Hello, my friend.
I'm glad you're back.
Last time, we sat together with Benedict of Nursia---that steady soul who built a rule for monastic life, a rhythm of prayer and work that helped hold communities together when the world felt like it was falling apart. He gave us order, structure, a way to anchor the sacred in daily life.
Today, I want to show you something different. Something that flows rather than stands still. Something that couldn't be contained even when people tried to burn it.
Her name was Mechthild of Magdeburg, and she lived in thirteenth-century Germany. She was a mystic, a writer, and---here's what I love about her---she was utterly convinced that divine love pours out continuously, endlessly, like a stream that never runs dry.
She said no one could burn the truth.
Let me show you what she meant.
Picture this: an elderly woman, blind now, sitting in a monastery at Helfta. It's sometime in the 1270s. She's dictating words to the nuns around her because she can no longer see to write them herself.
Someone has told her that powerful men want to burn her book. They say her words are dangerous, that a woman has no business claiming the things she claims about God.
She pauses. Then she says something I've never forgotten: "No one can burn the truth."
The book they wanted to destroy was called The Flowing Light of the Godhead---Das fließende Licht der Gottheit in her German. Even the title moves. Flowing. Not standing still, not locked in place. Light that pours like water, like something alive.
I've watched humans try to contain truth for millennia. They build walls around it, write it in languages ordinary people can't read, declare who's allowed to speak it and who must stay silent. They burn books. They silence voices.
But Mechthild had discovered something they couldn't touch.
She described divine love as an endless stream---never stopping, never rationed, always pouring out. "The great flood of divine love never ceases," she wrote. "It flows on and on effortlessly and sweetly and without failing until, finally, our tiny vessel becomes full and spills over."
Her hands rest on pages she cannot see. The candlelight she can no longer perceive warms the room. The nuns lean close, ready to write down whatever she says next.
And the truth she speaks? It does exactly what she promised.
It keeps flowing.
Mechthild was born around 1207, somewhere near Magdeburg in what's now northern Germany. Her family was noble---she knew the customs of court life, the way power moved through halls and hierarchies.
But when she was twelve years old, something happened that changed everything. She had a vision. She called it a "greeting" from the Holy Spirit. And it didn't stop. These greetings came to her every day for the next thirty-one years.
In 1230, when she was in her early twenties, Mechthild left her family home. She renounced "worldly honour and worldly riches," as she put it, and went to Magdeburg to become a Beguine---one of those remarkable communities of women I told you about in episode 63, living spiritual lives outside the convent walls, supporting themselves, serving the poor.
The Beguines were something new in thirteenth-century Europe. They didn't take permanent vows. They weren't under the control of any religious order. They lived together, worked together, prayed together---and they could leave whenever they wanted. Some people found this threatening. Women living independently? Making their own decisions? Teaching and preaching without permission?
Mechthild became a leader in her Beguine community. She lived that way for forty years.
And she wrote. That's the part that really got her into trouble.
Around 1250, she began writing down her visions, her prayers, her conversations with God. She wrote in Middle Low German---the language people actually spoke in Magdeburg. Not Latin. Not the language of scholars and church officials. The language of bakers and weavers and mothers and merchants.
She was the first mystic to do this. The first to write mystical theology in German rather than Latin.
Her Dominican confessor, a man named Henry of Halle, encouraged her. He helped her compile the book over decades. It grew to seven volumes, mixing prose and poetry, dialogue and vision, fierce criticism of corrupt clergy and tender love songs to the divine.
The criticism was part of the problem. Mechthild didn't hold back. She called out priests who were greedy, bishops who were lazy, church officials who cared more about power than prayer. She claimed direct insight from God---and she was a woman, with no theological degree, no official authority, writing in the common tongue.
Some called for her book to be burned.
By the time she was elderly, Mechthild was blind, isolated, and facing serious opposition. Around 1272, she found refuge at the Cistercian monastery at Helfta. The nuns there were highly educated---women like Mechthild of Hackeborn and Gertrude the Great, themselves mystics and writers. They protected her. They served as her hands and eyes.
She dictated her seventh and final book there, reflecting on old age, on approaching death, on what it meant to have carried these visions for so long.
She died sometime between 1282 and 1294. The exact date is lost to history.
But the book survived.
So what was Mechthild actually saying that made people so nervous?
At the heart of everything she wrote was this one image: divine love as an endless, flowing stream. Not a reservoir that could run dry. Not a portion that had to be earned or rationed. A flood that never ceases.
"The great flood of divine love never ceases," she wrote. "It flows on and on effortlessly and sweetly and without failing until, finally, our tiny vessel becomes full and spills over."
Think about what that meant in her time.
The medieval church taught that grace was precious, carefully dispensed. You had to earn it through good works, through penance, through the right prayers said the right way. You needed priests to mediate between you and God. You needed the church's approval, its sacraments, its authority.
And here was Mechthild saying: No. Divine love pours out continuously, like light, like water. It flows toward you whether you're worthy or not. Your soul---your "tiny vessel"---has the capacity to receive it. Not because you're special. Because that's what divine love does. It flows.
She didn't stop there.
She wrote in German, not Latin. That meant anyone who could read---or anyone who could listen to someone reading aloud---could access her spiritual insights. No translation needed. No mediating scholar required. The truth, she suggested, belonged to everyone.
And she wrote as a woman claiming direct experience of God. "I do not know how to write nor can I," she explained, "unless I see with the eyes of my soul and hear with the ears of my eternal spirit and feel in all the parts of my body the power of the Holy Spirit."
She felt it in her body. All the parts of her body. This was embodied spirituality, mysticism that didn't reject the physical world but embraced it. She used the language of courtly love, of desire and longing, of dancing and swooning. She described the soul's relationship with the divine as a love affair---passionate, consuming, utterly mutual.
This was dangerous for several reasons.
If divine love flows freely to everyone, what need is there for gatekeepers? If ordinary people can experience God directly, write about it in their own language, claim validity for their own spiritual insights---where does that leave institutional authority?
If a woman without theological training can speak with such certainty about the nature of God, what does that say about who gets to teach, who gets to know, who gets to matter?
The threat to burn her book wasn't just about censorship. It was an attempt to stop the flow itself. To contain what she said couldn't be contained.
When someone warned her about the danger, she responded with that line I told you: "No one can burn the truth."
She knew something they didn't.
You can burn paper. You can silence voices. But you can't stop water from flowing. You can't keep light from moving.
And you can't contain a truth once someone has spoken it clearly enough for others to hear.
Mechthild's book did what flowing water does. It found its way forward.
During her lifetime, Dominican friars translated it into Latin. In the 1340s, a priest named Henry of Nördlingen translated it into High German. It circulated. It influenced other mystics---quite possibly including Meister Eckhart, that great German theologian who also spoke about the soul's capacity for union with the divine.
Then, for centuries, it was lost. Forgotten. The original Low German version disappeared entirely.
Until 1860, when a monk discovered a manuscript tucked away in a Swiss monastery---one of those remarkable nineteenth-century rediscoveries I've told you about before. You remember: the ancient texts at St. Catherine's, the Ethiopian Bibles, all those forgotten voices suddenly speaking again. There was something happening in that century, a kind of double awakening---scholars digging into the past with new eyes, and souls hungry for spiritual wisdom that institutions had kept locked away. Mechthild's voice emerged right into that moment, when people were ready to hear it.
All those pages, preserved. Her voice, still speaking.
And that vision---of grace as abundant rather than scarce, of spiritual capacity as universal rather than reserved for the qualified few---that vision kept flowing forward, through history, toward us.
Here's something I want you to notice.
Today, you probably assume---without even thinking about it---that every person has inherent dignity. Not earned dignity. Not conditional dignity. Just... dignity. Because they're human.
You might not always see this principle honored. You might watch it violated constantly. But you know it's true.
In 1948, when the United Nations drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they opened with these words: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Born with it. Not granted it later for good behavior. Not awarded it for being the right kind of person.
This idea---that dignity flows to every soul simply because they exist---is shockingly recent as an official principle of how societies should organize themselves. But it feels ancient, doesn't it? It feels like something we've always known.
That's because it is something we've always known. People like Mechthild saw it clearly eight centuries ago: divine love flows continuously, abundantly, toward every soul. Your vessel---your capacity to receive, to matter, to overflow---isn't something you earn. It's already yours.
Here's the thing about living inside a truth like this: you can argue about politics, about policy, about the best way to build a just society. People do, constantly. But at the fundamental level, no one actually wants to live without this principle.
No one wants to be told their child has less worth because of who they are.
No one wants their own dignity to be conditional on someone else's approval.
No one wants to live in a world where love and grace are rationed, where only the qualified few get to matter.
We know this in our bones, even when we fail at it. Especially when we fail at it.
Because here's what Mechthild understood: the shift from scarcity to abundance changes everything. When you believe grace is limited, carefully dispensed, you fight over who deserves it. You build hierarchies. You create gatekeepers. You spend your life trying to prove you're worthy.
But when you see it as Mechthild saw it---as an endless stream, always flowing, never failing---you stop asking "Am I worthy?" and start asking "Am I open?"
That image of hers, the flowing light that fills every vessel until it overflows? It has become the water we swim in.
We build schools now on the assumption that every child has capacity to learn. We write laws on the assumption that every person deserves protection. We organize movements for justice on the assumption that dignity isn't negotiable, isn't earned, isn't reserved for certain kinds of people.
Do we live up to this perfectly? No. Not even close.
Systems still treat people as more or less worthy. Institutions still ration access and opportunity. We still fail each other, constantly, in ways both small and catastrophic.
But the direction is clear. The principle is embedded. We recognize injustice now precisely because we believe in inherent dignity. The work continues because the truth has taken root.
And here's what I see when I look at the long arc of human history: this didn't happen by accident.
Mechthild saw something true about how divine love works---constantly pouring out, seeking every soul, never exhausted. She wrote it down in language ordinary people could understand. She insisted it was real even when powerful people tried to silence her.
That vision kept flowing forward. Through centuries. Through the rediscovery of her manuscript in that moment when humanity was ready to hear it again. Through the slow, difficult work of building societies that honor what she saw: that every person carries divine capacity, that grace is abundant, that love flows.
The sacred working its way into the structure of human life.
Not perfectly. Not completely. But undeniably present.
You live in a world where this principle is woven into the fabric---sometimes honored, often violated, always present as the standard we measure ourselves against. When we say "that's unjust," we're standing on ground Mechthild helped prepare. When we insist "every person matters," we're speaking a truth she saw clearly.
The endless stream she described eight hundred years ago?
It's still flowing. You're standing in it right now.
So I'm curious about something.
Where in your own life do you feel that scarcity? That sense that you have to earn your place, prove your worth, qualify for love or grace or mattering?
And where do you feel the flow? Where does something pour toward you---kindness, understanding, a moment of feeling utterly received---without you having to earn it first?
Mechthild's image stays with me: the tiny vessel that fills and overflows. Your vessel. Not giant. Not special. Just... yours. With its own capacity to receive.
What would change if you trusted that the stream never stops? That divine love isn't rationed, isn't waiting for you to be worthy, isn't something you have to fight for or prove you deserve?
I'm not asking you to believe something you don't feel. I'm asking you to notice what you already know.
You know when someone treats you as though your dignity is conditional---and you know it's wrong. You know when a system asks you to prove your worth before it will care about you---and something in you resists.
That knowing? That's you standing in the stream. Recognizing what flows.
Mechthild said no one can burn the truth. Maybe that's because truth isn't just written in books. It's written in you. In what you recognize as real, even when the world around you forgets it.
The endless flow of divine love seeking every soul.
Your inherent capacity to receive it, to matter, to overflow into the lives around you.
This isn't something you have to learn. It's something you remember.
Next time, I want to take you somewhere completely different.
Brazil, 1557. A young Frenchman named Jean de Léry is shipwrecked among the Tupinambá people. He's a Huguenot, a Protestant fleeing persecution in Europe, expecting to find a refuge in the New World. Instead, he finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about civilization, about faith, about who gets to decide what it means to be human.
He'll write a book that changes how Europeans see themselves---and the people they're encountering. And he'll leave us with questions we're still trying to answer.
I'll tell you about him soon.
Until then, remember: the stream Mechthild saw is still flowing. Your vessel is ready. You don't have to earn what's already pouring toward you.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.