To love one’s neighbor with perfect love it is necessary to be prompted by God. How can you love your neighbor with purity if you do not love him in God? But he who does not love God cannot love in God. You must love God, so that in Him you can love your neighbor too.
As a theologian Bernard stood in the Augustinian tradition. Like Anselm before him, St. Bernard believed it was necessary to grasp religious truth by faith before one could probe its meaning. His personal mysticism caused Bernard to look from the mind (as in Anselm) to religious experience for certitude.
There is a profound sense in which all of one’s life is lived out in God’s presence, and this recognition becomes a powerful tool for understanding all of one’s life as being consecrated unto God. The Carmelite lay brother Nicholas Herman (1611-91), known as “Brother Lawrence,” cultivated and practiced this sort of life, and its character has been preserved for us under the title Practice of the Presence of God (1692).
We have our religion through the medium of languages that have been long dead, and that present tendencies in education threaten to render more and more dead to us. Along with the languages, there is a growing disposition to relegate the ideas, the entire symbolic expression and form, of Christianity to the past.
Thus in Christ it is revealed both at birth and at death, man’s life can conquer time through time. The moments which in themselves can be and are the perfect symbols of man’s bondage to time and of his imprisonment in a world of endless recurrence, birth, copulation, and death, become the very symbols of man’s liberation from death, and of the liberation of all creation.
There is a closer relationship between faith in the Virgin birth and faith in the bodily resurrection of Christ than might at first sight appear. Both doctrines affirm the depth of God’s love, the extent of his involvement in the human mass, in the very substance of our human history, its reality of flesh and blood.
It is the moment of the annunciation which makes sense of all other moments. It is a moment which is truly in time, not out of time. It has a whole series of temporal consequences; the embryo begins to stir in the womb. But it is a moment in which eternity has really come, in which God is present and at work.
Like the early Christian witness, Daniels could write, “We are beginning to see as we never saw before that we are truly in the world and yet ultimately not of it.” He was sickened by signs saying “White Only,” but uncomfortable as well with making too “smart” an answer to a segregationist.
It is probable our hearts are right with God, and our intentions innocent and pious, if we set upon actions of religion or civil life with an affection proportionate to the quality of the work; that we act our temporal affairs with a desire no greater than our necessity;
he desert is the threshold to the meeting ground of God and man. It is the scene of the exodus. You do not settle there, you pass through. One then ventures on to these tracks because one is driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land.