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You're the Word of our Father,
the light of the first sunrise,
God's omnipotent thought.
Before anything was made,
you saw it and
designed it and
tucked your all-seeing nature in the middle of your sinew,
like a spinning wheel
with no beginning and no end,
still encircling everything.

Shepherd of our souls, and First Voice
of creation, now let there be …
freedom.
For we're still wretched creatures,
always weary, always weak,
and only you can rescue
us from the unhappiness
we make.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher is associate professor of English and scholar-in-residence at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia.

Read more about Hildegard of Bingen and her indefatigable joy in Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader by Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Paraclete Press, 2007).

Here are some of the best recordings of Hildegard's music:

• The Emma Kirkby Collection. Christopher Page, Hyperion 66227, 1993.
   
  
• A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Gothic Voices, dir. Christopher Page, Emma Kirkby (soprano). Hyperion DCA 66039, 1981, 1993.
   
  
• Hildegard von Bingen: Canticles of Ecstasy. Sequentia, dir. Barbara Thornton. Deutsche Harmonia mundi 05472-77320-2, 1994.
   
  
• Hildegard von Bingen: Celestial Harmonies. Oxford Camerata, dir. Jeremy Summerly. Naxos DDD 8.557983, 2008.
   
  
• Symphoniae: Geistliche Gesänge/Spiritual Songs. Sequentia, dir. Barbara Thornton. Deutsche Harmonia Mundi GD 77020, 1983, 1997.

For more background information, see:

• Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias , translated by Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, Classics of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1990)
  
  
• Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (Routledge, 2nd edition, 1998)
   
  
• Website for the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen Studies

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History & Biography magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Christian History & Biography.

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