Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
We commemorate today a Franciscan saint, St. Bernard of Corleone, born in 1605, died in 1667. He was a Capuchin Franciscan who lived in Sicily his whole life. He was a lay brother and a master of prayer.   He reached the heights of prayer, that affective, cordial, heart-to-heart prayer that, really, in the depths of our soul, we all desire, that heart-to-heart conversation, intimate prayer with God. He reached that, but he did so certainly not because he found the right books. In fact, he was completely illiterate, but because he learned how to speak to God what was in his heart.
In fact, after he had already been a brother for a while, some other brothers who knew that he couldn't read, couldn't write, couldn't make use of books, suggested to him, “Learn to read. You'll be able to read good books that will help you to pray and enter more deeply into prayer.”  And obvious that made him think, maybe that's true. So, he asked Our Lord what he should do. And he perceived a response in prayer from Our Lord that he didn't need books, that meditating the passion as it was expressed in the cross of Christ was going to be, for him, sufficient and more than sufficient. He needed no books to give him any further information
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Not that books are bad. In fact, books are very good and very useful. The point is that they're not necessary. Even if we find the best possible book, the book doesn't do the work of prayer for us. We have to do that. We still have to pray by expressing to God what's in our hearts. We read that book. What does it make us think? What does it make us feel? What does it make us resolve to do? Et cetera, et cetera.
St. Bernard would pray without a book, simply looking at the crucifix, looking and telling Our Lord what he saw, looking and telling Our Lord what he felt, what he experienced, looking and telling Our Lord what he resolved to do, what it inspired him to do. Some days it was beautiful. You could write it in a book and it would be an amazing meditation. Some days it was dry and arid. “Lord, I'm looking and nothing comes to mind. Lord, I'm pondering your wounds and no feelings come. Lord, I'm here, I'm praying, and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.” And that's heartfelt prayer. And that's truly affective prayer. That's truly conversation with Our Lord.
So this is the kind of prayer that makes saints saints. Again, books, super useful. We can and we should make use of them, but again, they don't do the work of prayer for us. The real work is laying bare before Our Lord what's really there in our soul, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the things that we aren't ashamed of, the things that we are ashamed of, everything.
Sometimes the temptation, and I call it a temptation, an error, is that, well, we can't really show Our Lord what's in our heart. We've got to first fix all that, put it all in order, and then we can pray. Then we can tell Our Lord what's in our heart, once it's all nice and orderly. No, it's the other way around. We've got to show Our Lord the mess that's in our heart, and that way we put it in order, not the other way around. We can't put it in order on our own. By showing the mess to Our Lord, He puts it in order.
So that's how St. Bernard prayed, though he didn't know how to read or write. He reached the heights of prayer in the depths of prayer. That's how he prayed. That's how all Franciscan saints prayed. That's how Our Lady prayed. She pondered in her heart and spoke to God from her heart.
So we are all called to that, and it's not difficult. I mean, it's difficult in the sense it takes work, but it's not really a quest for the right book—if I only had the right book. No, if books help us, great. If they don't, even that can become the very subject matter for our prayer, the kind of prayer that we're all called to, the prayer that makes the saints saints.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.