September 17
Saint Hildegard of Bingen,
Virgin and Doctor of the Church
Today's Gospel: Luke
7:36-50
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| Image created using Google AI Image Creator. |
Today the Church
remembers Saint Hildegard of Bingen, a Benedictine abbess who insisted, against
every convention of her time, that a woman with no formal theological training
could still be entrusted with visions from God, and then spent decades writing
them down anyway, filling volumes on theology, medicine, music, and the natural
world, composing chant so distinctive it's still performed today. She described
her visions as seeing everything bathed in what she called “the shadow of the
living light,” a brightness she experienced from early childhood but was too
afraid to speak of until she was well into middle age, and even then, only
after a serious illness convinced her that staying silent was making her sick.
Paul's words to the Corinthians today land close to her own account of herself:
by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain.
Hildegard called herself the least of those qualified to speak, unlettered, a
woman, unimportant by every standard her century used to measure authority and
then let God's grace work through exactly that unlikely vessel for the rest of
her long life.
That same
reversal is what makes the Gospel today so striking. A sinful woman comes into
the house of a Pharisee, weeping at Jesus' feet, wiping them with her hair and
anointing them with costly ointment, while the host looks on in silent
contempt, certain a true prophet would know what kind of woman was touching
Him. Jesus turns the judgment around entirely: her sins, which are many, are
forgiven, for she loved much. It is the outsider, the disqualified one, who
sees most clearly what love actually requires, while the respectable man at the
head of the table sees nothing at all. Hildegard understood that reversal from
the inside. The Church of her day had plenty of learned men who might have
claimed the authority to interpret visions like hers. It was the unlikely
abbess, written off by the standards of her age, who ended up teaching popes
and emperors.
That should press
on wherever you've assumed you're not qualified, not credentialed, not the kind
of person God typically uses, the sinful woman at the Pharisee's table, or
Hildegard, unlettered and afraid to speak for forty years. What have you been
keeping silent because you doubted you had any authority to say it? Hildegard's
illness, tradition tells us, only lifted once she finally obeyed and began to
write. What is the illness in you, the restlessness, the quiet ache, that might
lift the moment you stop waiting for permission?
There's a story
from the Canary Islands, of shepherds discovering a statue of Our Lady in a
cave, honored for decades by beings the natives could only describe as strange
lights setting candles around her before anyone had brought the light of full
Christian teaching to the island. Hildegard would have recognized that light
instantly; she spent her whole life trying to put into words the shadow of the
living light she'd seen since childhood, certain that even the most unlikely
soul could carry a flame the wise and credentialed had somehow missed. Our Lady
of the Candles, burning quietly long before anyone official arrived to explain
her, is Hildegard's whole vocation in a single image.
What have you
kept silent because you doubted you were qualified to speak it? Hildegard
waited forty years and grew sick from the waiting. Don't wait as long as she
did; what light have you been hiding under the excuse of unworthiness?
Rosary Man Jim
🌹
Freely given. Freely shared.
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