Vigils Reading – St Aelred

AELRED’S LAST DAYS

From “The Life of Aelred of Rievaulx” by Walter Daniel6

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As he lay in bed he talked constantly in gasps, and day by day his body got

feebler, until at last on 3 January he ordered all the monks to be summoned to

him, and made them this allocution:

‘Often I have begged your permission when I had to cross the sea, or it

was my duty to hasten to some distant region, or I had occasion to seek the

king’s court; and now by your leave and with the help of your prayers I go hence,

from exile to the fatherland, from darkness to light, from this evil world to God;

for the time has come when he, who redeemed me of himself without me, and

deigned by his grace to bind me more closely to himself in the bonds of a better

life among you, will take me to himself… We have a good Lord and now it

pleases my soul to see his face…

’

The most pious father added: ‘I have lived with a good conscience among

you, for as I lie here, as you see, at the point of death, my soul calls God to

witness that, since I received this habit of religion, the malice, detraction or

quarrel of no man has ever kindled any feeling in me against him which has

been strong enough to last the day in the domicile of my heart… By the grace of

Christ I have commanded my spirit that no disturbance to the patience of my

mind should survive the setting of the sun.’ At these words we all wept… and

most of all when he, weeping, said to us, ‘God who knows all things knows that

I love you all as myself, and, as earnestly as a mother after her sons…

To wait by his bedside during those days was, I confess, an awe-inspiring

experience… He would say…

‘Hasten for the love of Christ, hasten.’ When I said

to him ‘What, lord?’ he stretched out his hands, as to heaven, and fixing his eyes

like lamps of fire upon the cross which was held there before his face, said,

‘Release me, let me go free to him, whom I see before me, the King of Glory.

Why do you linger?… Hasten, for the love of Christ, hasten’

… In all my life I

have never been so stricken to the heart as I was by those words, so often

repeated, so awfully uttered, by such a man at such an hour, by a good man at

the point of death. And these words kept proceeding from his mouth through

three whole days…

I sat with him on that <last> day and…said to him in a low voice, so that

nobody would notice us, ‘Lord, gaze on the cross; let your eye be where your

heart is.’ And immediately raising his eyelids and turning his pupils to the

figure of truth depicted on the wood, he said to him who suffered death for us

upon the tree, ‘You are my God and my Lord, You are my refuge and my Saviour.

You are my glory and my hope for evermore. Into your hands I commend my

spirit.’ He uttered these words clearly as they are written, although for two days

he had not spoken so many words, nor afterwards did he speak three words

together… He died about the fourth watch of the night before the Ides of

January, in the year of the Incarnation one thousand and sixty-six… the fifty-

seventh year of his life…

Whenever I think of him then, I am still overcome by joy and wonder at

the gracious recollection… My God! He did not die ‘in darkness, as those that

have been long dead,’ not so, Lord, but in your light, for in his light we see your

light.

 

6 Daniel, Walter. The Life of Aelred of Rievaulx. CF 57. Trans. F.M. Powicke. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications,

1994. 133-135, 138-139.13