Faithful

 

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.

Saints Peter & Paul

 

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 the breach. In the end, I think I really learned to forgive and what it feels like to be forgiven by my father. He simply was not a grudge-holder. And when I was trying to muster the courage to take steps toward entering this monastery, it was somehow imagining his words as the Father’s words deep in my heart that gave me the courage I needed, “Give it a try. What have you got to lose?” My father knew me well. 

The idea of "knowing" in Ancient Hebrew thought implies a highly personal and intimate relationality. (See Jeff Benner) It is the intimate knowledge of lovers; in Genesis, we read that Adam "knew Eve his wife". And we pray in the psalm, “O God, you search me, and you know me,” implying an intimate loving awareness that is much, much more than God smugly spying on us. Hopefully, most often, this knowledge spurs a response, and we say with Saint Paul, “All I want is to know Christ.”

Both Peter and Paul whom we feast today came to understand themselves as fully known - forgiven failures who were loved by their resurrected and wounded Master. Jesus knew them both so well. These two pillars of the Church come before us this morning, a bit sheepishly, embarrassed by all the hoopla in their honor, they lower their heads and point to Jesus, whose mercy alone is their boast. Peter who, even as his best friend is being roughed up by soldiers and sentenced and spat upon, insists to a serving girl in the glow of a charcoal fire that he doesn’t even know who that man is. And Paul who’s been dragging the first followers of Jesus from their homes to prison and persecution. Both Peter and Paul find themselves discovered by the mercy of God in Christ Jesus, who identifies himself as the betrayed one, the persecuted one.

Both are converted, literally turned around by mercy. Peter who three times denied his Friend in the light of a charcoal fire is given the opportunity by Jesus three times to proclaim his love early one morning by another charcoal fire. There on the beach, he gets to say, “Lord, I do love you; you know well that I love you.” Jesus knew that all along never doubted it.

So, we know how Peter and Paul would respond to Jesus’ question, but what about when we hear the wounded resurrected Christ Jesus ask us this same question, majestic in its quiet insecurity Who? Who do you say I am/ How do you experience me? And Paul temporarily blinded by the glaring light of Christ’s self-revelation- “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting”- speaking from his deep-down experience will tell us that, “Nothing whatever can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.” Their encounters, and their evolving relationships with Jesus the wounded Life-giver, empower them both to be themselves wounded and forgiven life-givers. They have been empowered by mercy and compassion and forgiveness. We celebrate two men desperately in need of transformation, a transformation that happens in their encounters with their most merciful betrayed and persecuted Lord.

Paul will say it best: “God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.” Clearly, God’s preference for the weak is all about availability. Simply put- it is that only what is fragile, weak (and) precarious according to the order of this world that can allow itself to be “broken so as to be created anew.” That which is vulnerable is transformable; what is sinful can be mercied. But what is stiff, stubborn, and intractable is stagnant and stuck. Allowing myself to be forgiven changes everything.

Perhaps this is our most important work as monks- to allow things to fall apart and notice that, as things fall apart, we are more available for mercy. Perhaps part of our work is to normalize this fragmentation for one another- normalize the falling apart as the means to a most glorious end, life in Christ Jesus. This is not a careless, presumptive laziness, (“I’m broken, you’re broken; Christ will rescue us. No problem!”) Neither is it the blind leading the blind into a catastrophic fall. It is rather the weak leading the weak into a willing acknowledgment and celebration of the inevitability of our fragmentation and weakness as good news that will lead to our transformation in Christ. And so, I like to imagine us encouraging each other as once the about-to-be martyrs did, watching and waiting their turn with the beasts there in the dreary dugouts of the Coliseum. “Go forward; don’t be afraid. This falling, this dying will not be your dissolution but your means, a royal, jubilant gateway to new and more abundant life in Christ, into Christ. Go ahead, let yourself be eaten up! It’s worth it. He’s worth it. Don’t be afraid.” 

Jesus’ question to Peter, to each of us in this morning’s Gospel, situates us with Peter poised to listen to our Master as he whispers this hauntingly beautiful question to each of us in the depths of our hearts, “Who do you say that I am? Who am I for you? What is your experience of me in your life, in your history? How do you experience me now?” What will you answer? Perhaps when we come to understand ourselves as sinners desperately beloved by God in Christ, then with Peter we can say, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” and with Paul, “All I want is to know (you) Christ Jesus and the power flowing from (your) resurrection. Now nothing else matters.” 

When we eat this Bread and drink this cup, we proclaim with every fiber of our being that Mercy has found us, that we too like our saints have been empowered by his forgiveness because love is more powerful than death.

Reflection by one of the monks.

Without Fanfare

 

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 Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light ... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? .... Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. 

Quotation from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

Brother Jerome

 

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, he helped to build the monastery’s daughter-house of St. Benedict’s Abbey in Snowmass, Colorado. Brother was noted for his deep devotion, a serene and humble disposition, his kindness, and his tireless service to the religious life at the monastery.

With gratitude for his gentle presence among us, we commend his soul to your prayers. There are no calling hours. 

Thirteenth Sunday

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 in the understanding of the passages between them. Luke 9:51 reads, “When the days for Jesus's being taken up were fulfilled, he set his face (here translated as “resolutely determined”) to journey to Jerusalem. Luke 24:51 reads, “As he blessed them, he parted from them and was taken up to heaven.” These verses both refer to the mystery of Jesus's Ascension—his being taken up into heaven, but they surround a journey narrative that takes us up to the heights of the preaching and teaching of Jesus—think of the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son-- which inspire us to take up our own cross daily.

The journey of Jesus will take him up to the heights of Mt. Zion and the city of Jerusalem where all God's messengers have been rejected and slain. Thus, Jesus, like the Suffering Servant of the Lord in Isaiah, has to “set his face” to go to Jerusalem. The journey will take us up Mt. Calvary, Golgotha, where Jesus is taken up upon a cross to suffer and die for us, but then in three days to be taken up, raised up, “He has been raised!” Finally, the journey reaches its fulfillment as the risen Jesus leaves Jerusalem for Bethany, and there, as he raises his hands over his beloved disciples in blessing, (there he) is taken up to heaven by the Father. We are all of us on a significant journey—one called LIFE, better called Life, Death, and Eternal Life.

We are being poignantly reminded of this lately each day in the refectory as we reflect on Francie Nolan's life as a parable about our own lives growing up—I doubt that any of us felt it was easy, and as we get older and life's experiences become more challenging, we, like Jesus, have “to set our face,” that is, resolutely determine to continue on the Way in our prayer and in the way we live. This important Christian word “Way” was lost in translation this morning as we heard, “As they were proceeding on their journey...” The Greek, if translated literally, says, “As they went in the way...” The word “way” was used in the early days of the Church to describe Christianity itself which was seen as a following of Jesus who is the only “Way” to salvation. Today in the global Church renewal process called Synodality, the concept of the People of God being together on the Way has been emphasized. The word Syn-odality is derived from two Greek words meaning simply, “together on the Way.” The document from the bishops that introduced the process speaks highly of our particular way, the Rule of St. Benedict, with its remarkable chapter three about calling the whole community together for counsel - everyone from oldest to youngest. We know as followers of St. Benedict who followed Christ that our strength to persevere by the grace of God is enhanced immeasurably by our being and living here at the Abbey as a small but Spirit-filled manifestation of the Body of Christ, the whole People of God journeying together along the way—each one of us bearing his particular cross along the Way, but together with his brothers and sisters, not in isolation from one another.

Two other sections of Chapter Nine in Luke illuminate how we journey together with Jesus along the Way. One is Luke's description of the Transfiguration of Jesus in Luke 9:28-36, where we hear the voice of the Father telling us, “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” We find the strength to follow in the very listening with goodwill to the words of the Lord in the Scriptures, in the teachings of the Church, the words of our Church leaders and the Abbot, the anointed words of our brothers and sisters, and sometimes the words of our worst critics and even enemies. Listen to Him! So, we are nourished and strengthened along the Way by our brothers and sisters, by the Word that we hear and obey, and finally and perhaps most especially, the Eucharist, which is also present in Luke's immensely rich Chapter Nine in the prefiguration of the Eucharist in the miraculous feeding of the five thousand that Fr. Dominic spoke about so beautifully last Sunday, Corpus Christi. Every Mass, like this celebration right now, is a milestone on our own ever-ascending journey to the Father—a milestone where there is time for the leisure that is liturgy where we are refreshed and made ready for the rest of our journey by the gathering of the community in the love of God and by the celebration of God's Word and Eucharist, the bread of wayfarers going to God. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them, and I will raise them up on the last day.

There is one more heavenly grace that strengthens us on the Way to the Father that is emphasized by far more in Luke's Gospel than in the others. Whereas the Holy Spirit is mentioned in Mark 3 times, four times in John, 5 in Matthew, the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit is mentioned in Luke 13 times explicitly and many more times if you count the references to the Spirit of God and The Spirit of the Lord which one would, of course, do. The introduction to Luke in the latest version of the New American Bible points out that “no other gospel writer is more concerned than Luke with the role of the Spirit in the life of Jesus and the Christian disciple.” The fact that in Luke the Holy Spirit is so intimately associated with the Virgin Mother Mary makes his gospel spirituality all the more attractive and life-giving. It is the Holy Spirit that gathers us to celebrate the Eucharist. It is the Holy Spirit that imparts life-giving power and meaning to the words we hear in the liturgy. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the Epiclesis of the Eucharistic Prayer is that prayer in which we “petition God to send the Holy Spirit so that the offerings at the Eucharist may become the Body and Blood of Christ and thus the faithful, by receiving them, may themselves become a living offering to God.” Fr. Thomas Stegman remarks in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans that the Holy Spirit is “the empowering presence of God.” St. Paul, in this morning's reading from Galatians, exhorted us to LIVE BY THE SPIRIT! The Spirit gives us the power to “set our face” to go to our own Jerusalem to die to ourselves through, with and in the Paschal Mystery of Jesus and so live for others and for God who, at the end of our journey on the Way, will take us up in glory to the Kingdom.

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Today's homily by Father Luke.

His Sacred Heart

 

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. He 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 Beloved Son.* Jesus’ passion is to draw us into God. Today we celebrate the wonder of this divine passion for us perfectly enfleshed in his broken Heart.

In the First Reading Ezekiel the prophet has given us God’s self-description as loving shepherd, this, in turn, becomes a template for Jesus’ own understanding of his vocation as Beloved Son of the Father. Jesus is the good shepherd who will relentlessly search, run after and rescue all who are lost, even just one lost sheep. We might say, “Why bother? Why put the other ninety-nine at risk?” But this is who God is. And Paul assures us that this passionate desire of God in Christ for us is expressed in a great gush of graced love lavished upon us through God’s own Spirit – “poured into our hearts.” When we go to prayer, when we wake and walk and work and eat and breathe our day, God is drawing us, ceaselessly, searching and coming after us.

This desperation of a God in love, whose burning desire for us is unquenchable and unending, is in evidence constantly in the gospels. Jesus’ heart is constantly magnetized by desperation. A sobbing widow following the bier of her dead son knows she’s now without resource, destined now for a life of leftovers and condescension. I want to see, cries Bartimaeus. My son is at home dying, my dearest young slave, my daughter is possessed. Do something, I beg you. I’ve been to every doctor, tried every cure. But now, if only I touch his tassel. They have no wine, it’s only the first day of the celebration, and everything will be lost. Lord, wake up we’re going to drown, don’t you care. Lord, the one you love has died. And so best of all, last of all this dead-end that was always looming ahead will be destroyed by his passion and death on the cross. Because Jesus could not bear to have us live in fear of this final terror. He tramples down death by death because he is all Life. If only we knew the gift of God. If only understood his passion for us. He has given himself away totally, lavishly, foolishly, unreasonably.*

He cannot make us love him, still, he boldly exposes his broken Heart for us, longing as any man would for a loving response. He is not embarrassed by the vulnerability and desperation he reveals, he puts his Heart right out there. Perhaps all the tenderness and divine vulnerability are too much, perhaps even tasteless or off-putting. It is after all, way beyond a certain manly coolness and detachment. But Jesus loves us to folly, and he is not about to be evasive or diplomatic about it. How could he be? He’s on fire with it. And his love for us is not some disembodied theological premise or a refined, pious sentiment but a deeply felt, very raw, and real emotion. Jesus feels things deeply in his gut.

Today’s solemnity is all about this Divine Exposure. All falsehood, pretense, and sin; all the pain and suffering he endured and we endure, all the love we long for but dare not express, there too in his wounded Heart we see all the sorrow and suffering in Ukraine and Uvalde and Buffalo - it’s all right there in that Heart - exposed for all to see, in its bleeding, gut-wrenching beauty, the vulnerability of God. He shows us who he is, who God is, and who we are meant to be. The invitation is to go and do likewise – to love until it hurts, though often we might like to think there is an easier way. In the wounded Heart of Jesus, we see our reality and our sublime destiny, as individuals, as Church, as monastic community.

If like Jesus we dare to open our wounded hands and hearts to one another, with nothing to hide - at ease with the awkwardness and embarrassment of loving, at home with our vulnerability the kingdom can happen. At best two desperations will meet. Jesus’ desperate passion to share God’s love and our desperate need for the healing, grace, and love that only Father, Son, and Spirit can bestow. We cry out in a confident appeal that is always the echo of God’s first desperate longing for us.

In the humility of his passion for us, Jesus has come to give himself away. As we gather together around this Table to consume Christ’s wounded body and drink the blood of God poured out for us, we find ourselves once again overpowered by the mystery of his love, by the unquestionable reality of the mystery of a God who is love,* a God who even now desperately desires to offer us his precious body and blood even his wounded heart.

The Sacred Heart by Odilon Redon. Today's homily by one of the monks. References: 1. Sandra Schneiders. 2 Robert Barron. 3. Adapted from Karl Rahner.

Birth of John the Baptist

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 might also imagine what they said, as they saw him as a young man sneak off to the desert, and then preach and baptize with such urgency. “Not surprising at all; I always saw it in him,” they might say. “He was always different, not like the other kids; a kind of fire in him; a thoughtful kid; he liked to pray…” Maybe like things our friends and family said when we came to the monastery.

So it is that we celebrate today a kind of feast of sacred retrospection. Sacred retrospection. Tradition reflects back on the life of John the Baptizer and wonders at the holiness and uniqueness it sees even from his birth. We know this is a typical motif in Scripture and in accounts of many of the saints’ lives. And these stories were very often depicted in art. A favorite example is a relief of the infant St. Nicholas resting in his mother’s left arm. As she offers him her right breast to nurse him, Baby Nicholas raises both of his little hands, as if to say, “No thanks, Mom. I’m good.” Amazingly, it seems he has weaned himself; already quite a little ascetic and brimming with self-control even as a baby. The message is clear: Nicholas’ sanctity was obvious, even from any early age. Really? To the believing mind perhaps it’s not as ditsy as it sounds, but instead an unsophisticated expression of the truth which faith offers us.

Today on this Birthday feast of the Baptist, we celebrate a God who is constantly “acting on our behalf, out of love for us;” God drawing us to our truest identity. And since God preserves the universe in being, we believe that he acts in and with every creature in each and all its activities. This is not to say we are stuck in some plan, some occult predestination, but that God is always, always calling, beckoning us, drawing us to himself, longing to fill us with himself, drawing into the Trinity. We name this divine Providence.

And if today’s Solemnity strikes us as somewhat folkloric, this is not to diminish its truth. We are invited to look back and notice the finger of God - God acting in John’s life, and in our own. And so jubilantly we imagine John chanting to us with the Psalmist, “I praise you, for I am wonderfully made.” Each of us is invited to do the same, to reflect on our own lives with a kind of road-back-to-Jerusalem-from-Emmaus insight - “It was the Lord all the time, though I did not recognize him. It was you Lord, calling, using anything at all to bring me to you, to my truth, to the secret for which I was made.” It was, it is God’s finger in my life day in day out, all through the years.

This is what our candidates discover as they compose their autobiographies and tell us their stories in preparation for entrance, a kind of prayerful inventory that notices the earliest echoes of God’s call, what was always there, though they might not have named it that back then. 

In the end each of us is meant to say with Isaiah, “The Lord called me from my mother’s womb; he pronounced my very name…” Divine Providence had been at work all the time in our individual stories, in our personal histories, through all the blessings and reversals. These graces must be named and celebrated as God’s work in us, through us, for us.

God’s Providence is with us; God behind and before us, using anything at all, everything to draw us to himself. And so he invites us once again to this altar to our ultimate identity: Holy Communion, Holy Communion with him and with one another. And if our hearts leap for joy as did the infant John in Elizabeth’s womb, it is a good thing for the Lord Jesus is indeed very near.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Birth  of the Baptist, fresco in  the Cappella Tornabuoni of  Santa Maria Novella, Florence.  Homily by one of the monks.