Spiritual Stars of the Last Thousand Years: Hildegarde of Bingen
Homily of February 6, 2000
Father Brian Joyce
You know we have a lot of demons and a lot of personal fears, as individuals, as a society, especially as we are entering a new century and a new millennium because we don't know exactly what's in store for us. And we don't really know exactly where we are going. We can know something of where we have been. You know, we really are rooted in a people who, for 2000 years, have tried to live the Gospel and tried to learn something. And so, this weekend and the next two we're going to look at some of the big figures, just a few of them, and their wisdom that they may have left us for our journey and our time, some of the spiritual stars of the last thousand years.
I remember in 1960, I was in London and I was at Hyde Park. You know there at Marble Arch, they come out especially on weekends and stand on soapboxes and preach on every topic you can imagine, politics and religion and everything else. And the day I was there there was a man on a soapbox and he was attacking every form of religion there was and every church and every belief. And a man yelled out from the crowd at him, "Don't you have any respect for the Catholic Church?" And he thought for a minute and he said, "Well you gotta respect the Catholic Church. They have more saints per square inch than all the other churches put together." And I don't know if that's true, but we've got a lot of saints. And some of them are kind of foreign to us. It's nice that they were saints but it's hard to relate to their day and age and situation.
And then we got some saints that are pretty flakey. You know, it's kind of like having a crazy uncle in the attic that you don't want to talk about. My favorite is St. Simon Stiletes, and Simon was an early flagpole-sitter. Rather than going out to a cave as a hermit, or to a monastery, he got up on a pillar. And I think some other guys tried it, so he got up higher. He set the world's record. His pillar was 60 feet tall, and he lived there. I think the saints were the people who had to bring him food back and forth. Father Brian Timoney heard me say this at the 8 o'clock Mass. He did some research. He found out that Simon Stiletes spent most of his life and had the world's indoor record, or outdoor record, for being a flagpole sitter. And Simon the Younger came along, and he beat him. He stayed on the flagpole, or pillar of prayer, for 63 years. Wow! Crazy uncles in the attic.....
But, there are other saints who really fit us and have a wisdom for us. And we're going to look at a few of them this weekend and next and the weekend after. The one we look at today may be a surprise to you and probably because most of us have never heard of her. Her name is Hildegarde, from Bingen. So, she's called Hildegarde of Bingen. She was a German nun who lived almost 900 years ago, and was pretty much forgotten by society until the last 30 or 40 years. She was the founder and leader of a community of women religious. She was a composer. In fact, you can still get tape cassettes of her music and CD's of her music. She was a playwright. In fact, she did the earliest medieval morality plays that we know of, and they were performed at the Lincoln Center in the last couple of years in New York. She was the first person we know of in the middle ages to combine drama and music on the same stage. So, she's kind of the ancestor of Broadway Musicals today. She was an artist, a mystic, a contemplative, a visionary and an author. The Pope gathered all the Bishops to sit and listen to her writings. She was a powerful homilist and a preacher throughout the churches and cathedrals of Germany. She was a pharmacist and a physician, and political advisor and also critic to the Emperor, Frederick Barborossa, ( We have the letters back and forth between them.) and to the Popes. And I say Popes with an "s" because during her lifetime they had three Popes at the same time. She thought that was two too many. And she was a Church reformer. Now, it may sound like a strange fit for us in the 21st century because she lived in the 12th century.
When we think of it, going into the 21st century, I think there is a lot of isolation among people. I think there's almost a savage individualism among people in our own society. I think there's a restlessness and reform going on in the Church. There's new science and new technology and we don't know where or how far that's going to take us. There's a lot of violence and there's danger to our environment and to our planet. Now, she was in the 12th century. The 12th century was a time of conflict and change and of religious restlessness. There was a new science they didn't know about before, that came out of the metaphysics of Aristotle, breaking upon the scene, and a new technology for that day, and brand new politics. This was the first time they started having nation states, instead of cities and feudal things and kingdoms. And there was certainly turmoil and need for reform in the Church.
So, what questions would we put to Hildegarde of Bingen today? What would we ask her? My questions would be shaped by today's scripture readings, the readings from the Bible at today's Mass. First of all, we had Job who couldn't sleep at night and didn't know whether to get up or not. One of our basic questions is, "What helps us to get up in the morning, when it's hard to face a new day, let alone a new century and a new millennium? Where do we get the energy for that? Or we listen to Jesus in the Gospel, and the question we ask is, "How can we bring healing to one another and to our world? How can we cast out demons and fears? And how can we best preach the Gospel?"
Those are the questions I'd put to Hildegarde. And I think her response comes in her view, which is very distinctive, of God, her view of life and her view of the Church. Her view of God.... You know, we all have our own images of God, how we think of God, how we pray to God. Her image of God was God as a Living Light, and God as Living
Light and Fresh Energy. When she talked about the relationship between us and God she didn't use catechism phrases or technical or theological language. What did we grow up with? I grew up with our relationship with God was called "sanctifying grace." And they even had it painted in the catechism poured into a bottle. You know what she used to describe our relationship with God? Her phrase was "fresh greenness." Fresh greenness to describe our relationship, grace, and the energy of God. And she described herself, and let's think about ourselves as this for a
moment, she described herself as a feather on the breath of God. So, her lesson, I think, is let God in and let God carry us, especially when we're faced with burdens and problems and fears. Let God in and let God carry us.
The second thing, she had a very unique vision of life. She saw all of life as connected with the whole universe. She said, "We human beings are the thinking part of the universe, and we're called to be co-creators, responsible together for the shaping of the world. Now this was before Columbus discovered America. This was before Carl Sagan told us about the billions and billions of galaxies and stars out there. This was before modern physicists told us that the molecules and atoms right here in us right now are connected with those on the farthest planet and stars and they affect each other all the time. Before all of that she spoke of life as a web. She described all of us and the universe as a web of life, all things interconnected, mutually responsible and all revealing God. So, her lesson, I think....I think her lesson is to notice and to care for the universe around us. You know, you see her with a plant and a medicinal bowl, and I think because she noticed so carefully the plants and herbs of her time, she became her century's foremost pharmacist, and a physician, because she noticed. But the lesson to us I think is to notice and to care for our universe.
And the third thing she had a view of was the Church. She felt the Church should be marked by compassion and reconciliation. And I think that rings a bell with so many good people who are barred from the sacraments for one reason or another or one regulation or another today. Let me take a second to describe how she lived with her
community, a community of women in sort of a compound where they had a chapel. They had their living quarters where they ate. They had a cemetery. And the three things they did, number one was they sang the Office, the Psalms, to mark the hours of the day. They loved doing that and she wrote the music for it. They celebrated the Eucharist. They loved that. That's number one. Number two: They copied the Scriptures, and that's how many Bibles were passed on to today, and they illustrated them with fantastic illumination. She was the best of the artists. And, thirdly, they ran an infirmary to take care of the poor.
Well, in the fall of 1178, there was a young nobleman who had been separated from the Church for a long time. And she saw that he was reconciled with the sacraments of confession. And he died. She had him buried in the southwest corner of their cemetery. And, before long, she was notified by the local clergy and by the Archbishop that the body was to be dug up and taken out because he was a bad guy. He was excommunicated. And she refused. And the penalty they threatened her with and imposed was "There will be no singing allowed ever more in your community and the Eucharist cannot be celebrated there." And she said, "This is just an exercise of clerical force and I'm much too old to be troubled by the plotting of corrupt Church leaders." And then she took her crosier (Like the Bishop, she carried a crosier, a staff), and at age 81 she went out and she knocked down every grave marker in the cemetery and leveled the ground so they couldn't find which body to dig up. And she held out until the clergy and the Archbishop gave in and saw it her way.
So, we've learned three things from Hildegarde. One, to let God in, God Who is Living Light and Refreshing Energy. And the second is to notice and care for the beauty of God's creation because all life and all the universe is connected in a web of life; and to let compassion and reconciliation happen because that's what the Church should be about. Not bad wisdom for the 21st century. Thank you, Hildegarde. And thanks be to God. Amen.