Mystics and the soul like a heavy bird

I keep forgetting to post this thing I wrote--I had promised to return to the little-known medieval mystic Mecthilde of Magdeburg and her bird-work.

Is she truly little-known? Well, we’re not talking about a woman of Hildegarde of Bingen’s status. I stand in straight-up awe of Hildegarde, Germanic warrior priestess, with her ciphers and her herbal remedies and her choral compositions (her Canticles of Ecstasy are still performed), dressing her nuns in white and marrying them to Christ in mystical bridal ceremonies, breathing down fire on corrupt bishops… Yet her visions and her writings are too bracing for me, I admit it. I prefer the soft mystics—Julian of Norwich in her hermit’s cell, seeing that all will be well… John of the Cross with his love poetry for God… And my dear St. Ephraim, who instead of sitting on a pillar like his Syrian counterparts, wrote theological hymns for a women’s choir… In case you’re wondering, on one of those many life paths we end up not taking, I would have studied Christian mystics. Instead, they are just old and strange friends, and I take license with their works.

Like Mecthilde. I’m forgotten all of her showings except the one that caught my imagination. She saw the undisciplined soul like a great heavy bird—like a kakapo, maybe, New Zealand’s flightless parrot, or the hapless dodo.
The soul wishes to reach the sun, that is, mystical union with the divine, but it is near pinioned by gravity. Its first efforts are feeble and slow. It is too heavy to fly, too weak to flap for long. An earth-bound bird of a soul. But if it struggles on, persevering, it gradually becomes stronger and lighter, until the day it is able to fly. And on and on, stronger and lighter, lighter and stronger, able to fly higher and higher until the day it finally reaches the sun and becomes one with God.

I think this is a brilliant image for the practice of spirituality. For the spiritual disciplines, to be catholic about it. I find any kind of spiritual effort terribly hard at first, be it contemplative prayer or lectio divina or fasting or silence or plain old-fashioned mercy. The soul, or the heart or the mind, does not find it easy to fly. And I don’t know that such flight is a linear path, like Mecthilde did, but I do know that such disciplines grow easier with time and feel nearly impossible after long neglect.

I guess I should be clear about this—this image isn’t about salvation, about flapping one’s way to God’s side on one’s own wings. This is about seeking communion, a life closer to God, a life in which there are no guarantees.
And to me that seeking means putting oneself in the way of the Spirit, in case that unpredictable wind happens to blow.
And it’s the seeking that I think is so hard at first for the soul, the lazy flightless soul that prefers to stay close to all the lovely worms and beetles in the rich earth.
And it’s the seeking that I think becomes easier the longer the soul tries to fly in such a way.
I think that God can blow any flightless bird off its feet.
But I’d rather be in the sky, learning to fly, looking for the faintest wind, not wanting to miss a moment.