4 - Living with Texts

Summary

In his biography of the Windesheim librarian Jan Scutken, Johannes Busch tells an interesting story about a young monk. The uncertain youngster complained to his more experienced fellow monk that he did not know what he was supposed to do with himself all day in his cell on feast days. Brother Jan advised him to write the words ‘Lord, have mercy upon me’ on his wax tablet; in this way he tried to convince the young monk that even the smallest of virtues is pleasing to God. Thanks to this wise advice the doubting monk understood that it was enough if he recited the seven penitential psalms in his cell, read something edifying or wrote something worthwhile in his rapiarium (‘notebook’). This anecdote sums up in a nutshell how each individual Windesheimer sought to put to rights his or her inner spiritual life. The young sisters in the convents received instruction in this important aspect of their lives, too, primarily from the mistress of novices, but also from the rector, the prioress or the subprioress. Through years of training, many of the sisters succeeded in gaining a high degree of control over their inner lives. In this they had but one goal in mind: the imitation of Christ

The necessary internal transformation was brought about by means of an on-going process which, in the traditional view, consisted of the stages lectio, meditatio and oratio (‘reading, meditation and prayer’). The way in which these stages were organically connected to one another for the Modern Devout is so characteristic of their form of spirituality that it deserves a separate study. This volume restricts itself to questions relating to the meaning the spiritual texts had for the personal spiritual lives of the choir nuns of Windesheim; they were continually reading devout texts, copying them, reflecting on them and meditating on their meaning, and out of this process of meditation they produced new spiritual texts, which in turn were used by others for their private meditation.

For convenience, three constituent elements of the Windesheim choir nuns’ meditational practice will be dealt with separately here.