Thursday, March 19, 2015

Saint Joseph

Our Constitutions tell us:

The organisation of the monastery is directed to bringing the monks into close union with Christ, since it is only through the experience of personal love for the Lord Jesus that the specific gifts of the Cistercian vocation can flower. Only if the brothers prefer nothing whatever to Christ will they be happy to persevere in a life that is ordinary, obscure and laborious.

How appropriate that Saint Joseph is our Abbey’s patron. Certainly he lived in close union with Christ Jesus and Our Lady in their home at Nazareth. And with Mary he loved the person of Christ most tenderly. And Joseph most faithfully, preferentially cared for Mary and their Son in a hidden workaday life that was undoubtedly “ordinary, obscure and laborious.”

Photograph  by Brother Brian.