Nov 14 | Be Like an Icon

Source: www.studyblue.com

Source: www.studyblue.com

Hildegard of Bingen is one of my favourite mystics. I first learned about her on my hiatus from the church and listened to her music when I was a Wiccan – I actually blessed my harp one night alone at home, listening to her music and dancing about the room!

One of my favourite things about her is her incarnational theology. In Physica she speaks of the rivers of the world being like the veins inside a human being, carrying blood about the body. I found I delighted in her description of “red earth” – red earth “brings forth many fruits that, because of their abundance, are unable to come to completion.” (103) This sounds like me!

I have always been profoundly affected by Hildegard’s art – both her music and visual art in particular. Her music is unusual in that she wrote melodies that often went beyond the normal range for religious music at the time. This is part of what makes it so special for me. I think my favourite piece is her “Columba Aspexit,” written in honour of St. Maximilian, which appropriately soars like the dove it is named for. She writes rhapsodic lines reminiscent of the Song of Songs:

The dove peered in through the lattices of the windows,

                Where, before its face, a balm exuded from incandescent Maximilian.

Art has been a huge part of my healing process. Although I am able to engage my left brain logical side, I am definitely a sensitive sensual right brain person most of the time. Symbols and creative expression are far more likely to nourish me. Music specifically has had a huge role to play in my healing journey. Having been bullied into the desire for constant invisibility for much of my childhood, I found I could come home to myself when I learned to play the Celtic harp. Writing had always been a solace for me, but since it is a solitary activity I could hide in it and express my feelings without any repercussions. It was very different to play an instrument and be good at it – this, I felt, let me not only express who I felt I really was, but let other people see it and, usually, love it.

For a long time the harp was something I pursued for its own sake and its role in my own healing, but eventually I began to discover that, through no “fault” of my own, it was working its own healing in others. I had the great joy and honour of bringing it into a few palliative care wards, and into the Dr. Peter AIDS Centre when my mum worked there. I had never liked hospitals as a child, but I felt very different once I had the harp with me. I felt as though I had a role there and it suddenly became a very holy exercise – even in the Dr. Peter Centre, sitting with addicts cackling as I played “Stairway to Heaven” and “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica. I was humbled by the people I met who were dying or in pain, and felt (and still feel) that the beauty they encountered through me has very little to do with me personally, and everything to do with the Holy Spirit moving through me. When I began composing, this sense only deepened, as I found myself writing songs about God that I could barely remember writing – I seemed to pull them fully formed out of the air. Eventually I expanded my healing ministry to Healing Touch and became more hands-on, but still had no sense that it was me that was “special” in some way – rather God or the Spirit gifted me with her presence and was thereby able to visit or help someone in a special way through me.

I think this is why I find that the most important part of healing – the part that I most want to develop, because it is not really something you can adequately learn from a book – is presence. I want to be a healing presence for people in pain and suffering. If I were to try and articulate this to my big sister Hildegard, I would perhaps say that I wanted to be like an icon: beautiful, not intrinsically holy but a window that reveals something much bigger than herself.

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