Abbey-Roads2

A monk’s friendship with the Child Jesus.

Fr. Mark  has a wonderful post on a French Cistercian monk and his devotion to the Child Jesus.  The monk’s name is Dom Vital Lehodey, and Fr. Mark has translated portions of a book about Dom Vital, as it relates to his devotion to the Child Jesus.  In fact, the section Fr. Mark translated is Dom Vital’s personal account of his relationship with the Divine Child.

“I hasten to leave the account of my exterior life and come to the great devotion, I should say the grace of graces, which has been the charm and the fecundity of my existence. I attach great price to my priesthood, even more to my monastic vocation added to my priesthood. But for me, the grace par excellence was the entrance of my Beloved Little Jesus into my life. It has lasted for forty years; far from having lost its value with the passing of time, it is to me dearer and more precious than ever. - Dom Vital 

A way of spirituality.

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Dom Vital goes on to describe how this devotion developed and filled his life, while offering us a deeper theological understanding of the practice.

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And, first of all, He taught me better to know Him, and by that very means, better to know His Father. Like so many others, before that, I was inclined to see in God the Master and the Dispenser of Justice, rather than the Father and the Saviour. He veiled the grandeurs that would have dazzled me; He very nearly hid from me His Passion, which would have frightened me. He made Himself so very little, so that I would not be afraid of living with Him. It pleased Him to show me the goodness of His heart, His love and His tenderness, His mercies and His mildness, His patience in bearing with me, His quickness to lift me up. Truly, He has a Saviour’s heart, a heart that doesn’t know how to become angry, that never tires of pardoning, of healing, and of loving, a heart that loves extremely His mission as Saviour and physician of souls. In truth, He also has the heart of a friend. How many times has He not come to console me in my sorrows, to rejoice with me on my anniversaries by His loving visits. Now it pleases Him to remind me that He has the heart of a man, which heart needs to love men and to be loved by men, the heart of a Child God, who loves candidly and is candidly happy to be loved. He reminds me too that I also have a heart that needs to love and to be loved, and that our hearts are made one for the other. Let us then love one another and never cease loving one another.

In thus making known to me the goodness of His heart, His and His tenderness, His mercy and His mildness, His astonishing simplicity, all things that make Him so lovable and so attractive in His Holy Humanity, He, by that very means, makes His divinity known to me. His Holy Humanity is, in fact, the most faithful mirror of His Divinity. All that is found in miniature, as it were, in his sweet Childhood, is found infinitely in the Word. And, since the Word is the Splendour of the Father and the image of His Goodness, in learning of my Little Jesus, I learn also of the Father and the Holy Spirit. They are, all Three, one and the same infinite Charity. The sweet Childhood of my Little Jesus has, therefore, been for me like the “Gate which is called Beautiful” (Ac 3:2), through which He introduces me just a little bit, so little, alas, into the sanctuary of the Divinity.”  - Dom Vital

So who is Dom Vital?

Dom Vital Lehodey 1857-1948 - was a Cistercian monk and abbot of Notre Dame de Grace near Bricquebec, France. He wrote in The Ways of Mental Prayer (1907): “As time goes on, and we make progress, we shall feel drawn to a more simple form of prayer in which the mind begins to be silent in order to let the heart speak.”

Go here for the entire text translated by Fr. Mark .