Vigils Reading

A reading from

WILLIAM OF ST THIERRY

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In order that your solitude may not appall you and that you may dwell the

more safely in your cell three guardians have been assigned to you: God, your

conscience and your spiritual father. To God you owe devotion and the entire

gift of yourself; to your conscience the respect which will make you ashamed to

sin in its presence; to your spiritual father the obedience of charity and recourse

in everything.

In addition, to make you grateful to me, I will add a fourth and provide

you with a monitor for as long as you are small and have not learned to keep the

presence of God before your mind.

If you will take my advice, you will choose for yourself a man whose life is

such that it will serve as a model to impress upon your heart, one whom you will

so revere that whenever you think of him you will rise up because of the respect

you feel for him and put yourself in order. Think of him as if he were present and

let the charity you feel for one another act in you to correct all that needs to be

corrected, while your solitude suffers no infringement of its secret. Let him be

present to you whenever you wish and let him come sometimes when you would

have preferred him to stay away. The thought of his holy severity will make it

seem as if he were rebuking you; the thought of his kindness and goodness will

bring you consolation; the purity and sanctity of his life will set you a good

example.

For you will be driven to correct even all your thoughts, as if they were

open to his gaze and visited by his rebuke, when you consider that he is

watching. So, as the Apostle bids: “Keep guard on yourself” with the greatest

care and, in order to have your eyes always on yourself, turn your gaze away

from all else. The eye is a remarkable instrument of the body – if only it could

see itself as it sees other things. Now the inner eye is enabled to do this. If then it

follows the example of the outward eye and neglects itself, giving its attention to

the affairs of others, it will not be able to return to itself, however much it may

wish to do so.

Give your attention to yourself; you yourself constitute abundant matter

for solicitude for yourself. Shut out also from your outward eyes what you have

grown unaccustomed to see, from your inner eyes what you no longer love, since

nothing so easily reasserts its claims as love, especially in younger and more

tender souls.

Make bold also to be wise at times and desire the better gifts. Be yourself a

parable of edification for yourself. You have one cell outwardly, another within

you. The outward cell is the house in which your soul dwells together with your

body; the inner cell is your conscience and in that it is God who should dwell

with your spirit, he who is more interior to you than all else that is within you.

The door of the outward enclosure is a sign of the guarded door within you, so

that as the bodily senses are prevented from wandering abroad by the outward

enclosure, so the inner senses are kept always within their own domain.

 

The Golden Epistle – William of St Thierry – Cistercian Fathers Series #12 – Kalamazoo, MI – 1971 – pg 45.11