The Poetry of Sam Hunt and the Practice of Spiritual Direction
Sam Hunt with his dog, Minstrel - Photograph taken by Phil Reid. Dominion Post (Newspaper): Photographic negatives and prints of the Evening Post and Dominion newspapers. Ref: EP/1983/2979/13-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23186961
BY TESS ASHTON
Featuring excerpts from an interview with New Zealand poet Sam Hunt in October 2010
A Research Project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Spiritual Directors’ Formation Programme of Spiritual Growth Ministries 2012.
CLICK HERE to view and download a PDF version of this paper including footnotes and bibliography.
INTRODUCTION
At the beginning of 2009, surprising things happened when I took a group of teenage literacy students wading in Sam Hunt’s book of poems, ‘Doubtless’, published in 2008.
The students - from VisionWest Training Centre, a second chance school for youth run under the auspices of Glen Eden Baptist Church in Auckland – were given the following brief: they had to pick a poem from Sam’s book; next try letting their minds drop into their hearts; then imagine they were floating in a deep pool with the words of the poem floating around them. They were to scan the poem with a ‘listening-eye’. The expectation was that a word, or a phrase, or a sentence, or a verse, would float towards them, bump into them, and invite them to look more closely. They were to contemplate what ’shone a little more brightly’.
I was teaching them a form of Lectio Divina, the 12th century Christian art of ‘holy reading’. But instead of gazing at traditional holy scripture, they were wading in poetry from the human heart, but which according to Sam, more often than not seemed to ‘drop from above’ (heard in a radio interview) before making it onto the page.
Delightedly every student who gave ’listening-reading’ a go, encountered a sense of being known, of being met, or understood in some way.
Students were shown how to tap, break open and explore the invitations and images that emerged from Sam’s special places, relationships, thoughts and memories. They sketched, and wrote their own poetry as they went.
Soon they could apply ‘listening-reading’ to other writers, to art images, and finally they started to read and hear the messages offered by the movements, colours and textures of Nature herself.
By the end of Term 2, a collection of student writings and artwork fluttered like newly hatched butterflies on the classroom wall.
For me, finding God in poetry has been rather like a child who goes to Sunday School for a year or two, may even get confirmed as a 12 year old, but who doesn’t find a personal relationship with Jesus until Billy Graham comes to town in their teens.
I read poetry in the form of nursery rhymes as a small child, and learnt poems off by heart through primary and secondary school as required. But it wasn’t until I started reading the poems of Sam Hunt with students, that I discovered that poetry - more specifically lyric poetry - could be a tool for the transformative action of the Holy Spirit.
This essay offers a glimpse into the mystery of poetics and how and why it can link the human with the divine.
One idea seems key: That poetic awe is: “capable at any moment of becoming not less, but more, than poetic awe. It is often with a profound sense of transfigured awe that the artist or mystic perceives the truths of super-nature, or on a higher level, of God.”
So says Leanne Payne in her book ‘Real Presence’ in which she discusses the Holy Spirit in the works of C.S. Lewis.
So where to start in terms of exploring the possible prophetic nature of poems? I started with the ancient Greeks: the foundational writers of the canon of western literature.
Greek scholar, H.D.F. Kitto says ‘poiesis’ was understood by the Greeks as first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. They believed Logos or divine reason connected to inspired poets in a way that informed human acts, thoughts and feelings, ushered in new eras of thought and understanding.
Poetics fell into disrepute at some point in the early church due to the pagan connection with the genre, so I have included some background on Greek poetics from Kitto and M.I. Finley.
I drew also from Alan Altany writing about Thomas Merton’s transformative poetics; Orthodox priest David Goa on Liturgy and Logos; polymath George Steiner on “presence’ in art and literature; linguist Edward Sapir on the technicalities of poems.
Eventually I felt reasonably sure of a set of features found in poetry that ‘speaks’.
Sam Hunt graciously agreed to comment on my list – and excerpts from an interview with him is the special part of this essay. Sam along with Goa and Merton links the action of poems to that of The Mass in Liturgy - the common element being the transformative action of The Word made flesh -‘I am’ – and the verb ‘to be’.
Several months after the interview, T.S. Eliot’s book “Selected Prose” put the nature of Poetics more firmly in my grasp. I’ve added some pertinent quotes.
And Carolyn Pinet’s 3 review of Jorge Guillen’s ‘Cantico’ came vividly into focus too...she nicely ties up this essay’s key ideas that poetry can be a canticle or a liturgy where ordinary, secular reality is recreated as extraordinary and sacred..and ”an act of creation in constant renewal”.
SAM HUNT
For nigh on 40 years Sam Hunt has made it his business to share the journey of his heart with ours, pouring out his unique brand of poetic annointing in schools and universities, prisons and pubs, on radio and in print, at symphonic and rock concerts, in film documentaries like ‘Catching The Tide – Sam Hunt’s Cook Strait’ (1988), and more lately as singer-poet on music videos with composer-musician David Kilgour.
The poet doesn’t hit the road so often these days, yet his canon of work - past and new - still beats its wings. There are odes and elegies, requiems and invocations, benedictions and lamentations, prayers and praises, confessions and absolutions.
But rather than being “religious” poems “about” God, these works offer, in the words of TS Eliot: “something larger than its author’s conscious purpose”.. “more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate”.
Sam Hunt uses the grand language of Nature and potent archetypal signals: a sense of tide and movement, of rivers and mountains, journey and homecoming, of tangled weeds and light on water shining, of glimpses through woods and wild possibilities, of not just his mother “out there on the other side of the world” or his brother’s “great coat flapping,” but our mother and our brother. (Glimpse P 258)
In another poem, Sam hints at the need to “give voice” to the world. And it’s the real things and things of mystery that he gives voice to and through: in ‘Doubtless’ God floats in cloud, boat and moon, in toi tois that wave like angels, and in ‘dreams of hawks’ and ‘high plateau’ – dream-like images that seem to carry a greater ‘presence’.
This fits the first of my series of pointers, to poems that - to use Sam Hunt’s phrase – “contain the DNA of God”.
Pointer 1: Reading C. S. Lewis with Leanne Payne, I gleaned that the poet’s gift is to be a muse for God, with God as the object of the poet’s love, not just a carrier of living images.
Sam says “being a muse for God” is – in the tradition of the ancient Greeks - doing the work of “making something” .
“It makes sense – in the sense that – put it this way round - might be putting it so far round the other way it won’t be recognisable but the thought of not writing poems on a pretty regular basis – one may reject them in the end – but that doesn’t matter – it’s the making of them – doing the old consecration trick – making the verb ‘to be’ – to not to have that would be unimaginable – I can’t imagine loving – or I can’t imagine a lot of things in my life if that weren’t there.
“And I’ve had barren times – when you go into the barren times – and there are no poems, there are no illuminations and there are no consecrations or transubstantiations – there’s nothing - you’re in the desert – 40 days and 40 nights stuff – in my case it was 10 years - only because I had the poems but I couldn’t find the verb – I couldn’t find the doing word – which was I really ultimately realised in an odd sort of cosmic leap was the verb ‘to be’…
…”the hardest verb of all to understand…has its own rules, has its own grammar, has its own exceptions as against the other verbs to run, or cook a meal…which I always found interesting.
“For me once I understood that and largely my father to thank for those sort of funny conversations we used to have”…”Dad had done all the classical studies training for his law and he always used to say about the verb ‘to be’ – strange to say from my agnostic father – but explaining to me at an early age the importance of the meaning of the verb ‘to be’ prepared me for the later understanding of the idea of consecration – ironic isn’t it that the agnostic parent prepared the child for the non-agnostic experience.
The only bit of the whole Catholic Mass that ever made sense to me - certainly by the time I’d finished my relationship with it - was the consecration..”
“..As I said to Pat Dunn the Bishop of Auckland quite a good friend mine, and if I die, if he outlives me, he’s going to say a prayer in this room here.
“I said the only bit I want is the consecration. I don’t want any of the rest – the farewells at the end - just the consecration. But he said there’s a ceremony and you’re strong on ceremony.
“And he’s right. If my father hadn’t gone on about the verb ‘to be’ at about Alf’s age (his son) – and what a funny verb it was – I think the whole understanding, or belief or sense of credibility of the consecration story - I don’t think it would have hit as hard as it did. It hit hard because I knew we were talking about something – that’s not ‘like’ something - but in a very odd peculiar way it ‘is’ something. Put it this way the word ‘like’ is wrong – maybe there’s no right word for it. Like trying to find the right word for aroha – words very, very hard to find.
“I loved what Ezra Pound, I think it was Ezra,.. said ‘poetry is the language that can’t be translated’ – in other words it ‘is’, it can’t be ‘like’. Like doesn’t come into it. It ‘is’. Like when the Pharisees asked Christ who he was – he didn’t say well I’m actually like the son of David.”
‘Like Christ saying ‘I am’, it (the poem) is.”
If you took one of the great Yeats poems – like The Second Coming – or Alpis Lazuli – or The Collarbone Of A Hare – and someone said to me ‘could you write 200 words on what Yeats was saying here’, what he meant, I’d be lost – I’ve got every idea – but it’s all contained in the poem, it’s all there, that’s where it is. It doesn’t belong elsewhere.
If you take for example a Theodore Roethke poem – Wish For My Young Wife” it’s only a few lines.
My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy’s mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.
“Well what’s he saying there? He loves her? To paraphrase it diminishes its importance - I think it diminishes its sacredness . Yeah I don’t need someone to paraphrase Schubert’s..
But back to the Mass: “The Mass is very much a great poem – to me it’s a poem before it’s anything else – and that’s its greatest compliment. I’m not demeaning it I’m saying, no, it’s that big”.
“It always interested me the Mass – in terms of the occasion and the poetry – yes, occasion and poetry go together.
“When I used to go to Mass and especially as an altar boy because you’re that much closer to the action - you’re so much closer to the table in the upper room - that it gave me a good chance to actually see what was happening. Now it wasn’t a question of ‘does the bread really become flesh or did you taste the wine and was it in fact blood’? – I’ve written a lot of poems on the subject”
“But certainly the transubstantiation is interesting – because it makes sense – to me - it always has made sense to me.
“The word made flesh - what are we talking about here? I think he’s making it fairly clear where we’re going – we’re not going to the races, we’re not going for a picnic – you know..
Orthodox priest and writer, David Goa draws the action of words and The Word in the Mass closely together too: “In the ritual we see the knitting together of memory and hope; indeed, they are knit together as the “Word out of silence” which transfigures the life of the world. Past and future coalesce in the present, in the transfigured presence.”
This description of Goa’s was so close to words I’d jotted down when I first started to think about the features of Sam’s poems – their sense of memory and hope, past and future meeting in the present.
For Sam the Mass is a transformative, transfigurative poem and his comments around the verb “to be” suggests this mystery is at heart of his work..
Old flames
The cabbage tree was, they said,
Dead. There was nothing they
Or anyone could do
Now or any day –
How sorry they
Were, and sad.
But the cabbage tree heard them – they never noticed it shaking its head:
It shook so hard
Stars were said to have spread
From where the cabbage tree stood:
A blossoming, new constellation
Across that night sky south.
Someone said just
Yesterday,
Some firesYou can’t put out. (p79)
‘Cloud Song’ has a ‘sky’ feeling too.
I find myself
Taking photographs
Of cloudsWhen I’m not
Dreaming of clouds
I wish I were
I wish I were
Some other place where clouds
Were the only thing happeningOr getting back to you
And what would you say
You would sayThe only thing on the menu
We have this evening, sir,
Is cloud. (P58)
I slightly nervously proffered the thought that Christ might be found walking through his poems?
“Yes I think you’re right – I agree with you”.
“What I’m saying about Christ is based on my mythology that I’ve grown up with - you do write from your place not just environmentally but your place spiritually in terms of your mythology in terms of the images you use.”
Sam loves the New Testament but he’s at pains to distance himself from Christian labels of any kind:
“Public worship is interesting, and I go occasionally”.
So how does Sam experience God in terms of being a muse for God: “the fact is when you are making contact with let us say for now the unknown – you realise something different is happening –I guess it’s like good anything.. like a beautiful wine..
“I’ve always found with poems something came on the room – lots of different situations I can think of –my grandfather knew a lot of Byron…
“..from an early age I had the attitude – this may sound a bit subservient - always had the feeling that – said this before in the odd situation - that every poem hopefully of some quality that you happen to write – is a gift – it’s not necessarily going to happen…it’s not a given.”
Pointer 2: Sam says true poetry must express “real” things - rather than be ‘about’ God. And that seems to be a vital piece of the divine poetry puzzle.
“I constantly refer to it actually – I’m just thinking about on Friday night (a show) – in the poem : ‘when a man pats a dog the world is that much better a place.’ I should do that poem more often.”
Sam wonders aloud the real things of man, and of mystery, like an ancient cantor, admitting to profound heartache and aloneness - “silence that has crashed around a man too long now” .. but he’s lifted too, through experiences that seem to hold him in the realm of light, hope and love.
“we’re all of us
Daughters.
So bless his
Holy Name, Amen,We’re all of us
Abandoned.
And the sun
Shows noSign of sinking and love
Is not a word muchUsed or practised in these parts.
We are, though,
Daughters. (p30)
Thomas Merton called poetry that talks about ‘real’ things ”transformative” poetry: a “poetics of disappearance of the sacred in favour of a direct humanized and intimate experience, an intimate meeting of the holy and the profane with an emphasis on a synthesis of a new creation or union of both the flesh and the spirit.”
“The mystery of Christ is at work in all human events, and our comprehension of secular events works itself out and expresses itself in that sacred history, the history of salvation, which the Holy Spirit teaches us to perceive in events that appear to be purely secular.”
The ‘real’ isn’t always about human relationships: Merton’s “Song For Nobody”, a poem depicting the “reality” of a yellow flower’s existence in God, had me page shuffling to Sam’s own two yellow flower poems for comparison: ‘Yellow’, and ‘What Do Dandelions Think?’
Quirkily, the yellow theme put me in mind of The Golden Tongue of St John Chrysostom, whose name is attached to the ancient liturgies of the Eastern Orthodox Church…and Theseus’ reliance on a ball of yellow string to help him find his way in and out of the labyrinth.
Here’s ‘Yellow’:
It is the yellow of
(guessed it) the
dandelion:bees have
died for it mistaking
the sun.That’s how one
Such story goes.
Yellow as that.Probably
True, the story.
AnyStory about
Dandelions and yellow
Has got to beFor you,
Remember it.
BeReady to die for it.
Yellow as that. (p249)
And here’s Merton’s ‘Song For Nobody’.
A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eyes
Someone is awake.(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought;
O, wide awake!)A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.
Pointer 3: The poet’s actions are outward rather than introspective, connecting and working with Nature and people and God and have the stamp of love.
In ‘Doubtless’, as already suggested, the threads of human brokenness can be tracked, and the feeling can be overwhelmingly desolate, but using the language of Nature and love, Sam’s poems seem to do the work of ‘spiritual direction: they notice what’s going on, name, own and respond to it. The poet is not introspective, in remembering, he moves forward.
Rangitikei river song
…no longer keeping eye
For crumbling edges,
Lovers or the weather.
Listening, rather, to the river:
Hawk and high plateau,
rivermist below. (V3 p13)
And the following lines, an excerpt, written in memory of Sam’s mother’s youngest sister, Hilary - again finds its potency in the language of the movements of Nature and the feeling of love.
The poem tells how his beloved aunt had dreams about Sam walking out on stage the whole of her last year: and of his visit to the farm where she’d lived -
..“I could only watch
The river flow past the farm,
The Tasman mountains heave through the mist,
The poplars hold the light apart.
And I thought for
A moment I saw
Hilary wave from the farmhouse door.” (p103)
There are other “direct” mystical experiences in a small New Zealand town:
That feeling-of-being-in-the-country
…Everyone creating their own sort of light
Throwing it out their kind of way
And you think of that community
And the communion of saints.
I never felt less
like wearing dark glasses
than in Reporoa this morning. (p133)
Asked whether this felt like the communion of saints Sam says: “not ‘like’, it ‘is’ the communion of saints - you’re right there in the upper room”
Pointer 4: On the subject of introspection, Payne and Lewis say avoiding that pitfall can “bring man out of himself and also be revealed to himself”.
Sam says he can only own to a “subconscious wish to be part of some larger consciousness”.
“But I’ll never write a poem trying to talk to anyone else…I’m talking to myself.
“By talking to myself properly and convincingly enough I may get somewhere else – I may even get somebody listening to the poem.”
Sometimes he writes about how God might be feeling:
‘Oterei rivermouth’
“I get to think that God
Is somewhere there between the river mouth and sea
GlisteningHelplessly
With only a broad sky a bored dog and me
listening. (p249)
Pointer 5: All the experts seemed to say that “poetry must be shaped with the utmost skill using the conscious mind “
Edward Sapir, a late 19th Century philosopher and linguist lists three aspects that shape poetry: the poet’s own inspiration, his technical skills in obeying the matrix (phonologies etc) of his language, and an underlying absolute language that underlies all languages.
He talks about the ideal form of poetry where the poet, so skilled in the knowledge and handling of the matrix of his language, that the form disappears allowing the larger, deeper, more intuitive, unknown, absolute language to come forth.
“Some artists – the Whitmans and the Brownings impress us rather by the greatness of their spirit than the felicity of their art,” where as other poets “like Swinburne may be more technically literary but their poems are built out of spiritualized material not spirit, and is too fragile for endurance.”
Sam Hunt: “Great poetry is when what’s being said and how it’s being said are inseparable.”
How do we know when it’s great? “Whether it’s alive – whether the heart is beating, whether it’s flesh and blood”, said Sam.
From Four Plateau Songs (for Tom turning 11):
“A man asked me
Last night in the house bar
Just how it was
I could remember Poems.I told him I could not forget them,
They’re flesh and blood.
And your best poem? He asked.
I told him Tom.
At first read many of Sam’s poems can feel full of holes, gaps, spaces, seemingly unconnected bits that flap like a curtain in the wind…a sense there’s another land behind the moving curtain.
But it’s this “allusive” movement T.S Eliot talks about, that allows “presence” to come through the words and spaces , or the silence of the text, connecting us with what CS Lewis calls the “deep heart”.
At that moment there’s a shift, a transfiguring and transforming action, an experience of the waters being parted, of bread being broken, and of entering into the aliveness or ‘the real’.
T.S. Eliot says this “allusiveness lies in the nature of words”, rather than the “fashion or eccentricity of a peculiar type of poetry.”
And he talks about how the poet must surrender his own emotion as he listens for what must be said. 1
Sam Hunt’s poem ‘New Words’ speaks of this listening, sculpting, self-sacrificing process:
‘New Words’
New words, the words I have not
Told, they gather for the night.I send them out each day, each tolling on its own. They reach
I know not where. They bounce back
Reeling, some ready to break,Some merely echoing. They
Bring back their news of the dayTold in each one’s way. They come
Back tired, relieved to be home.These words, the words I have not told, they settle for the night.
Then, and only then, I light
the lamp, work on them, work late;Coax and grill. Interrogation
Does not let up til dawn.Some nights, a few surrender,
Tell me all I need know—herDreams, the rhythms of her heart.
That’s when there’s a poem in it.
Pointer 6: “Gleams of celestial strength and beauty” can strike like arrows out of the words and the silence of the poet’s work;
Descriptions of Nature’s glistening images take timelessness to the higher realm of what Sam calls ‘ephemeral’ and ‘mystical-infused text.’
Sam describes this moment of recognition of reality, as “where light literally enters the temple – enters the person’s consciousness”.
The larger beauty emanating from the spaces between Sam’s words – is part of the silence Goa, and Merton, CS Lewis, T.S. Eliot and Hunt talk and write about.
A beauty in silence that speaks different things to different people, recalls different memories, different hopes, offers different invitations.
…Every time it rains like this:
Rain from early morning falling
Thick with light: the whole
Wide world of our bay
Has given in: rain: and nothing any
Friend or fisherman can do..
(V1, P36)
Sam says he intentionally visits silence: “I go down to Kopua (Hawkes Bay Cistercian Monastry) once a year – every 18 months or so.
You can go up for matins - I like to take in all the little chants – I set my alarm clock – I like to wander up the driveway in a winter’s morning – at 2 o’clock in the morning hear this chanting coming out –bl.. good music.
I go for that – and more – elected silence – to actually choose to go into a silent situation. I wrote a poem recently – I’ll show it to you later – new poem wrote it last week - one of the chords. Last line is
“when words don’t matter.’”
So from ‘Chords’ published 2011:
28
Pure distraction.
Or song of destruction.
Until I got the words
I thought it a love song.Good
to get it wrong.easy to confuse
distraction for destruction,And love for what a
fuck up it is,And, now and then, isn’t.
And words don’t matter
Goa says: “Word and silence are at the heart of the liturgical life, both in their power to evoke (sacred memory) and in their eschatological call”.
An echo of Merton’s protest poems - the sound of the prophet picking up on the pain of the world and giving voice, as he listens in the silence.
THE LANGUAGE OF LOGOS: NATURE, POIESIS, LITURGY
The golden thread of Logos or God speaking, can be traced through the interlinking history of poetics and worship.
The grandly religious ancient Greeks originally coined the phrase ‘poiesis’ which is derived from the ancient Greek term ποιέω. It means "to make" and a poem was considered to be “a thing made” and the poets were the creators.
Their lyrical, or heart-felt poems, using the language of Nature and myth, were considered to be divinely inspired and helped the people do the deeper explorative work of the soul.
Furthermore, and like Sam Hunt, the Greeks understood poiesis as first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world.
At their height, poems with a lyrical thread, along with many hymn-like passages of choral singing, were performed in great dramas in worship festivals.
Classics scholar, M.I. Finley says these dramas “concentrated on the most fundamental questions of human existence, of man’s behavior and destiny under divine power and authority.”
Productions of 1000 performers could draw a crowd of 14,000 - not a bad religious turnout for a polis with a population of, generally, about 20,000.
M.I. Finley: “It is of course impossible to recapture the feelings of these vast audiences, many of whom sat through three long days of difficult and complex poetic drama. But one can register the phenomenon and contemplate its implications”
The sponsorship of the production by wealthy patrons was called leitourgia or liturgy – poetry and the involvement of people in liturgy was part of the communal response to the sacred.
The ancient Greek Stoic philosophers (300BC) identified the Logos as the active force in poetics - they understood it as ‘the divine animating principle pervading the Universe’ – or ‘the active reason’.
Wikipedia: The Judaic-Hellenic philosopher, Philo (20BC-AD40), adopted the term Logos into Jewish philosophy. It made its way into the Gospel of John as the Divine Logos through which all things are made. Justin Martyr (150AD) identified Jesus as the Logos linking the ancient Greek idea of Logos as ‘Reason’ with the Holy Spirit;
Early translators from Greek, Jerome and Augustine in 300-400AD later talked about the Logos as the ‘living word.’
Logos appeared in the poiesis of the musical practices of the Jewish synagogues, which allowed the cantor an improvised charismatic song.
At the heart of that Liturgy was the Shekinah Glory, the transformative presence of God which parted the Red Sea, guided the people in pillars of cloud by day and fire by night, prophesied through Moses, and praised and rejoiced through Miriam.
And I thought of the manna, the living bread, the Shekinah that fed them. It had to be eaten fresh daily as an ever present living symbol of God’s love: these living, feeding, guiding, speaking, transfiguring symbols of journey were given as the people needed them.
Fr Pierre Poulain, links ancient Greek and early Hebrew Christian thinking on Logos: “ Logos meant both the Word of God, creating the world and guiding its history, and the Divine Reason, immanent in the universe and participated in by all rational creatures.”
But while poems in classical metre and style were composed by Christian writers, “from Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nazianzus, to Sophronius of Jerusalem, the pagan associations of the genre, as well as the difficulties of the metre, made them unacceptable for general liturgical use.” (Wikipedia)
Instead, the improvised song of early Christian services became a simple refrain, or responsorial sung by the congregation, and that formed a new liturgical foundation. This evolved into the various Western chants, the last of which was the Gregorian which reached its height in the great cultural and spiritual renaissance of the 8th century.
From the 10th century the lyric poem could be spotted in the vast number of nature-based hymns, many initially, by such holy poets as St Francis of Assisi, St John Of The Cross, St Theresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich.