Peter Helman

Dear Friends, 

Today is the Feast of Saint Aelred of Rievaulx (1110-1167), the son of a married priest from northern Britain. As a young man he was taken into the service of King David I of Scotland as master of his household, but Aelred left the court at the age of 24 and entered the Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire.

The Cistercians were reformers of western monastic tradition. They stressed austerity and simplicity in their contemplative rule of life. Their order was newly founded when Aelred joined, and we revere him as one of the first and greatest Cistercian mystics.

His second work of theology, Spiritual Friendship, is a classic of western Christian spirituality. It is so much a reflection on the gospel reading appointed for his feastday from John the Evangelist, when Christ tells his apostles in the Upper Room, on the eve of his betrayal and arrest, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. […] I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends” (15:12, 15). 

For Aelred, true friends are the guardians of our souls. In that Jesus loves us and calls us his friends, we see him face to face, and we know even more wondrously that he delights in us. And this recognition of God’s perfect love and perfect acceptance is difficult to bear because we so often cannot stand the offer of unconditional love.

Love risks everything, even pain and rejection. This risk, though, is our highest calling and our greatest good, and without love we cannot live. If we are beloved as friends, how much more are we to hold one another in love and friendship? Friendship, as Aelred says, “is that virtue by which spirits are bound by ties of love and sweetness and out of many are made one.”

Christ is always between us and in our midst. Do we live each day knowing that Jesus delights in us? If we did, how much more would be love and delight in one another?

Below is the collect for Aelred’s feast, which I hope can ever increasingly become my own:

Grant to thy people, Almighty God, a spirit of mutual affection; that, following the example of thy servant Aelred of Rievaulx, we might know the love of Christ in loving one another; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

Peace and love be with you always,

—Peter+