Medievalish 1.2
Two Creatures from Marguerite of Oingt for January 2022, plus a prayer from Jane Austen...
Happy New Year, friends!
Are you a fan of New Year’s resolutions? This year, I’ve never seen so many people skeptical of the motivation or project behind New Year’s resolutions. And in some ways, these detractors are right—some people embark on impossible diet or exercise schemes because they feel intense pressure from the culture around them that tells them they, or their bodies, are bad. Alternatively, these goals are another way to feel like we are in control. If I do X (meditating daily, eating salads), Y (tranquility, a hot bod) will happen. I am in charge. Perhaps that’s why I find that images or words are more helpful for me than particular goals. Today, I want to focus on two incredibly vivid images of Marguerite of Oingt, 13th-century visionary writer and prioress, in honor of the New Year and offer them up as New Year’s meditations, not so much goals as tokens or reminders of a life lived well.
While I was doing some digging for a project, I came back across the medieval contemplative writer, Marguerite of Oingt. Born around 1240, Marguerite became a prioress of a Carthusian convent, the charter house of Poleteins. She died in 1310. She was the only woman writer whose work has survived among the many, many male Carthusian writers of the Middle Ages. And she was a visionary who received sights and sounds, in fear and ecstasy.
As one might expect of a woman who is a leader in her order, a talented writer, and a visionary seer, her work is strange, beautiful, and evocative. Unfortunately, a lot of it consists of visions of Hell, including gruesome descriptions of dragons gnawing on the lips of evil people, or cloaks of pitch enveloping sinners, but there are some real gems too. Marguerite explores the idea of Christ as a Mother and the passion as the agonizing childbirth that gives the church life, which is how I first read her work in my research on this image of Jesus. Today, I want to focus on two interesting creature examples that she explores in her visions. And like the best parenting/coaching/teaching techniques, there’s a stick and a carrot in there, one negative and one positive creature to emulate in 2022.
Two Word Pictures from Marguerite of Oingt for 2022
And there are people who do not know how to talk of anything that is good, but judge their brothers and sisters and, if they know of any fault in anyone, they rather talk about this than do something worthwhile.
And of people like these Saint Francis says that they are like the brothers of flies because the fly always lands in the worst place it can find on a human being; for wherever it finds a scab or a blemish, that is where it quickly settles. And for that reason those who cannot occupy themselves with anything worthwhile are called the brothers of flies.
-Marguerite of Oingt, A Page of Meditations, from The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, ed. and trans. by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
I have noticed of myself recently that I find it very easy to be, to adapt the language of St. Francis and Mother Marguerite, a sister of flies. In the last five years, on a public and private scale, many of us have honed the gift of identifying scabs to an unprecedented degree. Not that the nasty bits of us aren’t real—they certainly are. But there’s an important difference between the physician, who treats even the most disgustingly infected wound with skill and trained attention, and the fly, obsessively drawn to scabs for the sake of its own gratification. For most of us, it feels good to revel in or dissect, perhaps with some smug implicit judgment, someone else’s partially healed or still gaping wounds, especially those with whom we disagree or do not like. How could they be so stupid/self-absorbed/hypocritical/prejudiced/wrong? How could they act that way? It’s one thing to identify it and combat any source of evil; it’s quite another to return to it over and over, bathing in one’s aggrieved sense of rightness.
This image is even more significant when we recall that Marguerite is a prioress. She’s shepherding the community of nuns that she leads. She’s building fellowship. There are few things more damaging to life together than this housefly habit.
Are you being a physician when you are drawn to someone’s wounds, or are you being a housefly? It’s a question worth asking yourself regularly as you engage with people similar and dissimilar to yourself, with people you meet in-person and online, and it’s one I want to ask myself a lot this year.
Living and Breathing the Beauty and Sweetness of God: The Saints as Fish
Marguerite has a vision of Jesus holding a book. Here’s what she considers as the book opens:
19. The saints will be within their Creator as the fish within the sea: they will drink as much as they want, without getting tired and without diminishing the amount of water. The saints will be just like that, for they will drink and eat the great sweetness of God. And the more they will get, the greater their hunger will be. This sweetness cannot decrease any more or less than can the water of the sea. For just as the rivers all come out of the sea and go back to it, so it is for the beauty and sweetness of Our Lord: although they flow everywhere, they always return to Him. And for that reason they can never grow smaller.
20. Even if the saints did nothing but think of His great goodness, they could never completely imagine the great charity in virtue of which the good Lord sent His blessed son to earth.
21. Now think that in Him there are also other goods. He is all one can imagine or desire in all the saints. And this is the inscription that was written on the first clasp of the book: “God will be everything to everyone.”
22. On the second clasp was written: “Mirabilis Deus in sanctis suis, God is marvelous in His saints.” There is no human intelligence that could imagine how marvellous God is in His saints.
-Marguerite of Oingt, A Page of Meditations, from The Writings of Margaret of Oingt, ed. and trans. by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski
The image of the fish in the sea is striking. The love of God is the saints’ medium; it is the water in which they swim, the air they breathe. God’s love, truth, and beauty are infinite resources, unlike literally every other single thing in our lives.
Visionary moments give someone a privileged sight into life beyond the constraints of time, place, and particular bodily limitation. Here, Marguerite transcends oxygen, sunlight, her thirteenth-century French priory, to see the atoms of living. The love and sweetness of God is the food, breath, and utter reality of the saints.
And Marguerite is strengthened in her knowledge that this isn’t the case for just the especially holy, or especially wonderful. “He will be everything to everyone,” she sees on one of the clasps of the great book that Jesus cradles in his hands. The other clasp directs us towards seeing him in other people: “God is marvelous in his saints.” These words check the housefly in me too.
I am reminding myself of Marguerite’s fish this year. The Age of Omicron is hard (I call it that in my head to make it feel more like a dramatic movie than the slogfest it actually is). Our resources, my time and patience, and our peace dwindle and feel so limited. Yet as Marguerite saw in transcending her time and space—without diminishing how hard all that time and space is—God’s abiding sweetness has no limit. Marguerite helps me to remind myself that I swim in the goodness of God, even when it’s so close and essential to me I cannot see it. Only occasionally, with an unusual brush of the fin, a particularly cold or warm patch of water, do I notice that gift. Perhaps a New Year’s mantra instead of a resolution: I am God’s fish. I want to be like the saints. I swim in his mercy, love, and sweetness. It comes to me in the food I eat, the air I breathe, the people I love. And though I drink it in, it never lessens.
Keep these 750 year-old creatures, gifts from Marguerite, with you a bit this week/month/year. What do they speak to you?
What I’ve been up to this month:
The newest Old Books With Grace episode features Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, professor and author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books. Listen on Spotify, Apple, or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Kayla Craig, author of To Light Their Way, is my guest on January 19th. We chat about liturgy, prayer, and the tradition of prayer books, especially as folks who grew up in non-liturgical traditions and want to try something different.
I was on the Fountains of Carrots podcast that aired on December 21, talking about the English mystics. I really enjoyed sharing about Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the English mystical tradition.
Celebrating Christmas with family, so not much writing to show you… stay tuned as I return to my first writing love, Julian of Norwich, sometime in the near future…
What I’ve been reading this month:
Nonfiction: Eugene Peterson’s Tell It Slant: a Conversation on the Language of Jesus in his Stories and Prayers. Peterson is, as usual, lucid, elegant, and profound. I loved re-meeting Jesus on the road to Jerusalem through Samaria and rethinking his parables in this marvelous book. I’m not finished yet but the book is starting to look a bit worn with all the folded pages for remembrance.
Fiction: Elizabeth Goudge’s The Child from the Sea. Not my favorite of hers (I love The Dean’s Watch) but I adore a good historical fiction more than any other kind of fiction. It’s about the supposed first wife of Charles II, the mysterious Welshwoman Lucy Walter, during the tumultuous seventeenth century.
Article: Plough Quarterly had a beautiful issue on ability and disability for their winter edition. I can’t really pick just one article from the bunch.
A Prayer from the Past
Give us grace to endeavor after a truly Christian spirit, to seek to attain that temper of forbearance and patience of which our Blessed Savior has set us the highest example; and which, while it prepares us for the spiritual happiness of the life to come, will secure to us the best enjoyment of what this world can give.
Incline us, O God, to think humbly of ourselves, to be severe only in the examination of our own conduct, to consider our fellow-creatures with kindness, and to judge of all they say and do with that charity which we would desire from them ourselves… Amen
Excerpted from Jane Austen, Prayer III, The Prayers of Jane Austen ed. Terry Glaspey
Peace for your January,
Grace