“He was wounded for our transgressions, he
was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are
healed.” Isaiah 53:5
You may think it odd to begin a
presentation about a famous set of prayers by a Swedish nun by spending time
with a German painting. But this
painting was directly inspired by the devotional writings of Bridget of Sweden,
especially her Revelations, a book of
visions of the crucified Christ. Bridget
never saw this painting, as it was completed 130 years after her death. But had she been able to paint, I believe she
would have created something just like this.
This is the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted
by Matthaeus Gruenewald in 1515 for the hospital chapel at Monastery of St.
Anthony in a village near Colmar in Alsace, now a part of France. One of the masters of the Mannerist style,
this is Gruenewald’s greatest work. A
similar “Small Crucifixion” is in the National Gallery.
The monks who served at the monastery of
St. Anthony were a community dedicated to treating those who suffered from the
plague and ergotism. There was no
remedy, and the monks’ mission was to provide physical care and spiritual
consolation. The painting appropriately
reveals Jesus who suffered as we suffer and who shows the extent of God’s love
through offering Himself to destruction.
Jesus is present in our pains and reveals His mercy as we face the
certain prospect of death.
Bridget of Sweden lived in a time
overshadowed by death, when Europe faced spiritual crisis and social
collapse. She was a woman of the 14th
century (1303-1373), who lived through the “Little Ice Age,” which caused catastrophic
crop failures and famine, the Black Death, the outbreak of the Hundred Years
War. Like all Europeans of her time, she lived in dread of the dramatic advance
of militant Islam, the Turks who threatened the survival of Christian civilization
in the eastern Mediterranean. The
Western Church was scandalously divided during her lifetime, with two rival
popes, one in Rome and one in Southern France.
This scandalous condition was known as the “Babylonian Captivity “of the
church. Bridget would lend her
considerable political acumen to trying to mend the division but it was not
resolved during her lifetime.
The opening passage from Isaiah 5w was
part of an oracle revealed to God’s people at another time of crisis, during the
original Babylonian captivity. The Israelites
were deeply disoriented, living amid the collapse of their spiritual
institutions. But in that moment, God revealed the promise of a Redeemer who
would heal their diseases and bring them lasting peace, through His self-giving
love, His suffering on their behalf. “He
was wounded for our transgressions,” He wrote, “he was bruised for our
iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are
healed.[1]”
The time before Bridget, the high middle
ages had been marked by a triumphant piety and elegant visual arts. One can see
great confidence in scholastic syllogisms, Gothic arches, crosses studded with
gems as Christ wore the crown of victory.
This changed dramatically in the 14th century. This time of horrors was also an age of
intense concentration on the sufferings of Jesus: as seen in realistically
carved crucifixes, devotions to prayers to the holy wounds, and a proliferation
of sermons about preparing for death. This
was also a time of deepened devotion to the Sorrowful Mother. The Stabat
Mater is a hymn of this era, a tale of a woman weeping for her fallen
child, as so many women of that age did.
The most influential figure behind this
flowering of piety was Bridget, a Swedish noblewoman who wrote a variety of
works and founded a religious order that spread across Europe, carrying her
devotion to the suffering Christ with them.
She and her nuns wore diadems studded with red stones, reminders of the
five wounds.
Bridget first had a vision of Christ crucified
at the age of twelve. These revelations
continued throughout her life, and many of them were collected and translated into
Latin by her confessors. Women couldn’t
study theology or publicly preach, but if God granted them visions, these could
be shared. She was one of a series of
female mystics of her era who received such visions and wrote lengthy
descriptions. Julian of Norwich and Margery
Kempe were seeing similar visions and writing about them at roughly the same
time.
Unlike most medieval spiritual writers,
Bridget was a married woman for much of her life, and bore eight children. She was a lady in waiting to the queen of
Sweden. But after her husband’s death
became a tertiary Franciscan and devoted her life to prayer and care of the
poor and sick. Eventually she was inspired to found a religious order, the Order
of the Most Holy Savior. She made a
pilgrimage across Europe in 1350, the most severe year for the Black Death, to
ask permission from the pope and to work for reform and unity in the
Church. She would wait for twenty years,
but was eventually granted permission and her order still continues, with
houses around the world.
The
Fifteen Os of St. Bridget
are a series of prayers associated with a vision in which Bridget asked Christ
to tell her how many wounds he had suffered in his crucifixion. Christ gave her a series of fifteen prayers,
and told her that if she prayed them each once a day, along with 15 Our Fathers
and Fifteen Hail Marys, in the course of a year, she would say one prayer for
each of his 5480 wounds.
Scholarly consensus today has turned
against the idea that Bridget herself wrote the prayers. They don’t appear in the earliest versions of
her writing. They may have been written by an early member of her community at
the motherhouse at Vadstena or even in England, where the order was
widespread. Nonetheless, the spiritual focus
of the prayers is fully consistent with the visions the saint did receive, and
the fifteen Os were spread by her monastic community from the very beginning.
They became intensely popular almost right
away, and appear in the primers and books of hours compiled for pious lay
people all over Europe in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. There has never been one
fixed text of the Os, and the texts were translated into different languages at
a very early date so common people could use them. The text we will be using during this quiet
day was edited by an Episcopal priest and lay scholar for the Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book in
2012. They are somewhat shorter than the
versions generally in circulation among Roman Catholics and use several phrases
drawn directly from the Book of Common Prayer.
It is striking that each prayer begins with an O—a cry of pain and sorrow. We look on Christ’s sufferings and the
sufferings around us, and there is little that we can say. We can sometimes do little more than weep
alongside a world where all things are so deeply broken by human sin. Bridget was a woman who knew intense pain:
giving birth to eight children, two of whom died in infancy; losing her husband
to an early death, facing criticism as she waited for twenty years to have her
order approved. Bridget saw deep human
suffering all around her. She fixed her
eyes on Jesus, and each of her prayers began O—
I was surprised when I first came here
that there is no image of the crucified Christ in this church, especially
because the real Saint Francis was so profoundly a man of the passion. If this
were a church of St. Francis deep in Appalachia or in the slums of Calcutta or
out in the African bush, I wonder if we wouldn’t demand at least one image of
Jesus, with his blood poured out and his eyes heavy with pain.
Many of us live very comfortable lives. We are relatively isolated from sickness,
poverty, strife, grinding oppression.
But we live in a time of dramatic change, in which many of our formerly
solid social institutions seem to be giving way. There is fear on many sides that an age of
horrors may soon await us. It may be a
time to cry out O, once more, and to
fix our eyes on the crucifix, to see the one who knows our pain because he has
suffered, who was bruised for our iniquities, by whose stripes we are healed.
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