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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260616
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SUMMARY:Vigils Reading - St Lutgard
DESCRIPTION:A reading from Thomas Merton on \nTHE MYSTICISM OF ST LUTGARDE3 \n◊◊◊ \nIn the month of June\, when the sun burns high in the bright firmament \nand when Cistercian monks\, like all other farmers\, hitch up their teams and go \nout to gather in the wheat\, St Lutgarde’s Day comes around in the Liturgical \ncycle. It is not a universal feast\, celebrated by the whole Church. It belongs only \nto two Belgian dioceses and to the saint’s own Order – the Cistercians. Yet she is \na saint whose spirit is as ardent and colorful as the June weather and as bright as \nthe tiger lilies that enliven the fields and roadsides of America in the month in \nwhich we celebrate her memory. And it is especially fitting that her feast should \noccur in the month of the Sacred Heart. St Lutgarde was one of the great \nprecursors of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. \nThe charm of St Lutgarde is heightened by a certain earthy simplicity \nwhich has been preserved for us unspoiled in the pages of her medieval \nbiography. She was a great penitent\, but she was anything but a fragile wraith of \na person. Lutgarde\, for all her ardent and ethereal mysticism\, remained always \na living human being of flesh and bone. When she was a young girl in the world \nshe seems to have been remarkably attractive\, and we can imagine her as \nsomething more than merely pretty. She must have had one of those \nmarvelously proportioned Flemish faces\, full of a mature and serious beauty\, \nwhich we find in the paintings of the great Flemish masters of a later day then \nhers. \nIn any case\, her entrance into the mystical life was not without an element \nof excitement and romance. She was faced with no mere abstract choice \nbetween heavenly and earthly love: it was not the mere solution of a conflict of \nideals which brought her eventually to the cloister. She was carried into the \narms of Christ by circumstances that shook her to the depths of her sensitive \nbeing. \nThe life of St Lutgarde introduces us to a mysticism that is definitely \nextraordinary. This is not the mysticism which theologians claim to be a \n“normal” development of the Christian life of grace and the infused virtues and \nthe Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Here we are in the presence of visions\, ecstasies\, \nstigmata\, prophecies\, miracles. St Lutgarde was a “mystic” in the popular sense \nof that term\, and her life was certainly colorful and extraordinary enough to \nmake her popular with Catholics of our own time\, too. Of course\, medieval \nsaints’ lives abound in strange phenomena\, and we are inclined to be a little \nsuspicious of the facile enthusiasm with which so many pious writers of those \ndays set down the deeds of their heroes as “miracles.” But the biographer of St \nLutgarde\, though occasionally suffering from the naivete common in his age\, is \nas reliable as anyone in the thirteenth century. \nIt cannot be too much stressed that in St Lutgarde\, as in all the early \nCistercians\, the love that embraces penance and hardship for the sake of Christ \nis never merely negative\, never descends to mere rigid formalism\, never \nconcentrates on mere exterior observance of fasts and other penitential rigors. \nThe fire of love that consumed the heart of St Lutgarde was something vital and \npositive and its flames burned not only to destroy but to rejuvenate and \ntransform. \n3 What Are These Wounds\, Milwaukee\, 1950\, pp vii-ix.7 \n 
URL:https://laycisterciansofgethsemani.org/event/vigils-reading-st-lutgard/
CATEGORIES:Vigils Readings
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