ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

We can imagine a typical Sabbath in the synagogue at Capernaum- people gathering, greeting one another; small groups of men in conversation, perhaps a few women; younger men entering and giving each other a nod. And then they all notice the possessed man coming in. Weariness, some irritation. “Why does his family even let him come here?” The younger men are grinning at one another, a couple of winks, as they recall a recent Sabbath when this guy blurted out an embarrassing truth about one of the elders. They loved that. This ought to be good, they think. What he will come out with today? Then Jesus enters. Some recognize him too. He sits with them, speaks a word, and teaches them simply, clearly, lovingly- not from on high but as friend and brother. For many, this is a moment of astonishment as they hear his word of truth and feel their hearts broken open. They close their eyes, their heads lowered. Then it happens, you-know-who starts up: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazaret...

This painting of Our Lady at the entrance of the Abbey church reminds us that Mary is Gate of Heaven, our Way to Christ her Son. All the houses of our Order are dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And the name of our monastery is actually Our Lady of Saint Joseph Abbey. In a spirit of compunction and intense desire, monks devote themselves frequently to prayer. While dwelling on earth, their minds are occupied with heavenly things, desiring eternal life with all spiritual longing. May the Blessed Virgin Mary who was taken up into heaven, the life and sweetness and hope of all earthly pilgrims, never be far from their hearts.   from the  Constitutions  of the Order

In today’s parables, Jesus reminds us of the promise hidden in what is small and unremarkable – seeds that grow in hiddenness and mystery. How like our prayer, our life that is ordinary, obscure, and laborious. We dare to believe that what we bear and what we do and what we pray have an apostolic reverberation – fruitfulness far beyond the cloister with a blessing for those in need. So this morning we pray for those adversely affected by the pandemic – for healing, hope, perseverance, and courage.   Almighty and eternal God, our refuge in every danger, to whom we turn in our distress; in faith, we pray look with compassion on the afflicted, grant eternal rest to the dead, comfort to mourners, healing to the sick, peace to the dying, strength to healthcare workers, wisdom to our leaders and the courage to reach out to all in love, so that together we may give glory to your holy name. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Sp...

We are told that late in life, Saint Thomas Aquinas was one day in prayer before the crucifix, in tears. Suddenly, Christ spoke to Thomas, “You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward will you receive from me for your labor?” His response was simply:  Domine, non nisi Te , that is “Lord, nothing except you.” Like Saint Paul Saint Thomas Aquinas will find his only joy and worth in gaining Christ and being found in him, realizing that life without him would be intolerable. As Saint Paul will put it, “I have suffered the loss of all things, that I may gain Christ - indeed, I regard them all as  rubbish …” So driven is Paul by his love and conviction that he can express it only by using this most vulgar term for filth in Greek sku’balon, because it connotes total worthlessness and revulsion. Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas , Stefano di Giovanni, 1423, tempera on walnut, 9.8 x 11.3 in., Vatican Pinacoteca.

Our Order was founded on March 21, 1098 when St. Robert and about 21 of his monks of the abbey of Molesme left their monastery to found the New Monastery of Citeaux, the first house of what was to become over the centuries the worldwide Cistercian Order.   Significantly, this date was both the feast of the Transitus of St. Benedict and, in that year of 1098, also Palm Sunday.   So, we can imagine them singing as they left Molesme the antiphon that years ago Fr. Gabriel at choir practice said can be called the Cistercian Theme Song: The Christus factus est , Christ became for us obedient unto death, sung over and over during the Holy Week trek to Citeaux. Both the feast of St. Benedict and Palm Sunday provided the themes of humility, obedience unto death, and paschal exaltation that are contained in that Antiphon sung on their new journey in Christ: a journey toward the School of Love-- where monks would be able to experience the contemplative expansion of their hearts in an ov...

As he called his first disciples, Jesus calls each of us. Like Saint Paul and all the saints, we long to depart to be with Christ. Daily we try to set our minds and hearts on things that are above where Christ is. We have died; our lives are hidden now with Christ in God. We consider everything to be nothing at all compared with knowing Christ Jesus, our Lord. Because of him, we have set everything else aside, because in comparison everything else is a pile of rubbish. And we want more and more to know only Christ and the power of his resurrection. We share in his sufferings even now and so are becoming like him in his death. And it is worth it, if somehow we attain the resurrection. So we keep pressing on to make it our own because Christ Jesus has made each of us his own. Our drawing closer to him, following him, is only possible because he draws us to himself. We need only be constantly available to this "drawing." Again and again, our Lord said, I am he. I am he. I am h...

On this Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, we pray for the full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life, and we beg God's forgiveness for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion. We pray that the merciful Spirit of God will help us to protect and care and reverence each person’s life. We pray for an end to the practice of abortion. And we remember all refugees and immigrants seeking a new homeland, we pray for the homeless, the house-bound, for the elderly who may be neglected, and for all those disabled, disrespected, or abused. May our hearts be broken open in compassion. O God, who adorn creation with splendor and beauty and fashion human lives in your image and likeness,  you alone have the power to impart the breath of life as you form each of us in our mother’s womb.  Awaken in every heart reverence for the work of your hands and renew among your people a readiness to nurture and sustai...

When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid The new dawn blooms as we free it For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it If only we’re brave enough to be it. Trusting in the protection of Our Lady, patroness of our country, w e pray for  our new President Joseph Biden and for  healing and reconciliation in our nation. In the Lord's light, let us be light for one another. Photograph by Brother Brian. Excerpt from  the poem by Amanda Gorman given at the inauguration this afternoon.

Let us pause a moment on this experience of meeting Christ who calls us to remain with Him. Each one of God’s calls is an initiative of His love. He is the one who always takes the initiative. He calls you. God calls to life, He calls to faith, and He calls to a particular state in life: “I want you here”. God’s first call is to life, through which He makes us persons; it is an individual call because God does not make things in series. Then God calls us to faith and to become part of His family as children of God. Lastly, God calls us to a particular state in life... They are different ways of realizing God’s design that He has for each one of us that is always a design of love. But God calls always. And the greatest joy for every believer is to respond to that call, offering one’s entire being to the service of God and the brothers and sisters. ...God’s call is always love: we need to try to discover the love behind each call, and it should be responded to only with love. This is t...

As we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we are discomforted by the hard truth that racial injustice is not a thing of the past. Pope Francis reminds us in  Fratelli tutti   “a readiness to discard others finds expression in vicious attitudes that we thought long past, such as racism, which retreats underground only to keep reemerging. Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our supposed social progress is not as real or definitive as we think.” We promise to accompany  the excluded, all those whose dignity has been violated.  

Today’s readings are clearly ordered around the theme of the call. In the first reading we heard the charming story of the call of the young Samuel and in the Gospel the call of the first disciples.  As you remember, Samuel’s mother Hannah had prayed at the temple before the Lord, in bitter tears over the humiliation of her barrenness, that she be granted a child, and when the Lord granted her desire, in gratitude, after the child was weaned, she brought the child to the Temple to be dedicated to the Lord, as she had promised in her prayer. Eli was responsible for his upbringing, education, and initiation into a life of service to the Lord. Eli and John the Baptist are both entrusted with the important task of preparing future servants of God for their particular mission. Both are models for us because they recognize that a divine call is a very delicate thing. It is a mystery that comes entirely from the divine initiative and is perceived by the person in the secret depths of th...

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”; and when he had said this he breathed his last. “ All I can say is, Alleluia.” These are the words I mentioned in Chapter that Fr. Patrick shared with Gertrude, our night nurse. It’s a moving statement, a summing up of his life. “All I can say is Alleluia.” And in today’s gospel, we have Our Lord summing up his life in the words: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Today’s liturgy is an opportunity to learn the similarities between these two statements and to learn from both Jesus and Fr. Patrick what it means to commend our spirit into the Father’s hands with an Alleluia refrain. I’ve heard that among Fr. Patrick’s many contributions to the construction of our monastery, one stands out—his work on the bell tower of our church—and I can believe it. He had the strength and drive to do masonry and roofing work, climbing ladders, and scaffolding to reach the peak of the bell tower. As I was thinking...

Among the homeless poor whose lives mingle with the litter of the streets, a nuisance to many in their grime and smell and soliciting eye, not all are deranged and lunatic. Surely some are true souls of despair who have embraced a life of forsakenness to enclose and silence within themselves a mistake now long past. And if these latter have a stifled passion we do not suspect, and a recurring thought that another life was possible with a different choice, in some cases the occupied faces hurrying past them may share more kinship than they realize with their own crossroad when they could have chosen differently... ‘The poor you have always with you’. And yet it is rather easy to look at the derelict poor and consider self-inflicted the scars from alcohol and drugs that mar their faces – easy to harbor disdain for their indecency. But then surely we sometimes miss a lonely man’s eyes looking up in a wish that his face will not provoke this time a glance of revulsion. And perhaps the same...

Not long ago a friend showed us this image of the central tapestry of the Baptism of Christ by John Nava which hangs in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. More recently we came upon this heart-rending image of a runaway slave named Peter. The story is told that one day in the early spring of 1863, Peter removed the shroud of rags that partially concealed his back to reveal a vast network of scars for a crowd of soldiers and medics who looked on. The wounds from the whip of an irate overseer also lashed the sensibilities of these observers and others who were soon able to see Peter’s back in a photograph that was mass-produced on a wallet-sized  carte de visite .  See Boston Globe, 2016. Soon the back of Jesus, whom we see baptized this morning in the Jordan River by his cousin John, will be brutally lashed like the back of the slave Peter. One day we hope to embrace the risen Lord Jesus who, we know, still bears the wounds of his passion. Perhaps we will f...

John the Baptist seems already to have had many disciples among the children of Israel, especially among the  ’anawim , the simple believers who day and night begged for mercy and forgiveness from God. Implementing Isaiah, John demands that people prepare the way of the coming Lord and strive for conversion of heart in view of the remission of sins. But what precisely is the meaning of this too familiar phrase, the way of the Lord? God never asks that we build a road in front of us as do over-confident pioneers, and then walk along it in order to go to encounter him. In fact, God asks the exact opposite: our assigned task is to clear the road which he is making, on which he is to reach us as he comes towards us, seeking us. The road is not ours but the Lord’s, and the initiative, the intention, and the project are all his! This road, in fact, is nothing other than the Incarnation of the eternal Word, an exclusively Trinitarian endeavor. As in the ...

Our Father Patrick Brown passed quietly to Lord early this morning. He will be remembered as especially hardworking and patient. Many of us recall him faithfully unboxing jars at the Trappist Preserves day after day, morning after morning; and always present in Church for the Divine Office. He entered the monastery in 1952. We praise and thank God for Father Patrick's 68 years of loving service in the Cistercian monastic life. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us   and persevere in running the race that lies before us  while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. Hebrews 12 Photograph by Brother Brian.

During his lifetime, numerous healings were attributed to the prayerful intercessions of  Saint André Bessette, as the sick and troubled people of Montreal flocked to him each day. He was deeply devoted to Saint Joseph and blest with tremendous humility. Amazed at what his prayer accomplished, André would say simply,  “I am nothing…only a tool in the hands of Providence, a lowly instrument at the service of Saint Joseph... God chose the most ignorant one. If there were anyone more ignorant than I, God would have chosen him instead of me." How to embrace my own lowliness?

Today’s Gospel is not a story about what a friend's mother used to call a “genteel sufficiency,” just enough. It is all about overflowing abundance and the immeasurability of God’s love and compassion. This is God's dream of the kingdom; for in this scene, we see the reign of God becoming a reality in Christ. In him heaven has been wedded to earth, and so a banquet is called for. God's promised One is here to feed the poor with as much as they want. And he has invited us to join them. Jesus is presiding at the marriage banquet in the kingdom. (Reclining was only for banquets after all; daily meals were taken seated at a table.) Perhaps you know the story of a boy from Italy who comes to America with his father; they are going to live with relatives in New York. They are very poor; the father has scraped together just enough to buy two tickets for passage on an ocean liner. The bit of money that's left is just enough to buy a giant wheel of cheese and a few loaves of b...

The day, dearly-beloved, on which Christ the Savior of the world first appeared to the nations must be venerated by us with  holy  worship: and today those joys must be entertained in our hearts which  existed  in the breasts of the three  magi , when, aroused by the sign and leading of a new star, which they  believed  to have been promised, they fell down in presence of the King of heaven and earth. For that day has not so passed away that the mighty work, which was then revealed, has passed away with it, and that nothing but the report of the thing has come down to us for  faith  to receive and memory to celebrate; seeing that, by the oft-repeated gift of  God , our times daily enjoy the fruit of what the first age possessed.  And therefore, although the narrative which is read to us from the  Gospel  properly records those days on which the three men, who had neither been taught by the  prophets'  predictions...