Hildegard

A Vespers Homily for St Hildegard of Bingen

A Reading from Sirach:

The pride of the higher realms is the clear vault of the sky,
as glorious to behold as the sight of the heavens.
The sun, when it appears, proclaims as it rises
what a marvelous instrument it is, the work of the Most High.

It is the moon that marks the changing seasons,
governing the times, their everlasting sign.
From the moon comes the sign for festal days,
a light that wanes when it completes its course.

The glory of the stars is the beauty of heaven,
a glittering array in the heights of the Lord.
On the orders of the Holy One they stand in their appointed places;
they never relax in their watches.

Look at the rainbow, and praise him who made it;
it is exceedingly beautiful in its brightness.
It encircles the sky with its glorious arc;
the hands of the Most High have stretched it out.

We could say more but could never say enough;
let the final word be: "He is the all."
Where can we find the strength to praise him?
For he is greater than all his works.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I know there are those whose experience of religion has been a negative one. They’ve encountered bigotry, oppression, anti-intellectualism, and all manner of social control under the cloak of liberated spiritual enlightenment. And I feel for them. I mourn for them. For indeed, my own experience has been precisely the opposite.

As a child I was always more at home in Church than in school. In Church you could ask the Big Questions of good and evil, right and wrong, why the world is the way it is, and the origins and destiny of humanity and all things. In Church could science and philosophy, ethics and history, faith and reason be interwoven together into one seamless, beautiful garment. The questions my peers thought boorish in public school were welcomed openly in the sanctuary.

For me, religion has always been about growth: personal, moral, societal, intellectual. Where else could theology and mysticism dwell together in suburbia? I owe the greatest adventures of my life to my faith, and the greatest comforts as well. I suppose that’s why I ended up a pastor: because for me, the way I was raised, religion has always been the door to deeper and higher and more wondrous things.

And I wish it could be that for everyone. For to know God is to grow.

As of sundown this evening, the Church begins our remembrance of St Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most remarkable people in all of Western history. To attempt to tell her story here would be too much; I’d have better luck lifting a mountain. But just to provide context, we’ll talk a little about who this most remarkable servant of Christ is for us today, and how we would all do well to follow her example.

Hildegard was the tenth and youngest child of lesser German aristocracy. Beginning at just three years of age, Hildegard experienced visions of uncanny insight and accuracy, which frightened her nurse but inspired her parents, who enrolled her as a Benedictine nun.

Hers was a life of paradox and contradiction. Sickly from birth, she lived to be over 80 years of age, at a time when half that was considered a long, full life. She had no formal schooling yet proved to one of the most brilliant minds of the Middle Ages, the very embodiment of what we call the Twelfth Century Renaissance.

She was “an abbess, artist, cosmologist, composer, counselor, dietitian, epistoler, healer, linguist, mystic, naturalist, philosopher, poet, political consultant, preacher, prophet, [playwright, exorcist] and visionary, who wrote theological, naturalistic, botanical, medicinal, and dietary texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems,”† and one rather delicious recipe for spiced cookies.

She was, in other words, a polymath of the highest degree, a peer of Newton or da Vinci centuries before either of them was born. And on top of all that, she came to be canonized as a saint and Doctor of the Church. Hildegard was simply a wonder. And throughout all her work, her botany, her poetry, her politics, her music, runs the constant thread of God’s own love for everything and everyone that He has ever made. In Christ, the Creator has entered Creation. In Christ, God is everywhere.

Hildegard’s oldest and most consistent vision throughout life, she maintained, was that of the glory of God permeating the heavens and spreading out into every created thing, every leaf, every cloud, every people throughout the world. And all of them, she insisted, were reflections of God’s living Light, by which she could perceive all things not merely with her senses but with her very soul.

Scholars often speak of the Medieval Synthesis, a sort of intellectual project whereby learned peoples of the Middle Ages agreed that all knowledge, all wisdom, all philosophy and science, could be woven together with Christ at the center. All truth is God’s truth, after all. Or in the words of St Paul: “Test all things and keep the good.” For Hildegard, this wasn’t simply a nice idea but her central religious experience. Everything in the world made sense to her in the living Light of God. Indeed, everything and everyone was a reflection of that Light, a reflection of God.

In this our greatest mystics and theologians agree: that in God, all are One. And with our eye firmly fixed on Christ, with our hands held fast to His Cross, we can see and perceive and make sense of all things—we can love the good in all things. Music, science, poetry, politics, philosophy, baking, botany, prayer, asceticism, mysticism, life together in community—we see God in all of it, in everything.

C.S. Lewis famously quipped that he believed in God as he believed that the sun is risen: not merely in that he could see it, but that by it he could see everything else. That’s what religion ought to be. It should open us to every question. It should flood us with awe and with wonder. It should have us delight in all learning, all culture, all activity, all love. It should make us be for the world the vision that Hildegard held in her soul for her entire earthly life: the living Light of God descending from on high, permeating all things, reflected in all things.

Forgive me if I find myself ranging too far afield. But the world is full of wonder when the world is full of God. That’s what religion was for Hildegard of Bingen. And that’s what I would have it be for every one of us today.

Someday, at the last, God will be All in All. Until that day, let us live as reflections of the living Light, serving Christ in all people, finding God in all things. Thus may religion be for everyone a source of wonder and freedom and deep, abiding joy.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

† Butcher, Carmen Acevedo. St Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church. (2013)