The Third Day of Christmas. Learning anew

Reading the holy family into our soul's journey with Hildegard of Bingen: A confession and an epiphany:

Dear fellow pilgrim,

By this third day of Christmas you might be sighing a sigh of relief: finally some time to start the journey! And so our group of Christmas pilgrims is growing as the feast days are fleeting and the pilgrimage towards the stable really begins.

Thank you for being here and for sharing this journey with others. Our 12 days of Christmas journey has been born out of the urgent need to look behind the accumulated traditions and what they might mean for our souls journey.

This is a slow walk, dear traveler. We do not rush. You can start any time. If you have only 5 minutes, stop in for a brief breather, look at a photo, breathe, look again. Scroll down to the blessing, and find our little surprise at the end. Leave your heart or a comment, so we know you have been here. If you have some more time, join me in this process of walking intentionally through these days and see where it will lead us. You can always respond to our emails or share with others in the comment section.

Have you ever talked to a Christmas angel? Did she talk back?

I arrived at this Christmas particularly weary. I am not quite sure why. Though I appreciate our quiet and solitude I also miss my big chaotic German family. And there is no way to walk towards the Bethlehem within, without contemplating the pained state of the current Bethlehem. I know many of you are worn down by these wars and conflicts and never ending bad news. Can we even allow ourselves to feel good, or at least ok?

Some of you could not celebrate with family for the 4th year straight, thanks to Covid. Some of you have lost loved ones and feel the void the hardest now.

On this Christmas night I also felt some “should” creeping in. Shouldn’t we provide a better, deeper, Christmas for our daughter? Shouldn’t it all feel more Christmas-sy today?

Shouldn’t there at least be snow on the ground?

I even tried to go to both Christmas Eve church services to get into the Christmas mood. It did not help. I felt like a stranger, looking in.

So, empty and tired and full of doubt, I ventured downstairs long after midnight and lit a candle again at our Christmas angel. Many of you are now familiar with our Weihnachtsengel. We wrote about her yesterday.

I looked in her face. She looked back at me!

Our “Weihnachts-Engel” holding the nativity scene in her base on Christmas night 2023. Is she looking at you, too?

I stood there with my fears, my emptiness, my numbness, my darkness. No, dear friends, no angel choirs were singing. But looking into the compassionate face of that angel moved something in me. Just a tiny little bit. Her head is tilted a bit to the right. Her eyes are clear and open. And she has the slight hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. Can you see it? Was she smiling at me? Is she smiling at you?

I extinguished the light and went back to bed.

On Christmas Day, after having sent out the first post, cobbled and wrapped together some how, I took a small booklet from my shelves. It had been sitting there for ever but I haven’t given it much attention.

I was hoping that perhaps the wise Hildegard of Bingen, the great medieval nun and teacher and healer and so much more, could give me some inspiration (you can find my short academic introduction to Hildegard here.)

And so I sat and read into Hildegard’s homilies on the Christmas gospel¹. Still no angel choirs.

But then, — wow. I read a passage that just blew my mind open! I had an epiphany. And we are not even at Epiphany yet!

If you would like to hold on to the Christmas pageant at face value you better stop reading here. But if you have been like me, and always suspected one might read the Christmas story as an allegory of our souls journey, do read on :-)

Hildegard of Bingen on Mary and Joseph as allegories for the soul’s labor

Hildegard presents these texts in the familiar style of a homily. She starts dutifully with the Bible text first, with her homilies 5 & 6 referring to Matthew 1: 18-21.

This is the short story of Mary who, betrothed to Joseph, hears from an angelic messenger that she will bear a child from the Holy Spirit. And Joseph then contemplates to leaving her but ultimately deciding to stick around. And if that is not enough already, he is also visited by an angel who tells him to not be afraid and that Mary will birth a son, Jesus.

While Hildegard walks in earnest verse by verse through the well known text, like a good commentator would, she also sneaks another reading in, almost between the lines. She shares this approach with the mystics of her time, namely to marry the literal interpretation with the mystical or allegorical as others have more recently done with modern depth psychological interpretations.

Let’s see how she does that:

She writes about Mary as “mother” who is any “faithful soul” concerned about doing good. She is betrothed to Joseph, “that is, to Wisdom, which knows every good thing in earthly and heavenly realms.”

What?? Wait a minute.

I understand the Mary part. Any soul concerned with the good. The “mother” archetype.

So you, me, we all, as long as we are concerned with the good are called to be Mary and to mother Divine inspiration.

But what about Joseph? Joseph, says Hildegard, as if it were fully obvious, “is clearly wisdom.” Wow!

Wisdom that is available to us, that can be found in any “mind that, instructed by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, meditates on every heavenly thing.”

For Hildegard the good soul needs to be married to wisdom so as not to fall into pride about the Divine inspiration she is about to deliver. She also needs to be protected and guided — all that a marriage stood for in biblical times.

And so when Joseph, wisdom, contemplates leaving Mary, an angel appears to him, saying:

“With trust, lead her with you to the things that you know in God, because she has been joined to you by holy baptism.” ‘For what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit,’ namely what the soul holds in her mind is from divine inspiration.

If this sounds difficult, I guess it is. Hildegard is a dense study. But, as with any study, we are rewarded by a burst of insight at the end, which is in itself a sacred birth.

What Hildegard offers here is a depth psychological reading for the holy family by reading them into our soul’s journey.

Let me try this in my own words now: So the soul walking pregnant with Divine inspiration (Mary) needs to be married to wisdom (Joseph), to protect and guide her, almost like a midwife would. Together, Mary and Joseph, the holy couple, is bound by blessing, they are soul and wisdom intertwined.

So is Joseph actually Sophia (the Greek for wisdom, a figure prominently appearing throughout Hildegard’s works) , the midwife for our soul who is walking pregnant with the Divine child?

Now I notice that I have written on Joseph last year, and you guessed it, on the third day! I wrote of him as a dreamer and tender guardian to the soul. Today he appears as Wisdom, the one who guards our soul from falling victim to our own ideals or “worldly matters.” The latter could be in today’s terms all the Christmas frenzy which has become a worldly business well suited to keep us too busy to care about what matters to our soul.

So, dear fellow pilgrims, good souls one and all, here is a thing to take home:

We need wisdom as our companion on this sacred journey, as a midwife in our birthing of the deeper soul.

— —

If this was now a bit much, try the recipe below :-) And come back to it later with some spiced wine in hand. It surely needs some more labor to get to the holy birth. Let’s try tomorrow!

So here is my humble blessing for today

Dearest soul,

child of God,

Mary mother

walking pregnant

through this pregnant season,

betroth yourself to

wisdom,

Joseph,

to guide you,

to protect you,

to walk along side you

while you carry your holy child

to term.

And may Christmas find you where you are!

Almut with Chuck and little one

Enjoying Spiced Wine. A Simple Hildegard recipe

Did we mention that we love to share food and wine? One of our favorites in wintertime is spiced wine (We have offered it before in a reflection on feasting and fasting.) It tastes even better knowing that Hildegard considers spiced wine a medicine. It also works without alcohol, using grape juice or apple cider.

The recipe is very simple:

• Take some red wine (a boxed one will do), straight or mixed with water, grape juice, orange juice, or cider, depending on the strength you prefer.

• Then comes the blessing of Hildegard, what she calls the “spices of joy”, which are: cardamon, cinnamon, anise, cloves, and nutmeg.

• Add some of the spices in a tea bag or directly to the liquid and simmer on low for approximately 3-5 min. (We often just add the spices and half a cup of boiling water to half a cup of wine.) You can also add some fresh grated ginger and / or organic orange peel to the mix as well as honey to sweeten. Enjoy hot on a cold day!

This post is part of this year’s 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations, a journey into the heart of Christmas for dancing monks and weary pilgrims given freely from our heart to your’s…

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1. Hildegard of Bingen. Homilies on the Gospels. Translated with Introduction and Notes by Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Liturgical Press 2011, pp. 46-49.