+ Bruno was born in 1030 in Cologne, Germany. He was educated in Paris and
Rheims, France and ordained to the priesthood around 1055. He taught theology
and one of his students later became Pope Blessed Urban II. Bruno presided over
the cathedral school at Rheims from 1057 to 1075. He criticized the worldliness
he saw in his fellow clergy. He opposed Manasses, Archbishop of Rheims, because
of his laxity and mismanagement and he became chancellor of the archdiocese.
Then following a vision, he received of a secluded hermitage where he could
spend his life becoming closer to God, he retired to a mountain near Chartreuse
in Dauphiny in 1084 and with the help of St. Hugh of Grenoble, he founded what
became the first house of the Carthusian
Order. He and his brothers supported themselves as manuscript copyists.
Bruno became an assistant to
Pope Urban II in 1090, and supported his efforts at reform. Retiring from
public life, he and his companions built a hermitage at Torre, where, in 1095,
the monastery of St. Stephen was built. Bruno combined in the religious life
the eremitical and the cenobitic; his learning is apparent from his scriptural
commentaries. He died in 1101 of natural causes and is buried in the Church of
St. Stephen.
In
the first reading today, we see the life of the monk reflected as a continual
search for the fuller and deeper meaning of the Word of God, and knowledge of
him who is the very Word of Life. St. Paul encourages the Philippians, all
monks and us to consider as rubbish all
that is not about discovering who Jesus is and how to have a full and mature
relationship with him!
In the gospel passage Jesus
tells those who are doing so that it will not be easy, but that the effort will
be greatly rewarded – and the joy that comes from full knowledge will be beyond
anything imaginable.
May we, like the monks of old,
spend a great deal of time, directly and indirectly, seeking God and reveling
in each and every little thing we find out about him! Let it make a big
difference in the smallest details of our lives!
In fact, in our own day, a
revived practice of generic MINDFULNESS is the perfect FIRST STEP in the search
for God, actually, it is the secret of the monks of millennia revealed: the
ONLY PLACE GOD CAN POSSIBLY BE FOUND IS IN THE PRESENT MOMENT: he cannot be
found anywhere else at all. Therefore, to find God is to seek him in the
present moment: and where God the Father is, so is the Son and so is there generated
Spirit. This is the God we worship, adore, honor, bless, pray to, chat with,
plead with, thank, and rest with: and he is always in the PRESENT MOMENT!
Google Mindfulness – Catholic
Mindfulness in Particular – and be on the look out as I am in the beginning
stages in writing a manual for monastic mindfulness – as I, like St. Bruno, the
Founder of the Carthusians, am a hermit, with all the time in the world to JUST
BE with God! You too can be with him and single moment, or succession of
moments that you choose to: JUST BE HERE, NOW! That’s all there is to it!
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