Saint Hildegard Way

A luminous medieval Rhineland landscape at golden hour on a late September afternoon, with mist rising from the banks of a winding river surrounded by ancient stone ruins overgrown with vibrant green moss and wildflowers. In the foreground, a rustic wooden table holds a small arrangement of spelt cookies dusted with cinnamon and cloves, alongside a single white butterfly resting on a sprig of herbs. The atmosphere is mystical and contemplative — light filtering through thin clouds creates a sense of the sacred and the earthly intertwined. In the background, the silhouette of a Romanesque monastery ruin rises against a sky glowing amber and deep violet, evoking centuries of memory and living spiritual presence. The overall palette is rich with deep greens, golden light, and warm earth tones, conveying the concept of viriditas — the greening, life-giving force of creation — as both ancient and urgently alive. Painterly, editorial illustration style with soft luminosity and devotional gravitas.

Day 12: Hildegard’s Feast Day — Viriditas, Prophecy, and the Living Legacy

 · 

Michael

The virtual pilgrimage concludes on September 17 — the Feast Day of Saint Hildegard, the anniversary of her death in 1179 and the day the Church has celebrated her for nearly seven centuries. It is the right day to ask what her life means now: not as medieval history, but as living provocation.

Day 12 brings together poets, theologians, and one of the most important voices in contemporary creation spirituality for a wide-ranging conversation about Hildegard’s prophetic relevance — to ecology, to justice, to the recovery of the feminine divine, and to what she called the fullness of the soul.

Hildegard as Practical Mystic

Rev. Dr. Shanon Sterringer opens by framing Hildegard not as a remote contemplative but as a practical mystic — someone whose interior life produced exterior action at every turn. The abbess who founded monasteries, preached in cathedrals, wrote medical encyclopedias, and defied bishops was not despite her mysticism but because of it. Her visions did not remove her from the world. They sent her deeper into it.

The session opens with the virtual Hildegard Feast — including her famous Cookies of Joy, a recipe from her medical writings in which spelt, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves are combined to lift the spirit and strengthen the heart. Hildegard prescribed them for sadness. It is an appropriately embodied way to celebrate a woman who never separated the physical from the spiritual.

Poetry and Thin Places

Australian poet Colleen Keating — whose poem In Search of Hildegard of Bingen appears in the Hildegard of Bingen Pilgrimage Book — speaks about Disibodenberg as a thin veil place: a site where the membrane between the visible and the invisible feels unusually permeable. She describes the synchronicity of a white butterfly at the ruins — an encounter that resists rational explanation and invites a different kind of attention.

It is a reminder that the Hildegardweg is not only a historical trail. It is a place where something is still happening.

Matthew Fox: Prophecy in Real Time

The session culminates with an in-depth conversation with Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox — theologian, Episcopal priest, and one of the leading voices in creation spirituality. Fox has written extensively on Hildegard, placing her at the center of a recovered Western mystical tradition that connects Celtic Christianity, the Rhineland mystics (Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich), and the cosmological vision of Thomas Aquinas.

The conversation ranges widely. Fox addresses Hildegard’s ecological vision as prophecy — her understanding of viriditas as a living force that creation requires for its health, and what its absence looks like in a world of wildfires and climate crisis. He draws connections between Hildegard’s theology and indigenous wisdom traditions that hold the earth as sacred. He speaks about her political call — her insistence that justice and the common good are not secular concerns but spiritual ones, rooted in the dignity of the human soul.

The session closes with Fox’s prayer for vigor for justice and the renewal of Mother Earth — words Hildegard herself might have spoken, eight centuries earlier, on the banks of the Nahe.

The Feast Day

September 17 is Hildegard’s Feast Day — and the capstone celebration of the Saint Hildegard Way pilgrimage journey in the Rhineland. After ten stages through her landscape, two days of deeper reflection on her music and her theology, the pilgrimage ends where Hildegard herself ended: in gratitude, in community, and in the conviction that the greening power of creation is still available to those willing to walk toward it.

Viriditas is available to all.
You only need to walk towards it.

Heather Boyle

Day 12 — Feast Day

Hildegard’s Feast Day falls on September 17 — the same week our pilgrimage journey walks through her landscape. If you feel called to be there, download our free Pilgrim’s Guide and take the first step.

This post concludes the Saint Hildegard Way virtual pilgrimage series. Learn more about the pilgrimage journey or get in touch.

Michael

This special ecumenical online pilgrimage website has been created by pilgrim-filmmaker Michael M. Conti, who took the 85-mile “Hildegard Way” through the Nahe river region in Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany.

Recent Posts