The Better Part
- FR. BERNARD BRO
I had left school; I was not yet fifteen.
After three years working in Paris in a very modest position as shorthand-typist, I entered Carmel at eighteen. I am now fifty-one. During those thirty-three years of religious life I have never been in a position of authority. The greater part of my time is spent in making altar breads and in doing the housework. That is all…. Since I was five years of age God has been to me the living and always present One. I have never felt otherwise. It is thus that I encounter him in prayer and everywhere else besides. For me he is Love.
My knowledge of God, my very first contact with "him" goes back to my earliest childhood, between the age of about three and four. I recall a huge plain covered with crops—wheat, barley, clover. It is about four or five in the morning. The sun, which has only just penetrated the clouds, suddenly rises above the horizon. I feel my whole being invaded by an irresistible Presence, unspeakably great, majestic, and powerful…. The immensity of God…and I so tiny, so insignificant, lost in the immensity, sent up to that mighty God, whom I felt so near, all the love of which my poor little heart was capable….
This hold of God on my soul has never left me. It remains my strength in difficulties and almost the essential feature of my spiritual life.
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Acknowledgement
Fr. Bernard Bro. "The Better Part." excerpt from Contemplative Nuns Speak (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1963).
Reproduced by permission of Continuum International Publishing Group, A Bloomsbury Company.
This excerpt appeared in Magnificat in October, 2018.
The Author
Dominican and doctor of philosophy, Fr. Bernard Bro has been a professor at the Pontifical Faculties of Saulchoir, preacher at Notre Dame in Paris, and recognized by the Academie Francaise for the whole of his work. He is considered among the world's foremost authorities on the life and writings of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Bro is also director of the French publishing house, Éditions du Cerf, and a key figure in publishing the definitive editions of Thérèse's writings. He is likewise responsible for the religious broadcasts at France-Culture. His books, which have been translated into English, include St. Therese of Lisieux: Her Family, Her God, Her Message and The Little Way: The Spirituality of Therese of Lisieux.
