UNTYPICAL and myth-shattering but beautiful is the trophy that noted sculptor Agnes Arellano created for the Hildegarde Award for Women in Media and Communication. This award is conferred yearly during Women’s Month by the Mass Communication Department of St. Scholastica’s College to honor and recognize the outstanding contributions of women in shaping the Philippine media.
Arellano’s “Goddess at Sunrise”, done in synthetic onyx, is a figure of a naked woman with arms raised and the palm of her hands facing upward. She is carrying half of the sky.
Well endowed on the hips, thighs and bosom, “Goddess” is a picture of fecundity, the antithesis of the stereotypical slim, lithe Barbie types perched on glass shelves. But while she is sumptuous and soft in front, her back tells another story.
She has a protruding spinal column of nine nodules that go up to the back of her slightly upturned head. She has a third eye on her forehead and a serpent is crawling around her feet. On the trophy’s base are signs and symbols related to Hildegarde.
“She is my ode to Hildegarde,” says Arellano who is in constant search of the sacred feminine. “Goddess” is a representation of the shadow of a woman that Arellano had seen on a hilltop at sunrise and which gave her an “aha” moment. (You can see it in my blog, www.ceresdoyo.com.)
The Hildegarde Award is now on its fourth year. This year being the 25th anniversary of St. Scho’s masscom department, the students and faculty decided that the honorees should all be Scholasticans in media—broadcaster Tina Monzon Palma of ABS-CBN and Bantay Bata, teacher, singer, composer Susan Fernandez (posthumous) and moi of the Inquirer.
Much of what I said to those at the rites I drew from the Hildegarde piece I wrote in this space some years ago.
Again, I say, it behooves us to learn from great women who lived many centuries removed from our time, women who made a dent in their milieu through their daring and groundbreaking work. Voices crying in the wilderness, prophets in their time, women of uncommon courage and wisdom.
Hildegard of Bingen was one such woman.
Hildegard, a saint of the Catholic Church, was an extraordinary woman who lived in the Rhineland valley in the 12th century. She was the abbess of a large and prosperous Benedictine abbey. She was a prominent preacher, doctor, scientist, artist, mystic, healer, poet, musician and composer. She had written nine books on theology, medicine, science and physiology. She was a communicator of wisdom and knowledge. Today she would be considered an eco-feminist.Those of us who were educated at St. Scho knew her only as one of the great Benedictine saints but we didn’t know much about her life and work. Now we do and we hail her.
We knew St. Hildegard then as the building up front, the most imposing structure in the campus, done in Beaux Art and Romanesque style, with intricate arches, huge columns and a grand social hall. On the front wall of the building are Saints Hildegard and Scholastica’s images in bas-relief.
With the rise of the women’s movement, Hildegarde is back to her future, so to speak. Her life is being celebrated. Her written works and music are being studied.
Hildegarde was 42 when she began to have visions that she recorded as “illuminations”. I have the book “Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen” with commentary by Matthew Fox who said of her: “If Hildegard had been a man, she would be well known as one of the greatest artists and intellectuals the world has ever seen.”
Fox dedicates the book “to my sister Hildegard, and all her sisters, past, present and to come, in a hope that their wisdom will cease to be repressed, ridiculed, forgotten and otherwise excluded from church, society and culture, so that the earth might be blessed and mutuality might be the law of the land.”
Wrote Bernard W. Scholz in “The American Benedictine Review”: “(Hildegarde) castigated a pope for his timidity and an emperor for moral blindness. She taught scholars and preached to clergy and laity as no woman before her had ever done…”
For almost 800 years Hildegarde was virtually unknown but in the 1980s she began to emerge and awareness of her significance began to grow. Her music is now being played.
Of her own music, Hildegarde said: “These watery varieties of sounds and silences, terrifying, mysterious, whirling and sometimes gestating and gentle must somehow be felt in the pulse, ebb and flow of the music that sings in me. My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.”
But it is in “Illuminations” that one gets a glimpse of Hildegarde’s “greening power”. (She coined the word viriditas.) She was first to view the universe as a cosmic egg. She offered a scintillating insight into the cosmos and its symphonic beauty. I couldn’t help thinking, Hildegard was eight centuries ahead of Teilhard de Chardin.
Hildegarde sings to us even today, and these lines from her could very well be for us, her 21st-century sisters.
“Hail, O greenest branch…(O viridissima virga…)/ When the time came/ that you blossomed in your branches/ hail, hail was (the word) to you! For the warmth of the sun distilled in you/ a fragrance like balsam./ For in you blossomed the beautiful/ flower that gave fragrance/ to all the spices/ which had been dry/ And they all appeared in all verdure…
“O life-giving greenness of God’s hand,/ with which he has planted an orchard,/ You rise resplendent into the highest heavens,/ like a towering pillar./ You are glorious in God’s work…
Celebrate Women’s Month, celebrate woman power!
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