I am the one whose praise
Echoes on high.
I adorn all the earth.
I am the breeze
That nurtures all things
Green.
I encourage blossoms to flourish with ripening fruits.
I am led by the spirit to feed
The purest streams.
I am the rain
Coming from the dew
That causes the grasses to laugh
With the joy of life.
I call forth tears,
The aroma of holy work.
I am the yearning for good.
It was a long time before I learned that prayer wasn’t just talking to God but, more importantly, listening. My first attempts at prayerful listening were frustrating. What I heard was . . . nothing. Then a shift occurred: I discovered a subtle difference between listening for and listening to. I learned listening as an intentional disposition, attitude, readiness.
Without prepositions, “listen” came to mean something more like open-hearted waiting, breathing, relaxing into wordlessness, becoming aware of Presence. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century French Carmelite, used the phrase “practicing the presence of God.” In my efforts at prayerful listening, this phrase acquired new meaning for me. Despite my own intermittent practice over days and years laced with distractions, in the best moments of listening prayer, sometimes a word or phrase or sentence came that I know I didn’t “make up.” It was given.
As I read the meditations of Hildegard of Bingen, the great twelfth-century mystic and scholar, I am taught again about this dimension of prayer, given in such rich and explicit ways to those folks like me, “busy about many things,” who find listening hard to sustain—listening and bearing witness to what we hear. It is there in the prophets. Repeatedly we read that “the word of the Lord came” to Abram, to Jacob, to Moses, to Samuel, to Nathan, to Jehu, to Elijah, to Isaiah and Jeremiah. Their job was to hear and deliver that word.
Of course there are delusions. Distinguishing the word of the Lord from one’s own voice, from the internal chatter where memories and plans and desires mingle with bits of poetry, is a little like teasing apart strands in a tangled skein. It behooves any of us, if we think we’ve heard a message from the Spirit, to check for ego investment, run it by a spiritual director, or otherwise wait for further clarification. But what “comes” in quiet times when our intention is directed toward God is worth our attention.
We can learn about paying that kind of attention from those to whom that word has come, and who have passed it on to us as Hildegard has in her writing. At first she undertook it reluctantly, but finally she opened herself to it as an act of obedience, which was richly rewarded: “I spoke and wrote these things,” she recalled, “not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out therefore, and write thus!’ ” In visions like those above, the voice of God is rendered in simple, brief lines that invite us to pause often and ponder. The God who speaks in them is the same one who uttered forth Creation, and to whom all Creation cries out.
In this short poem, “I am . . . I am . . . I am” echoes like a refrain. It’s the name by which God identified God’s very self to Moses—a small pronoun and verb which encompass all that is.
My husband has often opened his public prayers with the words “God, you are the one who. . . .” God is the one who provides what we need, or who directs us or holds us or sustains us or gathers us into a living body. I came to love that particular way of entering into prayer—beginning with a reminder and a recognition of who it is we approach when we begin to pray. I imagine how lovely it might be if we paused even in human encounters to look again and say, in effect, “You are the one who opens my mind to points of view I need to hear,” or “You are the one who reminds me there is room for laughter, even in hard times,” or simply “You are the one I chose and choose again.”
In Hildegard’s poem, drawn from three volumes of “visionary theology” recorded in similar poetic form, the voice represented as God’s invites us first of all to moments of recognition: if we wish to see God, we should look at what happens in the natural world and in humans at their best and most vulnerable. The invitation to see God in dew and rain and blossoms has been reduced to cliché by makers of posters and greeting cards. But mass marketing need not diminish the vision or freshness in this 900-year-old poem. The cloistered woman who wrote it also wrote botany texts and medical treatises and haunting music. In all of it she saw with an open, childlike immediacy what has too often, of late, been flattened into two dimensions and obscured by promiscuous repetition.
The compelling simplicity of her lines invites us back to moments of unveiled awareness. You see the blossom on that branch? It is answering my invitation. Have you noticed how the dew on the grass and the rain keep coming? The great water cycles are one of the many ways I move over the earth and enter into it, and into your very bodies and move among the trout. And among the fluttering aspens. I am verb, not noun. Still, but never static.
Before directing attention to God’s presence in the natural world, however, the poem begins with a reminder of God’s presence in the heavenly realm. “I am the one whose praise / Echoes on high.” We are reminded first and last of God’s transcendence. God is beyond what we can observe with the naked, darkened glass of the human eye. To see God in what is near would be misleading if we forgot the cosmic farness and the mystery of the “immortal, invisible” one “whose robe is the light, whose canopy space.” God acts from beyond what we know as “nature” and also within and among and through and beneath. So we have ample reason to think of God as both generating and being, as Dylan Thomas put it, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
The “I” in this poem not only calls our attention to who God is, but to what God does, and how to recognize God’s work in the world around us. “I adorn,” “I encourage,” “I cause,” “I call forth.” Those gentle verbs cover a significant range.
A God who adorns the earth, we are reminded, is a God who delights in beauty, and who, indeed, seems to regard beauty as a necessary dimension of life. I think of how often as a hospice volunteer I have witnessed a hunger for beauty that outlasts even hunger for food. I see it in patients who want flowers or a favorite painting put where they can see it from their bed, or who want to hear music or poems they love. A God who encourages is a God who allows and invites growth, cooperation, and collaboration from humans and all of nature—who invites participation in divine work. A God who causes the grass to laugh with the joy of life is a God who continues to generate a life force that bubbles up like an artesian well even in the smallest life forms. And the God who calls forth is the same who spoke Creation into being, summoning light into darkness and speaking word into silence.
That this God also calls forth tears suggests that our sorrow and our authentic sympathy and pity are likewise forms of participation in the divine life and plan. They open spaces in the heart that can’t be opened even by joy. Hildegard’s verbs are life-affirming. The list could go on, and her prayer invites us to let it go on, and open doors to faith seeking understanding.
Curiously, one variant among the verbs is a passive construction: “I am led by the spirit to feed / the purest streams.” One aspect of God is “led” by another, as though the God of the Trinity includes conversation in community. It reminds us of a family’s conversation, where one sibling might tug on another’s hand and say, “Look! Over here! Let’s move this rock, feed this duck, and put this spider back out where it can live.”
The final line of the poem offers a slightly different slant of light. “I am the yearning for good” is a claim of a different kind from those offered in the previous lines. It’s one thing to see God’s work manifest in the world around us, and even in our tears. It’s another to think of our own deepest longings as God-inhabited.
“He will give you the desires of your heart” is a line from the Psalms that shifted for me when I suddenly realized that it meant not only that God would fulfill my desires, but that God would provide the desires themselves, directing and purifying and in some ways complicating them to make them commensurate with what God, in love, might desire for me. Yearning for good is, itself, a gift. It is possible only when the lesser appetites for distractions, personal satisfactions, small victories, and idle pleasures fall away long enough to allow us to discover what it might mean to say, with Augustine, that “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Such yearning, even if it’s fleeting and quickly fogged over by immediacies, might be a moment of divine encounter devoutly to be wished and prayed for and savored when it’s given.
Hildegard invites us to listen, to watch for what comes, and to recognize the force and presence of the giver in the gift—the tree, the stream, the tears, the longing, the poem itself that becomes a prayer in the act of obedient listening and in the bold and trusting work of giving words to what emerges in silence and lingers in the inaudible laughter of grass.