Day 6 - Hadewijch of Brabant

April 6 - Hadewijch of Brabant - Thirteenth century

"Make haste to virtue in veritable Love; and take care that God be honored by you and by all those whom you can help, with effort, with self-sacrifice, with counsel, and with all that you can do unremittingly."

Apparently there is nothing known of who Hadewijch was beyond her letters and other writings.  She was a member of a movement called the Beguines, which flourished in the Low Countries in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  It involved women in a new form of community-based religious life that was distinct from the life of a nun.  They focused on prayer, works of mercy, simplicity of life and a spirituality that was focused on the life of Jesus.

Hadewijch, in particular, was a mystic who describes experiencing a number of visions centered around the love of God.  Really, love is at the center of everything she wrote about.  She encountered the love of God everywhere she went, in ever person she encountered, and in every situation of life.  She once wrote "I became inwardly so on fire that it seemed to me everyone on earth must be set ablaze by the flame I felt within me.  Love is all!"

I admire such passion and utter consumption by the love of God.  I try to live a life on thanksgiving, giving thanks for everyone and everything around me.  But I'm a far cry from the utter passion that Hadewijch exhibits.  It's so easy to be drawn into each day's petty distractions.  To get frustrated with life's little challenges, the annoying co-worker who tells really bad jokes at all the wrong times, the man ahead of you in the grocery line who decides he doesn't want his groceries after his credit card is declined so you have to wait for a manger to appear from the depths of the store to void the transaction.  All of these draw us away from living a life of love into a life bogged down by the mundane.

My prayer today is that I am filled with the flame of God's love and am reminded of it everywhere I turn...in everyone I encounter, in every sunrise and sunset, in even the people that annoy me.  They are all God's awesome creations.  And I love that!