August 20. 2024, Feast of Saint Bernard
Sap 7,7-10.15-16 ; Phil 3,17 - 4,1 ; Io 17,20-26
Homily
For over a century now, we have been celebrating saint Bernard as a Doctor of the Church. However, if Bernard is important to us monks, it is first and foremost as a monk and abbot. What we expect from him is not the answer of a great master to our problems, but rather the questions and challenges posed by a great spiritual master, who was first and foremost a monk, and who remained so through all the vicissitudes of his life.
He was a man of his time. David Knowles, an excellent historian, described him as ‘one of that small class of great men whose talents and gifts have found a fitting context’. For forty years, he made his abbey at Clairvaux the spiritual centre of Europe. The Cistercian Order and the spirituality of Western Europe were marked by his influence in a way comparable to that of Augustine of Hippo or Anselm of Canterbury.
He joined the Cîteaux community in 1113, shortly after its foundation. Two years later, at the age of 25, he became founding abbot of Clairvaux, a position he held until his death in 1153 at the age of 63. He spent much of his time outside his monastery, dealing with Church and State affairs, returning to Clairvaux for brief periods. But when he was there, he was fully present. And when he was away, he remained 100% a monk, carrying his brothers and friends in his prayer and affection.
Bernard was a unified man - an essential characteristic of a true monk. For this reason, he was able to bring profound unity to everything he touched. A man of God, in love with God, he never separated his love of God from the affection of the human beings he lived with or met. It was God Himself who sent him back to people, and it was the experience of his own humanity and his compassion for people that stimulated his prayer and his service. There was no false dichotomy in him between love of God and love of others.
He did not even have that other dichotomy - so common - between action and contemplation. For Bernard, as for all the great mystics, priority was certainly given to ‘contemplative prayer’. But once that priority was firmly established, there was no amount or intensity of service of the brothers that could jeopardise that relationship with God. Of course, Bernard sometimes moaned... perhaps rather rhetorically, about all this activity. However, his ability to maintain contemplative prayer in the midst of an overflowing rhythm of activity was evident.
If Bernard made Clairvaux the centre of the whole Church and Society, it was because he was aware that Clairvaux was only a small part of a much larger whole. He was concerned about the whole Cistercian Order, the whole monastic Order and the whole Church. And this relationship gave Clairvaux itself an extraordinary life. Bernard was also concerned about Society. The same love that he had put at the centre of his own life, he was convinced that every human being should live it as well: married people as well as monks and bishops and even the Pope, kings as well as beggars.
One of the well-known sayings attributed to Bernard is that he asked himself every day: ‘ Bernard, why have you come here ’. For us too, the monks of today and of this abbey, the fundamental question is always the same: ‘ Why did we come to the monastery? -Why have we stayed ? Perhaps we can carry this question in our hearts throughout this day.