Solemnity of Saint Bernard

Greatness and littleness seem to be mutually exclusive. Any yet in the spiritual realm, as we know, littleness paradoxically opens us to greatness. Once greatness is achieved, however, littleness must be preserved if true greatness is not to be lost. Bernard, often mistakenly (but understandably) thought to be the founder of our Order, is someone who managed to sustain this delicate balance between greatness and littleness. How exactly he achieved this is less obvious than that he took to heart Sirach’s words humble yourself the more, the greater you are and through deep humility allowed charity to be the root and foundation of [his] life—to quote from Ephesians. Through this humility Bernard was fully grounded in his true identity as a beloved child of God and liberated from the heavy burden of egotism and the need to seek the limelight—which certainly wasn’t in short supply in his life. Freed from this heavy load, Christ’s burden became surprisingly light and enabled Bernard to fruitfully live the extraordinary kind of life he did. The burdens we carry are often unnecessarily heavy precisely because we don’t heed Jesus’ invitation and come to him to be fulfilled; instead, we seek glory and honor from one another. The glory and honor that we seek in so many varied, subtle, and often unhealthy ways is already ours, and yet we keep looking outside ourselves for what we already possess in the Christ who dwells in our hearts through faith. And it is this same faith that enables us, like Bernard, to grasp fully the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love, and experience this love which surpasses all knowledge, so that we may attain to the fullness of God himself—surely there is no greater glory!