Why talk about Saints? We moderns are intrigued by people who lived lives of virtue and moral excellence. They seem so different from the rest of us. Observing saints more closely reveals that they were ordinary people just like us. So despite their faults and frailties, they have much to teach us.

St. Hildegard began having visions in 1101, when she was just three years old. When she was eight, she joined a Benedictine monastery, and took her vows there at age fifteen. In 1136 Hildegard was elected abbess, and began writing and composing hymns. Her most famous work is Scivias (short for Scito vias Domini, or "Know the Ways of the Lord"), in which she detailed twenty-six of her revelations.

Hildegard founded a monastery near Bingen, Germany, in 1147, a facility large enough to support fifty nuns. Visited by visions all her life, she used her insights to guide others on the proper spiritual path for nearly eighty years. Hildegard died in 1179, leaving behind her Scivias as well as a book on medicine and another on natural history.

If Hildegard had taken the Spiritual Types Test, she probably would have been a Mystic. Hildegard is remembered on September 17.

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