A Holy Calling

AS I WRITE these words, about one month before I retire from the job I’ve cherished for over a quarter century, I feel glimmers of first-grader-me, so distraught at the occasion of the school year’s final bell that it took the principal, my teacher, and my mom to pry me, sobbing, away from my desk. Bidding farewell to something you’ve treasured has its shadows, but can also open a portal into new and wonderful light. As my time on The Bluff winds down, I’ve been in frequent conversation with Hildegard of Bingen, OSB, my go-to saint—my godfriend—whose wisdom I’ve long sought when navigating any kind of transition.

I was destined to seek her counsel. A couple decades ago, while sorting my mom’s things, I found a Mother’s Day card I’d given her in the 1970s with a hand-painted prism and the shaky calligraphy of my teens spelling out something I’d seen scrawled on a bus seat: “All creation is gifted with the ecstasy of God’s light. —Hildegard of Bingen, OSB.” At the time, I had no idea who she was or that OSB stood for the Order of Saint Benedict. My 14-year-old self just found the sentiment profound, worthy of Mom’s special day. Uncovering that card among my mom’s treasures inspired a treasure hunt of my own, to find out more about this medieval woman someone thought to quote in a bit of holy vandalism on a city bus nine centuries after her death.

She’s been called a “multi-media saint,” for her creativity burst through every kind of boundary. Canonized twice, consulted even today for effective herbal remedies, and with her own channel on Spotify, Hildegard was a poet, mystic, counselor, painter, herbalist, prolific correspondent with bishops and popes, and a composer of hymns sung today and often filed under “New Age,” which cracks me up, as she died in 1179. The liturgical arbiters of her time were scandalized that her melodies and harmonies dared to occupy multiple octaves, holding that religious music should be devoid of pomp, with all notes contained in a single octave. Chided by Church authorities, Hildegard fired off blistering rebuttals demanding to know why they would keep praises of an infinite God so rigidly constrained. Hildegard found the Latin of the 12th century inadequate for capturing the pulsing energy of her mystical experiences of God, and so she created a new language of about a thousand words to do exactly that. Not bad for the tenth daughter of a family that placed her as a tween in the care of a Benedictine abbey at a time when tenth daughters were more burdens than blessings. Not bad for a medieval woman period, when formal education was far from the norm for anyone, let alone a young girl.

If, as Saint Hildegard noted, “all creation is gifted with the ecstasy of God’s light,” then her boundless productivity makes clear that she took very seriously her own role in co-creation. Although she didn’t coin the Latin word viriditas—usually translated as “greenness” or “generativity”—Hildegard made it a cornerstone of her poetry and music. Her encouragement to “go green,” to watch for the ever-productive possibilities of a loving God, has offered me hope through many of the transitions in my life. So often what has begun in tears has turned into dancing. Like the time I wanted to flunk every student in my favorite class to keep them from graduating. Sorrowful goodbyes blossomed into correspondences that have thrived over decades. I’ve gotten to share in their weddings and baptisms of their own children. Wildest of all, a handful of those children have shown up in my classes right here on The Bluff, a thousand miles away, enchanting me all over again. God’s greenness, Hildegard reminds me, means there is always a possibility for growth. As she showed with music and language, Hildegard’s greening will not be constrained by linear time. Not only does she help me to look forward in fruitful ways during times of transition, but she also helps me to look back with a “greened” lens.

One of my favorite phrases in Hildegard’s poetry is “once-spiced things:” those people, objects, and experiences that nourished and delighted us once upon a time. “Going green” with Hildegard’s guidance transmutes each change, each small death, into a new life, often one I never imagined. I have a magnificent son, kind and clever and generous, altogether a joy to hang with. He started as a little sack of sugar whose cries for food and colic I finally learned to distinguish, just in time to be faced with a toddler testing the boundaries of the sandbox and my patience, which I finally got a handle on, only to navigate raising a boy who was riding trikes, then bikes, and then in the blink of an eye, driving the family van. The eloquent, big-hearted man who swaps book- and movie- and cast-iron-cookingtips with me these days is irreplaceable, but the losses of the infant, then teetery walker, then black-turtlenecked adolescent, and all the people he was in between are little deaths. Greening, Hildegard-style, takes the edge off my grief at those deaths. She helps me contemplate the truth that the splendor—the new spice—of the son I love so much now is only possible because of the many seeds that had their own glorious, evanescent moments then transformed into new lives.

Long before Marie Kondo taught us to purge our drawers of things that no longer spark joy, Hildegard urged us to take stock of those “once-spiced things” cluttering our hearts and spirits and to summon the energy to re-ignite our ardor for them—or to prune them gently away, allowing the freshly spiced life that cannot be stopped to take root. The sorrow that had my chubby little fingers clenching the desk that last day of first grade—so desperate was I not to lose the joys of school, only to find out that second-graders write in cursive! And fourth-graders build dioramas of our favorite books! And sophomores argue about how many levels of infinity there are! And professors read and write and walk with astounding students all the days of our careers!—has waned with Hildegard nudging me to seek the greening in the endless and inevitable transitions that comprise a life.

My first years in the classroom, when I knew all the songs and shows my students did, were sumptuously spiced. As the years passed, losing the easy connections I could make with students as a near peer made teaching a once-spiced thing, until I found that earning the racing stripes of a few gray hairs imparted a kind of gentle playfulness to my interactions with the young people in my care that has its own spice to be savored. The small death of my creaky knees has afforded me a new green life from the nearest bench, to slow down and sit, listening more carefully, more deeply, to my students and colleagues who, like most people, as Hildegard’s own Benedictine sister Joan Chittister reminds us,“really just need a good listening to” in our roiling world.

“There is a power that has been since all eternity and that force and potentiality is green!” Hildegard exults. Transitions, losses, and mistakes as portals to new life, for those willing to look with greened eyes? Yes, please!

I’m glad she’s with me for the next part of the journey.

KAREN EIFLER brought a joy-filled 26-year tenure to a close with her retirement this May. She helped form nearly 1,200 new teachers in that time, opened wide the doors of UP’s Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life, and has been abundantly blessed by this community.