Visitation

How blessed is she who believed that what was spoken to her by the Lord through an angel would be fulfilled.

Mary believes beyond doubt that the Lord’s word is trustworthy. And so in the self-forgetfulness of love, even as she ponders in her heart the wonder and confusion of the Angel's message, she travels into the hill country to be with her cousin Elizabeth in the final weeks of her pregnancy.

Mary shows us how to keep faith and believe even when things seem like they do not fit together. Let us go to her and place ourselves in her keeping, for she can help us receive with joy even what we do not understand.

Visitation, Mariotto Albertinelli, 1503, oil on wood, 232 x 146 cm, 
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Trinity

For God to be Trinity means that God explodes with delight from within.  Such delight requires mutuality of persons, for it is delight at knowing and being known, delight at belonging to Another, delight at the inability of having one’s own existence apart from that Other, delight in never for all eternity having been absent from the life of the beloved Other, delight that celebrates its freedom in a playful, unstoppable dance that has as stage the whole enraptured cosmos and that thrills in abiding with the blessed Two who are Persons other than Oneself.  This explosive, world-creating energy of delight wells up from the bosom of the Blessed Trinity. 

What is good is “diffusive of itself”, says St. Thomas. God is too good, and therefore too “diffusive” of himself—too exuberant and squandering of his Being—to keep his secret delight to himself. The action of a divine self-outpouring is a central biblical category already at work from the first verses of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…. And the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light.’” Each of these verbs—creating, moving and saying—imply a dynamic outward movement on God’s part, beyond the sphere of his own self-sufficient Being and into the void of nothingness, that he may pour himself out into what is not-God. Note the Trinitarian undertones present in Scripture from the outset: God creates not out of a splendid isolation but with the collaboration of “the Beginning, the First Principle, who says: “I was beside him as his craftsman.” The Father created all things in the Word through the Spirit.  Every action of God is a self-outpouring of divine life that in no way depletes the Being of God.  

The expansive throbbing of God’s triune Heart can never quite contain itself. The beaming forth of  primal triune joy provides the blissful pattern for all created love and friendship. From the Trinity we learn that our own greatest joy should be to fill someone else with life. 

Excerpts from Father Simeon's Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

Incense

May my prayer be counted as incense before You. Ps 141. 2

In the early Church a reluctance to use incense during the Liturgy because of its associations with pagan idol worship, soon gave way to an intuition that it was a fitting way to show honor and praise and image the rising of prayer to the heavens.

Here Brother Jonah  incenses the Sacrament at the Consecration in a photograph by Brother Brian.

Mary in May

We remember that May is Mary's month, and now our gigantic bed of lilies-of-the-valley is blooming just outside the monastic refectory. The poet Hopkins says that the growth and flowering of May remind Mary of the joy she experienced while carrying the Lord in her womb. "All things rising, all things sizing, Mary sees sympathizing." 

Pentecost Sunday

We share some excerpts from Father Abbot's homily for this Solemnity:

There is always more when it comes to God. God always has more for us- as much as we can bear. In a way, we can say that the Holy Spirit is God’s more- God’s overflowing more for each one of us. So, how much can we bear? How much of God’s love can we bear?

The Spirit guides each one of us in countless and diverse ways. There are absolutely no circumstances in our personal life journeys that exclude the Spirit’s presence. When we sin, the Spirit guides us into repentance. When we are sick, the Spirit guides us into strength and healing. When we face death, the Spirit will guide us into the fullness of life. So, how can we remain open and receptive to the Spirit’s guidance? To my mind there is one essential condition for such openness and receptivity. We need moments in our lives when we can be still, when we can be silent, when we can listen.

Take a deep breath and listen to and listen for the Spirit of God breathing on you, breathing into you, breathing you. And what does the voice of the Lord carried on the Divine Breath say to us, to each one of us? "You are my beloved child in whom I delight." My brothers and sisters, take a few moments on this Pentecost Day, take a few moments every day if possible, and let go of all the inner noise, stop the interior dialog and allow God to delight in you.

Light in the Cloister

"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 1950’s. 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.

Saint Pachomius

Today in the Cistercian calendar we celebrate the feast of Saint Pachomius of Egypt, who in the first half of the fourth century and after having been a hermit like many others, founded one of the first communities of monks at Tabennissi.  A straight line leads from his idea of cenobitic monastic living, which was an innovation at that time, to our own Rule of Saint Benedict.  It should, then, fill our hearts with joy and gratitude to see how Pachomius’ vocation and teachings embody most effectively one very special way of living the single Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, common to all Christians. 

When Pachomius had reached spiritual maturity an angel ordered him to leave his hermit’s cave “and call the young monks together and dwell with them” (Palladius, Lausiac History).  This seems to be a clear monastic fulfillment of the Lord Jesus’ prayer to his and our Father in today’s Gospel:  “As you sent me into the world, so I send them into the world”—including this monastic caveat: “They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world”(John 17: 11b-19).  Indeed, Pachomius is sent, like Jesus, to “keep in the Father’s name” the brother monks God has given him, “so that they may be one just as (Jesus and the Father) are one”.  Nor is such fraternal unity merely an abstract idea, as we see movingly enacted in the first reading, when the Christians of Ephesus smother Paul with the hugs and kisses of their affection at his final departure from them (Acts 20:37-38).

My brothers: we have obviously not brought ourselves together either to this monastery for our life-long monastic journey or even to this morning’s Eucharist, for we are nothing other than “the Church of God that he acquired with his own Blood”(Acts 20:28) when he called us out of the darkness of our selfish individualism and united us as his Body.  Let us, then, rejoice that Jesus had us here in Spencer in mind when praying to the Father, and let us also feel sorrow for ever having forgotten this life-giving truth which can bear such powerful fruit in our lives, if we allow it.

Excerpts from Father Simeon's introduction at this morning's Eucharist.