Will We Listen?
Hildegard of Bingen is a champion of the Earth, of Mother Earth. She’s the champion of women’s rights and the Divine Feminine, and also of the Sacred Masculine. She brings them together explicitly as we’ll see in her paintings and in her writing. She is, of course, a great student of creativity. Art as meditation is such a big part of her spiritual practice. She was a genius in music, an amazing painter of mandalas and other things, an herbalist, a gardener, a healer.
She has so much to offer us at this time in history when human knowledge has gone overboard and despoiled so much of our Earth and its creatures. We need more wisdom to balance that knowledge, and she brings that forward in such a marvelous way. Of course, she is a student of cosmology. She is a scientist always exploring what is this universe in which we find ourselves.
When Hildegard was 10, her parents gave her to the church, as was the custom. The 10th child was given to the church as a tithing. Hildegard lived under the training of an anchoress. When Jutta, that anchoress, died, Hildegard was voted into a position of leadership when she was about 36.
By the age of 42 or 43, she had this big awakening. She underwent a very great illumination. That’s what she calls it. Here’s how she described it. She said it is the Holy Spirit who illumines. She wrote, “O, Holy Spirit, fiery comforter spirit, life of the life of all creatures.” The Holy Spirit is a burning spirit. It kindles the hearts of humankind. This is her self-portrait of her awakening.
