A Mirror of Charity
Between chores –
hulling strawberries
answering letters –
or between poems,
returning to the mirror
to see if I’m there.
(A Poet’s Revolution: The Life
of Denise Levertov, p.245)
What are these few lines of Denise Levertov trying to
communicate? If a poet or an artist
returns to the mirror to see if she ‘is there’, what about us who live monastic
life, a life where we strive to be open to the flow of grace, to the Spirit who
forms us into a new creation? Returning
to the mirror to see if I am there, to see if I am myself…to see who or what I
am serving. The poetic image of a ‘mirror’:
I like to suggest that this image is a
profound symbol or metaphor for the monastic path. A symbol points to, mediates a reality that
is hard to express in our ordinary means of communication. A symbol has multiple levels of meaning, it
communicates the ineffable and offers an entrance into the Divine life. Our Christian life is full of such symbols
and rituals. With its use by St. Paul in
1 Co 13:12 and 2 Co 3:18, the image of ‘mirror’
found its way in such ancient Christian writers as Sts. Augustine and Gregory
the Great, and later on it was used as well by our Cistercian authors of the 12th
century.
“And, we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors
the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned
into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit (2Co
3:18). These moving words of St. Paul draw
us to return to the ‘mirror’ to see how we are living this quest to see God
face to face, to allow the veil covering our hearts and souls to fall away as
we are transformed into the One who is the face of God’s love. In my brief research on the metaphor of
‘mirror’, I learned that it was used in different ways. I was touched by this
ONE way that this image was used: both Augustine and Gregory the Great referred
to the Bible as a ‘mirror’ in which one could see the “virtues and model of
love that would lead one to the experience of Christ” (Bernard Mc Ginn, The
Growth of Mysticism, p.348). In
other words, Scripture was seen as a mirror where we can get a sense of our
relationship to God. It is interesting
to note that Augustine at the end of his life wrote a book entitled: De Scriptura sacra speculum (Scripture:
A Sacred Mirror). Fr. Charles Dumont
in his introduction to Aelred of Rievaulx’s The Mirror of Charity quotes
these words of Gregory the Great: “Holy
Scripture is offered to the eyes of our soul like a mirror. In it, we can see our interior
countenance. There we see our ugliness
and our beauty. There we become
conscious of our advancement. There, of
our total lack of progress” (CF-17, p.49).
What Aelred does in his book II of The Mirror of Charity (and
apparently he is following St. Augustine), is he gathers together twenty-five
New Testament texts and presents them to his readers so that “one may
contemplate as in a mirror the countenance of his soul more carefully”
(p.51). Aelred’s point is that Scripture
enables us to see the countenance of our soul: where we need change and
conversion, and the light of truth reflected by the mirror can even reveal the
cause of our sin or problem.
In reflecting on the use of the ‘mirror’ metaphor in Aelred,
Charles Dumont quotes Soren Kierkegaard who warns against approaching the Word
of God as ‘doctrine’ or as an ‘impersonal thing’. Kierkegaard writes: “Because if the Word of
God is simply a doctrine for you, an impersonal thing, objective, it is not a
mirror….And if you observe an impersonal attitude toward the Word of God, one
could not say that you look at yourself in its mirror, because this act
requires a person….No, when you read the Word, you should constantly say to yourself: it is to me that it is
addressed; it means me” (p.54).
Kierkegaard is very much in line with how both Augustine and Aelred used
the metaphor of ‘mirror’ in relation to how the Word of God addresses us.
Letting the veil drop…even for a moment, simply to see if I
am there for God, for one another. The
‘mirror’: the mirror of charity: “In this mirror of charity, one’s likeness to
charity will appear only to one who abides in charity, just as no one sees his
face reflected in a mirror unless he is in the light,” writes Aelred (p.54). Let us look into the mirror…the mirror of
charity to see how or if we are abiding in charity. Let us look into the mirror of faith to see
how strong is our ‘mustard seed of faith’.
Between chores –
hulling strawberries
answering letters –
or between poems,
returning to the mirror
to see if I’m there.
Sr Kathy DeVico
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