Category: Video

Asking a question is hard in live virtual events
As the filmmaker-pilgrim behind The Unruly Mystic Series, I have always found the answers more instructive than the questions. Learning what to ask in the first place — that is the hardest part. Perhaps that instinct comes from my DNA as the son of an astronomer, Peter S. Conti (September 5, 1934 – June 21, 2021). The answers I received through many hours of interviews gave me insight into my own constantly developing spirituality — a luxury I don’t have in live virtual events, where there is no thoughtful editing to fall back on.

Through the process of making these films and running live virtual events, I gained confidence in my own creative work and in the importance of making something of value for the world. For those who haven’t yet taken that plunge fully — there is someone out there right now looking for something that your future self will be creating.

Going Live in Virtual Events

Through the filmmaking process I have encountered many people whose knowledge and personal journeys would have enriched the films — but it is virtually impossible to include everyone in a 120-minute documentary. Each story is unique, each inspirational in its own way.

Starting in 2020, during the pandemic, I began using a live virtual events format to share those conversations in real time — with breakout rooms that allow for the kind of exchange that can lead to genuine understanding and change. These are the conversations that films can point toward but never fully contain.

The first experiment was a VMuir Day Panel in 2020, celebrating John Muir’s 182nd birthday on April 21, 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Panelists were asked about death, connecting with nature in isolation, and why John Muir remains relevant today.

That September, over 150 virtual pilgrims attended the first live Saint Hildegard Pilgrimage — a virtual gathering for her Feast Day on September 17th. The response was extraordinary and confirmed that this format has a life of its own.

Hildegard Presenter Requirements

Presenters for the Saint Hildegard virtual events are invited based on the following criteria:
- A personal connection to Saint Hildegard’s teachings, medicine, art, or music
- Has done something meaningful around that creative connection — has taken the plunge
- Is able to share their own process and experience in doing that work
A Work in Progress

I see each of us in Saint Hildegard, and Saint Hildegard in each of us. That is a work in progress — and an ongoing invitation.

Join the conversation as we celebrate the spirituality and creativity of Saint Hildegard, as manifested through her natural medicine, art, writing, and music.

Saint Hildegard Virtual Pilgrimage — September 2021

Virtual Pilgrimage with Saint Hildegard — sainthildegard.com

The September 2021 gathering offered a live virtual pilgrimage — both live and pre-recorded — spanning 12 days of recordings alongside two live event days over Saint Hildegard’s Feast Day, September 17 and 18, 2021.

On September 17th at 1 PM EST, the Feast Day opened with the ringing of bells from Hildegard Haus in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, followed by a sermon from Rev. Dr. Shanon Sterringer. On Saturday, September 18th, Rev. Carol Vaccariello opened the day at 1 PM EST, followed by Rector Susan Springer offering a solemnity for St John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado.

Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox — author of Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegard’s Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs, and Hildegard of Bingen, a Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century — shared reflections on spirituality and creativity with the gathered community.
September 16, 2021
Now more than ever relevant!

Screenings

Now more than ever, we all long for an order in which fairness, justice, and compassion for all people is demonstrated by our respective governments. Saint Hildegard had her own “unruly-ness” toward the powers of the Church — allowing an excommunicated nobleman to be buried in the cemetery at the convent, defying the direct orders of the Bishop of Mainz. Whose teaching was she following in taking that unruly action? That teaching is still relevant today.

Hildegard didn’t resist quietly. When the Church threatened to place her convent under interdict — forbidding all religious services, music, and sacraments — she wrote back with fierce theological clarity, arguing that silencing sacred music was an offense against God. She won. The interdict was lifted. This was a 12th-century abbess standing her ground against the full institutional weight of the medieval Church — and prevailing.

That combination of spiritual depth and civic courage is exactly what makes her so resonant now. She didn’t separate her inner life from her public one. Her mysticism was not a retreat from the world — it was the source of her willingness to engage it, challenge it, and demand better from it.

Isn’t it time you became unruly? In unruliness, find your own mystic heart.

Now More Than Ever Relevant

Audiences everywhere are fired up by Saint Hildegard’s 12th-century activism, creativity, and ability to speak her mind across 800 years of distance. At screenings from university campuses to church halls, the conversations that follow are rarely about the past. They are about now — about power, about conscience, about what it means to trust your own perception when the world is telling you to stay quiet.

Students in particular respond to her story with a recognition that surprises them. Here is a woman who was told, in every possible way, that her voice didn’t count — and who wrote, composed, traveled, debated, and prophesied anyway. That is not a medieval story. That is a human one.

Students at Oxford Emory University — a screening of The Unruly Mystic: Saint Hildegard

If you are interested in hosting a screening — at a university, a spiritual community, a festival, or a private gathering — get in touch. The film travels well. The conversation it starts travels even further.

November 21, 2016
Remembering Linn Maxwell Keller

Linn Maxwell Keller was an embodiment of Saint Hildegard in both spirit and talent — truly worthy of being her own version of a patron saint of creativity. She didn’t just perform Hildegard’s music. She inhabited it. And in doing so, she gave contemporary audiences a direct, living connection to a voice that had been silent for eight centuries.

Linn Maxwell Keller — An Interesting Connection

I first heard of Linn Maxwell Keller during the spring of 2013 while researching Saint Hildegard online in Boulder for my film, The Unruly Mystic: Saint Hildegard. I discovered she was performing the very next night in Denver at DU — and while I couldn’t attend, I was teaching that evening, I called her the following day to introduce myself.

You never quite know how someone will receive an unexpected call from a filmmaker they’ve never met. Linn received it with warmth and openness. Besides inviting me to Jackson Hole later that year for an interview, she opened up an entirely new dimension of Hildegard’s music for me — the embodied, performed dimension that no amount of reading could have provided. She also allowed me to use clips of her work in the final film, a generosity that shaped it in lasting ways.

Through Linn, I was introduced to others in her community, most notably Dr. Beverly Kienzle, who was a professor at Harvard Divinity School at that time. These connections — one phone call leading to another — are exactly how this kind of documentary gets made. Sadly, Linn passed away far too soon, just a couple of years after the film was released. The loss was felt by everyone who had encountered her work.

Linn Maxwell Keller — interview for The Unruly Mystic at her summer home in Jackson Hole

Remembering Linn Maxwell Keller (Dec 6, 1943 – June 18, 2016)

On St. Hildegard’s feast day, many of us remember a beloved friend — Linn Maxwell Keller, an internationally acclaimed mezzo soprano whose life’s work became inseparable from Hildegard’s legacy. As The Times of London proclaimed in August 2010, and as anyone who witnessed her perform could confirm: “Hildegard is reborn as mezzo Linn Maxwell.”

Linn performed with world-class orchestras and international opera companies, and played recital halls across the United States and in twenty-five other countries. On April 19, 2015, she performed her play Hildegard of Bingen and the Living Light to a spellbound audience at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, MA — then departed directly for a tour of Australia. She completed a second play, St. Hildegard: Trumpet of God, also available on CD. With her ensemble The Hildegard Singers, she recorded two CDs of Hildegard’s music: O Greenest Branch: Songs of St. Hildegard of Bingen and Hildegard of Bingen: Songs from the Abbey. Her recordings ranged from medieval sacred music to opera to cabaret — a span that itself says something about the depth of her gifts.

Linn is deeply missed by all of us who knew her — family, friends, fans, and the communities she supported and sustained.

Her work lives on through interviews and selected scenes from her film at hildegardofbingen.net. You can also see more of this remarkable woman in The Unruly Mystic: Saint Hildegard, where her presence is one of the film’s most memorable gifts.

With thanks to Dr. Beverly Kienzle for this remembrance.

September 17, 2016