Bishop Varden at Lenten Retreat: St. Bernard, the Idealist

[ad_1] Bishop Erik Varden delivers his second reflection on the Non secular Workouts within the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV, Cardinals residing in Rome, and heads of Dicasteries, specializing in the theme: “Bernard, the Idealist.” Here's a abstract of his reflection.

By Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO

What kind of man was St Bernard? The place did he come from? He towers over the twelfth-century Cistercian motion: such have been his charisma and industriousness.

Many individuals, together with some who ought to know higher, suppose he received the order going. He didn't, after all; although he did make a splash when he turned up in 1113, aged 23, with a band of thirty companions.

The monastery he joined, Cîteaux, was a mission as a lot of innovation as of reform. The founders, who set it up in 1098, referred to as their home novum monasterium . They have been doing one thing new, not primarily reacting in opposition to something, which is simply as properly, since initiatives of response ultimately run into the sand.

On the face of it, the Cistercian mission was conservative. But its protagonists launched novelties. This dialectic was fruitful.

Bernard’s confidence in his personal judgement might make him versatile within the observance of typical procedures he in any other case claimed to uphold. His view of the Church’s wants drove him generally to undertake inflexible positions that concerned fierce partisanship.

However he was no hypocrite.

He was a genuinely humble man, absolutely given to God, able to tender kindness, a agency good friend—certainly, capable of befriend former enemies—and a compelling witness to God’s love. He was, and stays, fascinating.

Dom James Fox, entrepreneurial abbot of Gethsemani from 1948 to 67 as soon as wrote in exasperation about his confrère Thomas Merton: ‘His thoughts is so electrical!’ Merton wound Fox up along with his concepts, intuitions, and insistence. But Fox knew him to be real. He revered him, loved his firm (once they weren't in the midst of some epic quarrel), and went to Merton for confession for many of his abbacy.

It might be daft to check Thomas Merton to Bernard of Clairvaux, but there may be temperamental similarity. Whereas Bernard by no means knew about electrical energy, his was a quicksilver nature containing and having to equilibrate large tensions.

Bernard’s educating on conversion is born of a Biblical tradition second to none and of well-pondered notions of theology. Additionally it is, and more and more so with the passage of time, born of non-public battle as he learns to not take it as a right that his course is all the time the fitting course, taught by expertise, hurts, and provocations to think about his self-righteousness and marvel earlier than God’s merciful justice.

Bernard is an effective, sensible companion for anybody setting out on a Lenten exodus from selfishness and pleasure, wishing to pursue authenticity with eyes set on the all-illumining love of God.

* Bishop Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim, Norway , was requested to evangelise the 2026 Non secular Workouts for Pope Leo XIV, Cardinals residing in Rome, and the heads of Dicasteries of the Roman Curia, which runs from Sunday, February 22, to Friday, February 27. Here is the link to his website.