The Passion of Hildegard
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Happy (almost belated) Feast of St. Hildegard of Bingen! Her feast is on 9/17 but since I am always late, I just pick a September day.
I’ve linked ideas for celebrating below. But first, it’s important to clear up some misinformation about this dynamic woman of God to avoid being misled by enemies of the Church…
For the majority of my Catholic life, I intentionally avoided St. Hildegard. I had come to associate her with the many New Age practitioners, wiccans, and deviant nuns who like to claim her as their own. I had lived that and didn’t want to go back!
She doesn’t belong to them, of course, and she never ascribed to their heretical ways. But because her writings are not as accessible as other saints and her ways uncommon, she has been more easily co-opted by people with an agenda.
I once brought a St. Hildegard peg doll to a peg doll exchange. One astute woman asked why I brought Hildegard to the party…and I knew why she was asking. I assured her that I wasn’t a “progressive.”
The sad truth is that most accessible info is unreliable. Not every quote is hers or properly translated. Not every work is interpreted with her faithful vision. Some letters are fake. I give you warning that if you go looking, you will find a lot of false information and should be discerning.
So why did I bring Hildegard to the party?
Hildegard was a deep ocean, full of life and fire, music, wildcraft, salves, painting, visions, poetry, theology, and prayer…
She was an Abbess, an artist, a preacher, mystic, healer, composer, polymath, and Doctor of the Church. She loved the earth and saw that “God has arranged all things in the world in consideration of everything else.”
She challenged the corruption in the Church around her and raised her voice against it while demanding fidelity from her shepherds.
She was NOT an ecofeminist, a proponent of “global humanism,” a witch, an earth-worshipper, a gnostic or a goddess.
She was a contemplative nun under the Rule of St. Benedict. And the silence which formed her for decades became the school in which her soul burned with passion and flourished with productivity.
Read more about Hildegard and ideas for celebrating HERE… 🌸