When I think of Moses I dwell particularly on his leading
Israel through the desert wilderness on the way to the promised land. It was our Father Saint Robert who led the
hermits of Colan from their solitude there even deeper into the wilderness
forest of Molesme with the two “tablets” of the Rule of Saint Benedict and the
Gospel as their guide. When this was no longer a place of solitude and fervent
monastic life, he once again took up those tablets and led a monastic Israel to
the inhospitable wilderness, “the desert place called Citeaux” there to found
the first house of our Order. And, like Moses, Robert was denied the joy of
really entering into the Promised Land that Citeaux would become. He was called
back by the Pope to his original monastery of Molesme after only about eighteen
months at the New Monastery. We today
still hold tenaciously to Robert's ideal of the monastery set in the wilderness
in imitation of Our Lord's own predilection for deserts, mountain tops and
wilderness as places of prayer, where
without the distractions of the
city, one can come to better know
oneself and God in Christ, God who allures us into the desert there to speak to our hearts personally and
communally through the Holy Spirit.
Words from the Letter to the Hebrews were used to describe Saint
Alberic in the early 12th century narrative of the founding of the
Order, the Exordium Parvum. In Hebrews 11:36 our ancestors in the faith
are described as those who “endured mockery, scourging, even chains and
imprisonment.” Likewise Alberic is
described in chapter 9 of the Exordium
as “a learned man, that is to say, well versed in things divine and human, a
lover of the Rule and of the brethren, who had for a long time been carrying
out the office of prior in the church of Molesme...and who had striven and
labored much and long so that the brethren could pass from Molesme to this
place (of Citeaux); and who for the sake of this affair, had to endure many
insults, imprisonment, and stripes.”
We, who are so inspired by the purity of heart of our founders, can
easily forget how much shock, scandal and anger the decision of Abbot Robert,
Prior Alberic and 20 other monks to leave Molesme must have caused. This probably led to Alberic's
suffering so many insults and even violence from the abandoned monks of
Molesme. The decision to found Citeaux
took real courage and tremendous faith in the face of hostility.
Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Mark made me think of the one
authentic letter of Saint Stephen Harding in our possession. There in Chapter 10 Jesus speaks
lovingly to his disciples as his “sons,” his own children and
encourages them to the renounce earthly riches and even the the joys of home and family for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven with the
promise of a new kind of wealth in God and in human relationships that goes
beyond anything they have known - a hundred-fold increase.
A few years before his death in 1133. Stephen wrote to Abbot
Thurstan and the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne in England which
he had entered as a boy. While still a young monk, Stephen became discouraged
and left. He writes, “Fear Christ, but with love; and love him, but with fear.” Stephen
says that he who ran off encountered
“the riches of God's mercy,” so that he “the empty vessel” who had
left the monastery of Sherborne was himself filled by “the living
fountain” that is the Lord, for at
his death Stephen was head of an Order with 40 monasteries.
We see here the fulfillment of the Lord's promise in Mark’s
Gospel of a hundred times more brothers and sisters and homes. Stephen concludes, “I exhort your love
to strive to make the good repute you have... the occasion for further progress
in virtues, so that, progressing from what is good to what is better and
cleaving firmly to monastic observance, you may never cease to observe chastity
and humility, submitting yourselves to the zealous practice of frugality
together with charity even unto death that you may see the God of gods. Amen.”
