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Twentieth Sunday of the Year
17 August 2008
Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!
Dear Friends in Christ,
Each and every baptized person is called by the Lord Jesus to holiness of life, but too many Christians think of holiness only as the existence of a plaster statue: frozen, lifeless, artificial. On Wednesday of this week, however, the sacred liturgy reminds us that holiness is full-bodied and red-blooded because August 20th is the Feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux.
Bernard was born in 1090 and died in 1153, and he stands astride the history of the 12th century as a remarkable personality who could, by turns, be captivating and compelling or provocative and enraging. He was born near Dijon to a family of French aristocrats, and at the age of 22 he (along with 30 friends and relatives who joined because of his influence) entered the new monastery at Citeaux, the first house of a reform movement among the Benedictines which would come to be called the Cistercian order. Only three years later, Bernard became the abbot of a new Cistercian monastery at Clairvaux, and for the next 38 years, Abbot Bernard unleashed his prodigious talents on a Church desperately in need of reform and a Europe desperately in need of defense against the rise of militant Islam. He was known all over Europe and was perhaps the first truly international celebrity in his own lifetime. Bernard was counselor to kings and popes, and he traveled, wrote, preached, exhorted, cajoled, and commanded in a way that changed the course of European history. Throughout his strenuous labors, Bernard never ceased to be a contemplative monk, and at the heart of his life’s labor was an unswerving commitment to oratio ignata—prayer ignited or enflamed by love. His surviving written works fill many volumes and reveal a brilliant, irascible man of extraordinary depth and breadth. Bernard could be fierce and severe in controversy and gracious and tender in conversation. His commentary on the Song of Songs (actually 86 sermons collected as one work) is a masterpiece of theology, Scriptural interpretation, and moral reasoning, and his letters reveal a loving man who could be stern with his friends and even sterner with himself. Bernard was also a lyrical poet, and we still sing (in translation, of course) several of his hymns, including O Sacred Head Surrounded and O Jesus, Joy of Loving Hearts.
There was absolutely nothing frozen, lifeless, or artificial about Bernard of Clairvaux, and he stands apart in history as one of God’s prime numbers—those singular souls who cast light upon the outer limits of the possibilities of human nature perfected by grace. A quick internet search will direct you to several sources of information about this remarkable monk, theologian, poet, diplomat, evangelist, priest, and reformer, and in observance of this week’s Feast of St. Bernard, Abbot and Doctor of the Church, I encourage you to have a look at the life and work of the man Pope Pius XII called the “last of the Fathers of the Church.”
Father Newman