Viriditas on the Windowsill
Hildegard and the greening power of God.
Last week Phoebe brought home some mustard and cress seeds and we sprinkled them on a piece of damp kitchen roll placed on a saucer. We’ve been drenching them with handfuls of water twice a day and 8 days later, right when we were beginning to give up, they are beginning to sprout. It feels just as much a miracle as when we planted cress seeds last year and the year before that and the one before that.
As on my windowsill, so in my garden. Here too growth has suddenly become irrepressible.
Back in October I worried I hadn’t planted this year’s spring bulbs deeply enough but here they are above the ground and flowering. The narcissi came first, then the daffodils and now the grape hyacinths. The roses are growing strong new shoots and the geraniums are sending up fresh leaves. Every bare patch of soil is covered in pin pricks of green. The plum tree is budding. The grass is growing an inch a week.
Almost 1000 years ago Hildegard of Bingen coined the term viriditas (from the Latin viridis, meaning green and veriditas, meaning truth) to express this greening power in nature. Inspired by the lush, damp forests of her native Rhineland, Hildegard saw greenness as a sign of health, vigour, vitality. More than this, she understood viriditas to be Divine power - a sign of the Divine presence in nature bringing life to the landscape.
For Hildegard, this greening power wasn't only in plants but, metaphorically, in all things. The greening energy she saw in her verdant Rhineland countryside became a symbol for all of God's enlivening movement in the world, including in human beings. Like all other living beings, Hildegard understood each of us to have been made with the innate potential for growth and flourishing. The greening power of God within us is what helps us to come fully to life; our responsibility is to cooperate with that ripening action, in particular through the cultivation of love and justice. Without these qualities we lose our juiciness and dry out. “A person who lacks the verdancy of justice is dry,” she wrote, “totally without tender goodness, totally without illuminating virtue.”1
There's much to love about Hildegard not least because of her immense creativity. As mystic, scientist, musician and theologian, Hildegard’s writing refuses to be limited by genre. Every reading reveals something new. Today I spent some time with book Physica (a medieval medical handbook) and was struck by her encyclopaedic knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants and her refreshingly holistic approach to health, which combines herbal remedies, dietary advice and spiritual practices.2
As I look at the cress on windowsill and my greening garden I wonder about the freshness of my ensouled body, the juiciness of my embodied soul. Like so many others, I am soul weary from reading the news. Added to that, it's the end of the day and I haven't been sleeping well. I'm tired and my eyes dry. I wish I could ask Hildegard for a remedy that would help with both the physical symptoms and whatever might be the root cause.
Instead I take a glass of water into the garden and swing in my egg chair. The camellias have survived the frosts and are in full flower and the wilted jasmine I watered earlier this afternoon is already looking fresher. I close my eyes to welcome the world through my other senses. The birds are singing, someone in a far off garden is mowing their lawn. The breeze whips through the flowerbeds and then my hair. I inhale to welcome its refreshment. Opening my eyes, I reach for my glass of water and remember something I read earlier in the day:
“You are the mighty way in which every thing that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, is penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.”3
The wind blows through the flowerbeds again and I receive it as a grace.
I am still tired and my eyes are still dry but, as I think about Hildegard’s deep sense of interconnectedness, I wonder if simply consenting to be here, awake in this moment might be doing me some good.
I wonder if maybe, just maybe, sitting in this greening garden might be greening me too.
With love for your weekend,
