Looking Ahead to the Feast Day of Gertrude the Great

My essay about Gertrude the Great is up at the Living Lutheran site.  Go here to read it.

She is not one of the better known medieval monastics; Hildegarde of Bingen probably takes that title, especially since she's got a whole Pandora station named after her.

Still, there are aspects of Gertrude the Great's life that speak to me:  plenty of reasons to celebrate her feast day on November 16.

Here are some quotes to whet your appetite:

"We know that she began writing for the benefit of her sisters in the abbey. I like to think of her as a blogger of her time. She wrote for a small audience, but it was important to her, and she kept doing it."

"Because she was present for her writing practice, she was graced with a series of visions."

"She's associated with souls in purgatory, and I know that most Lutherans haven’t spent much time thinking about purgatory. Yet the older I get, the more the idea of purgatory makes sense to me. Not the after-death purgatory – but the kinds of limbo in which we might find ourselves mired."

"Perhaps our own purgatories have similar gifts to offer, if we can change our perspective."