Sleepless in Woodstock with St. Hildegard of Bingen

Sleep has been elusive this week. Oh, I have no trouble falling asleep, but after a few hours I'm wide awake with a racing mind (and sometimes heart). My go-to habit when I can't sleep is to pray the seven sorrows of Mary. But sometimes I just give up and get up. 

So here I am since 2:30 a.m. wide awake and wishing I weren't. And yet, so many of the saints spent their nights in prayer. Sad to say, I'm more likely to be doing the cryptogram or sudoku puzzles in the Epoch Times in the middle of the night. And sometimes, I do the worst thing for sleep. I turn on the computer.

This morning my computer search took me to a saint whom I've never studied, Hildegard of Bingen. This 12th century saint, abbess and doctor of the church, intrigues me. Not only that, but I had to laugh when I came across this snippet of information:

A final famous incident happened near the end of Hildegard's life when she was in her 80s. She allowed a nobleman who had been excommunicated to be buried at the convent, seeing that he had last rites. She claimed she'd received word from God allowing the burial. But her ecclesiastical superiors intervened and ordered the body exhumed. Hildegard defied the authorities by hiding the grave, and the authorities excommunicated the entire convent community. Most insultingly to Hildegard, the interdict prohibited the community from singing. She complied with the interdict, avoiding singing and communion, but did not comply with the command to exhume the corpse. Hildegard appealed the decision to yet higher church authorities and finally had the interdict lifted.

In view of the impending SSPX consecration of bishops and the likely excommunications, reading this now seems providential. I will be imploring St. Hildegard's assistance as events unfold. 

Among other things, Hildegard was famous for her visions which she saw as offering guidance for the church. She recorded them in Scivias. The first described seems to apply to our current situation:

I saw a great mountain the color of rust, and enthroned on it One of such great glory that it blinded my sight. […] and behold, he who was enthroned upon that mountain cried out […] ‘O human, who are fragile dust of the earth and ashes of ashes! Cry out and speak of the origin of pure salvation until those people are instructed, who, though they see the inmost content of the Scriptures, do not wish to tell them, or preach them, because they are lukewarm and sluggish in serving God’s justice.

"Those people" are the clergy of her time. Does her description not also fit many of our own shepherds today? She goes on to call for the clergy to be chaste, another very contemporary situation. Think of the pornographer in chief at CDF (Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith), "Tucho" Fernandez:

Therefore, let those appointed by consecration to offer to God the sacred sacrifice approach His altar in the sweetness of chastity. For if they themselves are the authors of corruption, how can they offer to others wounded by corruption the hand of salutary healing?

How indeed? And this can literally apply to Fernandez, the "author of corruption" of several pornographic books. How Pope Leo can allow him to continue at CDF is baffling unless he is a bird of the same feather.

The eleventh entry in Scivias relates to The Last Days and the Fall of the Antichrist, another prophetic vision that seems to apply to us today:

The Church will be harshly reproached for many vices, fornication, murder and rapine. […] The Church suffers most terrible persecutions and the blood of those who despise the Destroyer will be most cruelly shed.

Who are persecuted in the Church today? Those who promote evil or those who promote good? How many clerics guilty of sex abuse have been protected and moved around by their superiors? How many whistleblower priest or those most faithful to doctrine and practice of the faith have been canceled? While the heretical synodal clerics are coddled, the most faithful who "despise the Destroyer" prince of this world, are attacked. St. Hildegard is surely a "doctor" for our sick Church. She was only canonized in 2012 after 900 years. Interesting, eh, in this era of instant canonization for questionable individuals?

I found an on-line translation of Scivias at Columbia.edu which I plan to read. As to waking up in the middle of the night, making a new saint friend was well worth the sacrificed hours. May all my sleepless nights be as fruitful.