Is there anything more pressing than the continued emergence of the Divine Feminine? It offers a counterbalance to an out-of-control toxic masculinity in our culture today.

Would we be so involved in matricide, the killing of Mother Earth, if we were less hostile to Earth, matter, mother (mater)?

In this opening module, Matthew will explain how we’re all called to redefine masculinity. To move from masculinity as patriarchy, control, and power over to a more partnership relationship with self, body, others (male and female), and Earth herself.

In many ways, Hildegard leads the way in incorporating both feminine and healthy masculine dimensions into her ways of seeing and working in the world.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• How honoring both Father Sky and Mother Earth is part of Hilegard’s journey — and yours
• Why we’re called to develop the Sacred Masculine with us — and in our institutions and professions — whatever our gender
• How to develop your feminine and masculine sides to be a more balanced and energized person
• Ways to recognize the toxic masculine (patriarchy) and develop the healthy masculine — whatever your gender
• How honoring the archetypes of Father Sky and Mother Earth assist our process of cultivating a deeper commitment to saving Mother Earth
• A divine feminine and sacred masculine guided practice

You may already know that Hildegard was raised in a Celtic monastery named after a seventh-century Celtic monk, St. Disibod, whom she greatly admired.

The Celts settled all along the Rhine, and the spirituality of the Rhineland mystics is deeply Celtic.

This class will include a pre-recorded presentation by Celtic scholar and practitioner John Philip Newell, whose new book, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening What Our Souls Know and Healing the World, offers a profound and workable summary of Celtic consciousness. Newell was “warden,” or abbot, of the Iona community for many years.

Newell’s study puts meat on the bones of the Celtic tradition. He’ll focus on Pelagius (whom history has wrongly berated), John Scotus Eriugena — and St. Brigid of Kildare, an archetype of the strong feminine.

As you’ll discover, Hildegard carries in her work many of the characteristics and teachings of these great Celtic figures.

In this module, you’ll:

• Listen in on Matthew’s fascinating dialogue with John via video
• Learn about the often-forgotten, often-maligned tradition of Celtic spirituality that grounded Hildegard
• Discover an alternative to St. Augustine’s human-centered and original sin-centered religious worldview in favor of a more cosmic consciousness
• Recognize the many dimensions of Hildegard’s life and work — and teachings that are grounded in Celtic consciousness and practice
• Move through a guided spiritual practice in the Celtic tradition

The 4 Paths of Creation Spirituality name the deep inner and outer journey that’s both mystical and prophetic.

Starting in this session, Matthew will lead you to explore these four paths of creation in light of Hildegard’s teachings in back-to-back classes.

As Matthew will explain, the first two paths of creation, Via Positiva and Via Negativa, refer to the inner in-depth journey of mysticism.

You’ll discover how Mary Oliver’s poem “At the River Clarion,” one of many poems on the Via Positiva, truly captures the experience of the Cosmic Christ and what it teaches us.

Mary Oliver was a praise poet and a keen observer of nature who wrote about the disciplines “prayer” and “devotion” — and continues to invite us into them. She and Hildegard express similar perspectives in their many praise poems to nature and the Earth.

Hildegard is regularly calling for “joy,” “celebration,” and “passion” and is a keen observer of the beauty in nature.

Matthew will encourage you to analyze Hildegard’s teachings Matthew will encourage you to analyze Hildegard’s teachings about emptying and silence-making, letting go, how to handle suffering and grief.

In this module, Matthew will guide you to:

• Explore the similar ideas Mary Oliver and Hildegard expressed in their poetry
• Develop your own capacity for savoring and appreciating beauty
• Cultivate deeper awe, wonder, and gratitude
• Reflect on concepts like emptying, silence, letting go, suffering, and grief through the lens of Via Negativa and Hildegard
• Develop your aptitude for letting go, letting it be, and grieving
• Participate in guided practice based on both the via positiva to help heal grief

This week, you’ll learn about the two remaining paths of creation — the Via Creativa and the Via Transformativa, which describe the path of creativity and of taking your wisdom into the world — your outer journey of prophetic work and service.

Hildegard explains this as “working God’s work with God” or “co-creating.” You’ll also explore in greater depth Hildegard’s teachings about evil.

As you’ll discover, the seven main chakras represent your own inner doors of strength or, if they remain underdeveloped of weakness — whereby evil or shadow energy enters your being if you allow it. Matthew will also explain the entrance of the shadow or misdirected chakra corresponds to the seven capital sins.

You’ll also discover how a method of focusing on the seven main chakras on the one hand and the corresponding seven capital sins on the other helps you name your inner powers — and employ them in your struggle with evil.

In this module, you’ll discover:

• The concept of Via Creativa, or co-creating with God
• How the competing concepts of virtues (energies, habits) and vices (wrestling with evil) reveal the meaning of true strength
• The importance of art as meditation, also known as the way of the prophets
• A deeper dive into the concepts of Via Transformativa, eco-justice, eco-spirituality, and the battle with patriarchy
• Ways to develop your capacity for co-creating with Spirit and your inner self
• How to bring the 7 chakras alive in us — to stand up to the 7 capital sins, or shadow energies, that come at us from all sides as well as from within
• Practices for developing the co-creator within

In this session, Matthew will welcome Sister Joan, a Benedictine prioress of Hildegard’s tradition whose community is alive and well in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Sister Joan lectures and writes extensively and authored the forward to Matthew’s most recent book on Hildegard, Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times.

Her most recent book is The Monastic Heart, which brings forth her and Hildegard’s Benedictine lineage with over 50 meditations on dimensions that lineage addresses such as: Silence and Beauty, Community and Solitude, Bells (on remembering), Manual Labor and the Purpose of Work, and Perseverance and Peacemaking.

Sister Joan will lead the class and address such questions as: What does Hildegard bring to today’s spiritual crises? And how does Hildegard speak to us today?

Following her talk, Sister Joan will interact with Matthew, before opening the floor to student Q&A.

In this module, you’ll be prompted to explore questions including:

• What elements are there in the 1500+ years of the Benedictine tradition that speak deeply to us today — and that we can use in our everyday lives?
• How did these practices play out in Hildegard’s life and teachings — and how can they play out in our own?
• In what ways did Hildegard resist patriarchy in her day?
• Which lessons from Hilegard’s ahead-of-her-time philosophies can you apply to your own life?
• Plus, Sister Joan will lead you in a practice in the spirit of Hildegard

When Matthew and British scientist Rupert Sheldrake sat down together to dialogue on angels and their role in the cosmos in their book Physics of Angels, they chose to interact around three major teachers of angels — Denis the Areopagite, Thomas Aquinas, and Hildegard of Bingen.

This week, you’ll discover Hildegard’s profound and practical teachings about angels.

Much of what Hildegard teaches resonates with the teachings of Lorna Byrne of Ireland, present-day teacher and encounterer of angels,. For instance, she believed that angels don’t have wings like birds, but are more “like flames hovering in the power of God… their nature is a glowing burning.”

Here are a few examples of Hildegard’s angel teachings:

• Angels admire human work and workers
• Angels are eager to help humans at this time, but because humans are not asking them for help, there are many unemployed angels in the world today
• You can make contact with angels through intuition and creative work

Matthew will also guide you to explore more of the shamanism of Hildegard’s Wild Woman teachings that emanate from her and from Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

In this module, you’ll also discover:

• How modern-day angels are alive and well — and how a live cosmology is displacing a mechanical view of the Universe
• The ways angels play an important role in evolutionary history and in our own creativity as our muses
• How you can use work, insight, and intuition to call on angels for assistance
• The ways Hildegard’s shamanic roots contributed to her work, and how they can contribute to your work today
• What you can learn from Thomas Berry’s observation that if the human species is to survive in this time of climate change and more, we need fewer priests and fewer professors — and more shamans
• A guided practice to invoke the angels

There are many practices that allow you to ingest Hildegard’s teachings more fully in mind, soul, and body.

This week, Matthew will guide you to explore and implement some of them in class. For example, you’ll meditate and journal on succinct images from Hildegard’s writings.

Hildegard’s writings are full of these fresh and profound namings — and Matthew will guide you to explore them in the intuitive manner in which Hildegard shares them.

You’ll also chant or create a mantra from Hildegard’s words, allowing her music to roll over you. Perhaps you’ll write a poem to her, or simply be inspired by her to work through a current life issue.

In this module, you’ll:

• Journey deeper into the poetic teachings Hildegard shares with us to give birth to what she awakens in us
• Awaken to your own capacity to create new images and namings of your journeys
• Explore practices to use and develop future soul-making, including creating your own “I am” poem based on Hildegard and the Celtic tradition

Hildegard was once again ahead of her time in believing that healing the body began with self-healing of spirit.

This week, Matthew will share the work of Dr. Wighard Strehlow, author of Hildegard of Bingen’s Spiritual Remedies, which presents many of Hildegard’s teachings on healings. He also co-authored Hildegard of Bingen’s Medicine with Dr. Gottfried Hertzka.

Together, Dr. Hertzka and Dr. Strehlow worked at the Hildegard Center in Allensbach on Lake Constance in southern Germany, a clinic of holistic healing based on Hildegard’s remedies that successfully treated thousands of patients for over 40 years.

Dr. Strehlow gathered 35 spiritual forces of the human soul from Hildegard’s writings meant to cure the soul within. He believes that recovering Hildegard’s insights into cultivating the health of body and spirit may provide solutions to many challenges that currently frustrate Western medical science.

In this class, you’ll explore some of these teachings from both Hildegard and Dr. Strehlow.

Matthew will also address the charge that Hildegard was anti-Semitic, largely based on some anti-Semitism sentiments in her first book, Scivias. Did her anti-Semitism persist or did she outgrow it as she matured? Matthew will guide you to discuss this question and the healing Hildegard herself underwent.

As Matthew often says, we should not put our ancestors on pedestals by ignoring their clay feet, but name them so we do not go down the same path.

In this module, you’ll explore:

• How Hildegard instructs us to address psychological trauma, emotional distress, and other maladies of the soul that often lead to illness and chronic diseases
• Maladies — such as pre-cancer — through the lens of Hildegard’s medicines
• The fact that the gospels themselves have some anti-Semitisim in them (especially John’s gospel, the last gospel written)
• Why a critical eye for anti-Semitism is required of all Christians at all times
• An appropriate practice that will be shared

Matthew calls Hildegard the “grandmother of the Rhineland mystics.”

In this final module, you’ll discover how, near her death, Hildegard told her sisters, “please don’t forget me.”

Unfortunately, Hildegard’s work was not liberally disseminated after she died. It seems her sisters put more emphasis on preserving her letters and talks, books and healing remedies, than on spreading them abroad. Of course, there was no printing press then.

Nevertheless, Hildegard represents a high point of Creation Spirituality’s return to the West after the dualism of Platonists like St. Augustine and others. Such spiritual ancestors as Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa all developed the Creation Spirituality tradition of Hildegard, whether or not they were conscious of her writings and teachings.

Matthew will guide you to explore these nondualistic and creation-centered mystics who came after Hildegard. This lineage thrived until the bubonic plague of the 14th century — when Julian of Norwich fought tooth and nail to keep it alive, but was ignored for hundreds of years.

In this final module, you’ll discover wisdom passed on to us through the Creation Spirituality lineage, all in the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen, by luminaries including:

• Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechthild of Magdeburg
• Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich
• Nicholas of Cusa
• Plus, you’ll meditate while contemplating contemporary creation spirituality mystics, including Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver