By Father John Bayer, O. Cist.
Special to The Texas Catholic
Imagine being born in 1182, at a time when you could happily spend your whole life in the same community. But while you are a child, a shipwreck takes away the money your father had intended to be your dowry, and so, while you are at the age of 12 your parents decide, at least for the moment, to send you away to a convent for an education. There’s no way to phone home, and instead of being with your family and friends, you have to follow the strict schedule of some nuns. As a child, you don’t want to become a nun, and instead you care a lot about what you look like and about impressing potential suitors. After all, until that shipwreck took your dowry, you were hoping to get married relatively soon.
Well, that might be a strange set of circumstances to imagine, but it was basically the reality of St. Lutgarde, the Cistercian nun whose feast we celebrate on June 16. As a young woman, she felt trapped, and understandably so. And yet, her story doesn’t end in bitterness. So, what happened?
Several years later, when she was 20, St. Lutgarde had an experience of Christ that changed her forever. One day, as she was speaking with a boy who was trying to impress her, she suddenly sensed Jesus in herself. Somehow, Jesus revealed to her the spear-wound in his side and gave her an insight into his love, into his readiness to sacrifice for her and everyone else. And he encouraged her to abandon her attachment to the pleasures of the world — to all the natural things she thought would make her happy, like being attractive or getting married. Instead, he encouraged her to give herself entirely to his own way of loving. According to her biographer, she was so moved that she suddenly turned to the potential suitor and told him, “Get away from me … I already belong to another Lover.”
One way to describe what happened to St. Lutgarde is that she fell in love with Love, and in that Love she found the freedom to detach from everything that was inessential. Life suddenly became simple. Everything became about her romance with God.
It is important to emphasize that St. Lutgarde did not fall in love with Love in just any sense of the word love. She did not fall in love with the sentimentalism of a romantic comedy, or with the emotional experience of infatuation over a crush, or with self-indulgent fantasies about being marooned on a tropical island with a supermodel. She fell in love with the infinitely generous force that created the world. She fell in love with the unconquerable heart that overcomes every obstacle to bring life to others — she fell in love with the Sacred Heart of God himself.
Imagine a river gently overflowing its banks and cleaning every street and building, carefully carrying away every piece of trash, watering every plant, quenching the thirst of every creature, and giving every child a place to play. She fell in love with a force like that, with the river that purifies and brings life to the whole world.
Her vocation continued to develop as she grew ever closer to Jesus’ heart. Like lovers making great sacrifices to be together, her desire to make sacrifices for the sake of love grew ever more ardent. In fact, when she suffered blindness for the last eleven years of her life, she came to see her handicap as a gift, because it helped her to focus even more on her intercession for others in union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
We are all called to the same kind of growth. Vocations are not one-off moments — like the day of a wedding or an ordination. Vocations are lifelong relationships of growth in love. No matter where we are in life, no matter what success or failure we think we have experienced, it is possible, right now, to surrender to the loving movements of the Sacred Heart. St. Lutgarde could peacefully accept even the loss of her eyesight, along with all the monkish joys of reading, because for her everything could, in the end, be caught up into the river of love.
St. Lutgarde’s life is a lesson in the deep joy of continual detachment. When she was young, she surrendered her natural desires to be beautiful and find a husband when she became a nun. She didn’t cling to her losses. She detached and went with the flow of love. Similarly, when she was old, she surrendered even spiritual delights like reading when she became blind. She didn’t cling even to legitimate comforts and noble activities. She let go and discovered God in docility. Thankfully, Jesus had taught her early in her vocation that what really matters for happiness is sharing in his Sacred Heart — in learning to love as he loves.
Father John Bayer, O. Cist., is a monk at Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey in Irving.
Cutline for featured image: A statue depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus is seen at Sacred Heart Church in the North End neighborhood of Boston April 22. On May 15, Archbishop Paul D. Etienne of Seattle issued a pastoral letter on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, titled “Meek and Humble of Heart.” (OSV News photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
