This afternoon, I want to turn to a more private enterprise, this one from the late Middle Ages, and to a Carmelite convent called St. Mary of the Angels, in Florence. In August 1582, on the occasion of her sixteenth birthday, Catherine de Pazzi entered the cloister, and immediately re-christened herself Maria Maddalena. Her dates, 1566 to 1607, are a bit modern for my taste but, on account of her assuming the veil, I grant her certain liberties. I have turned to Maria for what she can reveal about the nature of the word as she speaks it with the most potent meaning. Maria’s experience comes to us so charged with otherworldliness that it’s hard at times to even describe it with conventional grammar.

Periodically, Maria would fall into a rapture, but not to make contact with the Lord. Other mystics have found the divine that way. Maria went deeper: She needed to articulate the Word, that is, the capital word, the word that is Christ. As Maria put it, “the Word’s mouth speaks.” Such a plan presumes no audience, for hers was something other than a performance in that critical sense, of the sort that generally requires an auditor, the performer having to account for her behaviour. Maria had no desire to deliver a string of meaningful, coherent sentences to anyone else. Maria’s mouth needed no ear. No evaluation, no validation. Nothing.

We thus cannot call her meditative journey an exercise in communication in any sense, not in the way we commonly use that word, not even in the electronically driven sense in which the computer reduces language to binary bits, and certainly not in the religious, communal sense. I cannot even call hers an exercise in self-expression, for she had given over her “self,” had it vacated – had vacated it – to be replaced by the Living Word. She sought nothing other than the divinity – her Lord Jesus Christ – entering a solitary soul – Maria Maddalena. She came as close as anyone can, I believe, to embodying what George Steiner calls, in his marvellous book of the same name, a real presence.

Despite her wishes and desires that the world in all its forms vacate, however, Maria’s trance-talks, her peregrinations in place, resulted in a book. But not by her design. Beyond not wanting an audience, she wanted no response from her sisters. They had other plans. Eavesdropping on Maria’s inner dialogues, they jotted down what they heard (what they thought they heard; what they wanted to hear), and then translated those notes not just into prose, but into a coherent, optically organized text, complete with chapters, paragraphs, an emotional trajectory, to a fairly sustained climax – a marriage to the Word – and a modest conclusion. They ordered her seeming disorder, and then sealed their work by giving it a title, I Colloqui, The Dialogue.