A few years ago now, I went on retreat to a convent of sisters. As I approached I was a bit nervous; not because I had four days of silence ahead of me but because the guest sister was, amongst the clergy, notorious for being rather rude and abrupt. In fact, she was known as Attila the Nun. I rang the door bell and Sr Attila opened the door with a big beam on her face. I thought in my pride that it was because I had arrived but I should have known better. Because when I stepped in I saw that there was another guest on retreat, a guest who had obviously been talking to the guest sister and given a cause for that big smile, a woman that I want to add to this list of heroes of faith we have been exploring during Lent. The woman standing there was Dame Cicely Saunders.

Cicely Saunders was born in Hertfordshire in 1918 to a well-off but unhappy family. Her father was domineering and her mother was cold and withdrawn. She was sent to Roedean at 10 and taller than all the other girls felt she never fitted in, giving her a sense of the outsider. She also suffered from a painful and slightly crooked spine and was made to lie flat on the floor for 40 minutes a day.

She wanted to be a nurse but her father disapproved and so she went to Oxford to read PPE. The war interrupted though and she enrolled as a student nurse at St Thomas' hospital but her back was bad and she has to return to Oxford where she trained as a social worker or what was called then a lady almoner. It was around this time that, as she said, a light flipped and she became a Christian.

Whilst working as an almoner she cared for a dying 40 year old Polish Jewish émigré called David. They discussed the idea that she might found a home for dying people to find peace in their final days. He left her £500. To begin with, she trained to become a doctor and not long after qualifying she wrote an article arguing for a new approach to the end of life. In it she wrote: "It appears that many patients feel deserted by their doctors at the end. Ideally the doctor should remain the centre of a team who work together to relieve where they cannot heal, to keep the patient's own struggle within his compass and to bring hope and consolation to the end".

Cicely researched pain management at St Mary's Paddington and eventually drew up plans to found a 60 bed hospice which she circulated to friends. She named it after St Christopher, patron saint of travellers, and though originally thinking it ought to be a Church of England hospice, came to believe it should be a religious foundation of an open character. She met the architect in 1959 and by 1965 she had raised enough to money to start building on a site in Sydenham. Money was precarious though and often the builder wasn't paid on time as they waited for more to come in. But different people came to help: local children prepared the garden, fire officers hung the curtains. The first patient was admitted in 1967 and by 1970 the HNS contributed two thirds of the running costs and NHS doctors undertook part of their specialist training there.

So, Cicely Saunders founded the first modern hospice and more than anybody else was responsible for establishing the discipline and culture of palliative care. She introduced effective pain management and insisted that dying people needed dignity, compassion and respect, as well as rigorous scientific methodology in the testing of treatments. She abolished the prevailing ethic that patients should be cured, that those who could not be cured were a sign of failure, and that it was acceptable and even desirable to lie to patients about their prognosis. She put paid to the notion that dying people should wait until their painkillers had worn off before they received another dose. She introduced the idea of "total pain" which includes the physical, emotional, social and spiritual dimensions of distress.  A good listener, she paid systematic attention to patients' stories. She did away with visiting hours too. Looking after the dying, she wrote, is a corporate act, everyone is involved: the nurses who make him confortable, the doctors who prescribe drugs and answer his questions, the priest who visits him, the physiotherapist who eases his movement, the occupational therapist who interest his mind, the kitchen who tempt his appetitie, the study centre who teach others of his needs".

Her Christian faith made her strongly opposed to euthanasia but always acknowledged that both sides in the euthanasia debate were against pointless pain and impersonal indignity. She was a a courageous woman, seeing beyond the medical establishment of the day and facing a lot of hostility but becoming the woman "who changed the face of death". As a Christian, she saw dying not as something to be feared, but as a spiritual event which can bring meaning to life and provide an opportunity for reconciliation. 'The crucified Jesus is the only accurate picture of God that the world has ever seen, she would say, and the hands that hold us in existence are pierced with unimaginable nails'. I am loved, therefore I am, she would also say.

Cicely Saunders was given many honours, not least the Order of Merit and later a Foundation to continue her philosophy and work. Up to the very end of her life, in her late eighties, she visited the patients in St Christopher's nearly every day. If you add up the numbers of people touched by her work it is astounding: the patients, the hundreds who drop in for day programmes, the patients cared for at home by outreach workers, the families of them all, the thousands of visitors and researchers who attend workshops and training, the thousands whose own doctors and nurses have adopted the palliative care approach she pioneered. Her Christian faith was her lifeblood and source of her energy.  I think that God will pick up any old tool, she said. Well, God tapped me on the shoulder and said, get on with it. As a vocation." Many years ago, in response to a question at a symposium about the prospect of death, Saunders declared that she would hope for a sudden demise but would prefer to die with a cancer that gave due notice and allowed the time to reflect on life and to put one's practical and spiritual affairs in order. Cicely Saunders died of cancer in her own hospice just 5 years ago at the age of 87.

Shirley du Boulay wrote a biography of Saunders that John Taylor, the former Bishop of Winchester, wrote a foreword to. He wrote:

Some biographies are an indispensable duty required by the status of the subject. But this is a story that simply had to be told. For here is someone who, almost single-handed (though she would fiercely deny this), has tackled and overcome one of the greatest unspoken fears that human beings have today, the fear of a painful and humiliating death from an incurable disease. The dread that this might befall some beloved relative is often greater than the fear for oneself. Hence the despair that lends such force to the case for euthanasia. And it si this despair that Cicely Saunders has dispelled with the light of a new hope.

I want to end with a poem that was written by a patient of St Christopher's , Sidney Reeman,on 28 January 1975 just a few weeks before his death. It is perhaps a tribute to the founder of the place in which he lay.