’Tis the Season of Good Will: Florence Nightingale, Faith, and the Courage to Heal

A Christmas message for modern life: carry the light

‘Tis the season of Good Will. But what is good will? I thought about this, wondering what the world would would look like if the world had more people like Florence Nightingale, steadfast in here faith and spiritual. Enjoy this Christmas message from Field Notes for Modern Life.

Snow did not fall at Scutari. Not properly.

Winter arrived instead as a damp breath off the Bosphorus, seeping through stone and canvas and wool, settling into joints and bandages and the mind. In the long corridors of the barrack hospital, the air held the day’s work, stale and close, as if the building itself had learned to endure.

Christmas was coming, which made the ache sharper.

Men spoke of it like a place you could still reach if you stared hard enough. A hearth. A kitchen table. The sound of plates. A child’s laugh. A street back home where the lamps looked kinder than they did out here. Some men laughed about it, loud and thin. Others did not mention it at all, as if naming it would cost them something they could not afford to lose.

This is often how the season of goodwill arrives. Not as comfort, but as contrast. A reminder of what is missing.

And then, as the lamps were lit and the ward clocks crept towards midnight, she came.

They called her the Lady with the Lamp. In the telling, the lamp became more than a lantern. It became a small moving sun, a stitched together star wandering the corridors of Scutari in search of the wounded and the forgotten. The men who had slipped behind the numbers and the paperwork. It became a promise you could see.

Florence Nightingale walked as if she had been here before, not in body, but in purpose. Her steps were quiet, but they carried. Men turned their heads. They shifted in their beds. The few who could sit upright made the effort, because there was something in her presence that made you want to become the sort of man who could be looked at without shame.

The light travelled over faces, over rough blankets and stretched bandages, over the shine of a water bucket and the dull metal of a cup. The shadows pulled back, sulking.

She stopped beside a young private whose eyes were open but not really seeing. He stared at the ceiling as if it might have answers.

“Where are you tonight?” she asked, her voice low.

He tried to speak. The words came out ragged.

“Sheffield,” he said eventually, surprised by the sound of it. “My mam’s got a bit of holly up. She’ll be putting a candle in the window.”

Florence held the lamp steady, as if it could illuminate Leeds itself.

“That candle is doing its work,” she said. “And so are you. You have endured. You have done your duty. Now you must do another. You must let your body mend.”

She did not promise him certainty. She was not in the business of false comfort. But she spoke to him as if his life still belonged to him, and that alone was medicine.

Further down the ward, a corporal lay with a fever sheen on his skin. The air around him was too thick, too warm, too spent. Florence lifted the lamp slightly and looked not at the man but above him, as if listening to the room itself

“Open those windows,” she said, not sharply, simply as a fact of the world.

A nurse hesitated, glancing at the dark outside as if winter itself might rush in and finish the job.

“The cold will not kill him,” Florence said. “The foul air might. We do not heal men by keeping them in a jar.”

A latch clicked. Then another. A seam of night opened. Clean, damp air came in, carrying the distant salt of the sea and the quiet reminder that the world was wider than this corridor. The ward exhaled.

“Again,” Florence said. “Morning and night. Fresh air is not a luxury. It is God’s ordinary mercy.”

A few beds away, two men were arguing in hoarse whispers. One wanted to talk about home. The other could not bear it.

“What’s the point of Christmas in a place like this?” the second man said. “It doesn’t reach us.”

Florence arrived beside them as if she had heard her name.

“Christmas is not a parcel that fails to arrive,” she said. “It is a discipline. It is a decision. It reaches wherever people choose to carry it.”

“And how do we carry it, miss?” the first man asked.

She glanced down the ward. A map of wounds, but also of hands.

“By making this place cleaner than it was yesterday,” she said. “By washing. By changing linen. By airing bedding. By tending to your neighbour when you would rather turn your face to the wall.

“That’s not Christmas,” the second man muttered.

“It is the original kind,” Florence replied. “Not sentiment. Not decoration. Service.”

Scutari was full of stories. Rats. Rot. Delayed supplies. Men packed too close. Infection spreading quietly, stealing strength without a shot being fired. The building had a hunger for neglect.

Florence did not fear those stories. She rewrote them.

She tested basins for grit. Lifted sheets to find damp beneath. Watched refuse carried away carelessly.

“It matters,” she said, gently but without compromise. “It all matters.”

Men began to speak to her not like a saint, but like someone who could do something. That mattered more than reverence.

A sergeant asked if she thought God had forgotten them.

“I do not think God forgets,” she said. “But I do think we do. We forget each other. We forget the duties that keep us human.”

At the end of the ward, a chaplain sat exhausted, his prayer book open but untouched.

“They want answers,” he said. “I have only words.”

“Then give them words that send them back to life,” Florence replied. “Teach them how to endure tomorrow. God is not only in the grand gesture. He is in the small obedience.”

Christmas came closer, one night at a time.

Water and soap were asked for without embarrassment. Windows were opened without fear. A hymn surfaced, quietly, imperfectly. Clean sheets were laid. Basins emptied. Men were spoken to like they would live.

On Christmas Eve, Florence paused at the centre of the ward and lifted the lamp slightly higher.

A flame is never only a flame. It is a refusal. A vote for life.

“This is not the end of you,” she said. “Not if you keep faith with the ordinary things.”

One man whispered that he did not feel brave.

“Bravery is not always the charge,” Florence told him. “Sometimes it is the washing. The breathing. The waiting. The choosing, again and again, not to give up.”

Outside, Constantinople held its own lights and prayers. Inside the British hospital at Scutari, a single lamp walked the corridors.

The myth was simple.

One woman refusing to accept that suffering must be filthy. Refusing to accept that men must rot in the dark. Refusing to separate the soul from the body.

The world still needs people like Florence. Not because we lack hospitals, but because we forget what healing really is.

Clean air. Clean hands. Clean linen. A steady voice in the night.

And the courage, at Christmas and beyond, to treat a stranger as if they matter.