Solemnity of Our Holy Founders
On the great Feast of the Holy Founders of our Order, a sister in formation was invited by the Abbess to share the following reflection with the Community at chapter:
Every Monday morning for the past year, Mother Marie and I have been studying the Exordium Course compiled by Fr Michael Casey OCSO on the values of the Cistercian Order. These classes have been a real gift. These Monday mornings have helped familiarise me with the values of our Order while acting as an introduction to our founding fathers: Sts Robert, Alberic and Stephen. Furthermore, they have given me, through the reading of early documents, a sense of their distinct personalities.
Robert, for example, was a charismatic leader whom I imagine easily endeared people to himself and was quite adroit when it came to fundraising. He also had a reputation for being inconsistent and his behaviour was, at times, marred by what Michael Casey refers to as levitas. Alberic strikes me as more of a quiet man. Michael Casey calls him ‘the invisible partner of the Cistercian reform’; he was more consistent, prudent and responsible and his life was marked by a certain gravitas. Stephen, at twenty-six, was a little older than the others when he entered the Monastery of Molesme. He had travelled a lot beforehand and perhaps brought with him an air of exotic life experience. Stephen was a gifted scribe and artist. All three of were “great hearted men,” as the Exordium Magnum describes them, “who wished to order their life totally in accordance with the regulations of their holy father Benedict and his rule of life.”
But what I want to talk about today is the way I think their personalities, and in particular that levitas of Robert and that gravitas of Alberic, have shaped one particular aspect of Cistercian life as I have come to experience it here in Glencairn over the past three years. It was at our recent Initial Formation Course that I first began to reflect on this, and it is related to something rather beautiful that Michael Casey said about monastic life. He said monastic life has a particular combination of both gravitas and levitas or, in other words, a seriousness and a lightness, a certain solemnity along with a distinct lightness-of-heart. He suggested that one of the gifts monastic life has to offer a new candidate is this potential to become a person of true equanimity – someone with this balance of gravitas and levitas. It is a kind of virtue to be cultivated but also a way of seeing reality and a disposition toward all of life, a way of being in the world that realises that in every moment of our lives and in every breath we take, we are immersed in Christ. “Christ is in everything and is everything.”(Colossians 3:1-11).
As Michael Casey described this lovely combination of gravitas and levitas, I immediately thought of the late Mother Agnes as someone who embodied these traits and this attractive quality of equanimity. I used to love my Thursday afternoons with her. We would sit together and I would read to her. I would sometimes wash her feet or cut her nails. She used to laugh at the smallest things and when I read scripture she used to close her eyes and it was as though the Word became one with her. To see someone whose whole life was shaped by and through the Word of God, was very inspiring and I felt a deep desire in my heart to live similarly.
I remember one day as I was wheeling her into the Church we stopped at the notice board as we usually did, to read the notices. On this day there was a particularly strange note there. It made absolutely no sense to either Agnes or I. She looked at me in that mild yet earnest way of hers, threw her eyes up to heaven, smiled and said “you need to have a sense of humour if you are going to survive here Laura”, words that felt as though they had dropped straight from the mind of God Himself. I realised later that this was that levitas that Michael Casey was referring to.
I used to wonder where this balance between levitas and gravitas – this deep interior equanimity – came from, and I began to understand, as I watched Agnes every Friday and Sunday night seated before the Blessed Sacrament at Exposition, her eyes firmly fixed on the Lord. It was as though she knew she was at the very heart of the world and the Church and there was nothing more important than to be there with Him. It brings to mind my favourite description of what the essence of monastic life is, from Jean Marie Howe’s beautiful book The Monastic Way. She writes that, “it is extremely important that we see our monastic life in the light of the mystery of Christ. For this, the eyes of the heart must be rooted deep in Christ’s life. Immersion is really so important, for the heart must be penetrated by the mystery: this level of spiritual depth is the essence of monastic life.”
We see this lovely combination of levitas and gravitas in the life of our Lord. One of the qualities so attractive about Him was His ability to be so at home in the human condition. Effortlessly, He weaved in and out of the messy situations of people’s lives. He never tired of speaking to them seriously about life and death, about salvation and sin, but He did so in parables and stories. He was so kind and so keen to bring them along with Him and help them see what promise His call held for them, especially when they could no longer see it themselves. And this is what He is inviting us to do too, to accept His grace as it comes to us and to behold Him and delight in Him and to be with Him in all things.
It must have been this instinct that inspired Robert, Alberic and Stephen to leave Molesme and found the New Monastery of Citeaux. They longed to be immersed in Christ and knew that this required a new way of living. It required an environment of silence and solitude and asceticism where they could get in touch with their deep hearts. Life in Molesme had become very busy and sometimes we need to do what we need to do, in order to put the Lord back into the first place in our lives. Maybe we need to leave something behind or do what Agnes did and simply sit before Him, letting ourselves be immersed in His Love, in the gravitas and the levitas of it. I will forever be grateful for all those who have gone before me and showed me the way: Sts Robert, Alberic and Stephen; and Agnes too.
Amen.