THE PERFUME OF COMPASSION

The pure pleasure of reading Sr Emmanuelle Billoteau's meditation on Bernard of Clairvaux' interpreting the Song of Songs made me translate it for you. 

In his Sermons on the Song of Songs, St Bernard (1090-1153) describes three perfumes of the “Bride”, which remind us of the “fragrance of Christ” (II Cor. 2:15) which we are all called to spread where we live.

In the Song of Songs, i.e. the song par excellence, according to Origen, perfumes are often mentioned: that of the (male) Beloved, identified by Jewish and Christian tradition as God or as Christ (SS 1:3); that of the (female) Beloved, understood as the type of Israel, of the Church, or of the individual soul (SS 1:12).

            St Bernard (12^th century) identifies three kinds of perfume relating to the “Bride”. “The first is that of contrition, which covers a multitude of sins . . . the second is that of fervour which contains a multitude of blessings”. As for the third, it is the “perfume of compassion”. While the first two touch our relation to God, the third perfume includes the other. In this, Bernard is faithful to the dynamic of the Song: the latter does speak of an eminently personal and intense relation to God, but never conceives that relation as intimist or exclusive, without the presence of a third party and of an openness to the universal – for instance, to those who do not share the same faith.

           

Contrition, fervour and compassion

The first of the perfumes, then, relates to sins, to our lack of love. “The soul,” says our author,  “gathers them, piles them and grinds them in the mortar of its conscience . . .then it burns them, as it were, in the fire of repentance . . . in the vessel of its flaming heart.” In other words, even our failures can be integrated into the offering of ourselves that we make to God.

            The second perfume is made up of nobler essences. “They are the blessings which God grants to the human race.” These will be “crushed” and “ground . . . in the mortar of the heart by the pestle of frequent meditation, and cooked all together on the fire of a holy longing.”  While God does not despise a broken and a contrite heart (Ps 51:19), he is honoured by the sacrifice of our praise (Ps 50:23).

            Nevertheless, for St Bernard the perfume most precious in God’s eyes is that of compassion. “It is made up of the indigence of the poor, the anguish of the oppressed, the distress of the afflicted, the faults of sinners, and in sum of all the pains of the unhappy, whoever they are, even our enemies.” He points out that while the essences of which it is composed may be “contemptible”, the resulting perfume “overgoes all scents”. It is a perfume that everyone may exude in one way or another: directly through concrete actions on a larger or a smaller scale; indirectly through prayer.

A spiritual life

           So let us not hesitate to practice patience towards those close to us, to comfort those who cross our path, to practice mercy, to show generosity . . . In all of this, what we are dealing with is a spiritual life, i.e. a life moved by the Holy Spirit who is “the love of God poured out in our hearts” (Rom. 5:5). Bernard shows us Biblical characters who have exuded this last perfume: Paul saying “Who is weak, and I am not weak?” (II Cor. 11:29); Job who says that he has been “eyes to the blind and feet to the lame” (Job 29:15-17); Joseph who forgave his brothers (Gen. 43:30); David sparing Saul who had tried to kill him (I Sam. 24) and weeping at his death (II Sam. 1:17-27) . . .

            Bernard, then, suggests to us a way of life based on the Scriptures, read not according to the letter but according to the spirit. Thus he initiates us into a fragrant reading which grows with time, with acquired familiarity, and with the deepening of conversion’s way.

A GOOD MAN FROM GASCONY

On the feast of St Vincent de Paul, I am happy to reproduce (with thanks) this little introduction to the man and his work from St Matthias, Somerset, N.J. I know few saints with more engaging faces. This portrait is by Simon François of Tours. 

The deathbed confession of a dying servant opened Vincent's eyes to the crying spiritual needs of the peasantry of France. This seems to have been a crucial moment in the life of the man from a small farm in Gascony, France, who had become a priest with little more ambition than to have a comfortable life. 

It was the Countess de Gondi (whose servant he had helped) who persuaded her husband to endow and support a group of able and zealous missionaries who would work among poor tenant farmers and country people in general. Vincent was too humble to accept leadership at first, but after working for some time in Paris among imprisoned galley-slaves, he returned to be the leader of what is now known as the Congregation of the Mission, or the Vincentians. These priests, with vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability, were to devote themselves entirely to the people in smaller towns and villages. 

Later, Vincent established confraternities of charity for the spiritual and physical relief of the poor and sick of each parish. From these, with the help of Saint Louise de Marillac, came the Daughters of Charity, "whose convent is the sickroom, whose chapel is the parish church, whose cloister is the streets of the city." He organized the rich women of Paris to collect funds for his missionary projects, founded several hospitals, collected relief funds for the victims of war, and ransomed over 1,200 galley slaves from North Africa. He was zealous in conducting retreats for clergy at a time when there was great laxity, abuse, and ignorance among them. He was a pioneer in clerical training and was instrumental in establishing seminaries. 

Most remarkably, Vincent was by temperament a very irascible person-even his friends admitted it. He said that except for the grace of God he would have been "hard and repulsive, rough and cross." But he became a tender and affectionate man, very sensitive to the needs of others. 

Pope Leo XIII made him the patron of all charitable societies. Outstanding among these, of course, is the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, founded in 1833 by his admirer Blessed Frédéric Ozanam. 

THE BEAUTY OF HOLINESS

I came upon this poem again (in my post of 20 October 2014), by the matchless Emily Dickinson, and could not resist putting it up here. It has everything: mystery, beauty, and faith. We sometimes tend to see "the beauty of holiness" as "the holiness of beauty": let this small gem, where the two are in exact and perfect suspension, be a lesson to us. 

The feet of people walking home

With gayer sandals go ---

The Crocus --- till she rises,

The Vassal of the Snow —

The lips at Hallelujah!​        

Long years of practice bore,

Till bye and bye these Bargemen

Walked singing on the shore.

  

Pearls are the Diver’s farthings

Extorted from the Sea ---​        

Pinions --- the Seraph’s wagon

Pedestrian --- once, as we —

Night is the morning’s Canvas

Larceny –- legacy ---

Death, but our rapt attention​        

To Immortality.

  

My figures fail to tell me

How far the Village lies ---

Whose peasants are the Angels ---

Whose Cantons dot the skies ---​        

My Classics veil their faces ---

My Faith that Dark adores ---

Which from its solemn abbeys

Such resurrection pours.

THE LONG HARD SLOG

It happens. You decided to take your faith more seriously. You pray more – much more. You read, you write, and you try to live closer to God. From all you have read, you suppose that this will strip away a lot of inessentials, leaving your soul leaner and in better training for wherever you are going.

Yet in fact you realise that no such thing seems to be happening. You feel if anything clumsier, heavier, more chaotic, more earthbound, Your prayers begin to sound repetitive to your own ears – so how, you wonder, must they sound to God’s? It’s all exceedingly frustrating.

Opening, more or less at random, my copy of the Carthusian text The Wound of Love, I saw that the anonymous monk writing this knew what I meant. “The life of most Charterhouses is a dull sort of grey,” he wrote. There may be treasures of interior life behind these disappointing exteriors, but they are often buried in unattractive dress. And then he goes on to say, “How could it be otherwise, face to face with the Absolute? Is this not the price of such dangerous proximity to fire? For it highlights all our faults, all our roughness of character and all the petty misery which in other circumstances would be swallowed up in the surrounding sea of trivialities. To wish to come face to face with God is deliberately to consent to expose all our faults and pettiness to the hard light of day. These first become apparent to others, and then, as we become enlightened, to ourselves.“

I found this both enlightening and cheering. We in the world are not committed to as absolute a life, and an opening, as Carthusians; but perhaps the movement he describes is equally true, on another scale, for us. Perhaps it is precisely the turning more seriously to our faith and its Centre, the moving closer to the Light, that shows up our shadows and general muckiness more clearly – in our case, perhaps first to ourselves and only later (one fears) to others? It is bad logic and bad theology to invert a proposition, yet there is the cheering possibility that the frustration is, at bottom, a good sign. In one sense, only a sign that the long hard slog is settling in; but in another, an encouraging wink from Don Camillo’s Friend on the Cross.