This week I am co-leading
a contemplative retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. Four
years ago on this site, Dewey Weiss Kramer gave an uplifting course on
Hildegard of Bingen for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program. I
decided to adapt today’s post from my reflections on that experience.
I
am writing this in the wake of the news of the death of Maya Angelou, and this
propinquity prompts me to note Hildegard and Angelou’s shared recognition of
our musical and lyrical needs spiritually, as well as the role that deprivation
plays in appreciating those needs. Both Hildegard and Angelou played many roles
in life, and both were strong and savvy women, unflinching in challenging
injustice as well as carving places for themselves in patriarchal systems and
cultures.
Angelou
took the wistful title and theme of her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from a poem by African American
poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. As a poor
African American girl turned woman from the backwaters of the South, Angelou
knew deprivation on multiple levels.
Hildegard,
from a wealthy family in Germany, used her privilege to create and defend a
group of women religious, but wrote some of her most profound words and
theology when her community was deprived of singing in worship by church
hierarchy.
I
fantasize about the harmony that these giants, Hildegard and Angelou, might
make now that both have been “flung up to heaven,” in the words of the title of
the latter’s last book, A Song Flung Up
to Heaven.
At
nine years of age, Maya Angelou chose to go mute for five years after naming
her rapist and believing it was her words that killed him. It could be argued
that her six memoirs that followed, perhaps all of her writings, were born out
of that silence, a kind of self-imposed spiritual discipline that emulates the
contemplative silences of the monastic life.
Silence
may have allowed her to listen closely to those around her, better able to
capture their choice of words and phrasings; to see life for what it was,
better able to be a truth teller in a world of denial and deception; to deeply
smell and taste and touch the world, better able to depict scents and flavors
and textures; and then to conjure her worldly, earthy, and cultural experience
in lyrical but accessible language.
Similarly,
Hildegard’s contemplative life empowered her to describe her visions, coaching
artists in their design, then to interpret “their truth,” their meaning
spiritually and theologically, in her rudimentary Latin, the mystical language
of the time.
And,
of great interest to this writer, Hildegard listened to the music of the soul,
creating her own forms of spiritual music that did not follow the conventions
of the day, thus creating an ethereal, unearthly music, music that serves as a
haunting reminder of the harmonies inherent in Eden (not far from that of
angels) and in the unfallen first human creature, of whom she said, “If he had
remained in his original state, the weakness of mortal man would not have been
able to endure the power and the resonance of his voice.” I have some sense of this, having heard Maya
Angelou speak and read her work with a musical, resonant, majestic intonation.
We
are blessed that Hildegard and Maya both found their voice.
I
am one of those persons of whom Hildegard writes “sighs and moans upon hearing
some melody, recalling the nature of celestial harmony.” Maybe these are echoes
of the sound of Eden, as Hildegard suggests, or premonitions of heavenly bliss,
or “the music of the spheres.”
I
hear that music in lyrical writing, whether poetry or prose. That’s why I was
so taken with Hildegard’s prayer, “O ignis Spiritus Paracliti,” which, even
without music, sings to me, especially that phrase, “O sweet savor in the
breast.” Like the Lord’s Prayer, it would be a worthy part of every liturgy.
Harmony
comes from the integrity of body and spirit that I experience with Hildegard in
the sacrament of music. Augustine’s reservations about the sensuality of music is the
very thing that draws me to it as an instance of the Incarnation of God. Music
is the Word made flesh—again.
“The
body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is
proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises
to God,” Hildegard affirms. Just as for
Hildegard encountering one of the Trinity is to encounter all of the Trinity, in
my view, to encounter an instance of Incarnation is to encounter all
Incarnation.
That’s
why Hildegard’s understanding that Incarnation was not the result of The Fall
but intended from the beginning makes sense to me, especially as she views
Creation itself as an incarnation of God, its fecundity, its greening (viriditas)—in my words, a divine
impulse, a holy “oozing,” and the soul’s melody.
And
the soul’s melody is not just human, it is in every creature, every atom, in
the whole of the cosmos—nothing is truly inert in Hildegard’s view, everything
is a “sounding icon” and “vibrations” of God’s self in everything.
As
I wrote in Communion of Life:
Our
original sin
Is
not the seizing of forbidden fruit,
But
failing to see
The
infinite in the finite,
The
luminous, sacred essence
Of
the garden;
Failing
to revere
The
life that gives us life;
Trampling
on the taboo,
Sequestering,
quantifying,
And
qualifying the holy—
The
heart of our garden.
Forgive
us, earth,
Be
merciful in our willful ignorance
As
you are gracious in your altruistic nature.
Hold
us accountable, and then,
Hold
us.
Reading
this you will understand why I was so taken with Hildegard’s fresh
understanding of human alienation, that the first human transgression was
refusing the white flower, the fruit of humility offered by a benevolent God:
“Its scent comes to the human’s nostrils, but he does not taste it with his
mouth…for he tried to know the wisdom of the Law with his intelligence…but did
not perfectly digest it…or fulfill it in full blessedness by the work of his
hands. … He did not seek God either by faith or by works.”
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