Holy Mystics: A Hermit...
Generous God, we give you thanks for the lives and work of Richard Rolle,
Walter Hilton, and Margery Kempe, hermits and mystics, who, passing through
the cloud of unknowing, beheld your glory. Help us, after their examples,
to see you more clearly and love you more dearly, in the Name of Jesus Christ
our Savior. Amen.
Richard Rolle (c. 1300-1349) is the earliest of the great 14th century English mystics. Though the facts about his life are uncertain, it seems that he was born in Yorkshire and studied at Oxford, though he seems not to have earned a degree there. Nevertheless, he was widely read and at home with Scholastic theology. He became recognized as an accomplished poet. His writing was geared, not just to the cloistered or the learned elite, but to anyone who was interested in what he had to say.
At about the age of 19 he became and dressed as a hermit, finally settling at Hampole, near a Cistercian nunnery. To some of his contemporaries, Rolle seemed somewhat unusual, even a bit mad. According to his biographer, one day, as he was "sitting...in a church, rapt in meditation,...he felt in his breasta strange and pleasant heat, as of a real sensible fire, so that he kept feeling of his breast to see if the heat was caused by some exterior cause. He often heard heavenly music..." Heat, song and sweetness characterized his mystical experiences, of which he wrote, for example, in one of his best known works, Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love).