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.