, like the wealthy, be nursed efficiently at home. What is more important is that a woman- yes, of her time , but an example for all time--she goes on touching our hearts and souls because she is the Outsider who takes the steep and rugged pathway, challenging us all, nurses, doctors, managers, all over one hundred years later to have faith that we can make a difference.

May I ask you to remember, as an inspiration to your next steps on that pathway, the description by Elizabeth Gaskell, of Miss Nightingale:

"She has no friend-and she wants none. She stands perfectly alone, half-way between God and His creatures..."

DAVID CHAPMAN, May 2011