Demi - Hildegard of Bingen: Scientist, Composer, Healer, and Saint

Hildegard of Bingen: Scientist, Composer, Healer, and Saint

Demi 2019

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Wisdom Tales in an imprint of World Wisdom, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Demi, author.

Title: Hildegard of Bingen : scientist, composer, healer, and saint / by Demi.

Description: Bloomington : Wisdom Tales, 2019. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018042182 (print) | LCCN 2018052404 (ebook) | ISBN 9781937786786 (epub) | ISBN 9781937786779 (casebound : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Hildegard, Saint, 1098-1179--Juvenile literature. | Christian women saints--Germany--Biography--Juvenile literature.

Classification: LCC BX4700.H5 (ebook) | LCC BX4700.H5 D455 2019 (print) | DDC 282.092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://url.emailprotection.link/?aQIGj4lOvUgMGIEdjJ2U_yMP1Pz2yg1JhzhqEBlgPHic~

Printed in China on acid-free paper.

Production Date: November 2018

Job/Batch#: Q18110120

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Hildegard of Bingen

Scientist, Composer, Healer & Saint

Demi*

Once upon a time in 1098 AD, in Mainz, Germany, a little girl was born named Hildegard.

She was a very special girl, because when she shut her eyes, she saw lights, and inside those lights were pictures of Heaven.

When she was three years old her inside lights became so dazzling and bright, that they would make her whole body tremble and shake.

Her lights told her many things. If she looked at a mother cow, she could tell the color of its calf before it was born. She could also predict the future.

But afer seeing so many things with her lights, she got terrible headaches. Her parents decided to send her to the Benedictine Cloister of Mount St. Disibod. This monastery was on a beautiful mountain illuminated by the sun. It was a place where people who saw God could go and pray.

Hildegard learned reading, music, singing, Biblical history, prayer, spinning, and work. She was so musical that she could hear the singing of an entire prayer service just once and perform it.

She said, There is the music of Heaven in all things and we have just forgotten how to hear it until we sing it!

When Hildegard was eighteen, she became a nun and took the Benedictine habit. She was so wise and so kind that when she was older, Hildegard was elected Abbess of the cloister.

But now when Hildegard shut her eyes, her secret lights were so blinding and her headaches so great that she could hardly bear it any longer.

Then, suddenly, she heard a voice that said:

This is the voice of God....

When you see a great light inside you, that too is the light of God....

You must let other people see what you see.

You must let your inside lights shine out.

And so Hildegard began to tell what she saw in her secret land of lights to a nun and monk who wrote it down in a book called Know the Ways of God. Hildegards secret lights showed how to live for God and enter His heavenly city. As Hildegard wrote down what she saw, her headaches also went away. But she wondered if she should tell everything she saw in her secret land of lights.

She thought, I am just a poor, little woman. I am just a feather on the breath of God.

The greatest monk of the time, Bernard of Clairvaux, told her to continue sharing her secret lights, and so did Pope Eugenius III.

When Hildegard was fifty-three, she finished her book Know the Ways of God and became famous. Now everyone wanted to see her at St. Disibod Cloister, but it wasnt big enough. Hildegard prayed and received heavenly guidance to move her nuns to Rupertsberg near the town of Bingen.