The Night School with St. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Saints as Our Cathedrals

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The Night School with St. Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Saints as Our Cathedrals

Series 15, Part 3

November 19, 2024 • Rick Ganz

In Series 15, we have picked our Guest based on the date when his or her feast day is celebrated (annually) according to the Catholic liturgical calendar. Mechthild’s feast day is November 19th. She began a poem in this way:

Ah blessed absence of God,

How lovingly I am bound to you!

You strengthen my will in its pain

And make dear to me

The long hard wait in my poor body.

She, and in a way similar to Julian of Norwich (who was a Guest at The Night School in the Fall of 2018), Mechthild received a series of “revelations”, a series of intense experiences of God that profoundly deepened and recentered her life. Her effort to express what she saw and understood became a work that took her fourteen years to write, which she called The Flowing Light of the Godhead. About this one of the greatest living scholars of her thought has the following to say.

Margot Schmidt writes - “Rather, it [this book] is the expression of a basic human drive that comes to the surface, sometimes more, sometimes less. To these basic human drives we can reckon hunger, love, sex, and a yearning for God. This last-mentioned drive appears to have been so smothered by the others that today we scarcely still perceive it as a basic drive. And yet, the testimony of the mystics teaches us that the human person in its capacity for God (capax Dei) soars above all other recognized drives and surpasses them in a marvelous and terrifying way, once we have been awakened by the spark of God’s spirit or God’s love. In the face of this bursting forth of a passion for God, everything else suddenly retreats. An important characteristic of this passion for God is that it irrevocably prevents us from falling back into an all too vapid and tame existence. In essence Mechthild of Magdeburg’s book, The Flowing Light of the Godhead, is nothing other than the moving story of God’s heart and the human heart, and of Lucifer’s cunning attempts to interfere with the ties that join them.” [Margot Schmidt, “Preface,” in Mechthild of Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Godhead, ed. Bernard McGinn, trans. Frank Tobin, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998), xxv-xxvi.

More from The Night School for Deeper Learning: Series 15 (Fall 2024)

The Night School with St. Teresa of Avila, The Saints as Our Cathedrals

October 15, 2024 • Rick Ganz

The second Guest of our Series 15 of The Night School has her annual feast day on October 15th, which is one reason that we have chosen her to be our Guest on this night. She wrote in a letter in 1574: “It is necessary that we bear our weakness and not try to constrain our nature. Everything amounts to seeking God, since it is for Him that we search out every kind of means, and the soul must be led gently.” Britannica offers this short summary: "St. Teresa's beliefs centered on prayerful meditation and poverty for her sisters. St. Teresa of Avila (born March 28, 1515, Ávila, Spain—died October 4, 1582, Alba de Tormes; canonized 1622; feast day October 15) was a Spanish nun, one of the great mystics and religious women of the Roman Catholic Church, and an author of spiritual classics. She was the originator of the Carmelite Reform, which restored and emphasized the austerity and contemplative character of Carmelite life. St. Teresa was elevated to Doctor of the Church in 1970 by Pope Paul VI, the ﬁrst woman to be so honored.” St. Teresa was our Guest at The Night School in the Spring of 2019, who was introduced to us by Joel Kibler. Teresa’s inexhaustible depth and almost unparalleled grasp of the ways of God with human beings could cause us to choose to have her visit each year, and we still would only have experienced and understood a small part of her enduring gift to the world.

The Night School with St. Robert Bellarmine, SJ The Saints as Our Cathedrals

September 17, 2024 • Rick Ganz

Saint Robert Bellarmine died in 1621, in the chronological center of the historical phenomenon known as the Counter-Reformation or the Catholic Reformation. He was a bishop, a cardinal, and a member of the relatively young Society of Jesus, founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola [and his nine companions] in 1540. In his own times and for many generations thereafter, he won wide recognition for his writings on the spiritual life, which ran through many editions and translations. He also won recognition for his writings against the Protestants and especially for his opposition to certain ecclesiological [church life] ideas espoused by King James I of England. When he was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1930, he brought with him into our own century his reputation for skill in religious controversy rather than his fame as a writer on spirituality, which had been part and parcel of the esteem in which he was held in earlier centuries. [John O’Malley,“ Preface, ”in Robert Bellarmine: Spiritual Writings, ed. John Patrick Donnelly, Roland J. Teske, and John Farina, trans. John Patrick Donnelly and Roland J. Teske, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), 3.]