Margery Kempe
&
The Fire of Love

During her years of worldly prosperity Kempe had recoiled from the sight of lepers, their faces disfigured with ‘whelys & bloberys.’ In middle age, her attitude changed. She told her confessor that she wanted to hug and kiss these unfortunate people out of love for Jesus, since their open wounds recalled the wounds that he had suffered.

 

Her confessor told her not to kiss men but women only. Accepting this, she went to a place where homeless lepers found shelter and asked some of the women to let her kiss them on the lips; and so she kissed there two leprous women with many a holy thought and many a devout tear (& so sche kyssed þer ij seke women with many an holy thowt and many a deuout teer).

 

Kempe’s tears and screams aren’t simply expressions of grief or deep feeling. In many cases they serve to rebuke a workaday world; or to penetrate, with a woman’s voice, a Christian milieu ruled mainly by men.

 

Kempe’s care for outcasts, and self-identification with them, along with her screams of rebuke and assertion, feature in my song ‘How Divinely she Dreams.’