ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

  Once again we came upon these archival images of monks at work from our founding monastery of Our Lady of the Valley in Rhode Island. In our own ordinary daily tasks, we are encouraged by the example of our holy forebears. And we pray that we, like them, will be faithful in all things. And if the circumstances of the place or their poverty should require that they themselves do the work of gathering the harvest, let them not be discontented; for then are they truly monastics when they live by the labor of their hands, as did our Fathers and the Apostles. Let all things be done with moderation, however, for the sake of the faint-hearted.  from the Rule of Saint Benedict, Chapter 48.

  An essential element of our monastic conversatio is mindfulness of God. We are to be responsive to the Holy Spirit and so cultivate continual mindfulness of God's presence. A good part of this “mindfulness” often entails a great deal of “mindfulness of my desperate need for God’s mercy.” And my heart is broken open with regret and repentance as I recall, sometimes in vivid detail, the dumb, selfish things that are a real and embarrassing part of my past. How could I have been such a jerk? God is not surprised. Why should I be? So it is that I remember blowing up at my Dad one day for some trifle that I deemed inappropriate. I was not proud of myself. And a day or so later, I had the sense to apologize. His response was simple, “Jimmy, you never have to apologize to me.” This touched me deeply. His words were my forgiveness.  He knew me and understood me, he loved me.   And I understood that the love, the relationship we had, meant more and could tolerate ...

  It seems the needier we are, the more impossible our impediments, the greater the opportunity for Jesus’ graced entrée, for God longs to be ordinary. Why else would he choose to be a child, why else a carpenter and a wandering teacher? Why else allow himself to be done in by thugs and jealous bureaucrats? Why else choose to be hidden in a morsel of bread on our altars? It is why Jesus has come, God with us, near us, in us. Our messes personal, and communal are charged forever with his kind, incessant presence. God  longs  to encounter us there. Jesus has come to stay with us, now right now. His mercy finds us here over and over again. Eternity is always interrupting. The amazing yet ordinary things- the beauty, the sorrow in human experience and in all of creation- beckon to us and draw us to him, who is constantly seeking opportunities to engage us, here and now, without fanfare. It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creat...

  Our Brother Jerome Collins passed peacefully to the Lord on Sunday morning, June 26. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,  after graduation from high school he served in the U.S. Army during World War 2 as a teletype operator and was honorably discharged, having been awarded Army of Occupation and World War II Victory medals. He worked as a traveling salesman for eighteen months and for three years as a precision tool grinder. Br. Jerome entered our founding monastery, Our Lady of the Valley in Rhode Island, in the autumn of 1949. When in March of 1950 that monastery burned to the ground he transferred with the rest of the monks to help build a new monastery, St. Joseph’s Abbey, on the grounds of the former Alta Crest Farm here in Spencer. In the above photo of the fire at Our Lady of the Valley,  Brother Jerome is pictured on the far  right . Here at the Abbey  Brother Jerome worked as an electrician, cook, and porter. For a little over a year in the mid-1950s...

Today's gospel begins the fifth section of the Gospel of Luke, the Journey Section, the climactic narrative of the ever-ascending journey of Jesus to the Father. Last Sunday, because of Corpus Christi's special gospel, the normally read gospel was not heard. That gospel, Luke 9:22-27, is important for the proper understanding of what the journey embarked upon in today's gospel is about. Last week we would normally have heard St. Peter call Jesus the Christ or the Messiah of God, and we would have heard Jesus correct any erroneous notions that Peter and ourselves might have about that. Jesus claimed for himself the title The Son of Man who must suffer greatly, be killed and raised on the third day. Furthermore, he said that anyone who wishes to follow him must deny himself, take up his cross daily and thus follow him. The opening verse of our gospel today which is Luke 9:51 forms with Luke 24: 51 what is called a literary inclusion—these are like literary bookends that aid i...

  Words have lives, they evolve. Such is the word, passion . It comes from the Latin passio meaning to bear and endure. It is the origin of the word patient . Later in its life, passion came to mean suffering. Further on, the passion would describe erotic love and soon after any ardent emotion or enthusiasm. How fitting then that we use the word passion with all of its nuances and resonance to describe the suffering and death of Jesus our Lord. For all that Jesus endures because of his tender love for us is most truly his passion . “For the joy that lay before him, Jesus endured the cross despising its shame.” Patiently, passionately, most ardently Jesus gives himself away to us, for us. And when he feels things, he’s moved to his very guts . Jesus is thus the perfect enfleshment of this passion of God’s self-forgetful love for us. H e has come to establish an intimacy with us that signals our access to everything he has received from his Father, even the glory that is his as...

Something utterly unprecedented in God’s graciousness was about to occur, something so exceptional in Israel’s history, that a forerunner would be essential, someone to prepare the hearts of the people for God’s radical inbreaking . John is that man. His call to repentance, to absolute honesty, justice, and care for the poor will prepare Israel for the immense reversal that will take place in the person of Christ Jesus. For Jesus will indeed be the Messiah, but not the one everyone expected. And this morning we look back at the infancy and early childhood of John and notice with him the Lord calling him even “from his mother’s womb.” John will kick and stir in the long-barren womb of his mother Elizabeth at the nearness of Christ in Mary. And miraculously when his father names him John, the name given him by an angel, his mute father’s tongue will be loosed. And so today the local folks all wonder, "What, then, will this child be? For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.” We ...

Fire safety at the Abbey is a priority, and drills are held on a regular basis. Because of the immense size of our property, The Spencer Fire Department has kept a substation here at the monastery which houses equipment for their own use in town and for use here at the Abbey in the event of an emergency. F.D.S.J.A. Station 2 was established to assist the Spencer Fire Department. We are blessed to have the concern of our local fire department.  Many of our monks have volunteered for training and manning the station through the years.  Brother Benedict has been Captain of our little station for some time, and a group of monks has recently been outfitted for turn-out gear. And they meet regularly for training. Pictured above with Engine 4 are Brothers Guerric, Kenneth, Benedict, Michael, and Andrew. We pray that these services will never be needed, but it is a comfort to know we are prepared.

  We are always inspired by the ardor and single-heartedness of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, who died as a Jesuit scholastic at age 23 while caring for plague victims in Rome in 1591. Indeed, s o confident was Aloysius in God's tender love for him, that one day as he was playing ball with the other young Jesuits, Saint Robert Bellarmine approached him and asked what he would do if he were told he was going to die the next day. "I would go on playing ball," said Aloysius.  So may we always trust in the Lord's merciful love. As Cistercians we are happy to recall that on his deathbed Aloysius asked his brother Jesuits to read to him from Saint Bernard's  Sermons on the Song of Songs , a text that he always found consoling. The Vocation of Saint Aloysius (Luigi) Gonzaga,  Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) (Italian, Cento 1591–1666 Bologna), ca. 1650.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Used with permission.

She saw the moon hanging in midair, in the sky. Although the moon was shining bright, there was a single black spot on it. This became a recurring vision that for years Juliana couldn’t figure out. One day the Lord told her that this vision of the moon was a symbol of the Church, so bright with all its feasts, but the black part of the moon meant that there was no feast to honor the Sacrament of the Altar in a special way. (At that time the celebration of this Mystery was only observed on Holy Thursday, but on that day it is mostly Christ’s sufferings and death that are thought about.) So the Lord told her that he desired another day be set apart to celebrate his real Presence in the Eucharist. In 1246, St. Juliana, an Augustinian nun, and prioress persuaded the bishop of Liège to initiate a special feast on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday to honor the Blessed Sacrament. Fifteen years later, in 1261, Pope Urban IV, formerly Archdeacon of Liège, ordered the whole Church to observe thi...

Visitors or newcomers often ask if monks get bored. I suppose I do - not bored by our rhythm of liturgy, work, and prayer, but bored by me. It is perhaps the most difficult part of our  ascesis  - to see clearly over and over again the sad, boring truth of who I am. The truth is - I bore myself constantly with my sinfulness and stubbornness. Having seen and understood that painful, neuralgic reality all too well, over and over again, the challenge is there and then to allow God in Christ in that very moment to gaze on me with love and exquisite tenderness. It seems utter madness to allow myself to be the object of Christ’s love and attention and mercy precisely in that moment. This is the wonderful trick of the monastic vocation - I thought I was coming to the monastery to gaze upon Christ, but it is Christ Jesus the Lord himself who wants to gaze upon me in my lowliness and poverty.  Photograph by Brother Brian. Reflection by one of the monks.

  Today the One who cannot lie—the very one who is “the Way and the Truth and the Life”—addresses us as his intimate friends and makes us a solemn promise: I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now. But when he comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth. As the source, foundation and final end of all lesser truths, surely the Reality of God’s Triune Being as a mystery beyond words, but embraced in faith and adored with love, is the deepest and most precious revelation that the Holy Spirit makes to the Church and to humanity. This Mystery of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate today is eternally unfathomable, infinitely more so than the magnificence of all universes, real or imagined. Yet this ineffability is really no valid excuse for muteness, because mystery is the very spice of celebration, and human celebration requires language, no matter how imperfect and groping—rather like a blind person trying to describe the bright splendor of the sun while o...

  But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother,  Raqa,   will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, 'You fool,' will be liable to fiery Gehenna.  Mt 5 Which of us in anger or frustration has not once, at least in our head, used an undesirable name for someone who bothers us? And we recall with amusement that the epithet,  Raqa , literally means "blockhead."  But in God's kingdom, there is no place for name-calling. Jesus begs us to respect and reverence one another, no matter what we have suffered at their hands. Lord Jesus, teach us to be gentle and accepting, to swallow the bitter remark and instead give a blessing.  Photograph of the Abbey scriptorium by Brother Brian.

  "The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall," said the American architect Louis Kahn. Indeed, buildings that matter have spirit and meaning and are never merely functional. With the assistance of local architects and contractors, monks designed and built our monastery in the 1950s. Their vision formed the architecture, and its beauty has continued to form succeeding generations of monks. We remain grateful for their care. Photograph of early morning sunlight in the southwestern corner of the cloister.

              Our community could not exist without the gift of the Holy Spirit. Only the Spirit of the Father and the Son can make communion possible among us: "being of the same mind…united in heart, thinking the same thing.” The Lord has called us to a special charism in the Church: forty-five men of all ages and backgrounds, living and working together day in and day out, without wives and children, at all hours of the night and day in church, obedient to a Rule and an abbot – this charism is impossible without the Holy Spirit. It is all too easy to see what happens in the absence of the Spirit – community life dissolves, discipline is non-existent, a monastery becomes a home for numerous groups of sarabites whose law is to do whatever pleases them. Only the Holy Spirit can keep this from happening.           That is why Our Lord’s appearance to the disciples on Easter night is...

Come, Creator Spirit, visit the minds of your children, and fill the hearts you have made, with heavenly grace. You are called the Comforter, the gift of God most high, living spring, and fire, love, and spiritual anointing.  You are sevenfold in your gifts, the finger of God’s right hand; you are the Father’s  true promise, endowing our tongues with speech.  Enkindle your light in our senses, infuse your life in our hearts; strengthen our bodies’ weakness by your never-failing might. Drive far away our foe, and grant peace without end, that with you to lead us on, we may escape all harm.  Grant us, through you, to know the Father, also the Son; may we ever believe in you, the Spirit of them both. Amen. In preparation for the great Solemnity of Pentecost, we pray our novena to the Holy Spirit. And each evening at Vespers, we chant this ancient Latin hymn. We share a fine translation completed by one of the monks.

Ever since Jesus’ return to the Father at the Ascension we are now enabled to encounter, love, and minister to Jesus in every human being, and this not as a fragment of our mystical imagination but as a concrete existential fact and an act of obedience to Jesus’ own commandments! Jesus’ going to the Father, and our gladly letting him go to the One who begot him, is what enacts Jesus’ Real Presence in every member of humanity and makes him accessible to us at every turn. The mystery of Christ’s Ascension results in the harmonious merging of the two previously distinct commandments of love of God and love of neighbor, so that they, in practice, become but a single commandment. At the Ascension, Jesus of Nazareth becomes the universal, cosmic Christ. What an extraordinary explosion of love! This explosion of love, this drowning of the whole cosmos in the tumultuous ocean of divine love by the re-creating action of the Divine Spirit, has very concrete consequences in our way of life…Inspir...