O noble Love, do in me
Your holy will in all things
My life and death belong to you.
May you make of me
One of those spirits
Tuned to perfect praise
Who let God be God in silence.

-Hadewijch of Antwerp, translated by Andrew Harvey in “Love Is Everything“

Notes

I was struck by this short poem this morning. Struck by Hadewijch’s total surrender to the will of Love. “My life and death belong to you.”

What I was most struck by, though, were the last two lines.

May you make of me
One of those spirits
Tuned to perfect praise
Who let God be God in silence.

She asks to be “Tuned to perfect praise.” Why does she ask for this? On the surface, this prayer seems less practical than, for instant, the Prayer of St. Francis, in which he asks to be “An instrument of your peace.”

But, as we allow the petals of Hadewijch’s awakened heart to unfold for us, we see that praise itself is one of the highest tasks of existence. In fact, praise is the natural state of all beings living in harmony with the divine. Many mystics see nature as a brilliant display of Love in love with itself, erupting in constant praise.

Here is what Alan Watts says on the matter.

“Reality itself is gorgeous, it is the plenum, the fullness of total joy… And all those stars, if you look out in the skies, is a fireworks display, like you see on the 4th of July, which is a great occasion for celebration. The universe is a celebration. It is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is. Wowee.”

Then there’s the last line:

Who let God be God in silence.

I don’t believe Hadewijch is referring to God in the sense of a paternalistic man in the sky – a being removed from our earthly existence. It would be easy to let that God be God, because we can’t do much else anyway.

Rather, I believe Hadewijch was seeing God in everything: seeing every aspect of existence, all of nature and human culture, everything that happened in her life, as an expression of God. I believe she was seeing God in every blade of grass and stray dog. In every death of a loved one, every man from the orthodoxy who tried to destroy the movement of radical service she was part of (and eventually succeeded), every leper she touched in the leper colony in which she likely died.

Thus, when she says, “Let God be God,” she is referring to the presence of God in all of earthly existence. We could take this to mean simply, “Accept things as they are.” But I think she means something even deeper than that. She repeats the word “God” twice. I think she means, “Accept things as they are, and see the divine hidden in them.”

To see the divine in everything, and to let it be exactly as it is.