Happy New Year!
This is, I believe, the beginning of the New Year. School has started. New shoes and backpacks walk by my house, worn by excited-but-timid kindergartners and swaggering “older kids” on their way to school. The weather is cooler. We’ve had a touch of rain – I’d forgotten how lovely it sounds in the early morning. Autumn light and leaves are coloring the days. I’m celebrating the New Year with a new book, Femina: A New History of the MIddle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It, by Janina Ramirez. Already, I am learning new things. For example, although we think of men bringing Christianity to newly conquered territories, often it was women -- those warriors' and rulers' wives, sisters and daughters -- who actively shared their Christian faith in these new surroundings. Some of these women were revered in their lifetimes. Ramirez writes about the grave of one of those women, who was laid to rest on her real-life bed. Turns out an actual bed frame was most often handed down from generation to generation in those days, and burying a bed with someone on it was a sacrifice for the surviving family and a mark of honor for the deceased. I thought of that this morning as I made my own. It’s also been fun to learn more about women I’d already heard of – Joan of Arc, a national heroine who led French troops into battle before she herself was put to death; Julian of Norwich, who spent part of her life enclosed, or anchored, in a small cell within a church and who said many interesting things besides the oft-quoted “all shall be well”; and Margery Kemp, who described her religious pilgrimages in great detail at a time when men did most of the writing. But the person I’ve been thinking about most this week is Hildegard of Bingen, whose feast day was Sept. 17. Born in Germany in about 1098, Hildegard had vivid visions throughout her life, which she interpreted as illustrations of faith and divine love. (People have since speculated that she suffered from migraine headaches.) Her descriptions of her visions overflow with feminine imagery. Her parents gave her to a monastery when she was a child, and by the time she was 51, she had established her own religious community. She was a prolific writer, composed music, studied natural medicine and wrote two volumes on the subject. She corresponded with religious and political leaders of her time, preached and collected her own homilies from 1160 to 1170, and wrote two volumes on medicine. She lived for more than 80 years, at a time when the average life expectancy of a woman was about 43. Many of Hildegard’s visions were recorded as she and a priest/scribe sat in separate rooms, with only a small window between them. With the help of a younger nun, Hildegard described her visions to the scribe. Among them, Ramirez writes, were two visions of scripture -- Synagoga, who held the Jewish prophets in her arms, and Ecclesia, who held the Christian faithful in hers. I love the idea that those who hold the God's messengers and believers are women. I’m preparing to teach a month-long course on women in the Bible who work together in favor of life and my mind turns often to Hildegard’s imagery and a phrase that Ramirez uses in her book, “you cannot be what you cannot see.” Recovering the stories of women who have gone before us in time is a lot like women’s work, in general: It’s never done. And all of us, not just women, can profit from this work. Three more thoughts about Hildegard to ponder in this New Year: One reason she was so prolific was the length of her life and her stamina. If she had died at 50, a nice life for a woman of her time, she would never have founded her monastery and would have left behind only a few songs and one book. “But her life was one of extraordinary creativity and a staggering output of work,” Ramirez writes. So, I need to keep working. During her writing career, she took care to “differentiate her style and approach from the theologians of her time. The difference in tone could be compared today to that between an academic article and a trade book.” Always my aim. Who knew it was Hildegard’s goal, too. Lastly, Hildegard was canonized a saint in 2012 and proclaimed a “doctor of the church” in that same year. Her relics, preserved whenever possible for a saint, were “only her heart and her tongue,” Ramirez writes. They “have survived the tumultuous centuries of history . . . . all heart and all tongue, Hildegard was a woman whose voice still cries out as loudly today as it did 900 years ago.” Amen.
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