Scholar Wendy Farley introduces the Rhineland mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg:
Little is known about Mechthild [c. 1212–c.1282], though her name indicates that she lived most of her life in Magdeburg, near the border between German-speaking and Slavic territory…. A pious child, she was twelve when her almost daily “greetings” by the Holy Spirit began. As a young woman of about twenty she moved to Magdeburg, a city where she knew only one person, perhaps a Dominican friar. She lived as a beguine for most of the rest of her life…. Mechthild’s beautiful and bold book The Flowing Light of the Godhead is among the first religious writings in Middle Low German. By writing in her native language, she makes her spiritual journey and her theological reflections available to women and laypeople. [1]
Farley focuses on Mechthild’s radical understanding of God’s power:
The church of Mechthild’s time used monarchical images for God to justify a hierarchical ordering of human society: from God descended popes, bishops, clergy, lords, vassals, and fathers. Like medieval rulers, God demands obedience and loyalty. God’s favor is to be desired and God’s punishments feared.
Mechthild uses royal imagery for God (empress, queen, or lord). But because she conceives of power as a form of love, she understands monarchical metaphors in a distinctive way. God’s majesty and omnipotence are qualities related to the divine desire for intimacy with humanity. For Mechthild, it is not sheer power that makes God divine. It is love. This play between love and power is evident in the preface of Mechthild’s book, where God claims authorship of the book. “I made [gemachet] it in my powerlessness [unmaht], for I cannot restrain myself as to my gifts.” [2] This is a paradoxical way of describing divine power. Even God is powerless to contain God…. God is powerless to stop giving gifts to humanity. Because the divine nature is love, to do so would require the unmaking of divinity itself.
Theologians such as Augustine and [Martin] Luther struggle to understand how to reconcile love and justice or divine omnipotence and human agency. This is in part because they think of power as coercive or univocal agency. But for Mechthild, God’s desire for humanity is incompatible with sheer omnipotence, not because God has less power but because it is a different kind of power. God renounces power as “might,” in favor of love….
Mechthild acknowledges that there is a kind of power that demands strict justice and leaves the guilty to languish in their prison…. But she withholds this kind of power from God. This is not because God has less power than these wielders of might but because that kind of power is a diseased and distorted power. Out of love, the Father abandons the power to perpetuate suffering because the deeper and more authentic power is what redeems, heals, and restores. Mercy is a different kind of almighty-ness which draws even those brutalized by sin back into loving communion.… Divine power allows love to displace might. [3]
The Well. by David Whyte
But the miracle had come simply from allowing yourself to know that this time you had found it, that some now familiar stranger appearing from far inside you, had decided not to walk past it any more; that the miracle had come in the kneeling to drink and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed and the memories you held and the realization that in this silence you no longer had to keep your eyes and ears averted from the place that could save you, and that you had the strength at last to let go of the thirsty, unhappy, dust-laden pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking with her bent back, her bowed head and her careful explanations. No, the miracle had already happened before you stood up, before you shook off the dust and walked along the road beyond the well, out of the desert and on, toward the mountain, as if home again, as if you deserved to have everything you had loved all along, as if just remembering the first fresh taste of that clear cool spring could lift up your face to the morning light and set you free.
