She was also a woman of great interior freedom, who finally chose to live outside the safe walls of her castle. At around the age of twenty, she descended into the city beneath, Magdeburg, Thuringia (a federal state in central Germany), forsaking her luxurious lifestyle, and joining a community of independent women, the Beguines, who lived without religious vows with the goal of serving the poor. As such, she was a pioneer, presenting lay women, used only to clerics and nuns who lived cloistered in convents, with a new, holy way of living out the Christian life. Under the spiritual direction of the Dominicans, she lived a life of deep prayer and physical austerity.
Mechtild lived as a Beguine some forty years. These women, unsupported by relatives or husbands, focused especially on helping women and children left destitute because the men in their lives had joined the Crusades, or had died during the Crusades.
The Beguines were a fascinating movement, and each community across Europe was different. "It was the beguines’ skill in caring for the poor, the sick, and the dying that earned these women the respect of townspeople, local authorities, and, at first, church leaders," says Jean Hughes Raber. The beguines had self-governing rules (though not a rule) "and a magistra (rather than an abbess or prioress) who served as a leader and spiritual guide. Beguines did not take vows, though many stayed in the beguinage their whole lives; they were free to leave their communities to marry and raise families.
"As their learning increased, beguines took a lively interest in theology, wrote their own meditations, and even translated Bible stories into the vernacular. They embraced a lively form of worship that involved singing and spontaneous dancing. Church authorities who had initially supported the beguines began to view them with growing consternation. Women coming and going unattended at all hours of the day and night, claiming to be on missions of mercy? Women debating theological issues like university scholars? Women translating Holy Scripture? All this... led to accusations of sexual misconduct or, worse, heresy.
"To mollify church leaders, beguines found it prudent to make visits in groups or to expand their dwellings to take in patients, the elderly, and school children. Some beguines willingly donned distinctive gray dresses and white hoods so as not to be mistaken for prostitutes. Some agreed to live in enclosed communities or to submit to the supervision of a religious house. Sometimes these concessions were not enough. A few beguines and their works were burned as heretical. It is difficult not to read the accounts of the constraints placed on women beguines by a suspicious male clerical hierarchy and think of those imposed on women by clerics in many faiths today." (in the July 29th, 2015 issue of "Commonweal" magazine.)
Mechtilde, a lay woman without a shred of status - because she had left her castle, - and without authority - because she was not a male cleric - still had the inner freedom to dare to write about God with spiritual authority. She wrote a passionate, poetic, seven volume spiritual work called "The Flowing Light of the Godhead." And she daringly wrote it in Low German, the vernacular of the people, rather than in Latin, the language favored by clerical intellectuals.
She described how she wrote her work in this way:
"The writing of this book was seen, heard and experienced in every limb… I see it with the eyes of my soul, I hear it with the ears of my eternal spirit.”
Considering that the Beguines praised God with dancing, it's not surprising that she wrote -
" I cannot dance O Lord, unless Thou lead me.
If Thou wilt that I leap joyfully
Then must Thou Thyself first dance and sing!
Then will I leap for love
From love to knowledge,
From knowledge to fruition,
From fruition to beyond all human sense
There will I remain
And circle evermore."
And she wrote of the Holy Trinity -
"God is not only fatherly,
God is also mother
who lifts her loved child
from the ground to her knee.
The Trinity is like a mother's cloak
wherein the child finds a home
and lays its head on the maternal breast."
Because of her work with the poor and the sick and abandoned, she knew that God's love aflame in us also must lead to the fruit of good works:
"If you love the justice of Jesus Christ more than you fear human judgment then you will seek to do compassion. Compassion means that if I see my friend and my enemy in equal need, I shall help them both equally. Justice demands that we seek and find the stranger, the broken, the prisoner and comfort them and offer them our help. Here lies the holy compassion of God that causes the devils much distress."
Mechtilde's spiritual director, a cleric, was a holy humble man, fully believing in her and her work. But, she was acutely aware of other clerics holding positions of power and prestige who abused their power. Because of her inner freedom, Mechtilde did not hold back from openly criticizing clerical abuses, and church corruption - and so she was severely criticized and persecuted. Several times her works came close to being burned. She was condemned seventeen times by the Pope as being a "loose woman" - and ended up on the run and isolated, but still writing.
Eventually, poor, sick, blind, and abandoned herself, she threw herself upon the mercy of St. Gertrude the Great and the Cistercian convent of Helfta, around 1285. She lived there in peace, for twelve years until she died. This convent became one of the most important centers of female mysticism in the Middle Ages - and the persecuted and abandoned Mechthilde was eventually declared a saint - and her work the first great mystical work written in German.
Mechtild can inspire us all today because she understood the inner freedom that comes from living in God and with God. Edwina Gateley says of her -
It was a dangerous time,
and you, Mechtild,
were a dangerous woman....
You were free, Mechtild!
Your experience of God
freed you to be yourself,
secure in the knowledge that
'love is all,'
and that, before it,
we must all be free from fear....
"God,' you declared,
'is infinite freedom,'
who calls us into a deep,
personal relationship,
that no one and no thing
can destroy or take away.
'See, there within the flesh,
like a bright wick englazed,
the soul that God's finger lit
to give her liberty.'
A dangerous message indeed
for a Church bound
by 'the letter of the law.'"
(from "Mothers, Sisters, Daughters")
What an inspiration Mechtilde can be today, to a Church striving to get beyond the letter of the law to pastorally serve those who do not feel a valid part of her: to serve the divorced and remarried outside the Church; the LGBTQ community, who still feel hated; lay women, whose gifts are still not totally recognized; women who feel called by God to the ordained diaconate, but whose vocational call is unheard or denigrated as not being "real"; black, Hispanic, and the Indigenous peoples, who still must battle the scourges of racism and white supremacy, unfortunately in people who do not recognize these prejudices in themselves; those on Death Row, and those languishing in sanctuaries, tragically caught between a dangerous homeland and an unwelcoming new land.
Mechtilde's life also discloses the reality of what happens to us when we advocate for the voiceless, the abandoned, the marginalized, who speak up against corruption in the Church, and also in Government. You yourself become isolated, lonely, and marginalized. You join Jesus on his cross. May we all have the courage to do what God asks us to do, in interior freedom, courage, and love. May we too be considered "dangerous."
"May your message,
your poetry,
and your songs of love
help bring us home too, Mechtilde.
May God come to our souls
like the dew on the flowers
and may we, too,
hear God's voice
in the song of the birds." (Edwina Gateley)