The following article was originally published in January 2004 for Christmas of 2003.
We hope St. Bernard and Christmas Card People continue to touch our hearts today.

It's a lovely bowl, encircled with a band of flowers against a black background. The ruler tells me it measures 12" in diameter, too small a monastery for the hundreds of souls represented in the one-hundred or so cards.

Monastery, you ask? It's Christmas time. Humor me. See, I think Christians are like miniature monasteries, welcoming folks into their lives to help them on their journeys, a la Bernard of Clairvaux, who lived during the twelfth century (1090-1153), and set the world on fire with his vision and leadership of the Cistercian Order, particularly through his devotion to Christ and Mary.

Love is what Bernard was about, and human love is what the troubadours sang about in the village square, but Bernard led them to understand human love as a symbol of the soul's love for Christ, particularly in his writings on the Song of Songs.

In the book, Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality, published by the Paulist Press, we learn that Bernard was born in Fontaines les Dijon in 1090, and had become by his twenty-fifth birthday the abbot of the monastery which he had founded in the valley of Clairvaux near Aube, France four years earlier.

He revived St. Benedict's rule for religious life, and persuaded the monks to abandon their lives of princely comfort more suited to the royal courts of twelfth century France.

Yet, Bernard persuaded, rather than dictated, and became known for his gentleness. The following prayer reveals both his personal experience with God and his conviction that this is possible for anyone who seeks him:

Lord, you are good to the soul which seeks you.
What are you then to the soul which finds?
But this is the most wonderful thing,
that no one can seek you who has not already found you.
You therefore seek to be found so that you may be sought for,
sought so that you may be found.

Could it be, my friends, that amidst the tinsel and toys, the brand-name clothes and the latest piece of jewelry from Tiffany's, millions of little Bernards are telling one another to seek the Lord at this Christmas time?

The entire world is on a Terror Alert. We need, say the Christmas Card People, to switch to a Love Alert before the bombs fall and the time for alerts is no more.

Some Christmas Card People are young married couples with little children to rear, car payments, mortgage and doctor bills to juggle, but they stopped to send their cards.

We need more canonized saints who majored in peanut-butter sandwiches and mutual funds to reassure parents that what they do is as holy as anything managed by John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila.

There are cards from older married couples facing retirement with too little money and too much time, trying to figure out how to spend the evening of their lives well, not knowing how long that evening will be.

Others have lost their spouses, and find the days and weeks and months and years stretching endlessly ahead, with loneliness at every turn.

Some cards are from the sick and the terminally ill, afraid, and not trusting that their sickness is their prayer, pleasing to God, for they are most loved by him, even when prayer itself appears impossible.

Cards are from everyday people, seeking peace and hope in a world filled with war and fear. Modern Bernards of Clairvaux, writing their own verses to The Song of Songs for the Year of Our Lord, 2004.

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