Mirabai Starr - Hildegard of Bingen: Devotions, Prayers & Living Wisdom

Speak and write! the voice from Heaven commanded.

But Hildegard of Bingen, medieval visionary nun, remained silent.

Hildegard was forty-three years old when her visions finally became so insistent that she could no longer contain the secret she had harbored since early childhood: the Holy One, identifying itself as the Living Light, spoke to her. It spoke to her regularly, its voice emerging from a swirl of spiraling light. It taught her the mysteries of the universe in stunning detail and with absolute clarity.

Oh mortal, who receives these things not in the turbulence of deception but in the purity of simplicity for making plain the things that are hidden, the Holy One said that day in 1141, write what you see and hear.

It was not doubt that held her back, Hildegard assures us. The voice carried such authority that she was convinced its origin was divine. It was not a case of low self-esteem either, she says, nor a matter of worrying what other people might think. It was, she tells us, simple humility. Who was she, an uneducated woman, to proclaim Gods message to humanity?

But her refusal to cooperate with the divine demand almost killed her. Hildegard reports that she fell onto a bed of sickness. The more she resisted, the more seriously ill she became. Until at last, she writes in her introduction to the Scivias, the first chronicle of her visions, compelled by many infirmities ... I set my hand to writing ... and rose from my sickness with renewed strength.

What is the secret wisdom we each hold hidden in our hearts? What would happen if we rose up and shook off the limitations of our circumstances and spoke in the divine voice that has been whispering to us as long as we can remember? What if we allowed ourselves to become still enough to really hear the inner wisdom that is our birthright? What if we simply gave ourselves permission to listen?

Maybe in small ways the heavens would open up and reveal their secrets. Maybe light would pour through the cracks in our fragmented selves and we would become whole again, capable of bringing others into wholeness. Maybe we would remember what we came to this earth knowing and then forgot again, the perennial wisdom that, carried by the natural rhythms of our humanness, we have forgotten and remembered over and over.

Maybe by now life has brought us to our knees and we realize we have nothing left to lose by speaking the truth.

We are not all prophets. It may not be our job to challenge authority and expose corruption. We may not be the ones to penetrate the code of sacred scriptures and feed the spiritually hungry. It may be up to others to sound the clarion call of impending doom, calling on humanity to change its ways.

Ours may be a modest awakening. We may simply refuse to participate for another moment in a life against which our hearts have been crying out for years.