Aelred

 

 

 

When the young Aelred (1110–67), who was a courtier of King David I of Scotland, visited the newly founded monastery of Rievaulx in northern England, it was love at first sight.  He spent that night in prayer and discernment and the next day gave up his promising career and asked to join the Cistercians.  Thirteen years later, in 1149, he was elected abbot of Rievaulx and presided over the abbey’s remarkable growth in numbers and prosperity until his death at fifty-seven.  Rievaulx was home to several hundred monks and lay brothers.  Aelred kept them occupied with manual labor and chanting the Divine Office in a church whose substantial ruins are still a noble and inspiring sight today.

        

Aelred was a popular preacher and a prolific writer in several genres, including theology, hagiography, history, genealogy, and spirituality.  His book Spiritual Friendship is read today even outside monastic circles.  Cistercian monks and nuns looking for early examples of Cistercian spirituality might well look at several of Aelred’s spiritual treatises and sermons.

         

Sermons in the twelfth century and later were given in the chapter room, not the church. The translator, Fr. Michael Casey OCSO, prefers to call them discourses or conferences, so as not to suggest sermons in church. 

 

The discourse or sermon presented here, S 32 on Saint Mary’s Purification, is not among Aelred’s most impressive works, but it is a good example of a typical liturgical sermon.  It was intended for February 2, called today the Presentation of the Lord or Candlemas.  The Blessed Virgin appears only in the final paragraph. 

 

There Aelred describes her as the “the true Zion, holy Zion, the beautiful Zion who adorned the chamber of her heart” in order to welcome Christ the King in every possible way (S 32.28).  Through most of the discourse Aelred teaches his monks how to adorn the chamber of their heart to be a pure and beautiful dwelling place for the Lord Jesus.  He teaches practical, not theoretical, spirituality.

 

Aelred compares the heart or soul to the structure of the temple described in Ezekiel 40, giving him a chance to talk about operations of the soul that pertain to each of the temple’s parts from the outer court to the innermost chamber.  From his description of the vices to guard against, we can perhaps infer the kind of temptation that his monks were contending with.  Their struggles were not so different from our own. They and we struggle against concupiscence of the eyes and concupiscence of the flesh, and these temptations enter our heart directly or through our memory.  Along with them come numerous “fantasies and frivolities and pleasures” (S 32.19).  Instead of all these, we are to fill our thoughts and words with everything that is pleasing to our bridegroom, the Lord Jesus.

 

The inner chamber of our heart is where affectus resides.  This word is left untranslated because no single English word does it justice.  Other translators suggest “inclination,” “attachment,” and the like.  Aelred says that affectus inclines us toward the delightful, toward the useful, and toward what is right and proper (S 32.21).  We are to welcome Christ the King into our chamber “with all affectus, all love, all sweetness, all pleasantness” (S 32.25).  Aelred’s principal influences seem to be St Augustine, John Cassian, and Evagrius in their lists of vices and virtues to be avoided or practiced on the journey to God.

 

In this discourse Aelred teaches us that practices matter in our spiritual life.  By our struggles against temptation, our persistence in loving, our obedience and humility, and our daily monastic duties, we adorn the chamber of our heart until at last only Jesus matters.  Then he comes to make his dwelling in us.

 

 

 

 

Recently the family of one of our sisters came to visit.  In the group there was a legion of little ones, with their beautiful shining faces.  I love looking at children.  I often think that we remain like kids, for better or for worse, in so many ways.  The attentive contemplation of these tiny versions of ourselves is so revealing to me.  Because they do not have to pretend, they openly show what we usually hide behind our grown-up masks.

 

One of the things that fascinates me is how they can change from a state of bliss to total despair in a few seconds. Certainly human life is full of ups and down, like the waves of the sea.  As the Ecclesiastes says: “there is a time for everything” (Eccl 3: 1).  But this is not the same as remaining like children, “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind” (Eph 4: 14), victims of circumstances and our own moods and whims.  

 

Sometimes you get the impression that the more you grow in self-knowledge, the less you know what to do with your poor self. Here is where Aelred comes to the rescue!

He knows well of our struggles—“Our way of life is the cross of Christ” (S 10.31)—and he is ready to offer his experience and advice to all those who are willing to work “with great care and attention” (S 32.8) to make progress.  We need to be healed, fed and enlightened, this is true, but then our hearts will discover real gladness and sweetness (cf. S 32.1-2).

 

In the tradition of Evagrius and John Cassian, he focuses on the quality of our thoughts as the place to begin our work.  We need to watch.  Not only because the enemy comes in the night of our troubles and the brightest days of our prosperity (cf. S 32.5), but because we have fruit to protect —our charity, chastity, joy, peace (cf S 32.6)—and, above all, because the Lord wants to visit us. Let´s “prepare for him a chamber in which he may take his rest” (cf. S 32.9).  “The spiritual bridegroom wishes to come to it today.  He is so beautiful, so pure, so holy that he cannot endure in that chamber which he wishes to enter any dirt or stain or foulness.  So, Zion, adorn your chamber” (S 32.3).

 

Is your house a little messy? Does the enemy creep in despite your best efforts?  Aelred is perfectly aware that 

all kinds of thoughts enter through the gates of our senses into our memory.  “Nobody can stop good or bad, just and unjust, clean and unclean, from coming into the memory.  What will we do?  Let us guard the gate of the inner court so that they may not enter there” (S 32.12). How?  “They come to the inner door, that is to deep thinking. They want us to think about all these things so that by [our] thinking they can find entrance into the inner court of delight” (S 32.14). 

 

It is crystal clear.  Have not you had one of those mornings when everything was fine till you gave entrance to that “little thought”?  Like Eve in paradise, you engage in conversation with the wrong one.  Then the apple looks delightful, and. . . you know the rest. It is easy to blame others, but it does not take us anywhere.  “It is our prerogative to open the gate to whom we will of all these and admit them into the inner court” (S 32.16). 

 

“Consider carefully. When all these things come into our memory and, in a certain way, inappropriately rush in, if we choose to dwell on something and think about it closely then we are opening the gate to it.  For this thinking is the door by which it enters into delight” (S 32.17).

 

But do not despair.  “Who is able to guard [the entrance to] that courtyard so [well] that the enemy does not gain entrance sometimes? Let us, at least, keep guard over the vestibule” (S 32.17).  “The vestibule is deliberation.  [The will] introduces into the house whom it wills.  The house is consent.  The chamber is affectus” (S 32.18). Keep watch; do not give consent; and your inner dwelling will be still safe, your embrace preserved for the Lord.   

Do you think we are ready for his visit now?  Not completely.  “If they do all these things gladly, even though at first it is with a certain difficulty and labour, then they will certainly lead the bridegroom, that is the Lord Jesus, into the house but not yet into the chamber.  To such a soul the Holy Spirit speaks: ‘Adorn your chamber, O Zion and receive Christ the King’” (S 32.20).   

 

When I came to this country, one of the first words I learned was “housekeeping”.  No one had to explain its meaning to me.  Well, Aelred is going to give us his final lessons for “soul-keeping”.  “Now let us see how we ought to adorn this chamber.  This chamber, as we have said is the affectus, and it has three parts—floor, walls, and roof.  . . . These three kinds of affectio are like the three parts of our interior chamber that we must adorn.  

 

And there are three [topics for] consideration which, doubtlessly, will adorn your chamber if they are rooted and established in our heart” (S 32.21).  “Our affectus, in so far as it attaches itself to things that bring delight, ought to be adorned with the consideration of divine charity” (S 32.22).  “Again, in so far as the affectus attaches itself to what is useful it is to be adorned with the consideration of the divine promises” (S 32.23).   “Again, in so far as our affectus attaches itself to what is right, it must be adorned with the consideration of the human condition” (S 32.24).

 

Aelred does not ask us to stop thinking.  Like a wise mother, he knows that the remedy for “our attachment” to junk food is not a perpetual fast, but tasty and nourishing food.   Every time our mind wanders we are to go back to Christ; “if our affectus attaches itself to our Redeemer delightfully, to our Remunerator fervently and to our Creator and Lord humbly, then the chamber is adorned” (S 32.25).   Now our mind and are our heart are unified; our house is clean and pacified. Now it is ready!  “What embraces will be there, what kisses?” (S 32.27).