{"id":24824,"date":"2025-02-26T08:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=24824"},"modified":"2025-02-26T10:37:06","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T15:37:06","slug":"24824","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=24824","title":{"rendered":"Mechthild of Magdeburg: God\u2019s Power Is Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"O Love That Will Not Let Me Go - Wide Open Spaces by The Sound of Wales - Live with Lyrics\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/h6iL_UInTVs?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Scholar Wendy Farley introduces the Rhineland mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg:\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Little is known about Mechthild [c. 1212\u2013c.1282], though her name indicates that she lived most of her life in Magdeburg, near the border between German-speaking and Slavic territory\u2026. A pious child, she was twelve when her almost daily \u201cgreetings\u201d 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\u2026. Mechthild\u2019s beautiful and bold book&nbsp;<em>The Flowing Light of the Godhead<\/em>&nbsp;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]&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Farley focuses on Mechthild\u2019s radical understanding of God\u2019s power:&nbsp;<\/em>&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The church of Mechthild\u2019s time used monarchical images for God to justify a hierarchical ordering of human society: from God descended popes, bishops, clergy, lords, vassals, and fathers. <strong>Like medieval rulers, God demands obedience and loyalty. God\u2019s favor is to be desired and God\u2019s punishments feared.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mechthild uses royal imagery for God (empress, queen, or lord). But because <strong>she conceives of power as a form of love, she understands monarchical metaphors in a distinctive way. God\u2019s majesty and omnipotence are qualities related to the divine desire for intimacy with humanity<\/strong>. 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\u2019s book, where God claims authorship of the book. \u201cI made [<em>gemachet<\/em>] it in my powerlessness [<em>unmaht<\/em>], for I cannot restrain myself as to my gifts.\u201d [2] This is a paradoxical way of describing divine power.<strong> Even God is powerless to contain God\u2026. 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.<\/strong>&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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, <strong>God\u2019s 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 \u201cmight,\u201d in favor of love\u2026.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mechthild acknowledges that there is a kind of power that demands strict justice and leaves the guilty to languish in their prison\u2026. But she withholds this kind of power from God. This is not because God has&nbsp;<em>less<\/em>&nbsp;power than <strong>these wielders of might but because that&nbsp;<em>kind<\/em>&nbsp;of power is a diseased and distorted power.<\/strong> Out of love, the <strong>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.\u2026 Divine power allows love to displace might. [3]&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Well.  by David Whyte<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-preformatted\">But the miracle had come simply\nfrom allowing yourself to know\nthat this time you had found it,\nthat some now familiar stranger\nappearing from far inside you,\nhad decided not to walk past\nit any more;\nthat the miracle had come in the kneeling to drink\nand the prayer you said, and the tears you shed\nand the memories you held\nand the realization that in this silence\nyou no longer had to keep\nyour eyes and ears averted\nfrom the place that could save you,\nand that you had the strength\nat last to let go of the thirsty,\nunhappy, dust-laden\npilgrim-self that brought you here,\nwalking with her bent back,\nher bowed head\nand her careful explanations.\n\nNo, the miracle had already\nhappened before you stood up,\nbefore you shook off the dust\nand walked along the road\nbeyond the well, out of the desert\nand on, toward the mountain,\nas if home again, as if you\ndeserved to have everything\nyou had loved all along,\nas if just remembering the first\nfresh taste of that clear cool spring\ncould lift up your face\nto the morning light and set you free.\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scholar Wendy Farley introduces the Rhineland mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg:\u00a0\u00a0 Little is known about Mechthild [c. 1212\u2013c.1282], though her name indicates that she lived most of her life in Magdeburg, near the border between German-speaking and Slavic territory\u2026. A pious child, she was twelve when her almost daily \u201cgreetings\u201d by the Holy Spirit began. As [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24824"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24831,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824\/revisions\/24831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}