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The Lay Witness of Ursula Fleming (1930-1992)*
The work of Ursula Fleming, both during her lifetime and since, has reached a tremendously wide range of people, and has elicited many responses. In Ursula Fleming's person the apparently unconnected fields of pain relief and Eckhart studies found a consistently clear advocate of mindful, reflective action; of action rooted firmly in spiritual tradition. The purpose of this paper is to describe her life and work as a particularly noteworthy instance of lay witness.
By the time of her death on 17 March 1992 (St Patrick's Day), at the age of 61, her work had begun to receive a very large measure of recognition.1 Less than a year earlier, in June 1991, she had been the recipient of an award from the Templeton Foundation, which seeks to honour special contributions to the cause of religious understanding. Much of her decades-long experience in pain relief work was set out in her book Grasping the Nettle: a Positive Approach to Pain,2 and it was subsequently adapted for a teaching manual for the nursing profession.3 The posthumously published collection of her correspondence, journals and writings (edited by her elder sister Anne Fleming) provides ample material on her long immersion in the theology of the German mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-1327).4 The book further relates how it came about that she, while having no professional training or status as a theologian, in time petitioned the Dominican Order to have the writings of Meister Eckhart reassessed with a view to reinstating them as sound Christian teaching. The Dominicans' response to that petition was positive, as, eventually, were the findings of the commission set up in 1985 to reexamine Eckhart's disputed statements.
Born in Wallasey, Liverpool, on 19 October 1930, Ursula Fleming grew up a Roman Catholic, and mostly she attended convent schools, as far as the disruption of the war years allowed. Home life was stable and happy. An absolutely crucial formative influence was the medical background of both her parents, her father Aloysius, a general practitioner (GP), and her mother Marjorie, who also trained as a doctor. Their ethos of care and compassion was transmitted to Ursula in full measure. Endowed with a naturally compassionate temperament herself, Ursula, when she came to...