St. Bruno – Becoming A Saint and why Every Catholic Educator Needs Solitude

hello there, my friend Jonathan Dole with you.

Welcome aboard to the Catholic Teacher Daily Podcast.

I'm pleased you are here.

It is the start of a new week here in the studio, and it is a great joy to try and

bring you something to encourage you, to inspire you in this incredibly important

work you do as a Catholic educator, principal leader, Bishop Cardinal.

Perhaps the supreme Ponti is listening.

Who knows?

The internet is a wide.

World.

Who knows what the Holy Father might be listening to today?

Let's just but I'm happy if I've got one Catholic teacher listening.

That's all I need.

Today is the Feast Day of St. Bruno, and one of the things I love to do

here on the show is we do a whole lot of different content, but I'm often

sharing insights from the divine office.

The daily prayer of the church today is St. Bruno, and I just think

he is one of the most interesting saints I have such a fascination.

With Saints.

I speak on the topic a great deal.

I'm gonna be speaking in the US next week and I'll be referencing some of the

Great Saints and they're just amazing.

It's such an interesting area because in heaven we will all be saints.

In fact, saints literally means those who are with God in heaven so often

say to people, look, God willing, you're gonna be a saint eventually.

Why not start now?

Why wait.

So we're all destined as we respond to the gift of grace, the gift of salvation

to be with God and to become saints.

But he's just a pro tip.

Why wait?

Because St. Bruno, like many of the saints, just shows us how it is.

Simple people actually responding to the demands of their time who became Saints.

And without going into great detail St. Bruno was operating in the late or

the mid to late 11th century and died just at the start of the 12th century.

But long story short, he eventually founded the Carthusian

order, which is one of those.

Really og special forces orders that kind of like the Navy

Seals of the contemplative life.

He just deep solitude, deep stillness, deep silence.

But he had a very busy life in between that I like I was

studying his life and he.

He ran into some trouble with a bishop called Manassas, who the divine Office

refers to, or the universal site that, that builds the divine office or makes it

available to us, refers to what was it?

Empires corrupt and violent.

That was his bishop that he had to deal with.

Empires corrupt and violent.

So anyway, Bruno goes through all these amazing adventures and constantly tries

to return to silence and stillness.

Keeps getting because he's so gifted.

And keep getting, keeps getting called back.

The Pope keeps asking him for help on special projects.

But yeah, he keeps returning to his monastery, which he founded,

the Grand Charu which I think is in Calabria in Italy, but just, I

think it's one of the oldest monastic houses still occupied, like we're

talking over a thousand years here.

One of the great things I love about our church is just this

this solidity, this continuation through all the moments of history.

What is it that Chesterton said that the Catholic church is a perpetually defeated

thing that always outlives her conquerors.

And what I wanted to do just to wrap up, is to give you a

couple of great quotes from St.

Bruno and I guess from the Catholic education perspective.

I just wanna keep putting before you this idea that God is sanctifying us through

the concrete realities of our daily life.

Yes, our prayer is so important.

Our sacramental life is so important.

But don't forget that we're also being sacrificed sacrificed.

You are.

I hope that doesn't happen.

You're being sanctified.

Gosh, let's get that in the edit suite.

You're being sanctified by the concrete adversities and difficulties and

joys and challenges of your daily life, just like some Bruno was.

Some Bruno was no doubt tested and no doubt put in very

difficult, complex situations.

I'm sure that his recourse was to solitude and stillness and prayer and silence.

And so I want to just encourage you to keep thinking that way, that what

looks to you like difficulties and challenges can often just be the ways

in which God is bringing about your sanctification, but how is he doing it?

Because what should be happening, I think, is that you keep.

Bumping up against difficulty and adversity, and your options are

like work harder, become bitter and resentful, or move deeper and

deeper into dependence with God.

So let me just offer you a couple of quotes here from St. Bruno.

There's just two.

The most famous one, which I'm gonna butcher in Latin, but is Stu Crooks Doom.

Vulva, Orbis.

Which translates beautifully.

You may have heard this.

The cross stands firm while the world turns, the cross stands

firm while the world turns.

It's as if the cross of calvary is this fixed point around which the

planet actually rotates or orbits in a sense, because I was thinking

about when I first saw that quote here in the studio, and I thought.

With all of the turmoil that's going on in the world.

Have you noticed like every day it's something else, right?

Every day, this news cycle, this social media cycle brings us challenge and

problem and challenge and problem and crisis and terrible stuff here.

This some Bruno brings us back to this incredible insight that the cross

stands firm while the world turns.

I was saying to one of my kids recently that.

Another big, we talk about this post-truth society where there's all

the conspiracy theories and there's all this stuff happening, and there's fake

news and false news and misremembering and dis, and misinformation.

I keep saying to my kids, I said, you know what?

There is only one who said he didn't know the truth, but he was the truth.

He was the truth.

So for me, Christ is this fixed point around which all reality moves.

And whenever I get confused about the world around me, I

genuinely just keep coming.

What did Christ say?

How did he live?

What is he saying to us in the church?

So I always love that quote.

I wanna share it with you because I think one of the great things that we do is

educators, is that we give young people some predictability and some stability.

And I think you can share this quote with them, the cross stands

firm while the world turns because.

I think young people need hope and the deeper that for you to teach them,

to share with them to go, look, yes, this world is crazy at the moment.

There's all this stuff happening but trust God, deepen in your faith.

What an incredible thing you can do for young people.

Give them a fixed point that they can keep looking to in all

the challenges of daily life.

So the last one I wanted to give you was another beautiful quote here from the ex,

from the actual private letters of St.

Bruno.

And he says this, what benefits and divine exaltation.

The silence and solitude of the desert hold in store for those who love it, only

those who have experienced it can know.

What benefits and divine exaltation, the silence and solitude of the desert

hold in store for those who love it, only those who experienced it can know.

And I wanted to share that with you because my message in a lot of the

speaking I'll be doing at the back end of this year is I'm constantly

trying to remind people and call people back to towards solitude,

stillness, silence, and prayer.

You know that old saying in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

I think in a culture of crazy distraction, I think that the person who prays, the

person who sits in stillness, the person who knows how to sit in silence is king.

Because, or queen.

Because I just think it's a revolutionary act.

That's kinda my thesis.

I've got a few big ideas, and that's one of them that.

We need to keep coming back to that.

And here we have St. Bruno over a thousand years ago telling us that in the silence

and solitude of the desert, now that can be the metaphorical desert, the desert

of silence, the desert of prayer, the desert of making time and space in your

life to get away from the distractions.

And have time alone with the Lord.

And there is no better way to do that than Eucharistic adoration.

So I have this crazy busy life, as three teenagers, complex business load of travel

and a simultaneous obsession with golf.

But I do actually manage to get to adoration usually every day, usually.

And I'm not saying that to sound pious.

I'm saying that because I've just figured out that life without it is problematic.

So my friends, I. Let's celebrate some Bruno today, and his message

for Catholic education is one of.

First that the trials and the tribulations are part of how God is sanctifying

us, and they're not going away.

So some Bruno had problems and challenges with violent empire and

corrupt bishops a thousand years ago.

You are gonna have problems too, if you're a principal.

You're gonna have challenges with staff, students, and parents.

If you're a teacher, you're gonna have travels with principals, students,

and parents, who knows, right?

There's all these different challenges.

They're not going away.

But what we can change in the midst of it is our dependence on Christ and our desire

to find him in silence and solitude.

Okay.

So that's what I wanna share with you today.

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And if you would like to book me to speak or for consultancy projects or we, I do

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Dot co. Jonathan doyle.co.

God bless you, my friend.

St. Bruno, we ask for your intercession.

We ask you to pray for us as Catholic educators, leaders, teachers,

principals, bishops that we would.

Accept the sanctification of the challenges we face and that we would

seek you in the solitude and silence.

God bless you my friend.

You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.