Today is the feast of St. Bruno, the founder of Chartreux.
The great author, Claudel, expresses this wish: "O that I might be a sower of solitude!"
He hopes that, by reading his book, the public may be drawn to recollection, interior silence and prayer.
But if such is the wish of the laity, what ought not my desire be? Ought I not desire that my presence and my words might incline my neighbors, without their being aware of it, to a more intense recollection; to a life more steeped in God?
There are persons of all kinds in Religious Communities. Some individuals radiate God around them scarcely at all, surely not that they are bad, or grossly unfaithful religious, but there is lacking in them a certain something which reveals God and which testifies to a life of assiduous prayer and absolute renunciation.
On the contrary, there are some persons. . . and God grant that they may be many. . . who are so imbued with a spirit of recollection, so magnetic through a certain inner, and sometimes very striking, radiance of character that they issue to others a silent invitation to aspire to holiness, to be no longer souls of earth, but souls whose normal ambition is heaven. Conversatio in coelis est.
I must do nothing for show, of course, or through a desire of artificially impressing my companions; for the sham would soon be exploded. But I will put forth a generous effort to grow more like the religious that I ought to be. Then even without conscious effort I will radiate God. Fill the lamp, God will light it.
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Adapted from Meditations for Religious
by Father Raoul Plus, S.J. (© 1939, Frederick Pustet Co.)
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