St Bernard
Bernard of Clairvaux: An Accidental Saint
By Fr Michael Casey
By Fr Michael Casey
It has been said that no one is born a hero; a person becomes heroic by responding to a confluence of circumstances that are contingent and unexpected. I cannot imagine anyone going to a travel agent and asking to be booked on a shonky airline in the hope that a crash may offer an opportunity to catapult into greatness. On the contrary, it seems that certain men and women become heroes simply by responding creatively to a situation which they had no part in creating. We think of a teenager who saved many lives during the bushfires, or a bystander who dives into icy waters to rescue a drowning child. All heroes, it seems, are accidental heroes. Far from going out of their way to achieve notoriety, they seem genuinely dazed by the attention their actions generate.
In the same way, I am inclined to think that holiness is not the result of setting up a project of beatific self-enhancement and rigorously persevering until the goal is achieved. To me it seems that saints are accidental saints: holiness is a matter of responding creatively to the less-than-perfect situations, not of our own making, that meet us day after day. Coping with unexpected pressures means viewing hard times with the eye of faith, acting with the boldness of hope to make things better, and never allowing love to be overpowered by discouragement or resentment. This, to me seems like a very solid definition of holiness.
Sanctity is inextricably bound up with the experience of hard times. I am not thinking of self-imposed rigours, but of the frustrations and failures that beset us all, those occasions when our best desires and intentions meet with resistance and opposition. The quality of our response to such unwelcome situations is what reveals the depth of our faith, hope and charity. If we read the lives of the saints, from St Paul to Blessed Mary Mackillop, we quickly become aware that their passage through life was not plain sailing. What marked them out from others was their equanimity in dealing with disasters – because of their firm trust in the goodness and providence of God. Instead of standing back to complain, they brought faith, hope and love to bear on the situation and made it better,
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast we celebrate today was no exception to this rule. He was a person of high intellectual and spiritual gifts; strongly attracted to the contemplative life and highly skilled in the art of fine writing. Yet little time was made available for these characteristic pursuits. Moments had to be stolen from a welter of less palatable occupations. From a very early age he was called forth from the areas in which lay his personal strengths, and obliged to deal with issues that were beyond his comfort zone – to become involved in the politics of Church and state, to travel widely in the service of the papacy and of the Order, to become enmeshed in theological controversy, and eventually and bizarrely, finding himself commissioned to preach the Second Crusade. He became perhaps the most famous man in Europe in the first half of the twelfth century – and yet this was not what he wanted. His career was all an accident, a departure from what he seemed called to. Unsurprisingly, he was uncomfortable with what life served up to him. Sometimes he found new resources within himself and performed well and his efforts were deemed a success. On other occasions his involvement went far beyond his competence and seemed to bring the worst out of him and, inevitably, not everything went the way he wanted it to go. Unsympathetic historians sometimes judge him harshly.
Bernard was a man of many talents, but he could not do everything. So inept was he at financial management, for example, that his community insisted that he not involve himself in temporal administration. He trusted friends but, when acting on their advice, he did not always check its accuracy and sometimes ended up in hot water. He was a man of great zeal, but occasionally this enthusiasm crossed the border and became impetuosity. Like most of us he usually did his best, but also like most of us, his best was not always good enough.
Bernard was too self-aware not to have regarded his double life with some ambivalence. He described himself as a chimera, the mythical animal that was half human and half bestial: Listen to what he says about his own life in his letters to friends.
● “I know very well that I have presumed to do more than I should have done without paying sufficient heed to myself.” (Ep 218:3)
● “I am like a little bird that has not yet grown feathers, nearly all the time out of its dear nest, at the mercy of wind and storm.” (Ep 12)
● I am weary and fainthearted. No better than an ant harnessed to a cart. (Ep. 280)
The spiritual doctrine that he developed was based on his own life-experience with all its vicissitudes. He knew that there was no need to offer guidance about the high points of life – these we easily embrace with great enthusiasm. He spoke more often about the negativities that we all face, the struggles we endure to remain faithful and the discouragement we feel when we make a mess of things. Bernard seemed to think that hard times were good for us as they were for him; once recognised and owned they compel us to turn to prayer, and thus the mess we make becomes a channel by which we experience the help of God and so graduallly we begin to know by experience the God who steps in to save us.
In the same way, I am inclined to think that holiness is not the result of setting up a project of beatific self-enhancement and rigorously persevering until the goal is achieved. To me it seems that saints are accidental saints: holiness is a matter of responding creatively to the less-than-perfect situations, not of our own making, that meet us day after day. Coping with unexpected pressures means viewing hard times with the eye of faith, acting with the boldness of hope to make things better, and never allowing love to be overpowered by discouragement or resentment. This, to me seems like a very solid definition of holiness.
Sanctity is inextricably bound up with the experience of hard times. I am not thinking of self-imposed rigours, but of the frustrations and failures that beset us all, those occasions when our best desires and intentions meet with resistance and opposition. The quality of our response to such unwelcome situations is what reveals the depth of our faith, hope and charity. If we read the lives of the saints, from St Paul to Blessed Mary Mackillop, we quickly become aware that their passage through life was not plain sailing. What marked them out from others was their equanimity in dealing with disasters – because of their firm trust in the goodness and providence of God. Instead of standing back to complain, they brought faith, hope and love to bear on the situation and made it better,
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, whose feast we celebrate today was no exception to this rule. He was a person of high intellectual and spiritual gifts; strongly attracted to the contemplative life and highly skilled in the art of fine writing. Yet little time was made available for these characteristic pursuits. Moments had to be stolen from a welter of less palatable occupations. From a very early age he was called forth from the areas in which lay his personal strengths, and obliged to deal with issues that were beyond his comfort zone – to become involved in the politics of Church and state, to travel widely in the service of the papacy and of the Order, to become enmeshed in theological controversy, and eventually and bizarrely, finding himself commissioned to preach the Second Crusade. He became perhaps the most famous man in Europe in the first half of the twelfth century – and yet this was not what he wanted. His career was all an accident, a departure from what he seemed called to. Unsurprisingly, he was uncomfortable with what life served up to him. Sometimes he found new resources within himself and performed well and his efforts were deemed a success. On other occasions his involvement went far beyond his competence and seemed to bring the worst out of him and, inevitably, not everything went the way he wanted it to go. Unsympathetic historians sometimes judge him harshly.
Bernard was a man of many talents, but he could not do everything. So inept was he at financial management, for example, that his community insisted that he not involve himself in temporal administration. He trusted friends but, when acting on their advice, he did not always check its accuracy and sometimes ended up in hot water. He was a man of great zeal, but occasionally this enthusiasm crossed the border and became impetuosity. Like most of us he usually did his best, but also like most of us, his best was not always good enough.
Bernard was too self-aware not to have regarded his double life with some ambivalence. He described himself as a chimera, the mythical animal that was half human and half bestial: Listen to what he says about his own life in his letters to friends.
● “I know very well that I have presumed to do more than I should have done without paying sufficient heed to myself.” (Ep 218:3)
● “I am like a little bird that has not yet grown feathers, nearly all the time out of its dear nest, at the mercy of wind and storm.” (Ep 12)
● I am weary and fainthearted. No better than an ant harnessed to a cart. (Ep. 280)
The spiritual doctrine that he developed was based on his own life-experience with all its vicissitudes. He knew that there was no need to offer guidance about the high points of life – these we easily embrace with great enthusiasm. He spoke more often about the negativities that we all face, the struggles we endure to remain faithful and the discouragement we feel when we make a mess of things. Bernard seemed to think that hard times were good for us as they were for him; once recognised and owned they compel us to turn to prayer, and thus the mess we make becomes a channel by which we experience the help of God and so graduallly we begin to know by experience the God who steps in to save us.
“First of all one perceives oneself to be in dire straits, then one cries to the Lord and is heard ... So, in this way, self-knowledge is shown to be a step in the direction of knowledge of God.” (SC 36:6)
Bernard is the great champion of the mercy of God and his teaching is the product of his own experience of receiving mercy – of having found himself out of his depth and having to cry out for help and then experiencing the clemency of God’s saving action. He is content with this situation. He does not wish to be without faults or struggles or contradictions – all of these are tolerable because they generate in us the will to turn to God and to accept grace. Thus he writes, “O how desirable is that weakness which is offset by the power of Christ!” (SC 25:7). He wants to be weak in order to experience the strength of Christ.
In a sermon left unfinished at the time of his death he characterises this lifelong relationship with Christ as the source of everything that is good in him; Christ in deed was his life.
“[Jesus Christ, the Word of God] is the remedy for all our wounds. He is help in time of trouble. He is the source of repair for those who are falling back, and he is the source of abundance for those who advance. Finally he is the means by which human beings have or receive whatever is good and appropriate for them.” (SC 86:3)
Perhaps the best advice he ever gave was after his death when he appeared in a dream to a novice at Clairvaux who was having a hard time. “Be a man and do not shirk, because in difficulties the Lord will be at your side to deliver you.” (Herbert, De Mir 1:37) May we learn from Bernard to rely on Christ to enable us to navigate the difficult passages of life and to experience for ourselves the wideness and graciousness of God’s mercy.
Perhaps the best advice he ever gave was after his death when he appeared in a dream to a novice at Clairvaux who was having a hard time. “Be a man and do not shirk, because in difficulties the Lord will be at your side to deliver you.” (Herbert, De Mir 1:37) May we learn from Bernard to rely on Christ to enable us to navigate the difficult passages of life and to experience for ourselves the wideness and graciousness of God’s mercy.
