Margery Kempe
&
The Fire of Love
Loving the Lepers, Claiming her Voice
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,’ of which these are the words (set to music here):
See Margery Kempe
In her gown of rough hemp.
How divinely she dreams
After frenzy and screams.
The bitten blood drips
From her quivering lips
As she hugs in the gloom
The cold family tomb
Where lie John who for years
Shared the spit and the jeers
And their son, whose poor quill
Told the good and the ill.
See the lepers’ embrace
Stain her gown and her face.
For her screams and wild shouts
She like them is cast out.
In the church just above
The good sing of God’s love
While the undercroft hides
The sick, poor and despised.
But as mayor, priest and reeve
Take their chattering leave
Mistress Kempe’s righteous cries
Shake the graves and dark skies.