Greening Power
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
March 17, 2019
Today is all about green. Each year Americans celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, taking to the streets to party, with parades, and green clothes, hair, face paint, and liquid refreshments. In cities all over the country the water in public fountains is dyed green for the occasion, including at the White House.
But best of all, and more importantly, St. Patrick’s Day is something of a kick-off for spring. This week spring will return to us, and St. Patrick’s Day was always the day when gardeners were told to plant their peas. In recent days the snow has receded rapidly, and I don’t know about you, but I immediately started looking around outside to see if there are any new green shoots emerging from the wet cold ground. Yesterday I was outside, walking around bent over double, staring at the ground, and was rewarded by sightings of day lily shoots. We can safely say that we’ve made it through another winter. Can I get an Amen?
Whether or not you are going to race home after church to plant your peas, today is a day to celebrate green. And despite all the Irish emphasis, one of the best ways to celebrate today is to remember the life of a German saint and mystic, Hildegard of Bingen.
Here’s some basic information about Hildegard: she was born in the verdant Rhine River valley in 1098. It’s a land of rivers, steep wooded hills, and vineyards. Hildegard was her family’s 10th child, and so she was given to the church at the age of eight, as a tithe, and grew up living with an anchoress, a holy woman, at a nearby Benedictine monastery. She became a nun at 18, and took over leadership of the women’s community at the monastery. Even at a young age Hildegard experienced visions. At 42 her visions intensified and resulted in a spiritual awakening that she described as ‘a burning light of tremendous brightness…a flame that does not burn out but enkindles…”
Hildegard’s visions resulted in an outpouring of creative activity for the rest of her long life; she wrote books, including a medical text, poems, and many letters. She composed over 70 songs and wrote an opera. One of her songs is in our gray hymnal.
As the leader of an abbey, Hildegard became well known to church leaders, including the pope, and attracted more followers, which led her to found two more Benedictine abbeys. In her later years Hildegard preached throughout the Rhine Valley, which was highly unusual for a woman, and wrote letters to church leaders accusing them of laziness and corruption. Not surprisingly, she ran afoul of the church hierarchy, which placed an interdiction on her and her community. An interdiction was what we would today call a gag order: it prevented the community members from speaking, writing or composing music. Fortunately this interdiction was lifted not long before Hildegard died. Almost 1000 years later, in 2012, Hildegard was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, and made a Doctor of the Church. You just can’t rush these things. But the honor is worth the wait: it is a rare honor, bestowed on only 34 people throughout history, four of them women.
Hildegard considered herself to be a prophet as well as a mystic, and hers truly was a prophetic voice. Prophets, said Hildegard, ‘illuminate the darkness’. They interfere. They don’t so much predict the future as look at the present in a very different way.
Though she was a devout Christian, Hildegard’s visions led her to see the universe in a unique way. She envisioned the universe as an egg within God’s womb. She experienced the great love of the Creator God for the creation, the earth, and insisted that this bond of love, this relationship between God and all that exists, calls us to be co-creators. Hers became a creation-centered spirituality.
Creation spirituality is completely different than the religion espoused by the traditional patriarchal theologians. They emphasized human sin and redemption. A theology of creation is positive in nature; it emphasizes love and care of the earth, and a sensual and passionate connection to the earth’s beauty and life. Theologian Matthew Fox sums up creation spirituality by calling it ‘original blessing’ instead of Original Sin. Another name for it is ‘ecological spirituality.’
Worship of the beauty and grandeur of the cosmos means being aware of the presence of the divine in nature. We Unitarian Universalists are no strangers to this spirituality, beginning with our Transcendentalist ancestors. We proclaim our sense of the interconnection of all creation through our seventh principle, affirming our respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. I suspect Hildegard would have been impatient with our language – our Puritan roots show when we speak primly about ‘respect’ rather than love or delight, or (heaven forbid) passion, as Hildegard would have!
In Hildegard’s words, “There is no creation that does not have a radiance. Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty, it could not be creation without (radiance).”
“I am the breeze that nurtures all things green,” wrote Hildegard. Her visions of God and creation led her to believe in a power, a life force, that was present in everything in the universe. This, she called ‘greening power’ and gave it a Latin name – Viriditas. Viriditas, greening power, is life in motion, the force that makes all things grow and expand. It’s what calls forth green shoots from the ground in spring, and causes trees to bud, flower and fruit. “There’s a real power here,” wrote Annie Dillard in this morning’s reading – she feels it, too.
Matthew Fox wrote, “[Hildegard] says that all of creation and humanity in particular is ‘showered with greening refreshment, the vitality to bear fruit.’ Greening power – viriditas – is creativity.” (30). It is the force that enables us to create: to compose music, to write, to dance and sing, to paint, to plant and to give birth.
Greening power, viriditas, comes from God, believed Hildegard, and she called it ‘God’s freshness’. “It is the power of springtime, a germinating force, a fruitfulness that comes from God and permeates all creation.” Hildegard thought of greening power as a force for salvation. Again we see the contrast with traditional Christian theology, where humans are saved from sin only through the incarnation and death of Jesus Christ. For Hildegard, salvation, or healing, came in the return of the greening power and the moisture needed to sustain it. As the weather warmed this week, think about how we sensed this stirring of life and felt saved from the coldness and lifelessness of winter. And think about times when you have felt saved by your creativity; felt connected to something larger both within and outside of yourself.
With her delight in the lushness and fruitfulness of the creation, did Hildegard have room in her beliefs for the negative side of life, for, well, sin? She did, and once again, it was a much broader and different definition than that of the patriarchal thinkers. If God’s creative power is present in the lushness and moistness of rampant growth, then Hildegard envisioned sin and evil as dryness. All that is cold and dry, to Hildegard, destroys creativity. It is barrenness. If we allow ourselves to dry up we cannot create, and this is a sin because we are called to be co-creators of the universe. Hildegard wrote, “If we surrender the green vitality of virtues and give ourselves over to the drought of our indolence so that we lack the sap of life and the greening power of good deeds, then the powers of our very soul will begin to fade and dry up.” (64) If virtue is green and moist, then so is justice, since the greenness of the soul will inspire people to good works. If sin is dry and hard, then so is injustice; souls that are dry and cold cannot be creative and compassionate.
These images and visions call to mind the season we are just emerging from: the hard, frozen earth, the dry, lifeless brown grass and the bare trees. Winter is a time of hardship. Spring brings a thaw. As the air and the ground warm, spring brings us water. This past week melting snow began trickling down the hills and filling the brooks with sounds of rushing water. We humans are instinctively drawn to water – the sight and the sound of water. We seek out springs, waterfalls, brooks, the ocean. We build fountains to recreate those sounds in the midst of cities. Water is life-giving, healing, and a crucial element in Hildegard’s viriditas, her greening power. Annie Dillard captured this in the reading we heard a few minutes ago, in describing a tiny leaf: “It was clearly moist inside,” she wrote. “A barely concealed, powerful juice swelled its cells, and the leaf was uncurling and rising between the green slips of tissue.”
No wonder then that Hildegard wrote frequently to church officials and clergy, urging them to not let their souls become dry and hard, but to remain, as she put it, ‘moist and green and juicy’. “Stay alive!” she was trying to tell them. “Stay creative, flexible, and just.” The response of the church fathers, as mentioned earlier, was to silence her.
Hildegard was perhaps the first environmentalist. She warned that “the earth must not be injured – the earth must not be destroyed!” Earth, to Hildegard, was our Mother, fertile, fecund, and generous – and she wrote angrily about the damage and the exploitation that humans are capable of. Imagine her reaction today, as we continue to foul our water and air. Whole species disappear, as do vital wetlands, coral reefs, and rain forests. So often we live in completely built up environments where we can go for days without being aware of the land and the seasons. Although we are co-creators, we can isolate ourselves from the creation, and from the viriditas, the greening power, which is sacred.
We know what this isolation is doing to the earth. We know about the changes to our physical environment, to our climate, and the health risks that can result. The question becomes, what is isolation doing to our souls? There is so much conversation about stress these days, about our harried lifestyles, about overwork and overscheduling. What if in our isolation from the natural world, we are becoming drained of our greening power, our viriditas?
If God is everything there is, everything “in which we live and move and have our being” as UU theologian James Luther Adams put it, if we are isolating ourselves from the creation perhaps we are also isolating ourselves from all that is holy. We lose ourselves as co-creators. Hildegard called God ‘the purest spring’. Do we cut ourselves off from these healing waters, this green force, and from the holy?
Let’s return for just a moment to Hildegard’s conception of sin, which is so often a challenging word for Unitarian Universalists. It helps if we translate the language – to think of sin not as wrongdoing, but of losing our connections; our relationships. I think of the church fathers, hard and cold-hearted, breaking off connection with Hildegard. If we are hard-hearted, dried up, we can lose our connection with other people, we can lose our connection with the earth, and we can lose our vital connection with ourselves.
As co-creators we need to care for the earth, and we also have to care for each other. We cannot do this effectively without taking good care of ourselves as well. We are part of this creation, and we are a good gift. We can start with the most basic care – making sure we have enough water, of course, and nourishment, and sleep. Beyond that, we need to care for our souls, to foster our own greening power, our vitality, and stir our creative energy so that each of us can become who and what we are meant to be. And finally, we are also called to participate in the creation, by noticing and protecting the beauty and the power of the natural world that is all around us.
Hildegard wrote: “Become a tree. Just as the soul is in the body, the sap is in the tree, the soul passes through the body just like sap through a tree.” In other words, plant your roots, bend and be flexible, reach for the sky, and water your soul so that you can burst forth with creativity and life.
My fellow longing, thirsty souls, may you drink freely from the spring. In this time of life’s rebirth, may viriditas rise within you and renew your spirits. May we all embrace our roles as co-creators of our planet and care well for ourselves and for others. Become a tree. Go forth and be moist and green and juicy.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
SOURCES
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Matthew Fox, Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times
Matthew Fox, Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen
