Tag: mystic

  • Living saints today? Have you met any?

    Living saints today? Have you met any?

    Where have all the saints gone?

    living saints
    St. Francis Hiding in the Garden

    Living saints?  Have you met any?  Not a Hindu or Catholic Saint, placed on candle-lit altar or in rose garden.  But a living saint today.  Someone who projects a oneness with the world, is filled with loving compassion, who has a purpose of being in service to others?  A humble person who is truly awake?

    I have been asking these questions, not as a religious person, but as a filmmaker who has made several films on past saints, the visionaries who woke us up like Naturalist John Muir and Mystic Saint Hildegard of Bingen; my own patron saint of creativity, has lead me to the idea who wouldn’t appreciate more saints?

    What would they look like?  Where would you meet them?  At a volunteer or charity event?  A yoga studio?  A meditation retreat?  At the office?  I bet you haven’t met a lot, if any at all.  So where have all the saints gone?  We should have more.  We have a greater population now than when historical saints lived.  We are more educated.  We have the internet of all things amazing.  So, why don’t we have more saints?  Is organized religion turning them away?  Are we treating them with antipsychotics?  Are they self-medicating with recreational drugs?

    Obviously I am not alone if you google “Where have all the saints gone?”  The question generally gets turned to who are the living saints today?  With wonderful answers from people that have meet Mother Teresa or other Sainted modern religious figures that were only officially canonized after their deaths.

    Living Saints?

    I like this comment I found:  “There are many living saints amongst us right now that we do not know of, simply because it wasn’t part of God’s will for them to be revealed to us. So it’s always good to love your neighbor, not only because we are called to do so, but also because you never know when you are talking to a saint!”

    That is so true.

    When I set out to make my films, I didn’t know at the time, that I would also be exploring that question in a more timely perspective as my subject material was historical figures that had personally inspired me and others into our live’s purposes.   “Early Christian communities venerated hundreds of saints, but historical research by 17th- and 18th-century Catholic scholars determined that very few of these saints’ stories were backed by solid historical evidence. Lives of such well-known figures as St. George, St. Valentine, and St. Christopher were based either on a legend that often predated Christianity or were entirely made up. Other saints had local followings. In rural France, St. Guinefort was venerated as the protector of infants after he saved his master’s baby from a snakebite. Saint Guinefort was a dog!” (Appeared in the November 2013 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 78, No. 11, page 46).

    If you want to learn more about saints, here is a list of recommended movies about saints that I have compiled. It is primarily Catholic Saints, but obviously that isn’t the only religion that has mystics and saints walking among them.

  • September 17th is the Feast Day of St. Hildegard of Bingen

    September 17th is the Feast Day of St. Hildegard of Bingen

    Hildegard Feast Day

    Hildegard von Bingen has been venerated as a Saint in the Rhineland for centuries. Although she is listed in the Acta Sanctorum — the official Calendar of Saints in the Catholic Church — more than 800 years after her death had passed before Pope Benedict XVI officially canonized her for the whole Catholic Church on Pentecost Monday, May 10, 2012. On October 7 of the same year, also by the personal intervention of the German pope, Hildegard became the fourth woman — after Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, and Thérèse of Lisieux — to be promoted as a Doctor of the Church.

    September 17th — Feast Day of Saint Hildegard

    September 17th is a special day on the Catholic Church calendar as it marks the feast day of a Doctor of the Church: St. Hildegard of Bingen. While some would like to think of her as the patron saint of creativity, the Catholic Church hasn’t made that an official acknowledgment yet — but we can hope.

    On September 17, 2013, American filmmaker Michael M. Conti was in Germany completing filming for his documentary and took part in the procession of Hildegard’s relic during her feast day. It was a remarkable experience included in the film The Unruly Mystic: Saint Hildegard.

    Hildegard Feast Day procession, September 17th
    Feast Day for Saint Hildegard of Bingen, September 17th — Catholic Calendar

    How Feast Days Are Assigned

    A saint’s feast day can be the day of their actual death or a day assigned by the Church. Typically, the Church only assigns a different day when the date of death is unknown, or when several other saints are already assigned to that day. Since the number of canonized saints exceeds the number of days in a calendar year, two or more saints often share the same feast day. When overlap occurs — or when the date of death is uncertain — another date is sometimes chosen, such as the day the saint was canonized.

  • Now more than ever relevant!

    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 discussing The Unruly Mystic: Saint Hildegard
    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.