January 17th, 2026

Female Mystics and the Face of their Faith

The 18th Rule of Love 
Below

Hildegard Von Bingen 

“The cornerstone of Hildegard’s spirituality was Viriditas, or greening power, her revelation of the animating life force manifest in the natural world that infuses all creation with moisture and vitality. To her, the divine was manifest in every leaf and blade of grass. Just as a ray of sunlight is the sun, Hildegard believed that a flower or a stone was God, though not the whole of God. Creation revealed the face of the invisible creator. Hildegard’s re-visioning of religion celebrated women and nature and even perceived God as feminine, as Mother. Her vision of the universe was an egg inside the womb of God.

Etty Hillesum 

When she and her family were forced onto a train from the Netherlands to Auschwitz in September of 1943, Hillesum quickly wrote these lines on a postcard and threw it from the train to be recovered: ‍

“The Lord is my high tower. In the end, the departure came without warning… We left the camp singing… Thank you for all your kindness and care.”

In essence, Etty Hillesum's faith was a mystical, active, and deeply personal response to evil, finding God not by fleeing the world but by embracing it, transforming her inner life into a source of profound love and service. 

“All I want to say is this: The misery here [the concentration camp] is quite terrible; and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire..."

And then time and again, it soars straight from my heart—I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force—the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world."

"When you have an interior life, it certainly doesn't matter what side of the prison fence you're on. .. I've already died a thousand times in a thousand concentration camps. know everything. There is no new information to trouble me. One way or another, already know everything. And yet, find this life beautiful and rich in meaning. At every moment."

 Etty’s life embodies the most extraordinary claim, that “God’s commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world” (5.3–4). Although it can seem like Etty was an exceptional person, a moral “Sabrina Ionescu” capable of doing impossible acts of love that the rest of us will never achieve, Etty found herself serving as if it was breathing. She laid down her life in love because God had already overcome the world for her.

The 18th Rule of Love 
By Shams of Tabriz 

If you want to change the ways others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. Once you achieve that stage, however, be thankful for every thorn that others might throw at you. It is a sign that you will soon be showered in roses.