Book of Awesome Women Writers. Becca Anderson
among short entries of her visions. Mechtild’s book is a rarity in medieval German literature and came to be read all over Europe. A snippet: “Lord, you are my lover. My longing, my flowing stream, my sun, And I am your reflection.”
CATHERINE OF SIENA poet of prayer
Catherine was the twenty-fourth of twenty-five children born to Jacopo Benincasa, a craftsman who made his living as a dyer of cloth in the city of Siena. At the tender age of six, Catherine knew she wanted to devote her life to God, but she didn’t enter a convent as a novice until ten years later, in 1363. She became a nun in the Dominican order four years after that and began her lifelong work helping the sick and destitute. During the plague, she and her female followers tended victims and buried the dead.
Loved and respected for her devotion (she was eventually canonized) later in her life, she acted as a director to a circle of nuns as well as a spiritual minister to many people from her community. She was a mystic, given to visions, and a poet, creating prayerful verse celebrating her faith and the glory of God.
Catherine was also an activist at heart and participated in the politics of her time and place. She even went so far as to travel to Avignon to prevail upon the pope to return to the Vatican in Rome. She was always helping others and thinking of herself last, barely eating in her desire to purify her being and be closer to holiness. She flagellated herself three times a day, seeing her personal suffering as an offering in exchange for the good of the church, saying, “O eternal God, accept the sacrifice of my life within this mystic body of holy Church.”
Catherine never learned to write, but several of her fellow nuns wrote down her original verse, letters, and prayers. Those she uttered in solitude are lost to us forever. An ecstatic trance state often came over Catherine during her meditations, in which she would lie prostrate upon the ground. Other times, her words came in short bursts interchanged by lengthy silences. Often, she sang as she walked alone. Her health became very frail, probably due to starvation, and she died at the age of thirty-three, leaving a set of devotional works nearly unmatched in their innovative splendor.
There the soul dwells—like the fish in the sea
and the sea in the fish.
Catherine of Siena
Fifteenth-century nuns in St. Catherine’s Convent in Nuremberg, Germany, loved books so much that in less than fifty years, they grew their library from forty-six books to over six hundred, mostly by hand-copying sermons, parts of the New Testament, tracts, and records of the saints’ lives.
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA pierced by God
One of a dozen children of Spanish nobles, Teresa de Cepeda y Abumada was born to a life of privilege on March 28, 1515. Upon her mother’s death when Teresa was thirteen, the girl was sent to live at a convent school. She was miserable there, and after she fell ill, her mind turned to thoughts of death and hell. Though she longed to leave the strict confines of the convent, the images of hell enabled her to keep from running away; “in servile fear” she “forced herself” to accept the nunnery.
For twenty years, she continued to battle with her will, her frail body, and the harshness of life in the cloister, aspiring to a life of devotion and spiritual growth with a Franciscan book as her only aid. Finally, she underwent a second conversion, and using “the eyes of the soul,” began seeing visions with regularity. Her visions were colorful and like nothing she had ever seen before; she saw jewel-encrusted crucifixes and tiny, pretty angels, one of whom pierced her heart with a fiery, golden pin. When demons invaded her dreams, she merely threw holy water on them and they ran off. In one dream, she experienced “transverberation,” a golden lance from God that pierced her heart over and over. She also began to hear the voice of God sharing his hopes for her destiny.
Teresa was encouraged by the voice to found a small convent among the “discalced,” the unshod, sandal-wearing reform movement of the Carmelite order. The discalced felt the Carmelite order was too soft; they believed in “holy poverty,” including begging for alms in order to survive. Teresa and her fellow sisters were determined to live this ascetic life, and in 1563 they moved into the small St. Joseph’s convent, where they spearheaded the “barefoot” reformation, traveling under terrible conditions in a wooden cart to found seventeen more such religious communities.
She also wrote books, spiritual guides for followers of the movement. Her Life is still widely read and remains in print; The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle were also met with an immediate readership of significant proportions. In Uppity Women of the Renaissance, Vicki León says that The Interior Castle was so well regarded that it “eventually won her the title of Doctor of the Church from the twentieth century’s Pope Paul VI.”
Teresa was referred to as a saint while still alive, but she ignored such approbation, and until her death in 1582, got on with the real business of life, scrubbing floors, begging for alms, and cooking for her sisters and converts, remarking that, “The Lord walks among the pots and pans.”
All things are passing; God never changeth; patience endureth.
Teresa of Avila, from her Breviary
MIRABAI Krishna’s convert
An Indian bhakti or saint-poet, Mirabai (1498–1565) is the best known of all the northern Indian poets of this style. A Rajput princess by birth, she was steeped in literature and music by tutors in the court of her grandfather, Rao Dudaji.
Renowned for her sanctity, Mirabai married the crown prince of the kingdom of Mewar, but her religious feelings caused her to reject a husband-wife relationship with her royal groom. Instead, she worshipped her Lord, the incarnation of Krishna called Giridhara, whose great works included lifting a mountain. Tradition has it that the crown prince’s family tried to kill Mirabai twice, and that she rejected the family’s deities and the proper widow’s rite of immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre upon his death.
If these legends hold any truth, they could easily explain why Mirabai began wandering, leaving behind all semblance of a normal life and devoting herself exclusively to worship of her Lord Giridhara. Toward the time of her death, she stayed at the temple compound of Ranachora at Dvarka. Her devotional hymns, prayers, and poems are still sung all over India and have recently found their way into printed form in English.
Only those who have felt the knife can understand the wound. Only the jeweler knows the nature of the Jewel.
Mirabai
JANE LEAD Sophia’s prophet
Jane Lead is one of those wonderful early women writers who are ripe for rescue from obscurity. She was born in 1624 in Norfolk to the Ward family, and, in her own words, was brought up and educated “like other girls.” Her difference emerged when she turned fifteen and a voice began instructing her during a Christmas celebration. This was her first mystical experience. Six years later, she married William Lead, an older, distant relative, and her religious devotions went on the back burner. The couple raised four daughters, and after her husband’s death in 1670, when Jane was forty-six years old, her interests returned strongly to the study of mysticism and a state she called “Spiritual Virginity.” Jane had a powerful vision of Sophia, meaning “wisdom,” a female aspect of God.
Jane Lead pored over the writings of the German theologian Jacob Boehme, who was widely regarded as radical in his spiritual beliefs. Jane’s convictions about the mystical way grew more fervent than ever, and she moved into the household of Dr. John Pordage, founder of an unorthodox religious sect. When Pordage passed away, Lead began to publish her own visions and beliefs with the help of a younger assistant, Dr. Francis Lee. Together they founded the Philadelphia Society, based on Boehme’s doctrine.
Her writing and the intelligence shown therein were astonishing. In 1681, she wrote The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, followed by The Enochian Walks with God and the four-volume work A Fountain of Gardens, Watered by the Rivers