Every monk had a guardian he could not see

CLAIRVAUX, France, Lent, twelfth century AD — Saint Bernard of Clairvaux told his monks that they were never on their own. An angel went with each monk wherever the monk went, St. Bernard said. The monk was to remember that and be careful how he behaved. He was to do it wherever he was staying, even by himself in a corner.

Clairvaux was a monastery in France, and St. Bernard was its abbot in the twelfth century AD. His monks lived there with him, and he was in charge of them.

On the weekdays of one Lent, St. Bernard gave the monks sermons explaining one psalm. He gave them whenever his other work and his visitors left him time. The twelfth sermon began from this verse of the psalm: “For He hath given His angels charge over thee: to keep thee in all thy ways.”

St. Bernard told the monks that God had given them to him to look after. Then St. Bernard called his own protection of them “so unsafe, so useless, so weak, so inadequate.” God had not thought an abbot’s care was enough for the monks, St. Bernard said, so God gave them angels as well.

Not even in a corner

From there St. Bernard spoke as though to one monk, calling him “my brother.” The monk was to show respect for his angel in every place, public or private. St. Bernard told the monk that he surely would not dare to do in front of his angel what he feared to do in front of his abbot.

The monk could not see his angel. St. Bernard asked him whether that made him doubt the angel was there. St. Bernard asked what the monk would think if he could hear the angel, or touch him, or smell him. Seeing was not the only way to know that someone was there, St. Bernard said. The monk’s faith told him that his angel was with him.

The angel was not only with the monk, St. Bernard said, but was there to defend him. The angels guarded the monks at God’s command. St. Bernard said the monks owed thanks to the angels as well as to God. “Let us give them love for love,” St. Bernard said.

A stone in the road

St. Bernard said he and the monks were “little ones” with a long and dangerous road ahead of them. He asked why they should be afraid with such powerful guardians protecting them.

In the next verse of the psalm, the angels carry a man in their hands so that he doesn’t hit his foot on a stone. A little one on a road like that needed “a guide, or rather a carrier,” St. Bernard said. When a stone lay in the monk’s way, he said, the angels would take the monk up in their arms and lift him over it. Swimming is easy, St. Bernard added, when someone else is holding your head above the water.

Then St. Bernard told each one of the monks what to do. A monk was to call on his guardian for help every time he felt violent temptation pressing on him. He was to do the same every time bitter trouble was about to swallow him. St. Bernard gave the monk the words to call out to his angel: Domine, salva nos, perimus (Lord, save us, we are perishing). The disciples used those words when they woke Christ in a boat that the waves were swamping.

St. Bernard named illness, bad luck and what he called “spiritual sadness.” He was sure most of the monks had been through troubles like these. The angels often held up a man in that kind of trouble, St. Bernard said. They held him so strongly that he got past the things that had frightened him most, almost without noticing.

The sermon ended with words for all the monks. St. Bernard told them to make the angels of God their “familiar friends.” The monks were to do it by thinking of the angels all the time and by praying. The angels were always near them with comfort and protection, St. Bernard said.

The Church reads a passage from this sermon in her daily prayer on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, October 2.