Self-knowledge

When a house is shut up, the sun's ray's do not enter, and so we don't see how much dust is found therein. But when the sun's rays penetrate, we soon realize how full of dust the house is. Self-knowledge is just such a ray...

ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA

The Holy Eucharist

Let us learn the wonder of this sacrament, the purpose of its institution, the effects it produces. We become a single body, according to Scripture, members of his flesh and bone of his bones. This is what is brought about by the food that he gives us. He blends himself with us so that we may all become one single entity in the way the body is joined to the head.

JOHN CHRYSOSTOM Homily on John, 46

Homily — Cistercian Disciples

Pentecost happened four weeks ago, and Ordinary Time started the next day, but today is the first Sunday in Ordinary Time on which we are not celebrating a particular solemnity of the Church Year. It’s the first truly ordinary Sunday in Ordinary Time this year. I remember how Father Eddy used to breathe a sigh of relief around this time and exclaim with a big smile: “Thank God for Ordinary Time!” Beyond no longer needing to worry about special Easter texts and rubrics, he understood that Ordinary Time has a special character of its own. It isn’t a blank liturgical period. Though he never said so explicitly, I would guess that what Father Eddy had in mind was that, after we have delved deeply over many months into the mysteries of our salvation as lived by the Lord Jesus, now comes the moment when we are invited to hunker down personally and live these mysteries ourselves, in our “ordinary, obscure and laborious” Cistercian existence. Ordinary Time urges us to make the Paschal Mystery permeate our concrete, ordinary circumstances. Despite the mostly nose-to-the-grind exterior of our life, it is only here that our mystical transformation into other Christs can take place.  

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke gives us the perfect theme to explore the actualization of the Paschal Mystery in our lives: namely, Christian discipleship, the existence of those Jesus first calls to himself as disciples and then sends out as apostles after making them into “a new creation in the Spirit”. For us monks, discipleship means specifically Cistercian discipleship, a topic of great relevance as we enter our yearly retreat today as a community and ponder our specific charism. 

Christ Jesus himself is, in a real sense, the one and only Apostle, the One sent forth from the Father as bearer of the world’s salvation. And yet he has chosen to share his redemptive mission with us through our active participation in it. No one, least of all we monks, can honestly bear the name of Christian without becoming a disciple through intimacy with the Lord and then sharing, as apostle, in Christ’s mission to save the world.

Today’s gospel contains a rich teaching concerning the particulars of Christian mission. The disciples are explicitly sent out to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus into people’s lives. Our mission, whether visible or hidden, is always a clearing of the way for the person of Jesus so that he will come to mean to others what he already means to us. The Lord is himself the greatest treasure we possess, the Peace that inhabits our hearts; and the quality of our love for both Jesus and others is shown by the intensity of our desire to share that treasure with everyone. The disciples are sent out two by two because our fraternal communion with one another as disciples is already in itself a manner of proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom. In this Kingdom, interpersonal communion and joyful unity reign supreme as the visible realities that best reflect God’s Trinitarian nature as continual circulation of love. The very heart of Jesus’ Gospel is love, and this truth can best be witnessed to not primarily through words but through lived relationships by persons who help and support one another, who find the meaning of their individual lives within a God-established network of relationships. In our lives as Christians, we are called to become the visibility of Jesus as the loving Heart of God’s Kingdom. Such should be the witness borne by the monastery as an ecclesiola or “small local church”.

Those whom Jesus sends out are very few indeed, considering the enormity of the harvest, and they are not given many provisions and even fewer certainties. The disciples are poor, a tiny minority hidden in a huge mass of people, and their existence is precarious. All of this, in and of itself, is obviously quite negative; and yet Luke presents these facts not at all as regrettable obstacles impeding the mission but, paradoxically, as the very conditions that Jesus himself imposes on the mission! The poverty of those sent, it seems, is meant to underscore the fact that the Christian mission has to be enacted by the whole of a person, with nothing held back, and relying on none of the gimmicks (like colorful appeal and guarantees of success) that the world considers essential. The apostles are, after all, proclaiming the Word made flesh, and so it isn’t enough for them to lack sufficient means: they must be poor in actual fact. Nor is it enough for them to proclaim the Kingdom of God with words: they must actually be men of God. And it isn’t enough for them to proclaim peace: they must actually be peace-makers. 

All the requirements made of the disciples by Jesus are, thus, at the level of personal identity and existence. At bottom, the many necessary actions and words of Jesus’ followers have to flow forth from their unique personhood as Christians, that is, from their joyful and vital symbiosis with the Lord Jesus. Their ministry does not at heart have to do with pre-set official functions performed exteriorly, or with precisely worded formulas and definitions, divorced from personal experience. Their highly personal identification with Christ—the fruit of grace, prayer and intense struggle—is what enables the disciples to truly become lambs who follow the Lamb of God himself wherever he goes, and who therefore offer themselves as an oblation in union with Christ. 

When you are poor in fact and not only in theory, then, as an evangelist, you have only yourself to give away, as conformed with the Word of God living in you. “Mission” has meaning only if it is but a single thing with the following of Christ. This truth has particular significance for us Cistercian monks that we are. Our special contemplative mission in the Church has nothing to do with going out physically from the monastery into the world, but everything to do with our actually becoming conformed with Christ in our inner being. The brunt of our monastic missionary effort consists in concentrating all the energies of our heart on intimate union with Christ, so that the Lord may then take the substance of our surrendered being and do with it as he wishes throughout the body of humanity and the cosmos.

And yet, we monks are very ordinary human beings, living physically in this world for the time being and, thus, coming into contact more or less directly with all sorts of people. In faith we believe that Jesus is subtly “sending us out” to every person we encounter in whatever manner. In every case, the personal poverty and vulnerability we have deliberately embraced by our vows can become the space where God’s Spirit is manifested. Radical poverty, both material and spiritual, freely embraced, brings with it extraordinary power: Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your Name. The disciples have renounced all earthly power and personal influence, and therefore the power of God is free to work the most splendid things through them. And the disciples’ necessarily self-effacing attitude makes their mission to be a non-threatening invitation to those who welcome them. They, therefore, inspire trust. Through their smallness as individuals, they open up a space for the miracle of conversion to Jesus. The witness of their own harmony of hearts, furthermore, shows clearly that authentically lived Christian faith drives out all fear, distrust and mutual recrimination. Where faith dwells, a truly Edenic condition flourishes which all rational beings yearn for. Isaiah embodies this condition of pure, universal joy in a glorious vision of Jerusalem as mother of all nations, where God will spread prosperity like a river and all may suck fully of the milk of her abundant breasts, a vision made real at this Eucharist.

Jesus does not send out missionaries who carry food, clothing or money to the needy. Rather, he sends persons without any money or provisions. The only thing they take with them is the all-sufficient Word of the Kingdom, which proclaims the necessity of conversion. This conversion has such urgency that the disciples musn’t waste any time along the way, greeting people and engaging in idle chatter. The radical Jesus excludes everything non-essential from the disciples’ words and actions, and this gives their mission a very ascetical, almost monastic flavor. Those Jesus sends are bearers of nothing but the living and naked Word, a Word they are called to embody in their existence as other Christs. This requires of them that, like St Paul, they never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Being Jesus’ intimate companion on the redemptive cross is both the form and the means of the Cistercian monk’s apostolate, which as such never requires that he leave the enclosure. Welcome, at last, to Ordinary Time! 

The Last Judgment

The Last Judgment will come when Christ returns in glory. Only the Father knows the day and the hour; only he determines the moment of its coming. Then through his Son Jesus Christ he will pronounce the final word on all history. We shall know the ultimate meaning of the whole work of creation and of the entire economy of salvation and understand the marvelous ways by which his Providence led everything towards its final end. The Last Judgment will reveal that God's justice triumphs overall the injustices committed by his creatures and that God's love is stronger than death.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1040

A Holy Calling

Do not be afraid to set your sights higher, to allow yourself to be loved and liberated by God. Do not be afraid to let yourself be guided by the Holy Spirit. Holiness does not make you less human, since it is an encounter between your weakness and the power of God's grace. For in the words of Leon Bloy, when all is said and done, "the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”

POPE FRANCIS Gaudete et Exultate

Homily — Saints Peter & Paul

Today’s solemnity honors two conversions that underpin the entire foundation of the Church. Two saints who were converted, literally turned around, by their discovery of mercy, better still by their discovery that they were discovered by Mercy in the person of Christ Jesus the innocent victim, who though he has suffered and died for his people’s sinfulness comes back from the dead without recrimination as forgiving victim. In fact he absolutely refuses not to forgive. This continues to astound and unnerve us just as it did Peter and Paul. Because if God will not punish us, we often try to figure out ways to punish ourselves because of our guilt. But God in Christ will have none of that. None of it. He returns from the dead full of wounds and speaks only, “Peace.” It does not mean nothing happened, too much has happened; sin has made a horrendous mess of his body, but forgiveness is more powerful. This is the confusing grace and ridiculous truth that both Peter and Paul experience in Christ. And we are invited as Church to find ourselves as they did, within the overwhelming reality of a wounded, resurrected and forgiving God. 

Peter says he is ready to die with Jesus; then betrays him in a heartbeat to save his skin. “Wait a minute; you’re one of that Galilean’s followers,” says the maid in the high priest’s courtyard. “I’d know that accent anywhere.” “Get out of here,” Peter mutters. “I don't know who you’re talking about.” Meanwhile, Jesus is next door being slapped, ridiculed and roughed up by soldiers. Regret over this will break Peter’s heart. But the risen Jesus will appear to him first of all the disciples, without any hint of blaming. And later he will forgive Peter over breakfast at another charcoal fire on a beach, as he gratefully receives Peter’s confession, “Lord, you know well that I love you.” Peter’s heart has been transformed.

And Paul. Well, as an expert in the Law, he knows that Jesus the blasphemer has been rightly executed for leading the people astray. So he has been ruthlessly tracking down Jesus' followers, dragging them from their homes to prison and persecution, and most recently cheering on those who stone the deacon Stephen. But soon during a journey northeast to Damascus, in a blinding light the resurrected Jesus will introduce himself to him with a heartbreaking question, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” The God who is purely and unambiguously love has raised this Jesus from the dead; the Law has been fulfilled and radically eclipsed in the person of Jesus the forgiving victim. Paul the angry persecutor becomes Paul the messenger of grace.

Peter and Paul have hurtled headlong into divine Mercy. And so they must revise their whole lives; for a deeply affective personal love for Christ now grounds their entire existence. They have fallen in love. Their encounter and ongoing relationship with Jesus have transformed, reformed them. And it is this radical reprioritization that gives such power and authenticity to their preaching and ultimately leads them most willingly, even joyfully to suffer the loss of all things even their very lives for Christ’s sake. Paul will say it best, “All I want to know is Christ Jesus and him crucified and the power flowing from his resurrection.” Surely Peter would agree. 

Today we celebrate with joy what mercy can accomplish in hearts emptied, made available to Christ because of bitter self-knowledge. Neither Peter nor Paul have anything to boast about but their dependence on Christ. For Peter and Paul, as for each of us, the resurrected Innocent Victim will always be “made present to us as forgiveness.” Willing at last to admit that we have reached the limits of our own prowess and possibilities, we no longer need to “fortify ourselves against” our own shabby embarrassing truth. Perhaps then with our hearts broken open, we will be ready to surrender like Peter and Paul, finally able to make ample space for the incomprehensibility of grace, because we realize that we like them have nothing to boast about except our dependence on Christ Jesus.

Finally, Jesus’ question to Peter and to each of us in this morning’s Gospel, situates us with him, poised to listen to our Master as he whispers this most compelling question, “Who do you say that I am? Who am I for you? What is your experience of me in your life, in your history?” What will each of us answer? Perhaps when we come to understand ourselves as sinners desperately beloved by God in Christ and found by his mercy incessantly, then with Peter we can say, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” For as forgiving victim, Jesus, ever marked by his wounds, has radically reinterpreted and expanded the meaning of Messiah. 

He, who is our Lord and Master, invites us once again to feast on his Body and Blood.

Mystical Prayer

Lifestyle and prayer grow or diminish together. If people today or in any age lack mystical prayer, it is not because it has been tried and found lacking. It is the Gospel that has not been tried.

THOMAS DUBAY, S.M. Fire Within