St. Hildegard's Breakthrough

Hildegard of Bingen, a 13th century Benedictine nun, was not always a saint. She went through a conversion experience, and her breakthrough makes her a great patron for oppressed peoples. In her earlier years, she admits she was passive, without a voice, frustrated, and physically sick. "I refused to write for so long that I felt pressed down under the whip of God into a bed of sickness," she says. Filled with doubt and erroneous thinking, she was stymied with the "I can't" syndrome. When she began writing, she regained her health, energy, and voice. "In the process of self-expression, of art as meditation," she was healed. Hildegard felt she had been given the Pentecostal fire just as the first apostles who overcame their fears and began to prophesy and to preach. She wrote of the wonders of God in her own unique way of speaking which included, music, drama, preaching, and biblical as well as medical commentaries. Her conversion was a kind of "waking up" because she had been asleep. She "wakes up to her own powers to communicate, to speak the truth, to critique, to lead in telling the marvelous things of God." Those who are oppressed, and each of us, need to let go of our apathy and claim our rightful inheritance. We must become alive to the Spirit within us, on fire with his gifts. She proclaims this in one of her poems: "O Holy Spirit, you make life alive, you move in all things, you are the root of all created being, you awaken and reawaken everything that is."