Memories on this feast of Bernard

I spent a very eventful junior year abroad at Oxford University, and one of the immediate effects of that heady time was my decision to become a Jesuit. Thus when I returned home to Staten Island, I took a volunteer job answering the phones at the lovely Mount Manresa, a Jesuit-run retreat house a few miles from my home. It was the oldest lay retreat house in the the United States, and a lovely oasis of trees and quiet places not far from the Verrazano Bridge. Sadly, it is now closed, but that summer I roamed its grounds, and prayed in its warm but lovely chapel, surrounded by images of Jesuit saints, a tangible sense of holiness and simplicity.

As part of my time there, I underwent a short retreat by a resident Jesuit, who gave me some Psalms to read and pray over. Today I suddenly recalled that today, August 20th, the feast of St Bernard, back in that summer of 1985, I sat on a bench to pray over the Psalms, and had some fairly serious experiences of the presence of the Holy Spirit. Somewhat shaken, I went and told Fr. Maher, expecting him to be dismissive. Instead he became very quiet, and looked at me very seriously, and said how this was indeed very real what I experienced, and although my own tendencies, due to the intensity of it, would be to rationalize and explain it away, and in fact dismiss it because otherwise it would have so many serious implications for the spiritual life and how the world really is, I should never give in to that. He was very wise and experienced, and of course correct.

As time passed I discerned that the Jesuit vocation was not for me, but I have never forgotten that day, and his words to me, or my time on that bench. I have ever since always associated those memories and those perceptions with the feast of St Bernard of Clairvaux, the day on which they happened, the day the Church remembers one of its greatest mystical theologians. Each year like today I am reminded that no matter what conspires to dampen the fires of our inner life and the work of the Spirit within us, like Bernard, we must never give in and let these forces distract us from our moorings as children in the image and likeness of God, as temples of that same Holy Spirit.

El Greco’s St Bernard of Clairvaux.