Today we celebrate the Memorial of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, an abbot and a Doctor of the Church. He was a Doctor of the Church because of his spirituality and his defense of the teachings of the Church.

Bernard was born in 1090 to a French noble family. And if you were born into nobility during that time, your life was pretty much set. His parents were incredibly faithful and were devout Catholics. Because of that, they instilled that faith into Bernard as he was growing up.

Bernard’s life changed when he experienced a devastating tragedy at the age of 19 – the death of his mother. It could be argued that his mother’s death totally changed Bernard’s perspective on life. It would for anybody at that age. It made him turn to a deeper relationship with God, made that a focus and a priority in his life. And thank God that it did because it gave the Church an incredible witness to faith in Jesus and how a relationship with God can transform our hearts. His experience with the Lord changed his perspective on who God is, how He loves us, and how He calls us to follow Him.

Bernard would later become a reformer of the monastic way of life. In the years that followed his mother’s death, he would join the Cistercian Order. Very quickly in his time as a Cistercian, he recognized how the Order was getting away from the Rule of St. Benedict. They were becoming more secularized and began to participate in various activities of the secular culture. Bernard wanted to change that and so encouraged his brothers to get back to following the Rule of St. Benedict, getting back to the way of life that was envisioned for their community in the beginning. Bernard would go on to establish nearly 70 monasteries faithful to that Rule, the last of which being at Clairvaux, representing the culmination of his monastic career.

In his spiritual writings, St. Bernard talked about the importance for us of loving God and striving to love God with all our hearts. In one of his writings, he shared:

“Admit that God deserves to be loved very much, boundlessly, because He loved us first; He infinite and we nothing,  loved us, miserable sinners, with a love so great and so free. This is why I said at the beginning that the measure of our love to God is to love immeasurably. For since our love is toward God, who is infinite and immeasurable, how can we bound or limit the love we owe Him? Besides, our love is not a gift but a debt. And since it is the Godhead who loves us, himself boundless, eternal, supreme love, of whose greatness there is no end, and His wisdom is infinite, whose peace passes all understanding; since it is He who loves us, I say, can we think of repaying Him grudgingly?”

God deserves all our love. Let’s reflect on that today: are we loving God immeasurably, a God who immeasurably loves us? Today let’s ask St. Bernard to pray that our hearts will continue to be changed so that we can love God all the more.

Image: Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Engraving. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Wikimedia Commons. Made available through the Wellcome Trust.