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St. Hildegard of Bingen’s Cry

“Arise therefore, and cry out”

September 17 is the feast of St. Hiildegard of Bingen. She lived from 1098-1179. A Benedictine Nun, at the age of 42, she was given visions and commanded rise up and cry out what she saw. She obeyed and produced a set of writings known today as Scivias.

Her first vision is of a hidden mountain, the mountain of God’s throne, an iron mountain of immutable justice hidden in divine glory. A purifying Fear of the Lord contemplates this splendor. Not the kind of fear that pulls away to protect itself. Rather the kind of fear that is vigilant and sees the truth. Eyes which gaze with this holy fear can never be satisfied with the merely mediocre. They guard against every form of compromise. The glory they behold demands absolute allegiance, complete surrender, and total humility.

In this description, is St. Hildegard suggesting a way by which we might enjoy the same vision she has shared in? This is no exercise in esoteric navel gazing. Her vision demands a journey beyond our own self-pre-occupation and into real friendship with God, a friendship protected by the strength of divine justice. She sees the truth in a way that demands an ongoing conversion of life.

She is well-formed in St. Benedict’s conversatio morum. The mountain she sees is not a truth we scrutinize so much as the truth that scrutinizes us: a scrutinizing of all our thoughts and actions in light of the Gospel. The truth she beholds demands repentance from the lack of justice we allow ourselves to slip into. The iron mountain she contemplates renders futile every effort to conform the Gospel to our own ways and invites us to be transformed by its just demands.

Today, where all kinds of cruelty are so easily excused and any form of self-indulgence so readily lifted up to the level of a fundamental human right, we need to rediscover the shadow of the iron mountain from which St. Hildegard cries out to us. Only under the glory of this mountain can we find the peace that the Lord has come to give. Only in the blinding light into which Holy Fear gazes can we find the humility to love one another the way Christ has loved us.

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Primacy of Contemplation

Before action, there is being.  Before apostolate, there is prayer.  Before mission, there is contemplation.

The primacy of contemplation is rooted in the primacy of grace in the spiritual life.  Action is imperative, but God’s action comes before our action.  Mission is born in contemplation.  Contemplative prayer is an encounter with Someone who knows the truth about us.  In this prayer, we discover how the Living God contemplates with eager expectation the noble purpose He has planned for us to share in from before the foundation of the world.
Prayer liberates us from everything that prevents us from being fruitful.  When we spend time in prayer, we make ourselves vulnerable to a plan that is not our own.  When we spend time in silence, we learn to listen to a voice beyond our own big fat ego.   When we spend time listening to the Word made flesh, we open our whole being to new life.
This is not to say there are many moments of grace that sprout from our efforts to be merciful to one another.  Sometimes these are the dominant graces of our life.  God loves to dwell in hearts that spend themselves for others and He is ready to sustain their efforts when nature reaches its limits.   Nonetheless, those who want to do something beautiful for God frequently discover that however noble the endeavors for which they spend themselves, their work amounts to nothing if He is not working in them.  
This is why those who are truly fruitful for the God humbly root themselves with fear and trembling deep in the Word: such tearful attention to the presence of God who speaks to them in sacred doctrine leads to a jubilation that informs everything they do. 
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St. Benedict and Lectio Divina

For St. Benedict, Lectio divina is an important part of Quaerere Deum, the search for God. (See his Rule, #48) We seek the Lord and find Him by obediently serving Him in love and humility. Yet, we cannot serve the Truth who is God if we cannot discern His voice. Because it radically roots us in the same Word the Father has spoken to us once and for all, Lectio divina opens our hearts to the voice of the Lord which whispers deep within our being. The beautiful, surprising and in-flowing presence of the Lord is free when devotion filled study purifies the heart with sacred doctrine. Lectio divina, prayerful Study of the Sacred Scriptures, makes the heart vulnerable to this purification.

Obedience – generous attentiveness to the Word of God chanted in the psalms, read in the Scriptures, present through the members of the community, spoken by those in authority, proclaimed in the liturgy and at even at meals – requires continual personal study of the Word with prayerful devotion of heart. This kind of attentive obedience is not exhausted by external works and the conformity of outward behavior. It requires a total conversion of the inner man – an ongoing conversation with the Word of the Father about one’s way of life in light of the Gospel. Lectio divina is about cultivating this deeper interiority, this more intense vigilance for the Life, Truth and Way in the inner most sanctuary of one’s own soul.

Lectio divina directed to obedience to Christ is part of our spiritual battle. We must never lose courage when confronting the evil one, or the world, or, most especially, ourselves. This requires a constant struggle against pride and an ongoing commitment to humility, to remembering that we are but the Lord’s fertile soil – it is up to Him to sow the seeds that will produce much fruit. Our job is to stand firm, to persevere, to believe in God’s mercy and to be generously open to His holy will – wherever we find it. When we read the Scriptures in prayerful reflection, searching its meaning with all the strength of our soul, He gives us the weapons to realize His victory once again – the victory the Savior won on Calvary is renewed whenever we persevere in surrendering our hearts to the Eternal Word in the present moment of our lives.

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Lectio Divina and Contemplation

One of my readers asked about the difference between the practice of Lectio Divina and contemplation. Lectio Divina refers to prayerful reading of the Bible and contemplation is described as a beholding with the eyes of the heart the splendor of the Lord. The two activities are related. That is why, over the course of the last millennium, Lectio Divina is often written about as a method of prayer which culminates in contemplation. Guigo the Carthusian describes how a prayerful engagement with the Scriptures can take us:

  • from reading and listening to a passage from the Bible (lectio) 
  • to prayerful reflection on the heart piercing truth the Lord discloses to us (meditatio) 
  • to the ardent offering of deep holy desires in prayer (oratio) 
  • to astonished wonder over the Lord who gazes on us in love (contemplatio). 

For him and many contemplatives, these activities flow together like rungs on a ladder leading from our earthly life to heaven, from our hearts to the heart of God. From this perspective we could say that prayerfully reading the Bible seeking the saving truth is already the beginning of contemplation. Mulling over the Eternal Word and keeping the Truth in the heart deepens one’s devotion to Christ and the greater our devotion to Him, the more faith opens us to the fullness of His ineffable mystery. In fact, this devoted reading makes the soul vulnerable to the mysterious wisdom and love of God from which we came, for which we are made and in which we are loved. Fashioned as we are for so great a purpose when we seek Him with love, we find Him in love – for He is drawn by love.

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The Mystical Life: Where Liturgy and Contemplation Converge

Liturgy and Contemplation converge in the mystical life, a life animated by the mystery of Christ.  There are many who see liturgy and contemplative prayer in opposition – one a shared experience of the community and the other an escape into the esoteric.  Yet neither liturgy nor contemplation are properly understood as experiences.  Nor can they be defined by their psychological outcomes. Contrary to this dominant
religious thought, the unity of contemplation and liturgy is grounded in the
remarkable access to God faith in Christ makes possible.  


The confidence Christ provides emboldens mental prayer and the liturgy to their ultimate end, to an
actual anticipation of the unity with the Holy Trinity to which the life of the
Church is ordered.   This means beyond
all merely psychological descriptions of the liturgy and mental prayer, these
practices converge in the heart lifted up as an offering to God.  Rather
than limiting ourselves to the narrowly anthropocentric boundaries of religious
experience, the unity of contemplation and liturgy lives in astounding theo-centric
horizons.  


Only a vision centered in the Invisible God glimpses the heights, depths and radical extent of his divine philanthropy, and only this perspective begins to provide a sense for how implicated we are in His merciful love.  This astonishing love for man is revealed in
Christ Jesus, the Word of God encountered in the Liturgy and pondered in prayer.   Those who have made themselves vulnerable to this Word in holy silence also avail themselves of  liturgical
participation which is truly mystical, beyond the limits of our own efforts and even our conscious awareness.  Those who hunger for this Bread of Life in the liturgy are fed with mystical food that nourishes them for the pilgrimage of prayer.

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St. Benedict

“Listen, O my son to the precepts of the master, and incline the ear of your heart: willingly receive and faithfully fulfill the admonition of your loving father; (cf. Prov. 1:8, 4:20, 6:20) that you may return by the labor of obedience to him from whom you had departed through the laziness of disobedience.”  Rule of St. Benedict, tr. Luke Dysinger, O.S.B.; Source Books (March 1997)


There is a certain urgency in this appeal with which St. Benedict introduces his rule.  He is deeply concerned for the reader, as if the very life of the reader depended upon understanding what he was trying to convey.   What he in fact conveys is a way of life, a day to day discipline for the Christian life.  Many followers of Christ are scarcely aware that our faith demands a disciplined life.  Without discipline, we cannot hear the Lord speak to our hearts.   

The saint’s appeal invites a relationship.  If his appeal works, it is because the reader has somehow intuited the holiness of St. Benedict and at the same time also glimpsed in these words the concern of a spiritual father for his son or daughter. What St. Benedict learned through those who formed him in the faith, he wants to pass on through this rule that he is entrusting to us.  Someone cared enough to pass on the faith to him, to be a spiritual father to him.  Now in this rule, he shares from his heart practical advice that he learned at the price of great personal suffering.  

In his efforts to be a spiritual father, he was often rejected and at one point his reputation ruined by false accusations manufactured by those who envied him.  But no matter the trial, he never wrapped himself in righteous indignation and lashed out against those who injured him.  Instead, he quietly followed his crucified God in the humble manner he learned from his own spiritual fathers.  By suffering such obedience to the Lord, he learned how to willingly and faithfully incline the ear of his heart so that he might labor for obedience.   It is precisely this kind of wisdom we need for the Christian life today, a wisdom forged in trials and tribulations, a wisdom which cannot be shaken.

St. Benedict teaches a discipline for the Christian life in which the disciple constantly chooses to be reliant on God and the way God wants to work.  The way God has chosen to work is through our fellow sinners.  It is a kind of scandal that God chooses to work through frail human beings, even to the point where sometimes in our devotion to the Lord we must obey them, even if they appear or are mistaken.  This never means we act against our conscience — God expects us to use our heads.  That is why He gave them to us.  But we often need to act against the temptation to think we know better than everyone else.  We also need to act against our tendency to put our own big fat ego at the center of the cosmos.  This is why we humbly make ourselves accountable to one another.  This totally goes against our cultural values which exalt self-sufficiency and individualism – even to the point of absolute selfism.  Yet, St. Benedict understands the apostolic command: we obey one another out of reverence for Christ. 

Christians are not self-sufficient. They are completely reliant on the Lord and on those to whom the Lord entrusts them. Consider how the Lord has chosen to reveal himself through the words of a preacher.  He makes known his ways through faithful teachers.  He is also teaching us through generous spiritual fathers and mothers.  Whatever our particular circumstance, our faith was given to us by someone who loved us enough to tell us the truth, even when that truth was painful to hear.  Our job is to listen to the Lord speak through such people – through them, He is speaking to our hearts, helping us overcome our laziness, teaching us how to make something beautiful of our lives for his glory, and leading us back to Himself.
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Divine Mercy and habitare secum

The Christian life of prayer is rooted in the mercy of God.  There are such dark places in our lives, only with the mercy of the Lord can we face ourselves and deal with the reality of who we really are.   Living with yourself, this ideal began to be articulated around the time of St. Benedict, although it was a lived part of Christian spirituality from the very beginning.  It means not only confessing sin and doing penance for the evil that one has done or entertained, not only accepting one’s weaknesses and limitations before God, but most especially habitare secum means being able to enter into the depths of one’s own heart to humbly listen to the Lord who waits for us there.   


Christian prayer deals with the reality of the human heart.  The heart is the spring from which flows all that is good and evil about ourselves.   It is broken and wounded, laden with many sorrows, and yet still capable of finding joy in what is good.  It is an inner sanctuary where God speaks to us.  People who do not want to deal with themselves or deal with God do not like to go there.  They remain unfamiliar to themselves and unaware of what is driving them in life.   Yet, when God calls us to Himself and we begin to yearn to be with Him, entering into our hearts, accepting what is there and offering to the Lord is the best way to find Him.  

The reason why has to do with the theme of mercy Pope Benedict singled out in his homily at Sunday’s beatification of John Paul II – mercy is the limit of evil.  John Paul II loved the theme of Divine Mercy – it was the mercy of God that helped him deal with the cruel brutality of World War II which was followed by decades of Soviet oppression.  John Paul was convinced that Divine Mercy is the limit of evil because the more he trusted in Jesus, the more mercy triumphed over evil.  Contemplating the face of Christ and clinging to the mercy of God was the secret not only of dealling with himself but also being merciful to others, even those who tried to kill him.  His confidence in Divine Mercy made John Paul II a compelling advocate for the dignity of the human person – it is why people were drawn to him all over the world.  They wanted to know the Mercy of God his life in Christ radiated.


Evil, the mystery of sin, dehumanizes – but Divine Mercy raises on high! Mercy is love that suffers the misery of another, the evil that afflicts someone’s heart, so that the dignity of that person might be restored.   Christ embraced our misery on the Cross that we might know God’s mercy.

How this applies to the heart is that the good and evil we find there are not co-equal dualistic principles.  Good has definitively triumphed over evil in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  When we turn to Him in faith, He gives us the power of his mercy and teaches us to realize the victory of good over evil in our lives.  He has already suffered our misery with us and is ever ready to meet us there – so that in Him all that is good, noble and true about us is rescued from the mystery of sin and raised up to new life.  

To learn to live with ourselves – this is to look at those places in our lives in which evil has a foothold and to offer these to God so that we can realize in ourselves how Divine Mercy is the limit of evil.  However deep the abyss of our misery – the abyss of mercy issuing forth form the wounds of Christ is inexhaustibly deeper.  The more we discover this limit to the evil in our own hearts, the more we can rejoice in the remarkable and astonishing presence of the Lord in our lives.  Rather than being driven by all kinds of brokenness we do not understand, we find ourselves able to live like St. Benedict, Bl. John Paul II and the other great saints – who through such interior deliberation discovered the secret of living with themselves before the face of God – habitare secum – is seeking the Mercy of the Lord.
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