Begin the Beguine

Fr. Tony’s Midweek Message

April 18, 2018

Begin the Beguine

One of the songs I sing to Elena to help with her Parkinson’s-impaired mobility (always helped out by music and rhythm in "dancing" transfers), is Cole Porter’s romantic “When they Begin the Beguine.”  “Beguine” is a Caribbean creole word for “a colonial white woman” used as the name of a close cheek-by-cheek slow dance.  But the word itself comes from 13^th-15^th century Northern Europe, and meant originally a woman religious who lived in quasi-monastic communities without taking the formal permanent vows of full-fledged nuns.  Instead, they made personal pledges to be bound by the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as long as they lived in the community. Poorer women, without the hefty dowry required to enter many nunneries, often became beguines and joined these independent community houses set up as a way of caring for impoverished women. To this day, the popular, vernacular way of referring to nuns of any kind in French is “beguines.” 

April 22 is the feast day of one of the greatest of all beguines, Hadewijch (also written as Edwige or Hedwig) of Brabant (the late medieval duchy that is now largely Belgium and Holland).  She was a poet and mystic who lived in the 1200s.    Her biographical details are somewhat unclear at this point; she is known today primarily through her Dutch, French, and Latin writings and the huge influence she had on later mystical writers like Meister Eckhart and John of Ruusbroec. 

She uses a form of French secular love poetry to describe the relationship between the speaker and God.   In her couplets, prose letters, and Book of Visions she sees Christ as a lover who pursues and courts each of us.  She describes such love in female terms:

“Of great Love in high thought I long to think, day and night.

She with her terrible might so opens my heart.

I must surrender all to her…

Sweet as Love’s nature is,

Where can she come by the strange hatred

With which she continually pursues me,

And that pierces the depths of my heart with storm?”

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+