own playfulness. Playfulness is important to musical and artistic being. Art brings another dimension to awe. We can experience awe in sunsets, mountains, children. There is also awe involved in music—in listening to Mozart, or participating in dance, or observing dance, or in many paintings. Awe is there. That’s the gift the artist brings. It’s like upping the ante on the awe of nature. After all, humans are nature, too. Humans can contribute to the lineage of awe. Joy flows from that. You’re fond of quoting Rank, the Native American mystic Black Elk, Meister Eckhart and your beloved 12th-century Hildegard of Bingen, who was just canonized as a saint. Tell us about your most recent book on Hildegard, A Saint for Our Times, a follow-up to your 1985 exposition of her Illuminations. I believe you are credited with interpreting for modern audiences Hildegard’s paintings as well as her music and her letters to the abbots, monks, popes and political figures of her time. Hildegard was an amazing force, a truly renaissance woman of the 12th century who wrote the first operas 300-400 years before any other western opera. She wrote 12 books on science. She painted 36 paintings of visions. She was an herbalist and a healer. She wrote books on healing so useful that a clinic in southern Germany uses only her teachings, and the medical doctors get real results. She was a prophet who wrote letters to bishops, cardinals, emperors and kings demanding they quit ignoring “lady justice.” She was fierce. It is interesting that she is canonized now, maybe because she wrote to popes about their being surrounded by evil men “cackling in the night like hens.” She led an amazing human existence. Above all, she brings the divine feminine back. That’s what makes me laugh about her recent canonization. I like irony. She is the Trojan horse for the patriarchal institutions. She tries to balance patriarchal excess with extra dimensions of feminism’s maternal and circular images of divinity. She is all about creativity and the greening power of the Holy Spirit. She says, “The only sin in life is drying up.”
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Her theology is amazingly balanced and profound. That’s the real reason she comes through so strongly today. She is given power by being named a Doctor of the Church. There are only three other women with that title. Luther himself called her the “first Protestant.” She was protesting corruption in her many sermons and her letters. She was kicking butt. I think she’s a model for all kinds of people today—not just Christians or Catholics. Please speak of the mission of GladdeningLight bridging the intersection of faith and art, exalting the artists’ role in spiritual creativity, and the Symposium theme, “Love, Now.” How does all this resonate with your take on creativity? I love what GladdeningLight is doing, because there can be no spirituality without art. Besides silence, art is the language that we have for expressing our deep, mystical experiences—awe, wonder, gratitude, grief, and suffering. This is what art is for: to help us name these deeply human, but universal, experiences. And also the struggle for justice. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were artists. The organizing of human beings to free themselves from oppression is an art form. True politics is an art form. It’s gathering people as an artist gathers paint, or a musician gathers notes or instruments. An authentic politician gathers people. I think that creativity and art are integral to the healing of people and inspire people to do better. They feed the soul. I love the way GladdeningLight is bringing together such a rich diversity of art so that people may realize how many people are committed to the sacred vocation of art. There is a sacrificial element to being an artist; there is no insurance. This sacrificial element—an artist’s generosity—is built into the journey. Other people only see results of fame, but there is a long journey before that. Motivations get tested and purified in the process, and that can be a beautiful thing. M.C. Richards said, “The greatest accomplishment of the potter is not the pot, it is the potter.” For more info on the “Love, Now” event with Matthew Fox, visit www.GladdeningLight.org or call 800-835-7212.
Alternative Wholistic Health Care Solving problems... naturally Michael Badanek, DC, BS, CNS, DACBN, DCBCN, DM(P) Board Certified in Clinical Nutrition, Certified in Applied Kinesiology, and Promoter of Alternative Complementary Medicine. 30 Years of Clinical Practice
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