Food for the Soul | September 16th, 2020
9/16/2020
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow, September 17, we celebrate the feast of Hildegard of Bingen. She was the most amazing woman of the Middle Ages. You may never have heard of her; that’s OK. You weren’t around when she lived (1098 – 1179). There are plenty of books about her. It is hard to summarize her life because she had so many interests which she pursued passionately. She was a Benedictine nun who eventually became the abbess and founded her own convents in the towns of Bingen and Eibingen in Germany. Hildegard was one of the few recognized female mystics of that time.
Hildegard often spoke of viriditas, the greening of things from within, analogous to what we now call photosynthesis. She saw how plants received the sun and transformed its light and warmth into energy and life. She recognized that there is an inherent connection between the Divine Presence and the physical world. This connection between Creator and created translates into inner energy that is the soul and seed of every thing, an inner voice calling us to “become who you are; become all that you are.” This is our deepest wish for wholeness. (Paraphrased from Richard Rohr)
As you go about your day tomorrow I encourage you to meditate on viriditas and on our connection to the Divine.
PRAYER
O Power of Wisdom
Hildegard of Bingen
O power of Wisdom!
who circling, circled,
embracing all things
in a single life-giving path.
You have three wings;
one soars to the heavens,
the second exudes moisture from the earth,
and the third soars everywhere.
All praise be to you, as is your due,
O Wisdom!
PRACTICE
The following practice is taken from one of the recent daily meditations of Richard Rohr in which he quotes from Anne Hillman’s book The Dancing Animal Woman:
The act of love is the surrender of self into life as it is. This is a love larger than our word “love” can contain or express. It embraces all of life and does not judge: tragedy and war, suffering and joy, creativity and destruction. Beauty. Death. The Other. Within this embrace of life as it is, lie acceptance forgiveness, healing.
When we let go enough into the depths of our being, we are in communion with all of creation. We are center and circumference. We are receivers of one another. Ours is an identity with all being. Herein lies our healing, the end of loneliness. . . .
To stay grounded I have had to find other ways to honor the paradox of our human identity. I have discovered that it is in the simplest, most minute experiences that I can begin to do that. Then, I am at home, my created self. I belong. Walking. Looking at a tree. Listening to a person, to the wind. Caressing a child. Scraping carrots in the sink. Weeping. Laughing.
Being tender. First, I learned to be tender with myself; to tend the needs of my soul. Then I began to tend the other which is also my self. If I am not tending, caring for some small portion of the living creation, how can I commune with that creation, be it the earth or a child, in any but the most sentimental way? A woman learns, in caring for an infant, that she becomes bonded. A person who tends the land or gives to another discovers the same bond. These are not moral niceties, they are part of the mystery. They are law.
In this kind of communion with life, new languages arise in our bodies: languages of awe and wonder, gratitude and a joy that is overflowing. They soften us. . . . The more gratitude or awe I feel, the more life shows forth its beauty and terror, the more my life is graced. These are the languages of being. Of being alive. This is a life lived with passion: compassion. . . .
There we await the mystery
POEM
If You Listen
If you listen,
Not to the pages or preachers
But to the smallest flower
Growing from a crack
In your heart,
You will hear a great song
Moving across a wide ocean
Whose water is the music
Connecting all the islands
Of the universe together,
And touching all
You will feel it
Touching you
Around you . . .
With light.
It is in that light
That everything lives
And will always be alive.
John Squadra, Source: This Ecstasy