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Bernard and Facing the Truth about Ourselves

If anyone thinks that what he is asked to do by God is easy, he knows nothing about spiritual warfare.  This is what St. Bernard explained to university students and professors over eight hundred years ago.  It is a good reminder for today.

In his teaching to this lay audience, Bernard appeals to the inner angst which troubles the human heart, a shared human experience.  Indeed, we all have this feeling, at least for a few moments.  In the spiritual traditions of the West, this feeling is attributed to guilt.  How is guilt to be dealt with?   Bernard knows that only the forgiveness of sin can remove guilt and without the removal of sin from our hearts, we are already suffering a living death.  He knows that the Lord died that we might know his loving mercy and forgiveness.  He also knows that unless we face the truth about the sin in our hearts, we cannot know this forgiveness and our life is not really any life at all, but a living death.   Bernard’s solution to this dilemma is to turn inward and face the truth about ourselves.

On this point, he invites us to search our memory and to reflect on things that trouble our conscience.  He calls this seeing ourselves as we really are.  As we become aware of what is disturbing us interiorly, he says we discover three things: our reason is blind and weak, our memory is filled with filth, and our will is infested with soars.  We discover to our own disgust that we actually prefer wickedness to what is good to such an extent that we no longer see how much we hurt others or our very selves.

To drive home this experience of ourselves, he describes an interior vexation within our hearts in terms of a marital strife between our reason and our will.   This will, he says, is an ugly old woman covered with festering ulcers who, in a fit of righteous indignation, accuses reason of adultery.  Who has not suffered at least for a few moments resentment when someone who loves us points out a sinful area in our lives?   It is even worse when spouses must admonish one another.   But the worst of all is when we find ourselves vexed at our own mind which has seen a truth that we do not want to accept, that we are not able to accept.  How do we deal with this interior conflict, this spiritual poverty?  Bernard pleads with us to listen to the voice of Christ, “Blessed are the poor of spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

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St. Bernard and Conversion

Speaking to a group of scholars and students of the University of Paris in the year 1140, St. Bernard described how the Lord calls us to conversion by revealing the truth about ourselves to ourselves.  He claimed that such conversion was not something that could come about merely by his own words, but rather by the Word of the Lord alone.  He saw himself as a prophet, one proclaiming the voice of God which was already resounding in the hearts of those who were listening.   About twenty of his listeners abandoned their careers on the spot and followed him, becoming monks of Clairvaux.   What did he say which so moved the members of this academic community?

He touched on three key themes in the Catholic Tradition of Christian spirituality which remain as relevant for us today as they were for those who heard them proposed in Paris: the agony of guilt, the certainty of death, and the yearning of the heart for God.  It is true that most spiritualities deal with these realities in one way or another, but the Christian faith proposes a connection between these realities.  Through faith in the Risen Lord, Christians have experienced not only relief from guilt but a healing of the very cause of guilt in us.  In the face of death, they have found a way to cling to an invincible hope which nothing, no amount of suffering or privation in this life, can take away.  Finally, through Christ crucified, they claim to have realized a union with God in love already in this life and feel sustained by the living presence and power of the One they profess to be at the right hand of the Father.

In our next post, we will consider how Christ is the answer to guilt, death and our desire for God in the thought of St. Bernard.

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Lent: St. Bernard’s Vision of Humility and Pride

We waste a lot of time thinking something is owed us.   We brood over injury.  We are not self-contained.  Lent helps us remember the real truth about ourselves and our situation.  The wisdom of the saints, like St. Bernard, helps us see our actual situation.  His teachings suggest we can be free of brooding and find a new kind of self-possession when we allow the Lord to preoccupy us with his immeasurable love.   We are, in fact, loved so much more than we deserve, but we can only see this as God leads us out of ourselves and into Him. 

For St. Bernard, conversion happens when we allow God’s love for us to cause a constantly expanding desire for Him in our hearts.  We allow God to stir this growing desire whenever we act on what God’s love prompts us to do in our hearts.  Growing in love in this way is infallible because God’s desire for our conversion never changes.   The result is as we desire God more, our freedom to act and to love grows ever stronger.

This next statement is a little paradoxical.  Our freedom reaches its fullness in mature humility.  The paradox resolves itself, at least partially, if we bear in mind the kind of only kind of freedom Bernard believes in – the freedom to love.  Mature humility is like a mountain top of self-possession or self containment for St. Bernard.  Love demands this kind of self-containment because to really love freely takes the full force of our being.  In mature humility, the heart rests content in God’s bountiful love.  It is a strange contentment because it demands constant vigilance, ongoing conversion.   Bernard calls this spiritual warfare.  It involves a constant struggle against our former way of life, against the gravitational pull of our big fat egos.  Another way he looks at it is that this kind of contentment to be sustained in the Lord must keep vigil against them movements of pride.

For those who want to climb to union with God, Bernard teaches that there is one great truth of which we must come to complete acceptance.  In his Ladder of Pride, he explains how we constantly work to fully accept God’s love for us.  This love is not commensurate with anything we think we have done to earn it.  The moment we start thinking we are owed something is the exact instant we climb the ladder of pride and fall out of the heights of humility.

There are probably a lot of people who think that this is psychologically unhealthy to think about.   They would probably conjecture that any awareness one has of being loved more than he deserves is really just poor self-esteem.  But humility is the virtue that regulates self-esteem.  It is singularly unhealthy to esteem one’s self more or less than the truth about who one is.  

St. Bernard would say that in truth, each of us is uncommonly loved by God, eventhough we have done nothing to deserve such love.   We do not know why we are loved in this way.  But we are, in all our unworthiness.  It is humility to accept this.  Paradoxically, progress is made in the spiritual life through the growing awareness of our own unworthiness in the face of God’s incalculable love.

In the heights of humility, however, we must fight against one uncharitable preoccupation which, while not seeming to be vicious, can uttlerly destroy our ability to learn to love.  He calls it curiousity, but what he means seems to be closer to ambition.    Biblically, it is the pursuit of “making an name” for oneself.  Think of Babel or the history of Israel.  The ambition to lord over others and to draw attention to oneself always leads away from God.  St. Bernard, pride begins with the way that we look at our brothers and sisters, and it ends in a total rejection of God.  His bottomline is that the heights of humility are a protected place as long as we we are humble in our dealings with one another.  But the gravity of pride constantly pulls at us and, he explains, this pull can only be resisted through prayer, fasting, and humble acceptance of those trials which come our way.

Prayer, fasting and the acceptance of trial helps us realize that our true value is in God’s love for us and in his love for those he has entrusted us.   Real self-esteem is rooted in this realization.   Our lives are meant to co-inhere: to co-inhere in God and to co-inhere in one another.   This means the joys and sorrows of God and my brothers and sisters belong to me, are the proper place for my heart to dwell.  Preoccupation with making a name for myself takes my heart out of this kind of self-possession.  For Bernard, the self does not fully exist isolated from God or from others.  The self, the human “I,” ought to be in communion with God and others, or it is less than itself.   Thus, to be self-contained, means for Bernard, that our only concern has become communion with one another in Christ.   

An interesting application with the observance of Lent presents itself.   Traditionally, Lent is a time of prayer, fasting and almsgiving.   In other posts I hope to address the connection of Bernard’s insight with Lent’s prayer and fasting.   Here, just a word on almsgiving which is not unconnected with the importance of bearing the trials that come our way.   In giving alms to those in desparate need what we are really doing, according to Bernard’s perspective, is containing ourselves in a very small way.  Our gift is a kind of sharing in the struggles of our brothers and sisters.  Think of the poor plight of those in Chile or Haiti or even the homeless mentally ill on our own streets.  Their sufferings are always connected to us because of who they are, and humility, knowing the truth about ourselves and how we are connected to them, does not afford us the luxury of ignoring their plight.  Their plight is ours.   For St. Bernard, to see it any other way is just pride.

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The Happiness which God Designs

The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstacy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. 
(C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity on why God decided to create us with a free will, a will that could reject Him.)

For as the Father and the Son
and He who proceeds from them
live in one another,
so it would be with the bride,
for, taken wholly into God,
she will live the life of God.
(John of the Cross in Romances (trans. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez)  reflecting on why God created the Church)

The Bridegroom’ love, or rather the Bridegroom who is Love, asks only the commitment of love and faith.  Let the beloved love in return.  How can the Bride not love, the Bride of Love himself?  How can Love not be loved?
(Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs: Sermon 83 (trans. G.R. Evans))

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St. Bernard and Coming to the Fullness of Love

St. Bernard built a way of life that flowed from Chapter 73 of the Rule of St. Benedict. In this final chapter, St. Benedict urges monks to learn the discipline of the Christian life he has presented because it is a good beginning, the minimum needed to make progress in a life devoted to Christ. Once one makes a good beginning, Benedict explains, “You can set out for the loftier summits.”

St. Bernard devoted himself to encouraging contemplatives to go beyond the minimum and progress to the summit of spiritual maturity. This summit is characterized by love. In our last post we considered the first kind of love, the foundational love for the spiritual life. This is what he calls love of self for one’s own sake. We saw how this kind of love leads to a love of God. Namely, in order to really love one’s self, we find ourselves turning to God and asking for his help. When we begin to percieve how good He is to us, we come to love Him because of what He has done for our sakes. To live a life out of this kind of love of God is very good. Bernard however sees that the Lord has called us to something even more beautiful. Through the grace of Christ given us, we have the possibility to learn to love not only for our own sakes, but for God’s own sake. In this kind of love, we glimpse the hidden source of Christian contemplation and mission.

What does it mean to love God for God’s own sake? This is to begin to see Him quite apart from anything that He has done for us. Love is beautiful and God is Love. To behold Him, to cherish his love in itself is not within our natural power, but we were created to be open to this vision. When we sit in silence before the Lord, wasting time in his presence, we open ourselves to God’s power to raise us above ourselves. Contemplative prayer is this openness to God. Such prayer is receptive to a subtle movement of the Holy Spirit by which He prays in our hearts. When we permit the Holy Spirit to do this, He communicates a new kind of love, a divine love. It is with this divine love, the love God has for himself, that we begin to see, to contemplate the beauty of the Lord from His own perspective.

St. Bernard describes this kind of prayer as “tasting” the goodness of the Lord. One might think that this was the highest form of love – loving God for his own sake. But Bernard believes that tasting the goodness of the Lord leads to an even more profound kind of love. In this experience, we find ourselves moved no longer by what we think we need for ourselves or those needs we believe those we love suffer. Instead, we are touched by the loving desires in the very heart of God. We find ourselves pierced to the heart by those things for which the Lord himself yearns because His hopes and dreams are beautiful and wonderful to behold. A new passion envelops us and our lives are ignited with the fire of God’s love. As we learn to live fired up by the very passion of the heart of God, St. Bernard says we begin to love ourselves for God’s own sake.

The self for St. Bernard is not the same as the “ego” or “me.” The self he describes is always an “us.” He always understands the human person saved by Christ as being in communion with others. Those who believe in Christ are brought into communion with his whole mystical body. As a result, loving one’s self always includes loving all those Christ has entrusted to us.

In the heights of love, we learn to love one another with the divine love the Lord has had for us from before the foundation of the world. Just as God yearns for us to thrive in his love, we learn to live with this same passion for ourselves and for one another. We see in each other the beauty of God’s holiness and we yearn with the same desire that burns in the heart of God for that beauty to be fully manifest. Christian charity, its orientation to serve, is not merely a wishful and naive human philanthropy. It burns with something this world cannot contain. In St. Bernards mystical theology, the truth of our humanity is realized in this burning divine love within us.

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The First Stage of Love According to St. Bernard

Tomorrow will be the feast of St. Bernard. A brilliant monastic thinker of his time, he helped contemplatives understand their growth toward spiritual maturity. He presented his ideas in terms of love – the growth and development of love in our life of faith.

The first kind of love on which growth in the spiritual life depends is a healthy love of self. He calls this, “love of oneself for one’s own sake.” In general, people who look out for themselves tend to avoid harmful behavior and embrace a good style of life. This is also true of people of faith. If we believe in God but fail to care for ourselves, our faith really does not do us much good. But if we want a better life for ourselves, we find ourselves oriented to a godly life. We want salvation – freedom from all those things that prevent us from becoming who we really are.

When I first began to understand this insight, I had this knee jerk reaction about loving myself for my own sake. True, Jesus said that we should love our neighbor as ourself and St. Paul asserts that no one hates his own body but rather cares for it. Yet loving concern for “self” has a paradoxical relationship to the Gospel mandate “deny yourself and pick up your cross.”

Here, we will not resolve this paradox except to say that if we did not have a healthy love of self we would be less Christ like. Even he, the night before he died, prayed that if it was the Father’s will, he might be spared his suffering and death. This indicates that the movement in the Lord’s heart to love to the full, to lay down his life for oursakes, presumes he valued the gift of human life He shared with us and that all things being equal He wanted to keep it. Life was something precious to Him otherwise it would not have been a sacrifice to lay it down for our sakes.

Christ’s attitude toward life is the attitude that every Christian must have. Christians who want to mature in their faith must learn to treasure the life entrusted to them and to reject squandering it on bitterness or brooding. Life is approached with a wonderful sort of vigor and freshness when we see that each heartbeat, each breath, is an irreplaceable gift.

Those who have suddenly been healed of what should have been a mortal illness know this feeling. Even those who have been told they will soon die can make the interior decision to make the most of life right now. When this sort of decision is made – the decision to live life to the full, one has begun to embrace what St. Bernard means. This kind of decision to live life to the full is, in the thought of St. Bernard, a decision to love oneself for one’s own sake.

One important aspect of this decision: it is not selfish but profoundly connected to those whom God has put in our lives. Every moment spent with a loved one or any little sacrifice made to take care of them is a joy – because somehow these other people we love are connected to us. The “self” co-inheres, or at least it is meant to co-inhere in those we love. This means taking care of them is a wonderful way to take care of oneself.

When we choose to live like this, the discipline of the Christian life makes a lot of sense. Daily prayer, giving up unnecesary things, small acts of love that no one notices, being fully present to and cherishing those God has entrusted to us, being passionate and pursuing excellence in work given to us, praying before meals and sharing them with others, avoiding insobriety and guttony, generosity to all – these practices simply flow out of a life lived to the full.

Another thing also happens when we try to live this way. We discover that we can not do it by ourselves. We need God’s help. So, we begin to ask Him and we begin to discover the loving Providence of God. He is so unimagineably good to us in so many tender ways – but often we do not see it because we have never humbled ourselves to ask for His assistance. When we do humble ourselves and go to Him – we soon find ourselves filled with all kinds of gratitude. We even discover, sometimes to our own surprise, we really love God. And we will look at this next step of love in our next post.

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Living the Truth according to St. Bernard

St. Bernard of Clairvaux has a dynamic understanding of the Truth that is vital for anyone who wants to grow in prayer. It is the first step on his ladder of humility. For him, Truth is not merely something we seek with our mind but a reality we embrace with our lives. Truth is not merely an idea but a lived experience. He sees no difference between right thinking and right living.

“I am the Life, the Truth and the Way.” Bernard roots his insights into Truth by identifying it with Jesus Christ. He explains that Truth is the One who comes to us “naked and weak and in need.”

This means the Truth does not force himself. He waits for us with a longing love to accept him. What stands between us and the One who comes is our ignorance, weakness and jealousy. But these things do not discourage the Lord and they should not discourage us. Truth for Bernard not only overcomes our ignorance but gives us strength and raises us above our own pettiness to behold the Lord’s merciful love. Humble self-knowledge, the strength to be merciful and contemplation of God in purity of heart mark the progress Truth alone produces in our hearts.

The naked Truth is more powerful than our ignorance. That is, Jesus stripped and scourged for our sins has power over our wounds. Those who want to begin to understand themselves need to turn their thoughts to the Lord and what He has done for them.

Thinking about how much he suffered for us leads us to ask, why? The answer is that he wanted to share fully our misery so that we might share fully in his mercy. When we look to him and what he has done for our sakes, we begin to realize the utter disaster from which his death delivered us.

The truth is, we are ignorant of what is really going on in our hearts, of the terrible suffering and abysses of misery that drive us to all kinds of ugly behavior. For Bernard, the Lord only allows us to suffer this truth so that we might desire something better. In his understanding of holiness, the foundational love that helps us begin the spiritual life is a healthy love of self. This might sound a little selfish if we do not understand it from Bernard’s perspective. For him, the idea of self is always the self in relation to others. It is never the isolated self.

If we have the sort of self love he has in mind, we yearn for righteousness the more we see who we really are and what Christ has done for us. Christ died for us that we might know real joy, true happiness. By his death and ressurection he establishes us in his own righteousness. But we need to desire this with all our might. This kind of desire for righteousness is informed by an acute awareness of how much we need the Lord. All of this co-inheres in the way we regard others. If we desire righteousness for ourselves and we are truly in relation to each other, we discover a new way to love our neighbor.

Truth and the healthy self love it engenders helps us to cease judging our neighbor and to have compassion instead. Without a godly love of self, when we see wickedness in others we tend to righteous indignation because in our weakness this is easier than compassion. To really be compassionate means to look at the needs of others as one’s own and know how to suffer with others in their troubles.

When we humbly accept the trainwreck of our lives that the Truth reveals, we realize that we are not that different from our neighbor. We all carry a common burden of sin and we all face a common death. This is the beam in our eye. Christ helps us see this and to take it out. Once we see, then all indignation over my brother’s failures dissipates. We feel the desire to be merciful instead — that is, to suffer with our brothers and sisters so as to affirm their dignity.

Mercy begins when there is a kind of compunction, a piercing of the heart that takes place. When the plight of my neighbor strikes the very core of my being – I can no longer sit in judgment. I can no longer be cold. My neighbor is in the same boat as me and we need one another if we are to endure in Christ’s love. Bernard even speaks of an ecstacy – a mystical experience whereby we are drawn out of ourselves and into the merciful love of God for our neighbors.

The final stage of truth is purity of heart. There is a contemplation of God’s mercy that raises us above ourselves. In this prayer, we see the truth about God. Petty jealousy and pride is destroyed – because we see the Lord and the world in a whole new way. Those who, relying on Christ Jesus, persevere in humility or accepting the truth about themselves and persevere in mercy or suffering with others, enter into a deep and profound union with Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Father of Mercy. This is a contemplation of the Lord in purity of heart, a contemplation to all who are willing to welcome the Truth who comes to us naked, weak and in need.

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