September 4, 2024
This month we observe the Feast Days of two remarkable women, Hildegard and Phoebe. Hildegard of Bingen, born in 1098 in the lush Rhineland Valley, was a mystic, poet, composer, dramatist, doctor, and scientist. Her parents’ tenth child, she was tithed to the Church and raised by the anchoress Jutta in a cottage near the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg. Drawn by the life of silence and prayer, other women joined them, finding the freedom, rare outside women’s religious communities, to develop their intellectual gifts. They organized as a convent under the authority of the abbot of Disibodenberg, with Jutta as abbess. When Jutta died, Hildegard, then 38, became abbess. Later she founded independent convents at Bingen (1150) and Eibingen (1165), with the Archbishop of Mainz as her only superior. From childhood, Hildegard experienced dazzling spiritual visions.
We are told that at age 43, a voice commanded her to tell what she saw. So began an outpouring of extraordinarily original writings illustrated by unusual and wondrous illuminations. These works abound with feminine imagery for God and God’s creative activity. In 1147, Bernard of Clairvaux recommended her first book of visions, Scivias, to Pope Eugenius III, leading to papal authentication at the Synod of Trier. Hildegard became famous, eagerly sought for counsel, a correspondent of kings and queens, abbots and abbesses, archbishops and popes. She carried out four preaching missions in northern Europe, unprecedented activity for a woman. She practiced medicine, focusing on women’s needs; published treatises on natural science and philosophy;
August 28, 2024
They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”Matthew 14:17
Some time ago, while backpacking in the Four Corners area of Utah, at Cedar Mesa, I awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of a small animal scurrying around outside my tent. At least, I hoped it was small. Earlier in the evening we heard coyotes calling in the deep canyons of Grand Gulch, where we were now four days into our trip. Curious, I unzipped the door of the tent and crawled outside, headlamp shining in the darkness, to find a fox scurrying away. Standing outside the tent, I turned off the headlamp, and looked up. In that moment, I saw more stars than I had ever seen. There was a fullness, depth, color, and abundance to this heavenly host that left me speechless. I will never forget it. The light from those stars had been traveling thousands of years to reach us in Red Canyon that night. Indeed, at that moment we were in the ancestral home of the Anasazi—from which the Puebloan tribes arose—and it occurred to me that the light from some of those stars began its journey at the same time the Anasazi lived in Grand Gulch, some two thousand years ago. In that moment, time and space seemed a seamless web of light. The light seemed to be everywhere, past, present, and future.
John Polkinghorne, the Anglican priest and physicist,
August 7, 2024
Next week, we in the Episcopal Church will celebrate the feast day of Jonathon Myrick Daniels. Born in Keene, New Hampshire, in 1939, he was shot and killed by an unemployed highway worker in Haynesville, Alabama in August of 1965. From High School in New Hampshire to his studies at VMI and Harvard, Jonathon Daniels wrestled with the meaning of life and death and vocation. Attracted to medicine and law as well as ministry, he eventually entered Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In March of 1965 the televised appeal of Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Selma to secure for all citizens the right to vote drew Jonathon to a time and place where the nation’s racism and the Episcopal Church’s share in that inheritance were exposed. Jailed on August 14 for joining a picket line, Jonathon and his companions were unexpectedly released. Aware that they were in danger, four of them walked to a small store. As sixteen year-old Ruby Sales reached the top step of the entrance a man with a gun appeared, cursing her. Jonathon pulled her to one side to shield her from the unexpected threats. He was killed by a blast from the 12-gauge shotgun. Jonathon’s letters and papers bear eloquent witness to the gifts he possessed, and to the cross he chose to bear as he discovered these gifts, renewing his mind and being transformed in the process. He writes;
“The doctrine of the creeds, the enacted faith of the sacraments were the essential preconditions of the experience itself.
July 31, 2024
In a lovely poem by William Stafford, we are invited to pay attention to the “threads” in our lives that endure, and in so doing, remind us of what is most deeply important to our faith journey:
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread. ~William Stafford
This week in the Episcopal Church we celebrate the “Philadelphia Eleven”—the first women ordained in the Episcopal Church—and we observe the Feast Day of William Wilberforce, reformer and abolitionist.
The ordination service was held on Monday, July 29, 1974, the Feast of Saints Mary and Martha, at the Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia, where Suzanne Hiatt served as deacon, and whose rector was civil rights advocate Paul Washington. Beginning at 11 o’clock in the morning, the service lasted for three hours.] The eleven women serving as deacons presented themselves to Bishops Corrigan, DeWitt, and Welles, who ordained them as priests. Harvard University professor Charles V. Willie, who was also the vice president of the House of Deputies at the time,