Are you familiar with Hildegard of Bingen?  Hildegard was a late medieval Christian mystic best known for her Scivias, her collection of visions she received from God.  For those with long musical memories, you may recall that thanks to a choral group recording some of her hymns a couple of decades ago, Hildegard became, briefly, an international singing star.

     You may of course reject that God could have given Hildegard visions.  Fair enough:  although her ecclesial superiors eventually decided that her visions were genuinely of God, they did so on the basis of a worldview which she and they already shared.  In a medieval Europe dominated by Christianity, culturally and otherwise, one would have sought independent verification in vain.

     Be this as it may, however, I invite you to consider one of her vision driven observations. It goes as follows, "But now, O human, you wish to investigate Heaven and Earth, and to judge of their justice in God's disposition, and to know the highest things though you are not able to examine the lowest; for you do not know how you live in the body, or how you may be divested of the body."

     If we look past the references to celestial presences, we see Hildegard making an astute assertion about the human race.  We do not know how we live "in the body."  Sure, we know how the human body works, and sure, we know the essentials of life's rhythms--birth, existence, death--but unless we invest in the legitimacy of "celestial presences," we will never know what this grand adventure of life really means.

     We're still trapped in who we are.