Novena in Honor of St. Aelred

The Feast of St. Aelred, March 3, came during our Lenten retreat this year, so we have postponed the Novena until after Easter.

It is, of course, a nine day Novena. You can actually choose your most convenient nine days.

Here’s how the Novena works. Each day of the nine day novena visit our e-group and read the Novena commemoration of St. Aelred and the St. Aelred Novena prayer. (This time you are not asked to pass it on to nine people or any of those superstitious things.) Just visit the e-group and participate in the St. Aelred commemoration of the day.

Day 1. We remember Aelred as a youth and teenager.

Aelred was born in Hexam in 1110 in northern England where his father was “pastor” of the Roman Catholic Church at Hexam. For priests to marry was considered sinful, but it was so common that it was not a scandal. Many years later, in Aelred’s lifetime, his father gave up the “parish” and his wife and entered a monastery for the remainder of his life on earth. Hexam was a parish which had many relics (tombs, bones, bodies of famous English saints). Aelred acquired his father’s devotion to these saints and later wrote about them.

At the age of 15 or thereabouts, Aelred’s father sent him to live in the court of King David of Scotland. He spent 10 years there and became a trusted aide of the King, who also was later proclaimed a saint of the church. At the court Aelred got a good education, but his greatest delight, he tells us, “was to love and be loved.” He had loves and friends, but he also had a broken heart many times. In the intrigues of the court, True Friendship of the type Aelred yearned for, was virtually unknown.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 2. Aelred enters novitiate and takes up “religious life.”

At age of 25 in the year 1135, Aelred abruptly left the court and entered the new monastery in northern England which St. Bernard, the abbot of Clairvaux in France, had sent some monks to establish just two years before. It was a hard life and the weather was cold and severe (which may account for the mere 57 years of Aelred’s earthly life). They “camped” in temporary huts along the beautiful, but often ice and snow covered, River Rye, while they and the workers constructed the monastery that eventually became the largest in all England.

While trying to adjust to this life so different from the court, Aelred began to yearn again for true friendship, and to see the possibility in a community centered on Christ. Slowly he began to explore what True Friendship could be. Within eight years he was named novice master, with the heavy responsibility of guiding the spiritual formation of the new monks which were already entering the monastery in increasing numbers.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 3. Abbot of Revesby

The Abbey of Rievaulx decided to establish a “daughter house” at Revesby, further to the east, but still in northern England. This was the first of the five daughter houses of Rievaulx. Aelred was selected to be the first abbot of the new Abbey. So he left whatever small comforts had been built into Rievaulx in those first ten years and went to Revesby and started all over again, with cold temporary huts, and much manual labor, back-breaking work that he flung himself into for the next two years from 1145-to 1147.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 4. Abbot of Rievaulx.

In 1147 the first abbot of Rievaulx died, and Aelred was elected to return from Revesby and become the Abbot of the “Motherhouse,” Rievaulx. It is located in a scenic valley, dubbed the “valley of light,” ever massaged with the sound of water running through the monastery grounds in the stream of the River Rye. (This, by the way, is the inspiration of our monastery fountain of bubbling water.)

For the next 20 years St. Aelred was distinguished as a capable, gentle, and caring administrator of an ever-growing abbey, one who never expelled a monk in 20 years. It reached a peak of 500 priests, brothers, and workers, and even today the massive shells of chapels, chapter rooms, dining halls, and dormitories are still a tourist attraction in northern England.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 5. Holy Abbot.

In addition to his administration of the Abbey, St. Aelred began to work on the writings which have earned him enduring recognition as one of the “late fathers of the church.” His writings embrace a vast array of writings on saints, history, love, friendship, religious life, and uncounted sermons and spiritual works.

Slowly in the monasteries of today his works are being translated from the original Latin into today’s English. (A few years ago I asked a Trappist monk from Boston if he “ever heard” of St. Aelred. He informed naïve me that he was the one who is translating St. Aelred’s sermons.)

St. Aelred wrote the lives of several English saints, and became a sought-after preacher for special occasions. He delivered the funeral sermon when King St. David died in 1153.

He began works on two of his best-known works, The Mirror of Love, and Spiritual Friendship. It was the well-known Cistercian (Trappist) saint of Clairvaulx, St. Bernard, who asked him to write a book on love, after their discussion of love when Aelred visited Clairvaux after a mission to the pope in Rome.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 6. The Feast of St. Aelred. Apostle of Friendship.

In Spiritual Friendship St. Aelred gives us his classic definition of “Friendship.” He says “Friendship is oneness of heart, mind and spirit, in things human and divine, with mutual esteem, and kindly feelings of approval and support.”

In Mirror of Love he departs from generalities and gets down to the nitty gritty of what a True Friend is and does. It is one with whom I deeply united in bonds of love, can find rest, pour out my heart, have sweet conversation, find a harbor of calm, lay bare my secrets, receive a comforting kiss, cry with and rejoice with, talk with for advice, feel togetherness even when we are far apart, and with heart and mind together we are bound in the closest ties of love.

There can be no doubt what Aelred means by True Friendship. And that is his lifelong gospel. It is not that he deviates from the Gospel of Jesus or the teachings of John. He theologizes that if God is love as St. John teaches, then God is Friendship.

“St. Aelred is known as a Christocentric twelfth-century monastic humanist. His most famous work, Spiritual Friendship, which explores the relationship between spiritual and human friendship in a monastic context, reveals his own conscious homosexual orientation and gives love between persons of the same gender its most profound expression in Christian theology.” (Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Vol. 4, American Council of Learned Societies.)

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 7. Lover, Friend, Christian Humanist.

St. Aelred was very personal and honest in his writings about love and friendship. St. Anselm and some of Aelred’s other contemporaries wrote about love and friendship, but in a much most clinical way, even though they were also gay. Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx wrote about his teenage loves, about his “true” loves in the monastery, about his own yearnings and experiences.

In asserting the need for friendship and love. Aelred legitimized the physical and spiritual embrace of other human beings – and in the context of a religious community. In this context, all loves are reconciled in Jesus and all are at peace in the love of the community. Honored as a medieval Christian humanist, Aelred had a great optimism about the capability of human beings to love each other in good communities centered on Jesus. When he entered the monastery, he did not leave the world made by God or the exercise of love which gives harmony to every day life. The whole world is God’s world.

St. Aelred found his answer to the meaning of life in its human dimension in the love of the brothers at Rievaulx – brother to all in community life, lover to some in his True Friendships. He found the love of God made real and physical by experiencing together love of God and individual human beings.

St. Aelred unabashedly insisted on the need for human loves, and in his Mirror of Love he pours his heart out in lament over the death of the monk Simon, with whom he felt a True Friendship.
“St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because he was true to himself – never covering up his sexuality which was same-sex attraction, and he was not pulled fully into the prevailing sex-negative anti-body dualistic philosophy of St. Augustine,” writes a participant at the conclusion of a seminar on the life and works of St. Aelred.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 8. Suffered from arthritis.

We all identify with Jesus who took on all the weakness and limitations of humanity to be one with us and died for love of us in the agonizing suffering of the passion and Cross.

St. Aelred especially identified with the sufferings of Jesus for us. The last ten years of his life on earth he was wracked with excruciating pain of arthritis. His sufferings were intensified with the unbearable pangs of kidney stones.

Sometimes when he had to stay in a little room near the infirmary, his friends would gather around his bed to cheer him up. (One’s imagination runs wild if gays were as cheerful then as they are now in the Philippines.)

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Day 9. Patron of OSAe, patron of responsible sexuality.

Many scholars have turned their attention to St. Aelred studies. Worldwide today there is an elite corps of “St. Aelred Scholars.” They are somewhat divided between those who speak frankly and openly of his same-sex orientation and those who would prefer, if they could, to sweep it under the rug. There are rumors that the Trappists don’t allow the monks to read Aelred’s works without permission. But Thomas Merton, a great world-renowned Trappist writer wrote a biography of St. Aelred. The rumors are untrue. The Trappists revere St. Aelred, and I spoke to a Trappist monk who is translating into English the sermons of St. Aelred..
The Trappists and Benedictines and other orders are fearful that the monks will follow St. Aelred’s teachings of love and friendship in the monastery. Because of homophobia they are trying to be on guard against “special friendships.”

Our reason for choosing St. Aelred as our patron is primarily because of the holiness of his life and his inspiration for us to give our all for Jesus. The name of Jesus was always on his lips and the love of Jesus was always in his heart, but he felt that his love of Jesus could be strengthened by following the teachings of St. John that love of neighbor translates into love of God. “Those who live in love, live in God, and God lives in them.”

St. Aelred was not a modern day gay activist. There is no doubt that he sincerely embraced the celibate life of his vocation. He was a product of his times and caught up in the sex-negative theology of St. Augustine, but he was liminal, way ahead of his times, in his honesty about love and his loves. He is not a role model of gay activism, but a role model of holiness, and honesty, and coming out as appropriate in one’s state of life.

“St. Aelred deserves to be the patron saint of gays and lesbians because his philosophy of the unity of the flesh and spirit does not follow the hateful language of homophobic official literature, and he led a life of honest openness about loving people of the same sex physically,” wrote Oscar Atadero at the conclusion of a seminar on St. Aelred.

We celebrate the feast of St. Aelred because our understanding of life and love is enhanced by this great saint whom we have chosen as our patron.

Novena Prayer
O most kind and loving St. Aelred,
In union with you
I come into the presence of our beloved Jesus.
I pray that you will obtain God’s favor for me
As I imitate your life of holiness
And follow your teachings
Of love and friendship,
Through Christ Jesus, our friend
Whose sweet name was always on your lips.

St. Aelred, pray for me.
St. Aelred, pray for us.

Special request
Please send your comment about the experience of the Novena to Fr. Richard saintaelred@gmail.com