Hadewijch of Brabant and Redemptive Suffering

So many of the saints noted in the Lesser Feasts and Fasts calendar are remembered in gendered ways. While the male saints are mostly ordained, the female saints are lay members of the church. The women are often depicted as models of suffering while the men are credited as being models of action.

Of course a lot of this is due to what was available to men and inaccessible to women throughout much of church history. Men received theological training and their writings reflect such education. Women’s spirituality focuses less on systematic theology and more on experiencing their faith on a more personal level.

In the late Middle Ages women begin participating in religious life more and more frequently. The Beguine mystics, such as Hadewijch of Brabant whom we commemorate today, were front and center of this movement. The Beguines were Christian women who found both the expectations for a woman’s life at court and the strict obligations of a cloistered life to be limiting of their personhood. So they came together in a new way, living together in self-sufficient communities of women. The Beguines didn’t require vows of their members or follow a religious rule. While male travelers sometimes stayed over in guest houses on their way through town, the only constant male presence was the priest who came to celebrate mass or hear confession.  These communities were whole worlds of their own and a refuge for countless women. 

Hadewijch served as a spiritual guide in a Beguine community and a devoted minister to the sick. She has no biographer to document personal details of her life, but she does leave behind a legacy of writings.  One of her collections of writings describes a series of visions she experienced. Her visions do not include wild, creative images like Hildegard of Bingen, but instead common things like a lamb or an eagle. 

Like many mystics, her visions are not a comfortable experiences. She consistently experiences a physical turmoil before receiving the vision and its message, and afterwards she’s left with a fleeting feeling of ecstasy. This ecstasy is a mixed bag—she feels intimately connected with Christ while also feeling extreme exhaustion and suffering. 

For Hadewijch, this suffering not only leads to spiritual growth, but is required for growth. She writes quite clearly in one of her letters, “Unless you suffer, you do not grow.” And in another, “All misery, all exile that one bears willingly for the love of God is agreeable to Him and draws us close to the totality of His nature.”  She really is a model of suffering.

Hadewijch believes that the pain and suffering we experience as human beings is how we most closely connect with Jesus Christ. What do you think? As parents we typically see the pain or suffering of our children as something to avoid at all costs.  But the reality is, pain happens whether it’s physical, emotional, spiritual, or mental. Hadewijch offers us a new approach to such suffering that may help us  find a way of redeeming pain in ourselves and others.