Observations placeholder
Hadewijch - The Mengeldichten - 25-29
Identifier
013857
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The authorship of these poems is disputed, but I think they ring true. The reason they are disputed is because they seem so different from her earlier poems – but this is what annihilation does to you, you are no longer you.
Thus many academics have called this new Hadewijch ‘Hadwijch II’, whilst at the same time admitting they ‘contain many themes in common with her uncontested works’.
A description of the experience
Jane Hirshfield, ed., Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women.
All things are too small to hold me,
I am so vast
In the Infinite
I reach for the Uncreated
I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide
Everything else
is too narrow
You know this well,
you who are also there.
Tighten
to nothing
the circle
that is
the world's things
Then the Naked
circle
can grow wide,
enlarging,
embracing all