If there were anyone who knew about insecurity or a sense of not “measuring up,” it would be the thirteenth century, “stealth theologian” Mechthild de Magdeburg: she wrote as a woman in a largely male-dominated world of letters; she did not know the more academic Latin of her time and instead wrote in her lay, mother tongue of German; and as one of the wandering, marginalized and soon-to-be-outlawed “Beguine” mystics, she rejected the patriarchally prescribed routes for women in her time (marriage and family, or the nunnery).  So Mechthild has something to teach us about how to overcome our insecurities.  The following five ways to “shush” insecurity in your life come directly from Mechthild’s spiritual “treatise” of sorts (if this eclectic mix of allegory, poetry, aphorisms, and visions could be called this), The Flowing Light of the Godhead.

1. Remind yourself that God is Love and that God in God’s love has imprinted God’s very Self on you in the form of your soul (I,22); then let God love you by in essence “waking up” to this love (II, 23).

2. Remember you belong to the community of God’s Triune Self as the Father’s “daughter” (son), the Son Jesus’ “sister” (brother) and the Holy Spirit’s spouse (II, 22).  Think about this for a moment: your life is caught up in the life of God, so that you not only are intimately known by God but belong with God and in God; strive to live into this reality.

3. View everything you do as an equal means of honoring God (and in turn taking yourself less seriously).  That means, as Mechthild spells out, that satisfying our most basic bodily needs (be it in the form of eating breakfast or taking a dump) can become a way of honoring God when we do it with love of God (I, 27).

3. Welcome the things that scare you or make you question yourself or your place in the world as gifts from God, and reject anything that separates you from God’s love (most notably, willful sin) (I, 27).

4. Remind yourself that other people are not what they seem: those who claim to be “religious” are often not; just as those who claim to be “secure” about their relationship with God and the course of their lives, are often not; so don’t compare yourself with anybody else, and instead learn to look within yourself to see how God is drawing your unique self to Love, which is really why you are alive in the first place (II, 25).

5. When you feel most unworthy, poor, lowly or unable to give the world anything of value, that is when God is most ready to use you, just as God used Mary the mother of Jesus.  God says to you this, in the words of Mechthild: “The highest mountains on earth cannot receive the revelations of my favors because the course of my Holy Spirit flows by nature downhill” (II, 26).

6. Meditate on how God is using even your insecurities to bear something beautiful and “holy”  (or “set apart”) within you, in the same way that Mary, the mother of Jesus, bore God’s very Self within her when she was most vulnerable and felt most unworthy (II, 4).