Operatrix in vinea Domini: A Chronogram for the Feast of St. Hildegard

Vineyards at the
Abbey of St. Hildegard,
Eibingen, Germany.

operatrIX In VInea DoMInI,
eXhortes nos
IgnaVa et obsCVra peCtora eXCItare
et VIrtVtIbVs CLarIbVs operare.

Worker in the vineyard of the Lord,
may you urge us
to stir up our sluggish and darkened hearts
and to act with virtues shining bright.

(Operatrix in vinea Domini, exhortes nos ignava et obscura pectora excitare et virtutibus claribus operare.)

My chronogram prayer to St. Hildegard of Bingen this year seeks her voice to help us out of the darkness of our times and the daylight work of God. The opening phrase comes from a passage in one of Elisabeth of Schönau’s letters to Hildegard, where she, too, exhorts Hildegard to the Lord’s work. In that letter (numbered 202 in the collection of Hildegard’s letters, and 21 in F.W. Roth’s edition of Elisabeth’s works), Elisabeth mourns the laxity and selfishness of her time. She writes:

O my lady Hildegard, complete the work of the Lord, just as you have begun, because the Lord has appointed you a worker in his vineyard [quia posuit te dominus operatricem in vinea sua – cf. Matthew 20:1ff)]. For the Lord sought people to work in His vineyard, and all those he found were idle because no one had hired them. The Lord’s vineyard has no gardener, and so it has perished. (…) Alas, what will happen in this matter? For the Lord is finding few in His Church who consider this matter with a burning spirit, but each person wishes to be a rule unto himself, and live according to his own will. The Lord has tested them, and found them sleeping [cf. Matt. 26:40ff; Mark 13:27ff; Luke 22:45ff]. (…) Arise! Wake up! Keep watch!

—Letter 202/203, adapted from the translation of Baird and Ehrman, in The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, Volume II (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 182.

I mean this today, not as an indictment of the Church herself, but as an indictment of our society as a whole. We wander blindly, darkened by selfish division. We have failed to do the Lord’s work with love, with clarity, with vision, with virtue. So let us stir our hearts awake this day, and allow St. Hildegard’s prophetic example to call us back to the goodness the Lord intends us to do.

About the Chronogram

The chronogram is an epigrammatic form where, if you take all of the letters that are also Roman numerals (I, V[U], X, L, C, D, and M, which are capitalized in the prayer above) and add their values together, the result is the year you are commemorating. In this case, 1 M = 1000, + 1 D = 1500, + 4 C’s = 1900, + 1 L = 1950, + 3 X’s = 1980, + 7 V[U]’s = 2015, + 10 I’s = 2025. I was inspired to write chronograms to honor Hildegard by those composed by Sr. Walburga Storch, O.S.B., a nun of the Abbey of St. Hildegard in Eibingen, Germany, which appeared in Festschriften for the Sibyl of the Rhine in 1979 and 1998.

Here are links to previous chronograms I have composed for St. Hildegard:

• O soror Sapientiae (2024)
• O virgo visionibus fulgens (2023)
• O prophetissa oecologica (2022)
• O hortulana sapiens (2021)
• O luce viventi coronata (2020)
• Spiritui Sancto honor sit (2019)
• O vas speculativum (2018)
• O Sibylla vera Rhenensis (2017)
• O vox nunc in caelo (2016)
• O vox praeclara (2015)
• O prophetissa teutonica (2014)
• O sancta Hildegardis (2013)
• O Hildegardis prophetissa, Doctor Ecclesiae (2012)