Becoming a Friend of God: Susan Garthwaite on Saint Hildegard

Like all of us today, St. Hildegard dealt with a world in turmoil. She believed spiritual development was the key to peace in troubled times. With her guidance, read, reflect, pray, discern, journal, heal, befriend your soul, and discover your mystic self. A richer life awaits.

Spiritual director and retreat guide Susan Garthwaite knows this journey well—she’s traveled it for years. St. Hildegard has influenced Garthwaite’s spiritual life, as well as her work as a spiritual director, and here she gives concrete examples of spiritual experiences and practices in which St. Hildegard’s insights can draw out our own wisdom. She also gently touches our worst experiences and offers St. Hildegard’s light for our liberation and fullness of life.

Saint Hildegard: Ancient Insights for Modern Seekers is a treasure trove of St. Hildegard’s bracing, rich, and transforming insights. Written for today’s seekers and spiritual directors, it takes us deeper into our own experiences in the company of the mystic visionary St. Hildegard, whose twelfth-century wisdom, still strikingly relevant to our contemporary struggles, enriches our journeys.

Susan Garthwaite is a spiritual director, spiritual writer, prayer group leader, and retreat facilitator in the Chicago area. For many years, she was a medical physiologist and project team leader working on new medicines for cardiovascular disease. Besides her numerous scientific papers, she has published on spiritual direction in Presence and on spirituality, especially the wisdom of women mystics, in Spiritual Life. She currently resides in Evanston, IL.