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St Gertrude the Great

16/November/2007 Filed in: Chapter Talks

St Gertrude the Great is one of those Benedictine saints who are too little known in the British Isles. Born in 1256, she entered Helfta as a child oblate at the age of five — like St Bede the Venerable — and also like St Bede, was placed under the care of another saint, in her case, St Mechtilde. Her early life was devoted to study but at the age of twenty-five she experienced the first of that series of revelations or visions which, in the words of her biographer, turned her "from being a grammarian to being a theologian". It is worth pondering that phrase. Whatever we think of the more extraordinary manifestations of grace in her life (and British Benedictines, by and large, are slightly uncomfortable in the presence of the extraordinary), we too need to become theologians in the truest and best sense: we are all of us called not merely to think about God, to read and write about God, but, as the psalmist says, "to taste and see that the Lord is good". Tasting and seeing. All of us. Now there's an extraordinary thought.
(Note on the illustration: this statue of St Gertrude the Great comes from the choir at Arouca, Portugal. It is wooden, painted to look like stone, and was done in the eighteenth century by a sculptor from Braga. The last time I saw it, Portugal was in the throes of a revolution.)