Vigils Reading – St Lutgard

A reading from Thomas Merton on

THE MYSTICISM OF ST LUTGARDE3

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In the month of June, when the sun burns high in the bright firmament

and when Cistercian monks, like all other farmers, hitch up their teams and go

out to gather in the wheat, St Lutgarde’s Day comes around in the Liturgical

cycle. It is not a universal feast, celebrated by the whole Church. It belongs only

to two Belgian dioceses and to the saint’s own Order – the Cistercians. Yet she is

a saint whose spirit is as ardent and colorful as the June weather and as bright as

the tiger lilies that enliven the fields and roadsides of America in the month in

which we celebrate her memory. And it is especially fitting that her feast should

occur in the month of the Sacred Heart. St Lutgarde was one of the great

precursors of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The charm of St Lutgarde is heightened by a certain earthy simplicity

which has been preserved for us unspoiled in the pages of her medieval

biography. She was a great penitent, but she was anything but a fragile wraith of

a person. Lutgarde, for all her ardent and ethereal mysticism, remained always

a living human being of flesh and bone. When she was a young girl in the world

she seems to have been remarkably attractive, and we can imagine her as

something more than merely pretty. She must have had one of those

marvelously proportioned Flemish faces, full of a mature and serious beauty,

which we find in the paintings of the great Flemish masters of a later day then

hers.

In any case, her entrance into the mystical life was not without an element

of excitement and romance. She was faced with no mere abstract choice

between heavenly and earthly love: it was not the mere solution of a conflict of

ideals which brought her eventually to the cloister. She was carried into the

arms of Christ by circumstances that shook her to the depths of her sensitive

being.

The life of St Lutgarde introduces us to a mysticism that is definitely

extraordinary. This is not the mysticism which theologians claim to be a

“normal” development of the Christian life of grace and the infused virtues and

the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Here we are in the presence of visions, ecstasies,

stigmata, prophecies, miracles. St Lutgarde was a “mystic” in the popular sense

of that term, and her life was certainly colorful and extraordinary enough to

make her popular with Catholics of our own time, too. Of course, medieval

saints’ lives abound in strange phenomena, and we are inclined to be a little

suspicious of the facile enthusiasm with which so many pious writers of those

days set down the deeds of their heroes as “miracles.” But the biographer of St

Lutgarde, though occasionally suffering from the naivete common in his age, is

as reliable as anyone in the thirteenth century.

It cannot be too much stressed that in St Lutgarde, as in all the early

Cistercians, the love that embraces penance and hardship for the sake of Christ

is never merely negative, never descends to mere rigid formalism, never

concentrates on mere exterior observance of fasts and other penitential rigors.

The fire of love that consumed the heart of St Lutgarde was something vital and

positive and its flames burned not only to destroy but to rejuvenate and

transform.

3 What Are These Wounds, Milwaukee, 1950, pp vii-ix.7