By Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Nov. 16 is the feast day of Gertrude the Great; we call her “the Great” to differentiate her from another Gertrude, Gertrude of Hackeborn. The medieval period was a time of many Gertrudes.
The Gertrude whom we celebrate Nov. 16 was born on the feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6, 1256. I celebrate her for the same reason that I celebrate Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. She’s one of our earliest female writers in the Western tradition. Unfortunately, we don’t have much of her writing left.
Like those other female writers, Gertrude was able to write because she was part of a cloistered community, which meant she had the education to write, the time to write and the support of her writing as a vocation. There are many reasons why I’m grateful for the monastic tradition and the support of the writing of medieval women is a major one.
We know that she began writing for the benefit of her sisters in the abbey. I like to think of her as a blogger of her time. She wrote for a small audience, but it was important to her, and she kept doing it.
Because she was present for her writing practice, she was graced with a series of visions. We remember her for being part of an early group of mystics who focused on the sacred heart of Jesus. I must confess that the sacred-heart mysticism is not my favorite branch, but I do understand its appeal and importance.
Some scholars call her one of the most important 13th century mystics. And some note that her spiritual exercises are still very accessible. What she wrote for the small audience of her sisters can still be influential today.
She’s associated with souls in purgatory, and I know that most Lutherans haven’t spent much time thinking about purgatory. Yet the older I get, the more the idea of purgatory makes sense to me. Not the after-death purgatory – but the kinds of limbo in which we might find ourselves mired in.
Let us celebrate the feast day of Gertrude the Great by thinking about our individual purgatories, the places where we might feel stuck. We could think about ways to unstick ourselves.
Or we could train ourselves to feel differently. We could consider that feeling of being bogged down to be a different manifestation of the monastic value of being rooted. The medieval mystics and monastics were able to accomplish a great deal because they were committed to a place and they had a community that was committed to them.
Perhaps our own purgatories have similar gifts to offer, if we can change our perspective.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott is a lifelong Lutheran, a college professor and department head. She has taught a variety of English and creative-writing classes for the last 20 years.
