Dilecto Meo
photo montage with stitched text on silk shawl
DILECTO MEO, postscript
This brief postscript draws several overarching concepts together, reiterated in effect, from readings on the source list that follows.
Writing on the myth of love, Julia Kristeva observes that women’s bodies are at that intersection, participating in both sides of the sacred: the calm appeasement and the rending of the sacred cloth.
The textile here, continues as a stand-in for our corporeality and susceptibility. Yet, this metaphor has its limits, as Beatrice Marovich writes: spirits tend only to move like textiles, to work like textiles… they reject the crude, brute weave of even the finest silk as something too literal… Spirituality travels above, outside of, the industrious textile. And from the writings of Saint Syncletica, in other words: We, readers, are meant to admire this rich girl who had the discipline to turn her eyes, entirely, from the sumptuous weave of multicolored garments all around her and clothe herself, instead, in nothing but her own humility.
Joann McGuire Robinson describes the dramatic impassivity of those aspirants of grace through divine union, as they abandon all createdness, including their own bodies, reasoning and intellect, while remaining in the world as embodied creatures. Simultaneously, despite the alleged transgressions of doctrinal readings, interpretations and compositions by women, Morgan Powell reminds us that the license to translate the Word into bodily media, … walks hand in hand with an understanding of human experience as revelatory of the divine.
And so, as Kristeva suggests, it is our internalization and illumination that transubstantiates the chiastic paradox proposed by the imagined union. It is as well, as Morgan Powell describes, only Mary, through her empathy with Christ’s torment, the flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone,... who may speak the words: Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi / I am of him as he is of me.
Suzuki Harunobu, A Woman Writing, Asian Art Collection,
The Brooklyn Museum, Attribution: Attribution: Suzuki Harunobu,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Sources
Alston, A. J., trans., The devotional poems of Mīrābāī, Asian Humanities Press (Division of Jain Publishing Co., Inc), 1998
Castillo, Valeria, “By Women, For Women: Woman-made Languages,” Babbel.com, 2020, https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/woman-made-languages
Clément, Catherine and Kristeva, Julia, The Feminine and the Sacred, Columbia University Press, 2001
Critchley, Simon, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology, Verso Books, 2012
Das, Devaleena, “Stripping, veiling, and inscribing: Devising the body in the works of Sylvia Plath, Imtiaz Dharker, Shirin Neshat, and Randa Abdel-Fattah,” Hecate, 2020, Vol.46 (1/2), p.44-46
Griffiths, Ann, trans., Pughe, George Richard Gould, "The Hymns of Ann Griffiths of Dolwar Fechan," The Project Gutenberg eBook, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51190/51190-h/51190-h.htm
Giorgetti, Leonardo, "Lucrezia Marinella’s Rime sacre [Sacred Verses]: Engendered Spirituality, Devotional Piety, and Affective Poetry in Post-Tridentine Venice," UC Davis Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hc1b7fp
Hirshfield, Jane, (ed.), Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, Harper Collins, 1994
Hodges, H.A. (trans.), Gwefan Ann Griffiths (Hymns of Ann Griffiths), https://www.anngriffiths.cardiff.ac.uk/hymns.html
Marovich, Beatrice, "fabrication of spirituality," Frequencies, https://frequencies.ssrc.org/2011/09/15/fabrication-of-spirituality/
Powell, Morgan, “Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi (Canticles 6:2): Mary’s Reading and the Epiphany of Empathy,” (chapter six) Gender, Reading, and Truth in the Twelfth Century: The Woman in the Mirror, Arc Humanities Press, 2020
Prodan, Sarah Rolfe. “Female Exemplarity, Identity, and Devotion in Lucrezia Marinella’s 'Rime Sacre' (1603).” Idealizing Women in the Italian Renaissance, 2022, https://www.academia.edu/79999728
Ricoeur, Paul, (trans) Blamey, Kathleen, Oneself as Another, The University of Chicago Press, 1994
Robinson, Joanne Maguire, Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, State University of New York Press, 2001
Sells, Michael A., The Mystical Language of Unsaying, University of Chicago Press, 1994
Smith, Margaret, Rabi’a the Mystic and her fellow-saints of Islam: Being the Life and Teachings of Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya Al-Qaysiyya of Basra together with some account of the place of women saints in Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1928
Steegmann, Mary G. (Trans.), The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno, The New Medieval Library, Cooper Square Publishers, NY, 1966
Veder, William R., “Saint Synclietica and the Sea: A Text Come to Life,” Russian History, Vol. 33, No. 2/4, pp. 153-162