16 May Optional Memorial (Obligatory Memorial the province of Great Britain)
From “Ignea Sagitta” by Nicholas the Frenchman, Prior General
I Will Lead Her into the Desert and Speak to Her Heart
Has not our Lord and Savior, by His grace, led us into solitude, where He speaks to our hearts with particular familiarity? He gives His friends consolation and reveals arcane mysteries not in public, in the marketplace, amid noise and tumult, but in the cell.
Indeed, in the solitude of a mountain, Abraham, moved by obedience, ascended at the Lord's command to sacrifice his son Isaac; he did not hesitate in his faith and gazed from afar at the fulfillment of the promise that was realized in the passion of Christ, who is the true Isaac. Lot, Abraham's nephew, was also ordered to hurry out of Sodom to save himself in the solitude of the mountains. In the solitude of Mount Sinai, Moses was given the law. Up there, he was clothed in such splendor that when he came down, the others could not look at his radiant face.
While Mary and Gabriel converse in the solitude of a cell, the Word of the Most High Father becomes incarnate. God, made man, in the Transfiguration clearly shows his glory to the representatives of the two testaments in the solitude of Mount Tabor. Our Savior chooses the solitude of a mountain to pray alone. In the solitude of the desert, he fasted uninterruptedly for forty days and forty nights, and there he wanted to be tempted by the devil to show what is the most suitable place to pray, mortify oneself, and overcome the tempter. The Savior therefore goes to the solitude of a mountain and into a desert to pray; he descends from the mountain when he wants to preach and show his works.
He who called our Fathers to the solitude of a mountain showed himself to them and to their successors as a sign, so that they might relive in their lives his actions, which are never without profound meaning.
Some of our predecessors followed this undoubtedly holy rule of the Savior. Recognizing their own imperfection, they lived for a long time in the solitude of the hermitage; and because they wanted to help their neighbors without the slightest personal distraction, they left the hermitage from time to time, but rather rarely, and sowed widely what they had gently reaped in the silence of contemplation, scattering the seeds through preaching.
