Today's sermon by The Reverend Bo Reynolds can be read below:

 Today in our kalendar, we remember Hadewijch of Brabant. Little is known about her life apart from her influential corpus of spiritual writings. She was mostly likely a Beguine, a member of a group of women who lived in a quasi-monastic community but did not take formal vows. Instead, they pledged to be bound by the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience only as long as they lived in the community. The Beguine movement was particularly attractive to women who could not afford the (often substantial) dowry that was required by many monasteries, but the level of her education shows that she was most likely from a wealthy background.

Hadewijch is considered one of the founders of Dutch lyrical poetry, which includes compositions in which she coopts a French form to extoll the love between the speaker and God rather than worldly love. She also wrote poems in couplets on religious themes, as well as prose letters and a Book of Visions in which she engages Christ in dialogue.

One of the visions is summarized as follows:

On a Sunday after Pentecost, a young woman lay in bed, too overcome with spiritual yearning to go to church. There, she...experienced a vision of a meadow filled with trees. In the center of the pasture was an uprooted tree of many branches. "O mistress," she heard an angel say, "you climb this tree from beginning to the end, all the way to the profound roots of the incomprehensible God!" As she turned from the tree, she saw Christ, who warned her that the cost of being one with him was to be poor, miserable, and despised by all, but the reward was the knowledge of his will and the experience of Love. He left her with these words, "Give all, for all is yours."

I found this particular account of encounter with Christ, paired with longing and distance to be appropriate for our age of practiced spiritual communion, when we are physically separated from the presence of Christ in the altar. Yet in spite of this distance, I hope that we might encounter the abundant fountain of Jesus’ heart, his heart which, when pierced by the spear, flows with water and with blood. He gives all for us; Give all, for all the abundant love of God is yours.