Is music an important part of your life? Saint Hildegard was a musician, among other things. Music was the way Hildegard found to express her vision of the glory of God.
Hildegard lived near the Rhine River in Germany. When she was eight years old, her parents took her to a wise woman named Jutta, who lived in a room attached to the church. Jutta taught Hildegard, and some other girls, how to read the Psalms in Latin and how to do needlework. Hildegard never learned to write.
When Hildegard grew up, she became a nun and the head of the convent. Hildegard composed songs about the love of God for the nuns to sing. She said that she wanted them to sound like angels singing. Her songs were about God’s beauty and power in all of creation, about Mary and the saints, and about heaven.
Hildegard was able to express these things so beautifully because God showed her these things. As a child she sometimes told others about her visions, but when she realized that o one else saw the same thing, she kept it to herself. When she was 42 years old, God told her to reveal to the world what she saw and heard. Still Hildegard hesitated. This amazing woman was not so sure of herself. She had never doubted that the visions came from God, but she worried about what people would think or say.
Again the inner voice told her to speak out. So she did. When the bishop read the first book, Scivias (know the Ways of the Lord), he said that it came from God, and he told her to continue. For the rest of her life she wrote; that is, she dictated to a monk or to several nuns who wrote for her.
In a time when few women wrote at all, Hildegard authored and illustrated major works of theology and contemporary texts on science and religion and on natural healing with plants, trees and stones. As more and more people heard about Hildegard’s wisdom and holiness, they came from all over Germany and France to seek advice and help with ailments of body and soul. She became so famous that bishops, kings, and even the pope consulted her. Hildegard never took credit herself; everything came from God, who had given her an understanding of the world. |
