Jacopone da Todi (1230 – 1306 CE) was born Jacopone Benedetti in Todi, Italy. Little is known with certainty about his life. He seems to have been well educated and from a moderately wealthy family, but at an early age suffered a deep sorrow – some legends have it that his bride to be was mortally wounded when a balcony collapsed at their wedding feast – and thereafter Jacopone became a wandering penitent, eventually joining the Franciscan Order. He died at a hermitage near Orvieto on Christmas Day, 1306.

In losing all, the soul has risen
To the pinnacle of the measureless;
Because it has renounced all
That is not divine,
It now holds in its grasp
The unimaginable Good
In all its abundance,
A loss and a gain impossible to describe.

To lose and to hold tightly,
To love and take delight in,
To gaze upon and contemplate,
To possess utterly,
To float in that immensity
And to rest therein —
That is the work of unceasing exchange
Of charity and truth.

There is no other action at those heights;
What the questing soul once was it has ceased to be.
Neither heat nor fiery love
Nor suffering has place here.
This is not light as the soul has imagined it.
All it had sought it must now forget,
And pass on to a new world,
Beyond its powers of perception.

Translation Serge and Elizabeth Hughes