“Our very life depends on continuous acts of beginning. But these beginnings are out of our hands; they decide themselves.
Beginning precedes us, creates us. There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning.
More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could."
John O’Donohue


18 September 2016: First Christian Church, San Jose

“Cry out, therefore, and write thus”

 

I was 18 years old when I first met her

on the lips of a man I never knew

under a ceiling of stars

in a meadow in the shadow

of a sleeping library

built to look like a fortress.

With my mouth,


he whispered,

Hildegard wrote,

God says,

 

I kiss my own creation, every image
I have made out of the earth’s clay.

 

In the same year of her life,

Hildegard’s feet kissed the threshold

of the convent.
Imagine: finding tenderness

on earth and in heaven at once.

 

In her cell

(yes, they really call it that)

her pen poured out

the questions to their answers.

 

It came to pass,
when I was 42 years and 7 months old,

            that the heavens were opened

            and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance
            flowed through my entire brain.

And so it kindled in my whole heart and breast
like a flame, not burning, but warming,
…and suddenly I understood
the meaning of the expositions of the books.
But although I heard and saw these things,
because of doubt and low opinion of myself
and because of the diverse opinions of men,
I refused for a long time the call to write.


It is quite irrelevant how bitter

the approval of men tastes.
It is mother’s milk.
We are weaned when we are weaned.
Hildegard named her emergence “dread.”

 

Part of the terror is to take back our own listening.

 

It took 833 years after she passed to eternity

under two raging streams of divine light
seen by two Sisters
and therefore unverified

for a committee of men in inherited regalia,

at a table carved by the clandestine dreams
of lesser men and no women at all,

to declare her a Doctor of Souls.

They called it “equivalent canonization,”

the consolation prize.

 

I dare you to say  

it is too little, too late.