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 ...