tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2627678655315773932.post5211191897900954179..comments2024-01-20T00:43:03.851-07:00Comments on Beginning to Pray: The Fire of St. HildegardAnthony Lilleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12208767782574708168noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2627678655315773932.post-68153080113478232492012-09-20T11:40:11.314-06:002012-09-20T11:40:11.314-06:00I love this saint. She was and is a great woman o...I love this saint. She was and is a great woman of strength, intelligence and love of God and man. Only one more month until she receives the full recognition she has so long and so richly deserved. Deo gratias!!<br />Ginahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15508408775352207633noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2627678655315773932.post-64449304663459822072012-09-20T10:45:42.138-06:002012-09-20T10:45:42.138-06:00What a beautiful meditation on how Hildegard's...What a beautiful meditation on how Hildegard's visions of the fiery life of divinity can help us on our journey to God! Too often, as you say, we separate God to fit him into whatever box we need at the moment: sometimes, he's that amorphous spiritual force that enlivens us creatively; other times, he's the rational structure of thought and of the universe (you can see here perhaps the false division we like to make between practical theology and systematic theology, or between the lived faith on the ground and the theoretical faith of the academic theologian).<br /><br />Yet, what Hildegard sees is <a href="http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/2009/02/divine-love-as-both-creative-and.html" rel="nofollow">a God who is both creative and rational at the same time</a>. At first sight, Hildegard's visions present us with a volatile whirlwind that seems to juggle so many different, contrasting, and even paradoxical images, keeping all of them in the air at once and letting none fall to the floor. On the one hand, it seems disordered, chaotic, even nonsensical—how are we to navigate such stormy waters as this jumble and juxtaposition of visionary moments? Yet, within the chaos we begin to discern order—but not order as we would have it in our everyday lives; no, in her inimitable and fascinating visionary style, Hildegard offers a glimpse, rarely in focus and always on the verge of slipping away, teetering on the edge of falling into the abyss, of an order that transcends any notion of order that our feeble minds can grasp. Hildegard's visions of Divine Love leave the confines of the strictly animalistic, the strictly rational, the strictly human, in order to fly away upward, striving to reach the heights of heaven where True Love dwells, from which seat can be glimpsed again what is truly creative, truly rational, truly human.Nathaniel M. Campbellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01835009706332559978noreply@blogger.com