Daily Reading for August 20 • Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, 1153

Human love for God progresses through four stages, Bernard says. We begin by loving ourselves only, a sterile love that produces nothing and leads nowhere. But in time we notice that we cannot survive alone and that God graciously meets our needs. We then begin to love God, but only because of what God does for us. This is the second stage of love. Gradually, as we experience God’s love, our love is purified and expanded so that we are moved to love God for God’s own sake, not merely for the benefits he bestows upon us. This is the third stage of love, but one final stage remains: the love of ourselves—as God loves us and for God’s sake. We grow inebriated with divine love and forget ourselves, becoming like broken dishes, rushing toward God, clinging to him, becoming one with him in spirit. “To lose yourself, as if you no longer existed, to cease completely to experience yourself, to reduce yourself to nothing is not a human sentiment but a divine experience,” Bernard writes. In this life, we experience this final stage of love only fleetingly, if at all. In one of his sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard speaks of “a sudden momentary blaze of glory, so that a great flame of love is enkindled in the soul.”

This, of course, is the language of mysticism. . . . For Bernard, the human soul retains its identity and becomes all the more alive. Others, like Gregory of Nyssa, speak of moving into a darkness where God discloses himself. Bernard, however, writes of gazing upon God in the luminous face of Christ. Bernard’s mystical experience is an intense relationship of love, preceded by much prayer and longing; it is the culmination of a long, plodding ascent. When the moment passes, it leaves one craving more. It is a foretaste of heaven.

From God Seekers: Twenty Centuries of Christian Spiritualities by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2008).