Medieval Monastics and the Work that Must be Done

Today is the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen; go to this post on my theology blog if you want to know more about her.

She's probably one of the most famous female monastics from past centuries.  A few years ago, someone told me that the Hildegard of Bingen channel on Pandora was one of the most popular. Then, as now, I doubted that fact.  And yet, it does speak to a yearning that so many of us have.

I think that many of us look to monastic communities past and present and idealize them.  But as I think and read about the lives of medieval monastic women, I try to think about what's left out.  Even as life in the abbey brought medieval women some freedom, they were still controlled by men, who may or may not have let them go in the directions that they thought would bring the most success.

When I think about their creative lives, I wonder if they created the art that most moved them or if they did the work that their communities needed:  music for the worship services, herbs that had medicinal/culinary value, weavings to cover cold walls.  What would they have done if they could have followed their true passions?

Very few of us have the luxury to follow our true passions.  Perhaps we don't really know what those true passions are, so shaped have we been by what our societies tell us our true passions should be.

Most of us have to balance many aspects of our lives, and many of us feel frazzled at this constant effort.  We will never achieve that true balance--attention to one aspect means that others go lacking (or waiting until later, whether it's a day later, a month, or years).  The lives of medieval monastics show us that it's always been this way.

We all face constraints of various kinds, and the life of Hildegard shows what could be accomplished, even during a time when women did not have full rights and agency. She was an abbess, and because being in charge of one cloistered community wasn’t enough, she founded another. She wrote music, and more of her music survives than almost any other medieval composer. She was an early naturalist, writing down her observations about the natural world and her theories about how the natural world heals us. She wrote to kings, emperors and popes to encourage them to pursue peace and justice. She wrote poems and a morality play and along the way, a multitude of theological meditations.

My theory: in the day to day, we feel we aren't doing much. But when we take the full measure of a life, we see how much a life can encompass.