Sermon for the 21st of September - Festival of St Hildegard von Bingen

Lectionary Readings for the Festival of Hildegard of Bingen

Proverbs 8: 12-14, 22-31

I, wisdom, live with prudence, and I attain knowledge and discretion. The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate. I have good advice and sound wisdom; I have insight, I have strength. The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth— when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. Proverbs 8: 12-14, 22-31 When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

Luke 10: 21-24

At that same hour Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ Then turning to the disciples, Jesus said to them privately, ‘Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.’

Sermon for the Festival of Hildegard of Bingen

As babies, as children, our parents shape us. They help to form our character; they pass on to us their wisdom---gained through the living of life, patient study, the modelling of others. As we grow older, we develop the power to choose who our other models will be, other than our parents---whose words we will pay attention to, whose behaviour---public or private, we will copy.

Christians have, above all, the model of Jesus, who lived a real life and died a real death. But in whose life and death and Resurrection we discern the power of God at work, to transform the shape of the whole world. Our life in community---a shared community of faith---helps us to fashion ourselves, day in, day out, as one of those who seeks to be like Jesus. We are seekers after goodness, truth, and that old- fashioned word, righteousness. We are always seeking to be better than we are. To achieve this, we seem to need a model, constantly before us, of the kind of life we want to lead, ourselves.

The irruption of Jesus into history was two thousand years ago. Since then, ever since the church came into being, Christians have found it helpful to hold up the model of particular followers of Jesus who seem to embody those qualities that bring us closer to God: a loving heart, a compassionate care for others, selflessness, self-discipline, wisdom. There are many other qualities I could name---humility, devotion, hard work, patience, perseverance.......

To come to know some of these models of the Christ-like life helps us to grow in our own lives toward that which we seek.

Biography is a kind of history that holds up a single life to our examination, so that we can look at it, ponder its particularities, turn it over in our minds---as far as we can at a distance of time---and see if it can help us to learn how to live.

Today we celebrate the life of Hildegard of Bingen. Why are we doing this? Why her? What difference did her life make to the world? What was so exemplary, so extraordinary, about her life that we might benefit from studying it?

How many women from history would you choose to be your model of life?

We have learned more about more women who have been unearthed from the historical depths, and that is a good thing. From the middle ages, the names are mostly of queens. Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, a near-contemporary of Hildegard, offers an interesting counterpart. She comes to us as a rare example of a woman who actively wielded political power in that day, was a patron of the arts, was intelligent and capable. Her first marriage, to Louis of France, was unhappy and was eventually annulled. Though she wished to stay unmarried, this was impossible because her wealth and power made her a target for kidnapping (if she was forcibly married, the kidnapper could take her lands---this is why many women sought the freedom of the convent in medieval times). So Eleanor married Henry II in 1152. Was Eleanor kind, compassionate, a lover of the poor? It is not clear from the historical record: she clearly had to have a strong will and immense energy. If you have not seen the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, for which Katherine Hepburn won the Academy Award for Best Actress, go home and watch it!

Hildegard was born some 25 years before Eleanor, in 1098, into a family of the lesser nobility, a family also of wealth and large connections in society, in the western part of Germany, the Rhineland. She was the last of ten children. She was pledged as a tithe (the tenth child!) to the service of God when she was eight.

I would like to quote one noted scholar who summed up her life:

"Hildegard was the bearer of a unique and elusive visionary charism. She was, as well, a prophet in the Old Testament tradition, yet at the same time a representative of the German Benedictine aristocracy in its heyday. Proudly aware of belonging to a social and spiritual elite, she was profoundly humble before God, awed by the audacity of her own mission, and by turns shy and strident about her gifts. Measured in purely external terms her achievements are staggering. Although she did not begin to write until her forty-third year, Hildegard was the author of a massive trilogy that combines Christian doctrine and ethics with cosmology; a compendious encyclopaedia of medicine and natural science; a correspondence comprising some 400 letters to personages such as emperor Frederick Barbarossa, King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of England, and four popes. She preached sermons from 1158 onward, not something women did in that period; she wrote astonishing liturgical music and hymns and even a musical morality play (the Ordo Virtutum)."

In order to participate in the divine office and read the Bible, Hildegard acquired a basic knowledge of Latin in order to understand the liturgy she recited each day. Boys of her social standing would have received a far better education at a cathedral school. Hildegard did not know German; her Latin was neither literary nor polished. Nevertheless, over the course of her life she exhibited a wide range of learning, not only in the Scriptures but in classical Latin literature, Neoplatonic philosophy, and natural science.

Hildegard had suffered from headaches and ill health from an early age. She had begun to receive visions at the age of five. It was not until she was 42, however, that she received the instruction to write down her visions, along with their interpretation.

The visions she received came not during trances, ecstasies, or seizures. She always insisted that she ‘was fully awake in mind and body.’ Unlike some others of that period, she did not engage in nor counsel extreme fasting or mortifications, and did not spend long periods in private prayer. It took decades of painfully acquired self- knowledge before she was able to understand her visions as a vehicle of divine

revelation. She was instructed not to waver in her sense of unworthiness as a woman or as someone untaught, for hers was a Divine authority. God had chosen her as His own medium of revelation, and she was to fully claim the authority that this fact gave her. Her almost constant illness gave her a balancing sense of her own frailty and dependence upon God.

Hildegard’s prophetic call was received when she was 43. It came in the form of a fiery light that filled her whole heart and brain and gave her a penetrating knowledge of all the books of Scripture. She knew that she had not received this call because she was any more deserving than others, but because the times were desperate. She described the age in which she lived as one in which the the Scriptures were neglected, the clergy ‘lukewarm and sluggish,’ and the Christian people ill-informed. Her mission, then, was to do with her prophetic charism what professional clerics had failed to do with their priestly charism: teach, preach, interpret the Scriptures and proclaim the justice of God.

In her later years Hildegard engaged herself in an astonishing burst of sustained activity. She supervised construction of the new buildings of the monastery, secured gifts and bequests to enable it to be financially secure, established monastic discipline there through preaching and teaching, wrote a commentary on the Athanasian Creed, composed her music. The final version of her music drama, the Ordo Virtutum, was written in this period. It antedates other known morality plays by about a century and a half. She also created a lingua ignota, a sort of secret language, in order to instil a sense of mystical solidarity among her nuns. Her growing fame brought an ever- widening stream of pilgrims to the monastery, as well as those seeking her counsel and those seeking to become nuns under her care.

At the age of 60 she felt that things were well-established enough for her to undertake prolonged absences on three long preaching tours. She travelled along Germany’s major rivers, the Rhine and Maine, preaching at monasteries and at Cologne and Trier, delivering fiery apocalyptic sermons. Many requests were made for the transcripts! Despite constant ill health, Hildegard persisted not only in her preaching but also in her writing. She died at the age of 81 in 1179.

Along with only a few others of her generation, she was more learned than women would be again until the Renaissance.

So this was Hildegard. A woman of the church, a woman who modelled authority and leadership centuries ago. Exercising her complete freedom to serve God, she ventured far beyond the boundaries of any expectation. She has left us her visions, her paintings, and her music. We can still hear her voice through these: her testimony to a profound love of God and faithful witness to the abiding truth of the Gospel.

Inspired by her life, may we use our own gifts so well!