We need that "greening power"
Some thoughts on Hildegard of Bingen, Puhpowee, and a mindset of learning
In the last couple weeks, the Seattle area where I live has transitioned rather rapidly from fall into winter. At least that’s how it felt to me.
When I boarded a plane to spend Thanksgiving week with my in-laws in upstate New York, leaves still paraded their bright colors on many of the trees here, and temperatures didn’t call for bundling up with a full wintry ensemble of scarf, warm hat, and gloves for a simple walk outside.
When I returned home, and in the almost two weeks since then, winter arrived, and thoroughly. Branches stand bare. I can see my breath in the air. Tiny raindrops look suspiciously light and fluffy; they don’t quite move like rain. They aren’t exactly snow, but a “wintry mix” for sure.
This may seem an odd time, then, to talk about anything being made green.
Or maybe this is exactly the time to be thinking about these things. Embracing our longing for them. Pondering the patience we’re invited into as we walk through these long, cold months, making peace with (or at least surviving) the short, dark days, the gray skies, the cold fog, and so many different kinds of precipitation that isn’t quite snow but isn’t far from it. (Okay, maybe some of these things are specific to the Pacific Northwest. But you get the idea.)
We could draw parallels to political and societal realities. These are bleak and foggy times. We might feel like we’re waiting to see how things take shape in the next few weeks (and months, and years)—and we might feel pretty sure we won’t like what we find when we get there.
Maybe it’s all the more crucial, then—for our own wellbeing, and for our communities and our world—that we search for and perhaps find a way to believe that greenness will return.
All that to say—y’all, I really loved
’ new book The Mystics Would Like a Word. Evans draws together stories and reflections from her own life and brilliance with stories and reflections from the lives and brilliances of six female mystics from Christian history.
I want to share with you something Evans draws out in twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s thinking that’s sticking with me. “Hildegard,” Evans writes, “had a sacramental way of seeing the world. To her, the material and the spiritual were two sides of the same coin.”
Evans continues: “Central to her understanding of God’s spiritual work in nature is what she called Viriditas.”
Viriditas: “the ‘greening power’ of the Divine.” The “force of the Spirit that is actively moving all things—including you and me, just as much as the earth itself—toward wholeness.”
Isn’t that gorgeous? There’s something about “greening power” as an image that’s speaking to me—in this literal wintry time, and in our current political reality.
What kind of “greening power” do you see in and around you? Where do you long to see it?
Evans goes on to reflect on what this “greening power” means to Hildegard, and for us today:
“The greening power of God means that nothing is final; everything is in motion, everything is in process. It means that the very forces of creation, rebirth, and fertility that keep the earth in motion are also living and active inside of us, because the greening power of God dwells within each of us…Just as the seasons come and go, so do the highs and lows of our lives: the cold and the warmth, the light and the dark, the death and the rebirth. It all holds, because we are all held.”
I wonder if you find yourself in this. I certainly do.
The “greening power” of the Divine feels like such a hopeful image to me. I feel like the times we’re living in call for every fiber in our beings to connect as deeply as possible to these “very forces of creation, rebirth, and fertility that keep the earth in motion.”
I’m reminded of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s reflections in Braiding Sweetgrass on the Anishinaabe word Puhpowee. She quotes Anishinaabe ethnobotanist Keewaydinoquay: Puhpowee is “the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.”
Isn’t that gorgeous, too? Doesn’t it feel sacred?
English, Kimmerer reflects, contains no such language for this life-pushing-up force, this newness-emerging energy. “Western science,” she writes, has “no words to hold this mystery.” But Anishinaabe—an indigenous North American language that English-speaking settlers tried to force out of existence—does.
If you’ve spent some time in evangelical Christian settings, or perhaps are still there, I wonder if all this feels a bit…animistic? Un-Christian? Suspicious, in the way it pokes at our comfortable distinctions between Creator and Created, between God and our natural world?
If so, I think that’s okay. And I think it’s worth noting that Christians in other eras were sometimes more comfortable with these sorts of blurred boundaries than we might be.
Shannon K. Evans reminds us, for example, that Hildegard of Bingen was actually a quite “orthodox Christian”; she was “even rather conservative in some of her beliefs and opinions.”
I was fascinated to learn that Hildegard actually lived in an era when lots of Christians were reconnecting God and Earth in creative and beautiful ways. Hildegard was, in this regard, according to Evans, a “true woman of her time.”
Perhaps Western Christians’ relationship with Earth has not historically been a monolith of exploitation and domination. Perhaps there has been a push and pull, over time, between these forces and healthier ones. Between domination versus care, exploitation versus connection, seeing humans as over and above the rest of creation versus an integrated and integral part of it.
Perhaps it’s relatively recently in Christian history that an exploitative view dominated and got us where we are, in the time of ecological crisis we live in.
We have much to learn from Christian thinkers of other eras. From theologians who lived before modern evangelicalism was born. From female Christian thinkers, especially, whose voices were often silenced or stymied or excluded from the common canons of historical theologians we tend to read.
And those of us who are settler Christians certainly have much to learn—infinitely much to learn—from indigenous thinkers like Robin Wall Kimmerer. Some other indigenous authors I’ve enjoyed and learned from, if it’s helpful on your journey:
and Edith Woodley, , , Tyson Yunkaporta, Joy Harjo.(Who else are you learning from? I’d love to hear in the comments!)
As I read the work of indigenous writers, I’m struck by a question many of them raise: What if Europeans had set foot on Turtle Island / North America and, upon encountering unfamiliar people already living here, chosen a mindset not of superiority but of humility? What if we’d chosen not to try to conquer or impose, but to learn and grow?
As
asks in Becoming Kin: “What if they had seen God’s presence in this place instead of emptiness and absence? What if the settlers, instead of reenacting the conquest of Canaan, had pursued relationship? What if they had sought kinship?”Our world would be different today, that’s for certain. (Understatement of the century.)
I’m hopeful, going forward, to embrace a mindset of learning, of relationship, of kinship. To shed any lingering evangelical-conditioned nervousness around learning from indigenous spirituality, from indigenous ways of thinking and growing and moving in this world.
Who benefits from this hesitancy? Not you, not me. Only the exploitative white supremacist patriarchal colonialist powers-that-be that are killing us all.
God is not threatened by our explorations, our learning, our growth.
God has always been present in this place, as Krawec says. We settler-descended folks have so much to learn.
So, I hope you find something hopeful or healing in Hildegard’s idea of “greening power,” or in Kimmerer’s reflections on the Anishinaabe word “Puhpowee.” I hope we embrace this life-force and find glimmers of it everywhere. I think it’s what we need in these times.
Looking for that greening, mushroom-raising force, together. And for a spirit of humility and kinship as we do so.
This is a powerful piece. Thank you. So much to appreciate and sit with. I love Hildegard.
She wrote one titled… ‘Holy Spirit Comforting Fire..
The era in which she lived as well… was it easier to pull the stops out and live or do you think it was more challenging as a women of presence?