“If today you hear his voice, harden
not your hearts.” Br. Guerric, it may seem a little odd to preface this solemn
moment of your vows with this holy warning, but it may be one of the most
important words from “a father who loves you,” namely, St. Benedict. Hardness
of heart is the main obstacle to receiving God’s mercy, which you have just
requested. It refuses to admit that it is wrong or needs God. So, if mercy is
your goal, you have come to the right place, for the Cistercian life is
precisely a remedy for hardness of heart.
But
how does Cistercian life soften up the hardness of our hearts? In short, our
Fathers designed it to demolish self-will. Who doesn’t want to sleep in
whenever he wants? Who doesn’t want the freedom to ignore church bells? Who
doesn’t want to be his own man rather than live under a rule and an abbot? In
other words, who doesn’t want to do it his own way? But in the Cistercian life, Jesus shows us the great good of doing it the Father’s way. That means
conversion of heart: giving up our own will and obeying the will of another;
giving ourselves to the discipline of psalmody, silence, solitude, and the
common life; giving up a search for greener pastures elsewhere. This conversion
of heart is the channel through which the mercy of God comes to us. But not
only to us, for Jesus wants us to be a channel through which he can pour out
his mercy on the entire world. That is our mission: to be a channel of mercy
for the whole world. It is a difficult task.
But
there is another way the Cistercian life softens our hardness of heart: by the
constant challenges we encounter living with Jesus and a group of men with such
diverse backgrounds. Jesus is the first to challenge us, especially when the
truth is at stake. Think of him calling out Thomas for his hardness of heart:
“Put your finger here and see my hands and bring your hand and put it into my
side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” But these challenges will also
come to us from our brothers, whether they mean to or not. Their challenges may
cause compunction or annoyance or whatever, but they often reveal our stiff
necks and hardness of heart or at least our impatience. But there is no use
complaining about these brothers because Jesus has handpicked the whole lot of
them. They are perfectly suited to sprinkle a little more self-knowledge upon
us.
Finally,
Jesus removes our hardness of heart by teaching us how to speak in tongues. No,
I don’t mean the charismatic tongues that Paul wrote about to the Corinthians,
but the different tongues of the psalmists that Jesus and the community take up
daily at the divine office, that is, the tongues of heartfelt petitions, of
laments, of praise, of thanksgiving—the tongues of every human emotion and
every human need which Jesus made his own when he assumed our human nature.
These tongues give us an entry into Jesus’ prayer and union with his Father,
and they soften our hearts so that we, too, can be children of our heavenly Father.
Of course, no one can utter these
tongues of the Psalms in union with Jesus, without the help of the Holy Spirit.
It is the Holy Spirit who in the Psalms cries out, “Abba, Father!” It is the
Spirit who softens our hearts by luring us into the desert where the Trinity
can speak to us. The anointing of the Spirit is sweetness and perfumed oil. It
is an invitation to the bridal chamber. It is fire, melting the frozen hardness
of past grievances. The Spirit of the Lord does all this in the Cistercian life
if we do not harden our hearts. You have been handpicked by Jesus to follow in
this way, and with the help of the Holy Spirit, as the desert fathers use to
say, you can become all fire—well, at least a controlled fire! Your brothers
are here to help you.
A selection of photographs by Brother Brian. Dom Vincent's exhortation to Brother Guerric at his Simple Profession, Sunday Chapter, 16 April 2023.
