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Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Date: Circa 1267.
Source: An Initial Capital Letter “B” from a
13th-Century illuminated manuscript: Legenda Aurea
(Keble MS 49, fol 162r).
Author: Unknown.
(Wikimedia Commons)
By: Abbot Guéranger, O.S.B.
Volume 13.
Time After Pentecost.
Book IV.
The “Valley of Wormwood” has lost its bitterness; having become Clairvaux, or “Bright Valley”, its light shines over the World; from every point of the horizon vigilant Bees are attracted to it by the “honey from the rock” which abounds in its solitude.
Mary turns her glance upon its wild hills, and with her smile sheds Light and Grace upon them.
Listen to the harmonious voice arising from the desert: it is the voice of Bernard, her chosen one.
“Learn, O man, the counsel of God; admire the intentions of Wisdom, the design of love. Before bedewing the whole Earth, he saturated the fleece; being to redeem the human race, he heaped up in Mary the entire ransom.
“O, Adam, say no more: “The woman whom Thou gavest me offered me the forbidden fruit;” say, rather: “The woman whom Thou gavest me has fed me with a fruit of Blessing.”
“With what ardour ought we to honour Mary, in whom was set all the fullness of good ! If we have any hope, any saving Grace, know that it overflows from her who today rises replete with love: She is a garden of delights, over which the Divine South Wind does not merely pass with a light breath, but sweeping down from the heights, He stirs it unceasingly with a Heavenly breeze, so that it may shed abroad its perfumes, which are the gifts of various Graces.
“Take away the material Sun from the World: What would become of our day ? Take away Mary, the Star of the vast Sea: What would remain but obscurity over all, a night of death and icy darkness ?
Therefore, with every fibre of our heart, with all the love of our Soul, with all the eagerness of our aspirations, let us Venerate Mary; it is the will of Him Who wished us to have all things through her.”
Thus spoke the Monk who had acquired his eloquence, as he tells us himself, among the Beeches and Oaks of the forest, and he poured into the wounds of mankind the Wine and Oil of the Scriptures.
In 1113, at the age of twenty-two, Bernard arrived at Citeaux, in the beauty of his youth, already ripe for great combats. Fifteen years before, on 21 March 1098, Robert of Molesmes had created this new desert between Dijon and Beaune.
Issuing from the past, on the very Feast of the Patriarch of Monks, the new foundation claimed to be nothing more than the literal observance of the precious Rule given by him to the World.
The weakness of the age, however, refused to recognise the fearful austerity of these newcomers into the great family, as inspired by that Holy Code, wherein discretion reigns supreme; for this discretion is the characteristic of the school accessible to all, where Benedict “hoped to ordain nothing rigorous or burthensome in the Service of God.”
Under the government of Stephen Harding, the next after Alberic, successor of Robert, the little community from Molesmes was becoming extinct, without human hope of recovery, when the descendant of the Lords of Fontaine arrived with thirty companions, who were his first conquest, and brought new life where death was imminent.
“Rejoice, thou barren one that bearest not, for many will be the children of the barren.” La Ferté was Founded that same year in Chalonnais; next, Pontigny, near Auxerre; and, in 1115, Clairvaux and Morimond were established in the Diocese of Langres; while these four glorious branches of Citeaux were soon, together with their parent stock, to put forth numerous shoots.
In 1119, the Charter of Charity confirmed the existence of The Cistercian Order in The Church. Thus, the tree, planted six Centuries earlier on the summit of Monte Cassino, proved once more to the World that in all ages it is capable of producing new branches, which, though distinct from the trunk, live by its sap, and are a glory to the entire tree.
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