Holy Founders
The Inner Face of Holiness:
Reflections on Saints Robert, Alberic, and Stephen
by Fr Michael Casey
Holiness is, for most of us, attested by great visible achievements. When we think of saints we tend to think of those who have accomplished much for God, for the Church or for others. In the case of our Cistercian Founders, we honour their memory by celebrating their success in establishing an Order and a way of life that have lasted for nearly a millennium. Robert was a visionary and initiator. Alberic the continuator and consolidator. Stephen the formulator and legislator. To see the fruits of their lives, look around you!
I suppose we half-suspect that these intelligent men were fully aware of the value of their enterprise and of their own place in history. I am sure that it would be very pleasant to go through life crowned with the consciousness that future centuries will hold me in veneration! But alas, such pious complacency is not holiness. Holiness is compounded with a much greater volume of self-dissatisfaction, a much heavier awareness of inadequacy, failure, and guilt.
There is also an inner face to holiness that is not dominated by wondrous deeds or wise words. Saints experience their lives much as we do. They stumble under the hidden burden of weakness, frailty, error and flagging energy; they are familiar with the world of fear, doubt and limitation as their inner shadow becomes daily darker – especially compared with the brilliant radiance of outward success.
Let as take a fresh look at the lives of our founders; perhaps we may discover their experience of self was not so different from ours. What was different was that they somehow transcended their inner negativity to rely entirely on grace to accomplish God’s will for them.
St Robert the Disappointed
Robert probably felt that his long life was a failure. He was a visionary, “a man of desires” yet he seemed to have lacked the capacity to follow through, and to bring his grand designs to a point of viability, or to find a stable role for himself within his own foundations. Only one of his many monastic schemes came to fruition, and that was through the work of others, a decade after his own separation from it. The burgeoning of Cîteaux began under his successors, and it is impossible that, at the success of his former monastery, he did not feel a certain wistfulness, perhaps tinged with envy and even bitterness.
St Alberic the Longsuffering
It is never easy to find oneself between a rock and a hard place. Stuck between the impractical enthusiast and the systematic enforcer, Alberic had many hardships to endure. We are told that he laboured much to ease the impact of two compelling personalities. And, inevitably, it was on him that the Molesme brethren vented their displeasure. Alberic was a reconciler but at a price. He learned meekness and patience through many sufferings, and it was this capacity to absorb pain instead of passing it on that made him capable of serving as the mortar, which held together the brilliantly incompatible Robert and Stephen.
St Stephen the Lonely
When the young monk Harding left his abbey of Sherborne and went to live on the continent, he was very much alone. Without country or kinship he changed his name to Stephen. He came to Molesme and thence to the New Monastery of Cîteaux fired with a vision that few others could encompass. Stephen was an austere man, a victim of his principles, to which he clung tenaciously even when they needed changing. He remained always a loner. Outshone by Bernard he watched the moral leadership of the Order progressively pass to others, probably aware that his death would be greeted by a collective sigh of relief and a rush of immediate changes. And it was. In old age he wrote nostalgically to Sherborne, the monastery of his youth, as if trying to bring closure to that portion of his life. He went blind and was forced to yield the governance of the Order to others before quickly slipping away.
Ourselves
Disappointment, suffering and loneliness: we are familiar with these. We are experts in feeling frustrated, ill-treated and isolated. Such is the common lot of the human family. To become saints we have to transcend these crippling feelings and attach our choices more firmly to the will of God. As Bernard says, “Follow the judgement of faith and not your own feelings”. The first stage of our transformation is that we do not allow ourselves to be dragged down by negative feelings, to wallow in self-pity and victimhood, to use our difficulties as a justification to give up the struggle, to make comfortable accommodations, to escape into laziness and self-indulgence. All of us are battlers, and for all alike only conformity with God’s will can bring peace, holiness and that state of blessedness that Jesus promised.
Robert, Alberic, and Stephen were all ardent seekers after poverty, and they found much more than they sought. Of them, as of us, discipleship demands that we live in the keen awareness of our lack of resources – in a spiritual poverty that is harder than material deprivation. Today we celebrate the hundredfold which they received, but we also allow them to remind us that it was gained “not without persecution”.
