Imagined Greetings from Hildegard of Bingen on Her Feast Day

I, Hildegard of Bingen, love to linger in rooms with no ceilings. I love to romp through the borderlands between what some call pagan and what some call sacred. 

A thousand years ago, when I was a little girl, I was just like you. I felt a deep connection to the Spirit. I called it umbra viventis lucis, the spirit of the living light. 

I was the tenth child in a wealthy German family, and when I was only eight years old, my parents gave me as a tithe to the church. I had told them about my visions and the living light I saw, and they must have thought it would be a good place for me. I was mentored by a nun named Hutta, and I learned to read and write. Of course, the art and power of literacy certainly would not have been taught to a young medieval girl like myself had I not found myself dwelling within the shelter–and, shhhhhh! the freedom–of the abbey. 

Over the years, I experienced powerful visions in which I came to understand God as an artist imbued with goodness, greenness, and light. And in turn, in a deeply patriarchal culture, I began to understand myself as a gifted person who should strive mightily to return her own gifts back to the world.

As I stood in the power of my midlife, I began to gather women together, and I founded a new abbey on a hilltop near the Rhine. 

Living as we did in the abbey offered us all a degree of freedom and autonomy. Being sequestered from the regular world offered me a sanctuary where I could lead others and take time to develop my gifts. The others elected me magistra, mother superior, in 1136. As I learned how to lead, I scribbled through the boundary lines we human creatures tend to inscribe around fields of knowledge. I saw the places where poetry and preaching blurred into one another. By trusting my own brilliance and accessing my intuition, I gave myself permission to explore pharmacy in the fields that enveloped the abbey. 

I even invented my own language for transcribing my visions and dreams. Over time, I learned to embrace the inner visions that came to me throughout all my days. I sketched them out and turned them into artwork. I wrote plays, and I composed mesmerizing music that people still study and play today. I’m known as a polymath. I loved to learn about the medicinal values of the plants that surrounded me, and I offered and provided holistic forms of healing for my community. I especially tended to the needs of women. 

All of my ideas were centered around viriditas—an image that I invented. 

Viriditas is the greening, regenerating, vigorous life-force of the divine.

Viriditas is a verdant force of beauty, power, and connection—God’s incarnate greenness that can be found, felt, and accessed within plants, creatures, and human beings. 

Viriditas is the green, creative power of life. 

Viriditas is all around us, in the trees, the grass, the gardens. 

Viriditas is in us, too; that’s what you felt when you were surrounded by the falling flowers at the art installation. 

Viriditas is the lushness of our souls that can transfer between bodies and earth.  

I long to help this world by revealing the vibrancy and interconnectedness of all. My heart aches for your time of climate crisis. I feel the fear you carry for your grandchildren and for their children. For the owls and the frogs and the salmon. 

I want to show you how to trust your visions and your intuition… to let you name viriditas as a divine force of healing and connection to ourselves, to others, and to creation.

In the midst of all our worries about the environment, I want to show you that earth is a holy, wondrous place to be cherished and to be protected. I want you to feel The Spirit’s vitality in all creation. 

I want you to develop your own creativity and genius. Did you know that expressing your creative callings is a form of prayer? What else could it be? I view you and me as co-creators with The Spirit. We mirror the divine light of God, and this light shines and refracts through the cosmos. 

I walk beside you in the midst of this confusing time. 

Always remember that there is an unseen, vital force that sustains life. It burns in the sun and the stars and shines in the waters. 

Tend to your own wild spirit.

Your compassionate, wild, vigorous sister sends you rays of light and a hope for the greening of all,
Hildegard of Bingen

[Image Credit: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons]