IN PRAISE OF MONACHISM THE UNION WITH GOD IS IN MULTIPLE WAYS. THOSE WHO PRACTICE INNER SILENCE IN GREAT MODERN CITIES

April 16 Saint Toribio de Liébana

 

 

faith and tenacity flee to the mountains and to the shadow of the Ubiello peak on the other side saint Toribio one of my many saints from the Mozarabic acts in which the month of April is abundant must have lived in the monastery where four centuries later a Anonymous monk with the skill of a good pendolist calligraphed and painted the exquisite illuminated codices of the Book of the Apocalypse, better known by the name of Beato de Liébana. Little is known about his life. That they made him bishop of Astorga, that he was a lawyer, that he was married and his wife died and left the world... The seat that Saint Fructuosus of Braga would also occupy and that he was a just and pure-hearted man whom Pope Saint Leo the Great He writes a letter to him [the same one who criticized Saint Hermenildo's rebellious conduct against his father Leovigildo]. Perhaps we do not have to trust many of the panegyrists and hagiographers who praise praiseworthy characters and distort their gaze.

But one thing is important in this pleiad of obscure men: that they went to take refuge in the solitudes of El Bierzo looking for Jesus in the contemplative life and founded monasteries in caves along the Pyrenean mountain range. They say that Paradise was settled there. Dumio, the Sierra de Oscos, the remote locations of the Cantabrian mountains, the Batuecas, the Valley of Silence on the way to Astorga and Ponferrada. These characters reaffirm my old belief that holiness exists and is determined in many ways because multiple and multifaceted, speaking many languages ​​and through innumerable circumstances, the approach to God is produced far from the vanities of the world.

The monasticism so reviled and incomprehensible to us produced these strange figures who found God in retirement and in books, in controversy, because Christ made them free. Christ the liberator The Eleuteros facing the miseries and circumstances of earthly life. And even today goodness and grace continue to exist.

 You can perfectly practice the desire for perfection and monasticism traveling by bus or in the midst of the maelstrom of this beautiful and cosmopolitan city that is Madrid. Holy Toribio intercede for us.

We too, within our modesty and inanity, have a vocation as pendolistas and we love the inner beauty that consecrates souls. And that has nothing to do with the "edoné" the exterior, the carnal and mortal; all that disappears in the grave to be turned into dust and worms.