ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

The Law of Moses was very important for the people of Israel. They were proud of the legal system they had developed in their desire to be God’s people. “What great nation is there that has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today?”, Moses asks the Israelites in the first reading that we heard from the book of Deuteronomy. Through the Law, they were expected to lead lives that were different, if not better than their pagan neighbors. There was a great emphasis on the observance of the Law as a sign of commitment and obedience to the Lord. But, by the time of Jesus, the Law had become so hopelessly complicated in its applications that only experts could interpret it in the many practical problems which would arise in daily life. The law was no longer a guide to help people love and serve God, but an end in itself. It was all about external behavior. As Jesus relates in today’s Gospel, many of the laws were of human invention. They had l...

Whenever we engage with the Word, our reading is not just reading, it is an encounter - with the Person of Jesus, Word made flesh, and Splendor of the Father. Such is the truth of our own  lectio divina  - as we read, we discover, more often than not, that we ourselves are being read. The life we live is not our own. We are Christ’s body, part of him, in him. And our stories are one with his. In Christ Jesus God “has become not only one of us but even our very selves.” 1  Jesus himself is our story, our book, our destiny - now, today; Jesus is the Book - with the power to reflect and illuminate our life; the one Book that forever informs how we navigate the little strip of time we have been given, helping us clarify and grasp its most vital moments and their meaning. 2  The wounded and risen Jesus is the key, the template that makes sense of each of our lives. He who sees deep into our hearts – reads them like a book. A few years ago, my favorite cousin Teddy died qu...

When Monica was told of Augustine’s conversion, he tells us in his  Confessions  that she leapt for joy, rejoiced, and praised God. This woman of faith well understood that God had given her more than she had ever dared to beg for. Augustine continues, “you changed her mourning into joy, much more plentiful than she had desired, and in a much more precious and purer way than she ever required.” God hears our prayers; God always answers our prayers – in ways we may recognize and in ways that we may do not understand. Still, we continue to pray with confidence and quiet wonder.  Saint Monica  by  Benozzo Gozzoli , 1464–65.

  Love is the only one of the movements of the soul, of its senses and affections, in which the creature can respond to its Creator, even if not as an equal, and repay his favor in some similar way... Although the creature loves less, being a lesser being, yet if it loves with its whole heart nothing is lacking, for it has given everything. Baptized into Christ we are one with Christ forever. He calls us to love Him with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, all our mind, our very being. But how can we? We can love because God gives us the love with which to love.  Text from  Sermon 83: On the Song of Songs, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.

Which of us is worthy - of love, of real relationship; which of us is worthy of Holy Communion each morning? Only the love of the other, earthly or divine; only that gaze of love can draw me into the reality of my belovedness. Small wonder that the intuition of the Church has placed this prayer just before Communion, “O Lord, I am not worthy.” We are not worthy. But Love has made us worthy. Indeed, in his desire for me, for you, in his dying and rising for us, Jesus loved us into worthiness. He refuses to not love us.  Still, we know the closer we get to him, the more clearly, we see who we are. Always, with the realization of God’s nearness, there is not boasting or complacency but reverence and contrition. “Who am I?” The response of a grateful, awe-filled heart is always appropriately- "I am not worthy." Noticing the blessing, the undeserved abundance, we see clearly who the recipient is. It is I, it is you, not because of what we have accomplished but because of who God i...

Reflecting on how I might approach Bernard for today’s feast, I found myself drawn to the theme of freedom, which is certainly fundamental for Bernard; since for one thing he devoted a whole treatise to it as a young abbot in his On Grace and Free Choice. Freedom is also clearly a value very dear to our contemporaries, reaching back to the very origins of our nation’s existence. I did a little search for a contemporary attempt to define freedom and decided upon one that has long intrigued me, that ventured upon by the Supreme Court in the case Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, in 1992, which is often noted as one of the few attempts on the official level to try to get at the essence of freedom. The majority opinion wrote this: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The first thing is that liberty is expressed here in terms of a right, which in the modern sense, in a f...

  Blessed is he who allowed his hands and feet and side to be pierced and opened himself to me wholly that I might enter 'the place of his wonderful tent' and be protected. Indeed it is a safe dwelling place to linger in the wounds of Christ the Lord. The protection this tent affords surpasses all the glory of the world. It is a shade from the heat by day, a refuge, and a shelter from the rain so that by day the sun will not scorch you, nor the storm move you. As we celebrate today the feast of our own Cistercian, Blessed Guerric of Igny, we wonder with him at Jesus' goodness and self-effacing love.  Detail of a photograph by Brother Brian. Lines from  The Fourth Sermon for Palm Sunday of Blessed Guerric of Igny.

When we hear Peter’s words this morning, “We have given up everything and followed you. What will there be for us? What’s in it for us?” We may be a bit embarrassed for him. But curiously enough, Jesus doesn’t rebuke Peter for his question. He responds graciously, promises him, promises us a hundredfold, everything — thrones, preeminence for each of them, a marvelous overwhelming return for all that we have given Him. God notices; notices what we have given; understands all that we long to offer or have tried to offer. He is aware of the gift we give, no matter how small. This is a God who deeply desires to be known, loved; a God who wants to engage us. Jesus notices. He notices and is grateful. “Everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands for the sake of my name,” He says, “will receive a hundred times more and will inherit eternal life.”  He promises that God will respond that he will reciprocate. “Rest assured,” says He. “...

We just listened to Our Lady respond to her relative Elizabeth with these words, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…” And we might add that her body proclaims the greatness of the Lord, too. Our Lady proclaims in body and soul the graces and love that God has showered upon her, and she rejoices in the promise that in the end, we, her children, will be with her, body and soul, in heaven. This is God’s promise. But first some background to the promise. When Pope Pius XII defined that Our Lady’s assumption was part of the deposit of faith, he referred to the great things God had done for her by using the words, “harmony of graces,” each grace building on and harmonizing with the rest. The harmony began when she was preserved from the moment of her conception from the crippling effects of original sin. It continued when she conceived the true Son of God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, by the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit and not by man. The har...

Today is a great feast of contemplative joy, indeed of explosive, intergalactic joy. At once our gaze is invited to soar upwards, beyond sun and moon and stars, by St. John’s vision in the Book of Revelation: “God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant”—the precious human ark containing the resplendent Word—“could be seen in the temple: … a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” How utterly magnificent! This vision of her who is, nevertheless, our sister and mother, steals our breath. Such a dazzling cosmic vision of faith, however, looks very different to the eyes of the body: the only thing our eyes actually see in the gospel is a very ordinary, pregnant young woman sweating as she laboriously climbs hills to visit and help her equally pregnant older relative. With good reason, today’s solemn feast of our blessed Lady’s Assumption is the patronal feast of the Cistercian Order. In this great mystery, th...

  “What eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him…”   I am emboldened by Saint Paul, who, when referring to what God has prepared, says, “…this God has revealed to us through the Spirit.” We have the Spirit of God, so let us follow the Spirit’s lead and allow our hope to reach in behind the veil and touch this mystery and be touched by it. Hope is a spiritual power given to us by God as a gift that enables us to desire the kingdom of heaven. Hope enables us to trust in Jesus’ promises, not on our own strength but on the grace of the Holy Spirit. The virtue of hope is aimed at the good things that God has prepared for us. Hope reaches out to a glory which eye cannot yet see, ear cannot fully hear, and the human heart can barely grasp. In our hope we touch the mysteries of heaven, and in the Eucharist, we receive a foretaste – of fulfillment, of communion, and of harmony in diversity – made present under the ...

As we celebrate the saints, we sometimes imagine them smiling a bit sheepishly; their heads lowered. And as we chant in their honor, perhaps they are more than a bit embarrassed by all the hoopla. They point quietly to the wounded Christ. “It’s not about us,” they insist. “It’s all about Jesus, what his tender mercy has accomplished in us.” The saints, like Saint Lawrence whom we celebrate this morning, ultimately know themselves as  mercied  sinners, who have been transformed by the love of Christ.  No wonder then that even as he was being roasted over a slow fire, Lawrence could joke, "Turn me over. I think I'm done on this side." Love made him brave and self-forgetful and even silly. _____________________________ You gain nothing, you prevail nothing, O savage cruelty. His mortal frame is released from your devices, and, when Lawrence departs to heaven, you are vanquished. The flame of Christ's love could not be overcome by your flames, and the fir...

This is the only way we ever have life within us. Jesus is very clear and blunt about it. His flesh is true food, and his blood is true drink. Any other diet leaves us empty and hollow, hungry and bereft of life. “Truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you.” Those are ominous words, words that haunt and challenge us to consider whether there is life within us, real life. Most of us spend a fair amount of time, energy, and prayer trying to create and possess the life we want. In spite of our best efforts, we live less than fully alive. Sometimes the outside and inside of who we are don’t match up. We ask ourselves, “What am I doing with my life?” We wonder if this is all there will ever be. Is this as good as it gets? As the years and decades roll by, we may find ourselves lamenting over what has become of us and our life. Nothing seems to satisfy. Many are tempted to despair at what is and what they think will be. Despite...

This morning we ascend Mount Tabor with Jesus and his three apostles. And we hear the  Father declare,  “This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  This is our truth as well. Baptized into Christ, we too are the beloved of the Father. The brilliance of this morning’s Transfiguration points us to another hilltop, that of Calvary. There the Beloved one will give himself away to us completely. His clothes, his flesh once bright with light on Tabor will be torn and stained with the spittle and blood of his passion. Empowered by his Father’s love, Jesus will freely give himself up for us. Trusting in the Father’s love may  we too   be transfigured and fearless enough to be self-forgetful like Jesus.  Photograph by Father Emmanuel.

The Canaanite woman in today’s gospel is a perfect icon of the life of prayer that was the core of St John Vianney’s existence. For this great contemplative whom we celebrate today, prayer was indeed the “land of milk and honey,” producing amazing fruit. Like this foreign woman, consumed with concern for the soul of another, the Cur é of Ars embodied a faith that was at once deeply humble, tirelessly insistent, aggressively bold, and that, above all, clung for dear life to the person of Jesus. He saw no limits to what God could do for him since his most ardent desire happened to coincide with God’s own: namely, the salvation of souls. Let us, too, now turn to the Lord, and humbly yet boldly beg him to inflame our sluggish hearts with the fire of his charity, through the intercession of St John Mary Vianney. Reflection by Father Simeon.

  On the day I finally entered the abbey, first we prayed in this church before going to the guest house to meet Fr. Marius, the vocation director. Two weeks earlier, toward the end of my observership, my Dad had died suddenly. The Dominican Prior had picked me up and had driven me to my family's house. After the funeral and some time there to mourn with my family about my dad, my mother drove me back to the Abbey. “Tommy,” she said in her Irish way, “I haven't ever prayed in your Church, so I get three wishes. Let's go in.” We prayed for a while. I thought I might be holding my mother up, so I left the side chapel, but she did not. I waited and waited and waited. Finally, she came out with a sparkle of joy on her face. “Tommy!” she said, “I'm sorry to have taken so long, but your Father was there with me.”  What a gift that was for me from my mother and dad and from Our Father in heaven. “This is truly the House of God!” I felt in my heart. In the first reading, we jus...

  As living stones, we are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  1 Peter 2.5 We celebrate today the 46 th Anniversary of the Dedication of our own Abbey church.   During the early years of the monastery's foundation here in Spencer, the growth of the community was remarkable. And ground was broken for our church on 19 March 1952. On 15 August 1953, the first Mass was solemnly celebrated in the newly completed church. Designed by some of the monks in collaboration with a local architectural firm, the  church was built by contracted lay workers and the many monks who assisted them. The church was finally dedicated on August 1, 1975.  We are grateful for the beauty and simplicity of our monastic church, grateful for the labor and inspiration of our monastic forebears. And we pray that we may become more and more "living stones" in Christ's ow...