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St. Aelred (1110-1167)
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St. Aelred was a Cistercian, a Trappist as Cistercians are known today. St. Bernard of Clairvaux was one of the best-known Cistercians. In fact, he inspired St. Aelred's first book on love and caused the founding of Rievaulx, the monastery (abbey) St. Aelred served for 20 years as abbot.Thomas Merton is perhaps the best-known of modern world Trappist. Like Father Merton, Abbot Aelred was a writer -- in many spiritually-related fields. His most popular works, those which gained him a place in late patristic literature, are two treatises on love and friendship: The Mirror of Love (often called Mirror of Charity) and Spiritual Friendship. Both are treasure houses.
Spiritual Friendship is modeled after Cicero's famous essay, On Friendship, which St. Aelred, in a light and conversational style Christianized into a delightful work on true friendship.
In Mirror of Love the reader will find sublime spiritual heights and delightfully human descriptions of what a true friend is.
A model of holiness, he reveals a glimpse of his holiness in some prayers gleaned from his works. We eagerly await translations of his sermons being prepared by Cistercian monks now.
O Good Jesus, let your voice sound in my ears so that my heart and mind and inmost soul may learn of your love, and the very depths of my heart be joined to you who are my greatest delight and joy.
What is the love I desire, O my God? What is this wonderful delight in my soul? May I call love the heart's own sense of taste since it enables us to feel your sweetness? May we call love the eye through which we can see that You are good? When we love, O God, we join ourselves to you because you are love. Love is your rich banquet which deeply satisfies us when we eat at your table and drink deeply from you. In your love we can forget ourselves and lose ourselves only to find ourselves in you. I beg you, Lord, let even a touch of this delight penetrate my soul. It is my heart's desire to seek you day by day by loving you.
St. Aelred lived a hundred years before St. Thomas Aquinas. He was not afflicted with all the hangups of Thomasian dualism, but was unfortunately tinted by St. Augustine's "anti-sex, anti-body" doctrines. Aelred's struggle to express the wonders of love and heed Augustine's nonsense makes him a fellow traveler with millions of gays and lesbians today who want to live in love because they are human. St. Aelred, though not a perfect role model of "coming out" deserves to be our patron because of the holiness of his life in the struggle to love as "Jesus loved the beloved disciple."
Known as a Christocentric twelfth-century monastic humanist, "his most famous work, On Spiritual Friendship, which explores the relation between spiritual and human friendship in a monastic context, reveals his own conscious homosexual orientation and gives love between persons of the same gender its most profound expression in Christian theology." -- Dictionary of the Middle Ages,Vol. 4, American Council of Learned Societies
