St. Hildegard: Be Weird

Readings: Sirach 43:1-2,6-7,9-12,27-28; Psalm 104:25-34; John 3:16-21

I went to a large public high school in the northern part of our state; at the time of my graduation, I believe we had around 250 in our class, and the enrollment of the school as a whole was about 1200 students. As you might imagine, the general feeling of attending a large public school with a 5-A football program was very different from attending ESA, particularly because, at least in the 90s, a large degree of conformity was still expected within most peer groups.

Those who stood out from the crowd were not celebrated, but mocked, repressed, and denied. Suffice it to say that, for a scrawny kid with an odd sense of humor and without abundant athletic talent, with long hair and strange musical tastes, whose major interests included being captain of the Quiz Bowl team and playing the piano, the word I heard more than any other to describe myself was “weird.”

Weird—what a strange word, originally used to describe fate by the Anglo-Saxons, and later associated with the prophetic witches in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. But I think that when it was wielded as a weapon against me in high school, what most people probably meant was “foreign,” or “strange,” in that they did not have room in their conceptual framework for people who didn’t conform to their understanding of the category “typical high school student.”

Thankfully, “weird” is a category that flourishes at ESA, since we embrace our non-typical ethos and wear it as a badge of pride (as I learned to embrace my own weirdness over time). Perhaps we should embrace St. Hildegard, whose feast day we celebrate today, as our patron saint. She is a strange one, and therefore one of my favorites.

St. Hildegard lived in the 12th century in Germany. She was the tenth of ten children and was raised in a monastery. She was a keen observer of nature and is still celebrated in Germany as one of their first national scientists. She was also an herbalist who knew a great deal about the healing properties of various plants and employed them much as a physician would prescribe medicines today (she even has a plant genus named after her).

In addition, she was a mystic, a theologian, and an evangelist, and she is one of the first composers in the western tradition whose name we actually know (most compositions were simply anonymous before this time). She spoke truth to power, calling out her male superiors when she saw them pursuing wealth and power instead of genuine spiritual growth. Oh, and she also invented her own language.

For Hildegard to have accomplished all of these things in her life, as a woman in 12th century Europe, is striking enough; but in 2012, 873 years after her death, she was named a Doctor of the Church, someone who is said to have had an important influence on Church teaching, joining only three other women and 30 other men who hold that title to this day.

St. Hildegard was indeed a strange woman, if by strange we mean someone who was a passionate spiritual leader and who had a great interest in uniting various kinds of knowledge. It is her emphasis on the interrelatedness of all things that makes her such an attractive figure today, and someone sorely needed to correct our misunderstanding of ourselves and our role in the world.

You see, Hildegard knew that one of the myths that had infected the Christianity of her day, just as it continues to infect the Christianity of our time, is that we are the masters and lords of creation, and that anything we desire, we take. A myth is a story, after all, that gives us an understanding of who we are and what our place is in the world. If we tell the wrong story, we end up in a bad place. The story of mastery and exploitation leads to mass extinction, water shortages, land mismanagement, and climate change—a frightening yet very real story playing out before our eyes today.

St. Hildegard saw, in contrast, that the world was an ordered and balanced ecosystem that depended on a happy marriage of oppositions to thrive. The passage from Sirach that Emily read speaks to these balanced oppositions; the sun and the moon; the stars and the rainbow, all speak of the glory of the Creator: “He is the all,” the writer states, and yet God is greater even than the creation. Or in the Psalm that Jeanne read, we see that God creates an incredibly diverse array of species, all of whom in turn praise the creator by the very fact of their beautiful and diverse existence. And John writes in the Gospel of Christ as the living Word through whom all life is created and sustained.

If our role and purpose is not to be the lords and masters of creation, what is our role and purpose? How do we praise the creator? Hildegard says that “men and women are the light-green heart of the living fullness of nature. A direct connection exists between the heart of a person and all the elements of the cosmos.”

Indeed, Hildegard anticipates the later discoveries of evolutionary science when she claims that creation is still being created. For Hildegard, creation is not something that stopped when God rested on the seventh day, but an ongoing reality in which humans participate regularly. Our role is to be co-creators with God, paying attention to the spirit within all life and creating harmony in the cosmos.

In this understanding of the life of faith, religion and spirituality are not separate from the rest of life; they encompass all of life, all of our ways of being, from gardening and recycling to careful observations of the natural world, to fighting for justice and peace rather than injustice and violence. Every time we make wise and peaceful decisions, we are co-creating the world with God; and, likewise, every time we make destructive and violent decisions, we destroy a little piece of God’s creation.

As Pope Francis has stated, “we can hardly consider ourselves to be fully loving if we disregard any aspect of reality. Peace, justice, and the preservation of creation are three absolutely interconnected themes, which cannot be separated and treated individually. Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth.”

In a few minutes we will be listening to and participating in the Eucharistic Prayer, the long prayer that Fr. Matt prays as he blesses the bread and the wine for communion. We’re using a different form of that prayer today that stresses the kinds of concerns St. Hildegard raised in her own day, demonstrating that sense of interconnectedness among all the elements of creation, the sun, the planets, and, as the prayer so poetically phrases it, “this fragile earth, our island home.”

The prayer goes on to tell the story of Christianity as a story about our greed, selfishness, and domineering attitudes that have diminished all of life. But it also stresses the hope of renewal and strength, in this holy meal in which God makes ordinary things extraordinary, in which God promises to bless us with his very body as strength for the journey of co-creation.

In 1966, in the wake of the Holocaust, the spiritual writer Thomas Merton struggled with the seeming “sanity” of the Nazi perpetrators of genocide, especially Adolf Eichmann, who slept well, had no outward manifestations of mental illness, who seemed to be perfectly content, even-keeled, and unrepentant in his trial in the early 1960s in Jerusalem. Merton wrote these words as he grappled with the question of this kind of “sanity”: “what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their suffering, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one’s own?”

Merton concluded with the realization that this kind of sanity is insanity and leads to total destruction. Instead, to renew the world, to co-create it with God, we should advance values that seem insane according to the world’s standards: the insanity of love; the insanity of caring for the creation; the insanity of preferring peace to war; the insanity of advocating for justice for all people; the insanity of gentleness, generosity, truthfulness, kindness, and bravery.

May we all find ourselves on the side of the weird! May we all willingly embrace the strangeness of God’s creation and God’s grace, the counterintuitive but all-important way of beauty, love, and service.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.