However, it is also important that we focus on the positive rather than the negative, drawing on those who inspire rather than those who infuriate. My mind was drawn to one such over the past few days because the Irish Council of Churches rep at our annual conference, Dr. Joan Back, passed me a copy of this month's "New City" magazine, which is a publication of the Focolare movement to which she belongs. She wanted me to have it because they had printed the poem/prayer below, which I originally published in this blog in 2017 but which was later included in "Doodlings and Doggerel."
I am privileged to know a number of really inspiring women including female ministers, but few of them hold a metaphorical candle to the German Benedictine, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179), a veritable renaissance woman, long before the Renaissance. She was an abbess, poet, composer (she even had a hit album recently!), theologian, philosopher and mystic, is considered to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany, writing influential botanical and medicinal texts, was the author of what is possibly the earliest German liturgical drama and arguably the oldest surviving morality play, and inventor of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota. She might easily be seen as a patron saint of the modern environmental movement with her strong sense of the wholeness of creation. Given her range of interests she has always intrigued me, especially given that she had a strong sense of how they were all integrated.
She wrote this short parable about herself and her calling (and this has a personal resonance for me this week):
Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I “A feather on the breath of God.”
And subsequently
Underneath all the texts, all the sacred psalms and canticles, these watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb, and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.
Hildegard of Bingen
But all of that is just a long-winded introduction for the very succinct prayer which New City printed, and which occurs in a number of variants in different sources and in different places in her writings. When I originally posted this piece I said that one day, with a suitable dictionary in hand, I might seek out the original. That day has still not come, but here is my rendering, based on a number of sources:
Holy Spirit:
The life of all creatures;
The cause of all movement;
The source of all song.
You are the breath - bring us life.
You are the salve - purify our souls.
You are the balm - heal our wounds.
You are the fire - warms our hearts.
You are the wisdom - open our minds.
You are the light - guide our feet.
Let all the world praise you
Through Jesus Christ our Saviour and our Lord.
inspired by the words of Hildegard of Bingen
If you are interested in seeing more material inspired by this amazing woman, including the image used in this post by Marcy Hall, check out https://globalworship.tumblr.com/post/132125159980/a-feather-on-the-breath-of-god/amp
Shalom
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