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Vida Dutton Scudder’s SOCIAL CHRISTIANITY: “Mysticism and Social Passion”¹
Joanna B. Gillespie, 2009

Introduction
More than a half-century after her death, Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954) is again attracting attention in the Episcopal Church. She is currently included in the volume of supplemental liturgies Lesser Feasts and Fasts.² A “revolutionary Christian” on the cutting edge of her era’s social thought and action, Scudder was a beacon among those Episcopalians and others for whom church was not merely a “bulwark of the social order” but “a challenge to sacrificial adventure.”³ A professor of English Literature at Wellesley College for forty-one years, (1887-1928), she was also a supportive voice and influence in the early settlement house movement, and left a trail of publications through which her mental and spiritual evolution can be traced.⁴ A uniquely gifted churchwoman in the geographically and technologically expansive post-Civil War era of American history,⁵ her impact can best be understood as part of the larger current of change then reshaping American Protestantism—Social Christianity.

Social Christianity, not an organized movement but an overarching cultural perspective at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, emerged when Protestant theology and attitude toward “mission” began to look at social outreach through a sociological lens. The adjective “social” justified local activism—e.g., seeing a mission field nearby or in one’s own city. Jane Addams, the famous founder of Hull House in Chicago, known as innovator of the settlement house movement and democracy training with immigrant Americans, considered the adjective “social” to signal “an ethical commitment to human interaction with real world issues”—expressed in topics such as social justice, social settlements, social philosophy, and of course Social Gospel.⁶

This essay locates Scudder amid the various Social Christianity actions and public involvements growing out of a new sense of “mission” from that new field of vision. It opens a window onto a less-explored aspect of Scudder’s powerful historic discipleship, her spiritual rootedness in a sacramental theology of everyday life. Her language for this spiritual stance, “the Mystical Body of Christ,” was incarnational and holistic, a rejection of abstract idealism in favor of applying Christianity to the everyday realities of the industrializing world.⁷ Scudder’s particular Social Christianity focus—urban poverty—enlarged both spiritual and workaday horizons for many early twentieth century citizens, men as well as women; in fact, she was a likely inspiration for the unlikely image of well-dressed, hatted- and gloved- Episcopal women praying outside a courthouse for condemned immigrant Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, in the late 1920s.⁸

A privileged young woman of her times, Scudder earned Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Smith College as early as 1887, and chose to turn toward her world’s gritty realities (urban slums and the struggles of immigrants) rather than content herself as an ornamental Boston lady. Her young-adult quest for a life engaged with this “Reality” was the challenge: “I cannot shut myself away [in libraries] and study medieval legends while today [poverty-stricken] men (sic) are perishing for the Bread of Life.”⁹ Determinedly exploring working-class life, a subject usually considered outside the boundaries of polite conversation among upper-class Victorian women, Scudder began a lifelong process of fusing her religious commitment with social radicalism. Her initial collegiate focus, English literature and art, gradually expanded to encompass the ills generated by the shameful condition imposed on American industrial workers, proceeding from that to Christian Socialist thinkers.¹⁰

Scudder’s remarkable engagement with her times—her personal ‘Social Christianity’¹¹—motivated her public activism and thus today her significance in Episcopal Church history. Less widely known was her formative role in the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross (SCHC) that she entered in 1889. A quietly independent laywomen’s third order association founded in 1884 by Emily Malbone Morgan, this ‘sisterhood’ was one of many new organizations of women dedicated to spirituality and social outreach emerging in the late 1800s.¹² Combining vows to a daily prayer discipline and to spiritual and social self-education, Scudder’s lifelong role in the SCHC formed the religious community within which Scudder was both nurtured and nurturer. Her dedication to combating the vast ignorance of average middle-class Christians about the conditions in which industrializing Americans had to live developed the radical political stance shaping her own Christian mindset, and influenced many SCHC study programs and retreats as well as its monthly prayer agendas called Intercession Papers (hereafter IPs—described below). Her crucial organizational contribution to SCHC was the design and administration of the SCHC membership formation process called Probation, making Scudder the second most influential figure (after Emily Malbone Morgan, the originator) in Companion history—and conscience raiser in the larger church circle of Episcopalians and other liberal secularists.¹³

Scudder’s concomitant authorial enterprise spanned nearly seventy years, beginning with a scholarly article in the 1885 Atlantic Monthly, “The Poetic Element in Medieval Art,” and her final book, My Quest for Reality (1952, two years before she died at age ninety-three). This was a second autobiographical reflection summarizing her lifetime of spiritual, intellectual, and theological quest. In all, her print legacy included five books (three novels, two biographies, and two autobiographies), more than two hundred essays and scholarly papers, plus meditations, litanies, prayers—a remarkable chronology assembled in the earliest authoritative biography by Corcoran (Note #3).

As a Christian socialist within and influential beyond the Episcopal Church, Scudder identified “deep wells of religious faith” as the source of both her spiritual vocation and activism.¹⁴ An outspoken critic of “complacent” Protestant churches, she and like-minded contemporaries saw the Social Christianity lens as giving them permission to investigate unsavory neighborhoods in their own backyards.¹⁵ Seeking first-hand experience in the developing concept of neighborhood settlement houses amid tenements in the slums, Scudder took a two-year leave from her Wellesley professorship (1893-1895) to help establish the earliest college settlement in Boston (Denison House) with Helena S. Dudley, head worker.¹⁶ Coming to maturity in an era when Episcopal membership symbolized status in the power elite, and gave educated women an implicit license to override barriers of class and social innovation, Scudder’s voice enabled her to “draw people to settlements...[and] rouse [others] to find out for themselves.”¹⁷

The unique element in Vida Dutton Scudder’s Social Christianity, however, was her “thirst for the holy” grounding her public activism.¹⁸ Any reformer, however well intentioned, must learn from the mystic to free the self from ego, she wrote. Mysticism has to become sacramental, “must see the Spirit moving through flesh and sense,” must experience the whole physical and social order becoming “the harmonious body through which Love, the Lover, Uncreate (sic) and Eternal, can find expression.”¹⁹ For Scudder, that vocation led her to work for political, social, and economic change “confronting liberal Christianity’s shallowness.” The social and the spiritual were “well matched in her: deep pain and despair balanced by deep prayer and silence” as she immersed herself in studying past Christians as models and spiritual companions who had pursued that path.²⁰

Scudder was not alone in her Social Christianity “reality” mindset; she enjoyed a wide circle of socially minded colleagues, recently brought to life in an essay by the Rev. Jacqueline Schmitt.²¹ On the dark side of this era’s burgeoning organizational creativity, American infatuation with monetary individualism was clearly revealing itself as not uniformly successful except for the few super-rich, leaving a disgraceful underside in its wake. Vida Dutton Scudder thus personified the juncture of two elements in late 19th-early 20th century social and Episcopal church history: the realization that America’s materialist, individualist pursuit of monetary success was creating a world likely to collapse of its own greed (critics such as Karl Marx had published this view well before the twentieth century); and the simultaneous explosion of Social Christianity inspired activities among women, thanks to their new levels of education, organizational experience, and public voice. Reclaiming Scudder’s impact today honors her as a precursor of these twentieth century ‘new women’, and her inspiring women’s expanded engagement with the suffering world in the Episcopal twenty-first century.

Scudder’s political and educational accomplishments were cast in a political vocabulary more familiar and accessible to today’s readers than her specifically spiritual and poetic writings which today strike our ears as hyper-Victorian.²² However, in the “slow crawl” of consciousness change in American church historiography, her ultimate elevation to the roster of honorary ‘saints’ on the frontiers of spiritual life (in Lesser Feasts and Fasts) remains religious, not merely political and educational. From within her own deep religiosity, Vida Dutton Scudder was the rare early 20th c. voice who challenged Christians (and many secularists) to acknowledge a broader range of social responsibility for society’s injustices than was previously within the horizon of white Protestant churches.²³

Scudder’s Spiritual and Literary Footsteps
An overview of Scudder’s biography, with illustrations from her many publications to locate its chronology, begins on her first wide-world horizon: she was born in India (1861) to Congregational missionary parents. After her father’s early death, she returned with her mother to their New England roots and publishing family (E. P. Dutton). An elite education—Girls Latin High School in Boston, and the new degree program for women at Smith College, plus European travel and study—cultivated her youthful idealism.²⁴ In England, young Scudder was inspired by then-new Anglo-Catholic outreach programs and inner city ministries wakening her to the “plethora of privilege” that had cocooned her life; a first step outside her own social class was to join the new civic-activist Salvation Army.²⁵ In 1875, adolescent Scudder and her mother were among the Bostonians drawn to the Episcopal Church via the liberal magnetism of the Rev. Phillips Brooks at Trinity Church, leading her to dismiss childhood church experience as “somnolent and decorous” rather than vital or life-involving.²⁶

Scudder’s forty-one-year professorship at Wellesley College [1887-1928] established her voice and reputation as advocate of educated women’s new social responsibilities, though she did not openly align with the 1920 political agitation for women’s vote. Instead she used the public platform of college teaching to develop her own perspective on industrial society’s dehumanizing authority structures. She affiliated with radical groups on the cutting edge of American Protestantism as early as 1887, co-founding the Christian Socialist Society with the Rev. William Dwight Porter Bliss.²⁷ Scudder advocated socialism not as political revolt that sought wider “material decencies” for poor workers, but as something more spiritual,—its “rich moral possibilities for the up-building of character.” The language of character was an early twentieth-century euphemism for the Protestant ethic and middle-class virtues, sometimes personified in the figure of Sir Galahad, a familiar motivational symbol in elite New England boys’ boarding schools.²⁸

Unusual for the ease with which she employed the language of power as well as of character, Scudder earned the early-twentieth-century sobriquet “embodiment of the Social Gospel.”²⁹ By the beginnings of the twentieth century, she condemned as racist the anti-immigrant bias of the U.S. Immigration Restriction League. Her 1902 essay “Democracy and Education” challenged the taken-for-granted WASP hegemony—assumption that the [White Anglo Saxon Protestant] American was “in charge of everything.”³⁰ Rather, she located “the genius that was America” in the “larger mosaic of talents” of its many immigrant populations.³¹ “My most impatient phase of radicalism [made me] bitterly resent the fact that the colleges where I was educated were middle-class institutions,” her first autobiography acknowledged; “we are all segregated in the prison of class...our culture is bound to remain tragically cramped and incomplete.” The three books published from Scudder’s 1890s classroom lectures trace her intellectual and spiritual evolution into overt political radicalism and have been called the major scholarly achievement of the U.S. Anglican Left in that era.³² Stimulated by the “unprecedented understanding of the whole historic process” she found in Lenin and Marxist philosophy, Scudder embraced their perspective on social power. By 1907 she articulated her perspective on church reform in the voice of her fictionalized Saint Catherine of Siena, the “vision that [has] sustained religious idealists through the ages: a purified church as a righteous society…one great company of lovers under Christ the King of Love.”³³

A 1901-1903 physical and psychic breakdown gave her a kind of ‘time-out’ that she spent in Italy,³⁴ melding her political idealism with the radical Christianity of two Italian saints then unfamiliar to American Protestants: St. Catherine of Siena (Scudder deemed her the very prototype of modern activist women), and St. Francis with his band. of Brothers (a discipleship community dedicated to physical poverty and spiritual exaltation). Both saints notably challenged the institutional and religious authority of their eras.³⁵ [In a later essay she would contrast her friend Jane Addams with St. Catherine, identifying the time-bound contrast in their stances: St. Catherine, confronting evil in both church and world, was also a dedicated contemplative exemplifying the charismatic energy produced from unifying the active and the quiescent. Jane Addams and her colleagues lived in 20th century times, requiring the thornier public path of twentieth century American Protestant doctrinal rigidities and leading her into civic compromise and – “diplomacy” – that all but erased the spiritual roots of her originating motivation.³⁶

Returning to her position at Wellesley, and attributing the strength to make that decision to the spiritual companionship of Saint Catherine, Scudder again plunged into social outreach activities: she formed an Italian Club for immigrant men at Denison House, edited and published both the letters of St. Catherine (1905) and the novel based on Catherine, The Disciple of a Saint (1907). In 1911, besides joining the Socialist Party, Scudder became vice-president of the Church [Episcopal] Socialist League organized by Bishop Bernard I. Bell, and published Socialism and Character (1912), an ardent, idealistic volume advocating reconciliation between secular radicals and those church members who were offended by faith in economic determinism rather than in Jesus Christ exclusively.³⁷

In 1916, with Scudder, Morgan, Jane Addams and visiting Chicago Companions at Adelynrood [the SCHC retreat house in Byfield, MA], the majority of those present signed a resolution to the church’s General Convention [comprised entirely of men: lay, clergy and bishops], calling that governing body to action instead of lip service regarding concerns of Labor.³⁸ This audacious act generated internal self-searching among some Companions: did the SCHC vow of intercession for social justice require all Companions to hold the same position on a controversial social issue, or not? Founder Emily M. Morgan held firm to the ultimate policy prevailing—that Companions unite solely in the Cross and Christ, rather than unanimity on a public issue—lest the Society itself “shatter on the rocks of partisanship.” Ideals of Social Justice “not being definable for all time,” Companions have continued through succeeding ages to pray about social issues but relying on votes. [In Scudder’s old age writings, she too came to this position.³⁹]

That same year, 1916, Scudder’s “Litany of the Holy Ghost” written for the SCHC chapel at Adelynrood, asked (among other petitions) “that it may please thee to strengthen the hearts and hands of all who fight for the justice of a larger life for all, hear us, O Holy Spirit.” Other social-class petitions prayed for mercy “upon men deadened by monotonous toil, and dissipated by meaningless diversion...On women who seem to bear children in vain... on children without childhood...That it may please thee to give us our daily bread sanctified by common love and common interest, Hear us, O Holy Spirit.”⁴⁰

Scudder applied her class-consciousness to the Victorian literature she taught (calling it “precious”), and to privileged college women along with the unprivileged, noting that the virtues of the “Haves”—mercy, pity, generosity—were hard to cultivate by “Have-nots, in an unclean tenement on a starvation wage.” Christ’s poverty was meant to free human beings from worldly interest and constraints while industrial poverty left people helpless in the face of worldly institutions and economic powers.⁴¹ Scudder’s angle of vision saw the public programs instituted by well-intended “children of privilege” (often middle-class white churchwomen) as indeed high-minded: “protect[ing] childhood, cleans[ing] politics, and eliminat[ing] disease.” These were however more “an homage to social peace” and generated more from “an attitude of pity” than realistic understandings of modern societal power. To Scudder, such idealistic goals constituted “brave, helpless experiments of philanthropy and reform” actually avoiding economic realities and ignoring the crushing weight of worker impotence.⁴² She had founded the Church League for Industrial Democracy in 1919 [hereafter CLID] to develop her own and Companions’ sophistication in promoting legislation for social equality and human betterment, e.g. against child labor.

Scudder’s Social Christianity concerns, often channeled through CLID, aimed to awaken the wider church to the realities of deplorable housing and unsustainable health conditions. During the 1920s, Scudder joined the secular American Civil Liberties Union, the Fellowship of Reconciliation for supporting her WWI pacifism, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—organizations originated “by devout churchmen who also wanted their ‘churches’ to be larger than isms.”⁴³ Scudder was one of the first women invited to lecture at an Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, MA (later published as The Social Teachings of the Christian Year, 1922)⁴⁴. In that same era, she outraged Wellesley College trustees by opposing a proffered gift of John D. Rockefeller money, calling the methods of its accumulation an “offense to the moral sense of the community.” An earlier article in The Atlantic Monthly, “Ill Gotten Gifts to Colleges,” had publicized her position; in the end she retained her faculty position but again this effort had a serious physical and psychological impact on her health.⁴⁵

In 1925, Companion Scudder spelled out a Companionship credo, “The Life of the SCHC,” for the Society’s Annual (membership) Conference. She labeled the Companionship’s bond of “holy affection,” as its vocation, the type of corporate life to which Companions pledge themselves—and “our corporate work as intercession,” through which [Companions] pray “with ardor and ever-widening intelligence, for social justice and religious unity (italics added).” Only personal consecration [can connect us with] the world’s needs and “away from private-mindedness.” Further, “intercession for justice and unity [presents] a sharp challenge to spiritual idealism.” Pointedly dismissing good-works sentimentality, Scudder wrote that Companions “believe, nay claim, that intercession is as natural and potent a force as gravitation.”⁴⁶

Scudder addressed the question of whether the SCHC vocation is “fundamentally different from women wearing a garb, habit, or costume.” Companions constitute their own version of a religious order, she averred, for women who crave “a more avowed and absolute consecration [but are] unable to leave everyday life;” what Companions pledge is “a special quality in one’s union with the world (italics added).” She contrasted SCHC with other types of women’s organizations: it was not founded to foster reform (e.g. the League of Nations), or to serve people actively (e.g. the settlement house movement), not a social club one could just ‘join.’⁴⁷ Rather, the distinctive contribution Companions seek “to make to the life of the Mystical Body, falteringly and often with failure, is steadfastness...in the secret work of healing through intercession those social disorders and religious dissensions which rend the human family (italics added).”⁴⁸

After her retirement from Wellesley (1928), Scudder continued very public witness, analyzing her political alignments: “How far can a Christian mind throw its fortunes in with communism? My conviction is that there is an impassable gulf,” despite its appeal as an ideal and its provocative reading of economic victimization. She enumerated the pros-and-cons of modern socialism (often too formulaic, or a mere platform for argument) and acknowledged the gulf between loyalty to Christ (often demanding a sacrificial dimension of its holy goal) and the socialist denial of religion.⁴⁹ For her, “real Christian Socialism” was physically, realistically embodied in the Jesus of scripture who stepped out of stained-glass church windows into the sordid streets of ghettoized hollowness and spiritual deprivation.⁵⁰

During the 1930s, among many publications and lectures, Scudder composed a Franciscan Litany for the 5th edition of the SCHC Manual, modernizing St. Francis’ spiritual community for her Companions that concluded with a “thanks for Sister Clare.” Celebrating the renunciation of property-ownership central to Francis and his companions, Scudder praised their “passionate desire to share...beauty and blessing with the least and lowest.” Separate petitions prayed for freedom from the lust of ownership, from trying to bargain with God, and from greed due to “acquisitiveness of the affections.” Twentieth-century practicality led her to include the wise but daunting challenge that they must also “reconcile personal release from greed with the organization necessary to social progress” (italics added)⁵¹.

Also during retirement, Scudder for a time lectured weekly at the New School of Social Research in New York City (then a fertile arena of radicalism), organized an Institute of Franciscan Studies (jointly sponsored with the SCHC), and published her autobiography On Journey (1937), probably not anticipating that she would later produce a retrospective sequel, Our Quest for Reality (1952). She composed a class-sensitive version of the hymn, “Thy Kingdom, Lord, We Long For.”

  “Thy Kingdom, Lord, we long for, / Where love shall find its own;
  And brotherhood triumphant / Our years of pride disown./
  Thy captive people languish / In mill and mart and mine;/
  We lift to thee their anguish / We wait thy promised sign...”⁵²

Scudder’s essays confronted the ‘sacred cow’ of American property ownership, naming the theology of stewardship—(holding one’s possessions in trust for God)—the only “truly ethical” restraint on greed. Even that could be unsatisfactory on two counts: it did not challenge the source of wealth (as she had the Rockefeller gift), only the use of it; and wealth itself contained the power to close ones’ eyes to the brutal physical reality of exploited workers and resources—her spiritual and physical definition of “Reality.” She chose to celebrate the “divine communism of light and air” producing lilies instead of monetary wealth; she defined “Ours” as a holy word, but not “Mine.” Christians have no other option than “throwing in their lot” with anything that opposes “a proprietary system.”⁵³

A moment of divine revelation in San Damiano, Assisi, Italy on April 14, 1932, transfigured Scudder’s final Italian visit: “As I knelt where the crucifix spoke to St. Francis, the same voice sounded in my ears: God, repair my Church... in my attempted obedience I seem to see that as the key to all my activities. I made an Act of Consecration not for myself only, but for CLID, for [the Rev.] Bill Spofford and all the splendid young priests who work for that League.” She experienced a supernatural blessing: “all my dearest activities and interests come under that motto: my two Franciscan books, the Wellesley School of Christian Social Ethics, the Companionship, a great many of my lectures and courses, and perhaps the majority of my articles. I’m glad the Voice was so clear in my ears, in the dusk of that ancient chapel… I shall not forget.”⁵⁴

During the 1940s, the organizational form of retreats increasingly attracted non-Roman Catholics and social radicals as well as Companions and other Protestant Christians. Scudder published Retreats At Adelynrood, a journal essay later reprinted as a widely circulated pamphlet.⁵⁵ It was both prescriptive (modern women need no fewer than three days to allow the opening of their “mystic sensibility”...and to discover the “commonplace as sacramental”), and descriptive (“retreats are the instrument that unites liturgical worship and personal devotion”). She led retreats, commending a daily pattern of prayer, solitude, and spiritual counsel, encouraging readings such as “St. John of the Cross, St. Augustine, Meister Eckhard, The Cloud Of Unknowing, Plotinus, Woolman, Fox, Berdayev, John Bennett’s Communism and Christianity, Toynbee, Alan Watts, and Edith Hamilton on myths—but no daily newspapers.”⁵⁶ Many of her retreats involved clergy friends, including Bishop James Huntington, Founder of the (male) Order of the Holy Cross in 1884, whose biography she published in 1940.⁵⁷

Also in the 1940s, Scudder’s continuing interest in issues of social-justice led her to organize a major conference at the SCHC Retreat House, Adelynrood, 1945, on “The Church’s Responsibility Toward Racial Groups” radically challenging the status quo. It developed from her two-and-a-quarter-hour lecture on the significance of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma (1944)—a book she thought might have more accurately been titled “The White Problem in America.”⁵⁸ In 1943, retiring after forty-three years as Companion in Charge of Probationers and while editing E. M. Morgan’s Letters to her Companions, Scudder delivered her valedictory Companion Conference paper, “Per Crucem Gaudium: Companions in the Way, Retrospect and Forecast.” Characterizing Companions as “Children of Process” vitally involved in the unfolding work of Christ’s ministry here and now, she once again stressed the dual commitment of SCHC vows—uniting “those interior disciplines we have honored from the beginning, with wide social vision, in fellowship with the great movements sweeping [the world] toward a new social order (italics added).” Present-day societal problems—racial, international, economic and political—cry out for Companions’ insight and impel our intercessions—the kind that “we who carry in our hearts ‘the image of Jesus Crucified’ can best offer.” In her 1937 autobiography On Journey, she had had coined a pithy epigram about revolution: “Religion is the leaven, not the loaf; the church as a whole is loaf, not leaven...minority groups within it have always had a prophetic role… The Way of the Cross is Christian revolution (italics added).”⁵⁹

Scudder’s final public paper (in her mid-eighties), “Anglican Thought on Property,” a principled summation of her Social Christianity worldview, was delivered at an Episcopal Theological School conference in Cambridge MA (1947). Her second autobiography, My Quest for Reality (1952)⁶⁰, reaffirmed a positive view of Marx’s “spiritual values” even as she confessed “frequent sharp sorrow” over its political and governmental actions. She still viewed organized labor and the co-operative movement as worthy instruments of the class struggle, but she no longer believed that change could be confronted or implemented solely by the institution of the Church: it must not be officially committed to any earthly program. The Christian Church, rather, is called to remain steadfast in the revolutionary Way of the Cross, and to nurture those creative “expressions of conscience by minority groups within [it]” who are inspired “by Christ to work for a new day.”⁶¹ Such a yeasty remnant can be the only initiator of true change.

In her urgent quest for Reality, Scudder joined as many as fifty-four reform societies, many by subscription, plus corresponding with spiritual leaders over the world, among them Church of England mystic theologian Evelyn Underhill. Scudder’s review of Underhill’s 1937 book Worship, titled “The Art of Corporate Adoration,”, displayed their differing stances toward “Reality,” their differences in churchmanship and national citizenship. Scudder, the committed Anglo Catholic, believed that Underhill devalued the “charismatic freedom” and rich catholic heritage available to American Protestantism; Underhill favored the obedience—sober, temperate, moralistic—that, in Scudder’s view, would produce only biblical rather than sacramental piety. Scudder’s theological perception was remarkably prescient American evangelicalism about late-twentieth-century; her own mysticism preferred “the soul in its solitude poured out to God, for the purposes of His undeclared design.”⁶²

By 1950, age and immobility restricted Scudder’s action to written correspondence. She regretted becoming “an historical relic” when what she had most relished was being a “trail maker hacking her way through a forest of ancient codes and institutions, rotting but still sturdy.” She was grateful for the ministrations of her local parish priest and for her many friendships with young idealists in Social Christianity projects. Her unwavering focus was religious: it remained “the ground of Christian social hope, the Trinitarian formulation unfolding its synthetic power, the supreme satisfaction...that soars...toward the Divine... [where] immanence and transcendence meet, where the Emergent God, child of humanity, is one with the Absolute and the Uncreate (sic], Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”⁶³

Scudder’s Spiritual Method: Intercessory Prayer
As an early-modern champion of public and social activism as everyday religious application, Scudder located her spiritual gyroscope in the “energetic power of intercessory prayer,” expressing her sacramental theology, her churchmanship, and the Companionship vow. Intercessory prayer, “not easy to believe in or to practice [is what] most perfectly unites our love for God and for our neighbor…and overcomes the last danger of spiritual self-culture.” To which she added the impelling characteristic of the American Protestant ethos, action: “In a peculiar sense, social intercession is the prerogative, duty, and self-expression of a catholic democracy.”⁶⁴ And as Companion-in-Charge of SCHC Probationers, Scudder continually fused action with and as an essential component of praying. Amplifying SCHC founder Morgan’s definition—that Companionship was the “profession of intercessory prayer”—Scudder commended “the secret, creative forces of thought and desire” in its practice. “God not only demands but needs our cooperation on the spiritual [as well as] the material plane. The Cross Bearer of the universe, as He passes in our midst, does not act for us, but in us.”⁶⁵

Intercession was the historic rationale (if not thus labeled) for immigrant Anglo-Protestant settlers’ female prayer circles in early New England; praying for others gave women permission to “luxuriate in prayer” without being accused of mere self-focus.⁶⁶ At the end of the Society’s first year (1885), Emily M. Morgan had named Intercession the first and sole corporate task of the newly formed SCHC and circulated a handwritten sheet, an Intercession Paper—that proposed a monthly prayer agenda which would become the Society’s major physical link.⁶⁷ Over the next half-century, Social Christianity concerns and intercessions were the point of spiritual convergence between SCHC founder Morgan and new Companion Scudder (1890)—the arena where the college-professor’s modern social vision of Christian responsibility in the “real” world tangibly expanded Morgan’s original theological concept, hospitality. Subsequent decades of prayers, retreats, and study conferences spread this locally-inclusive Christian commitment to service and intercession into Companions’ home parishes, civic involvements, and social citizenship. Scudder’s Social Christianity activism became the expression of her intense dedication to sacramental partnership in the Mystical Body of Christ.⁶⁸

The original communal character of IP petitions was deliberate. Attaching personal names was deemed presumptuous (“unCompanionly”) until after a major philosophical and societal change in the 1970s,⁶⁹ making impossible the authorial documentation of any individual petition during Scudder’s lifetime. In 1890, however, the year Scudder entered SCHC, a first use of the phrase “reconciliation of classes” appeared in this fifth year of published IPs, quite likely her petition (or submitted by a close Companion).⁷⁰ Also in 1890, mention of the hitherto-invisible topic of race appeared, an IP petition that blessed those “working for the uplift of colored people” and another for Hampton College (Virginia,) surely a half-century before many white Episcopal churches acknowledged race in public prayer or sermon.⁷¹ 1890 was also the year that newly-admitted Companion Scudder was the likely petitioner requesting Companion prayers for the founding of college settlements. Petitions reflecting Scudder’s modernizing view of the ‘mission field’ enlisted Companions in praying for better factory-work conditions, for poor Mexican women, and for the missionary work of Christian Socialists.⁷² In 1905, an intercession asked that “church people in general care more about” a new Christian Association for the Interests of Labor (CAIL), the pro-labor advocacy group initiated by Episcopal churchmen and women including Harriet Keyser and Vida Scudder.⁷³

The corporate, educational, and social-reality purpose of these and other unsigned prayer petitions is visible in each month’s submissions from 1885 on, each written from and for Companions’ involvement in a variety of civic and religious settings. By the time of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Scudder had corresponded with, advised, and influenced hundreds of Companions and Probationers, and lectured at many conferences. [In 1927, at least one Companion, perhaps more, had prayed for the “wrongly convicted foreign terrorists” Sacco and Vanzetti.] A Scudder-like petition in 1928 asked “that the church make more severe demands on its members in regard to social justice and the sacrifices it requires,” and commended The Progressive and The Nation among other journalistic sources, to educate and expand Companions’ Social Christianity horizons. In 1937, along with prayers for the final illness and death of SCHC-founder Morgan, Companions prayed for the great financial contributions that must be made to the nation’s general welfare by the privileged class, for lessened racial animosity, and “that the blot of child labor be wiped from the U.S. soul.”

Scudder’s spiritual and socially committed influence probably undoubted author of many IP petitions through the 1930s and 40s.⁷⁴ A first prayer mentioning the sin of lynching asking that this crime be outlawed by federal statute appeared in a 1940’s petition. One of her many letters to probationers reiterated her plea that Companions “enlist the social imagination in the great secret work of intercessory prayer.”⁷⁵ Other Companions, e.g. Mary Simkhovitch, Director of the Greenwich House Settlement in NYC from 1902-1946,⁷⁶ also submitted Social Christianity ‘realities’ expanding the intercessory continuum, e.g. a remarkable 1928 petition urging that “the concept of conflict be [seen as] a creative force.”⁷⁷ Social justice foci gradually evolved from an initial emphasis on issues of labor inequality and poverty to WW II and the 1940s, when the mass northern migration of sharecroppers from the Jim-Crow South addressed race more sharply: “may those interested in bettering the church’s attitude on race accept that as a daily personal responsibility.” An enlightened petition asked “that all Christians living at ease may receive the conviction that a slum is as morally disastrous for those who permit it to exist, as for the actual victims living in it.” Other petitions asked God to reveal himself to Hitler as to Saul on the Damascus road, with hopes of conversion, and a Companion studying Marxism prayed that “we Christians be able to discern in the new religion of Communism a devotion and loyalty we ourselves could apply to the brotherhood of men (sic).⁷⁷”

The appointment of Frances Perkins, the first woman Secretary of Labor, elicited an IP thanksgiving, alongside one praying that “those least affected by the Depression accept the most responsibility toward being stewards of the future.”⁷⁹ In 1953, a Companion requested “awakening to the American disgrace of preaching democracy and practicing racial inequality,” and in 1954, as Vida Scudder was nearing death, a petition read: “May God control the emotions and reactions of intelligent Christians disturbed at the prospect of desegregation.” Companions welcomed Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple’s dictum that American Christianity—institutional churches plus religion itself—existed not for its own members’ benefit but for the love and healing it could offer humanity—“service” being the very “business” of its existence.⁸⁰

The New Deal of the 1930s and 40s had created positive ‘social safety net’ programs (e.g., Social Security) that could be and sometimes were administered to increase white privilege and block racial equity. Lynching and segregated professions continued to flourish even after the military was desegregated by presidential edict in 1948.⁸¹ Race segregation was a sinful “Reality” for Scudder, making her prophetic white Christian voice the rare one that did not flinch from acknowledging it and calling for change.

In her nineties, Scudder knew she was “more radical than I used to be,” though not in any active Communist or Socialist Party: their atheism didn’t bother her but her Christianity bothered them. Her mind and pen remained alert, praying for disarmament in an atomic age while her thanksgivings centered increasingly on the wonders of human affection and spiritual companionship: “fellowship is heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell.”⁸² Recalling a mystical retreat sensation of oneness with the movement of the stars “in that ceaseless motion, the music of the spheres,” she realized her “Absolute”—not in the “crude stability we hopelessly seek from the dialectical rhythm of perpetual change…but in the Unmoved Mover.” And she affirmed her late-life realization that “the truest life in Christendom is found in those minority groups” within an institution or enterprise inspired by Christ to work toward a new day.⁸³ Scudder’s illumination of the Social Christianity cause—awakening church men and women to enlightened Christian activism in the Way of the Cross—superseded her hopes for change through political-structural reforms, in favor of true ‘energy-cells,’ the small numbers of enlightened Christian activists in many kinds of organizations.⁸⁴

In early 1954, a few months before she died, Scudder’s letter to a “precious Companion” confessed the difficulty of “not praying to leave [life]:” she dreaded but “expected to become a centenarian.” Welcoming visitors “when I can remember who they are,” her imagination was still kindled by the emerging world of the 1950s: “How exciting is this, the final phase of human history that I’m allowed to watch...full of menace and promise.” Because of dimming eyesight, she could peruse “the distant galaxies, past the limits of Space and Time and all the natural order and limits of this world of Process” only on her mental landscape, and sign her dictated letters “your ancient, all-but-historic fellow pilgrim, Mother Vida, SCHC.”⁸⁵ Having formerly urged “using the daily newspaper as an adjunct Intercession Paper,”⁸⁶ Scudder’s final credo was cast in exalted religious terms: “Mine is a Trinitarian Faith. Did not God Himself imprison Himself in Relativity? Was not the Word made Flesh? Gloria Patri et Figlio et Spiritu Sancti! Progress in our ‘quest for reality’ knows no end.”⁸⁷

By the time the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross began planning its 1984 Centennial, the “journey” image, (Scudder’s dynamic autobiographical metaphor,) was chosen as theme for the one-hundredth-anniversary liturgy (“Our Call, Our Journey”). Her words, prayers, and acts had urged Christians to be the “awakened minority” making a difference in the huge problems of the world. The Social Christianity empowerment of Scudder’s impact in her own generation is strikingly summed in contemporary theologian Walter Wink epigram: “Intercession is spiritual defiance of what is, in the name of what God has promised.”⁸⁸ Thanks to the liturgical calendar’s establishing October 10 as the day to honor Vida Dutton, her vital engagement with “Reality” remains a model of motivation for everyday saints in the twenty-first century and beyond.

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