The One Great Thing To Love On Earth

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste – or foretaste – of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

Not Curing But Caring

When another comes to us in his loneliness, the quick comforting word is not the first or best response. First let us respond to the real loneliness that is there by sharing it. In the deep emptiness and nothingness we need to experience the potential and the hope. Not curing but caring.

M. BASIL PENNINGTON, OCSO Jubilee: A Monk’s Journal 

Holiness Cultivated In Silence

The call to holiness is accepted and can be cultivated only in the silence of adoration before the infinite transcendence of God: “We must confess that we all have need of this silence, filled with the presence of him who is adored: in theology, so as to exploit fully its own sapiential and spiritual soul; in prayer, so that we may never forget that seeing God means coming down the mountain with a face so radiant that we are obliged to cover it with a veil; in commitment, so that we will refuse to be locked in a struggle without love and forgiveness. All, believers and non-believers alike, need to learn a silence that allows the other to speak when and how he wishes, and allows us to understand his words.”

POPE JOHN PAUL II Vita Consecrata, 38 

Saint John Cassian Quotes

Fasts and vigils, the study of Scripture, renouncing possessions and everything worldly are not in themselves perfection, as we have said; they are its tools. For perfection is not to be found in them; it is acquired through them. It is useless, therefore, to boast of our fasting, vigils, poverty, and reading of Scripture when we have not achieved the love of God and our fellow men. Whoever has achieved love has God within himself and his intellect is always with God.

If you wish to attain to true knowledge of the Scriptures, hasten to acquire first an unshakeable humility of heart. That alone will lead you, not to the knowledge that puffs up, but to that which enlightens, by the perfecting of love.

True spiritual knowledge has sometimes flourished most grandly in some who were without eloquence and almost illiterate. And this is very clearly shown by the case of the Apostles and many holy men, who did not spread themselves out with an empty show of leaves, but were bowed down by the weight of the true fruits of spiritual knowledge: of whom it is written in Acts: 'But when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were ignorant and unlearned men, they were astonished' (Acts 4:13).

Prayer and Work

Following Mary’s example, the fundamental practice for healing the wounds of the false-self system is to fulfill the duties of our job in life. This includes helping people who are counting on us. If prayer gets in the way, there is some misunderstanding. Some devout persons think that if their activities at home or their job get in the way of praying, there is something wrong with their activities. On the contrary, there is something wrong with their prayer.

THOMAS KEATING The Mystery of Christ

Shepherd of Delight—Homily

16-B Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Jer 23:1-6; Eph 2:13-18; Mk 6:30-34)

Spencer, July 21, 2024

We encounter the Lord Jesus in today’s gospel first of all as the shepherd of his own disciples. Returning from the mission Jesus had sent them on, the disciples are eager to tell their Master what they have accomplished. We see Jesus here gathering his disciples together and uniting them into a community around himself. This action starkly contrasts the evil shepherds in Jeremiah who, rather than gathering, violently scattered [the Lord’s] sheep and drove them away. Then Jesus listens attentively to the stories the apostles tell him about how their mission had gone. This exchange between Jesus and his disciples shows that authentic Christian mission cannot consist only in “doing and teaching”. Those who are sent also need to communicate their experience of mission to Jesus so as to internalize it, but above all in order to make sure their sacred mission remains centered on the person of the Savior and his service, and does not degenerate into one more enterprise of the self-serving ego.

This process of intimate dialogue between Jesus and those he’s called to himself is really a form of intense prayer. In this context, the disciples’ pastoral and personal experiences create an opportunity for something they urgently need in their formation: namely, to be both consoled and corrected by Jesus. Proclaiming the Gospel, bearing living witness to Jesus the Lord, is a laborious process that every Christian has to learn by patient trial and, at times, embarrassing error, but always as a result of intimate contact with the person of the Lord. Only communion with Jesus’ nourishing presence—never mental analysis alone—can guarantee the disciple’s spiritual growth.

We are also here struck by the fact that, in his dealings with his followers, Jesus does not show himself at all interested in the success of the mission. Jesus is no hard-nosed “pragmatist”! First and foremost he cares about the persons of those he has sent out. He truly acts as the good shepherd who knows his sheep by name, that is, intimately, individually, in each one’s uniqueness. The “success” or “failure” of the mission, as the world defines success and failure, seem to matter very little to the Lord. As he listens to the stories the apostles recount, the Master is sensitive to their fatigue. So he invites them to go off with him to a remote place away from it all so that he can personally tend to their weariness. How can we fail to be moved by the tenderness of such a Master who, like a mother hen, seems to anticipate his followers’ every human need? 

Mark’s text continues: There were many crowds coming and going, so that [the apostles and Jesus] no longer even had time to eat. Could the disciples at this point be suffering from the typically modern phenomenon of activism? Jesus continues to act as good shepherd by exhorting his exhausted disciples to rest. Jesus cannot here have in mind only physical and mental rest, but rather contemplative repose. He awakens in them the responsibility to stop all exterior activity now and then and make time to enjoy this silence and this solitude in their friend Jesus’ company. There is always deep wisdom in an alternation of modalities. God is not the slave-driver our own obsessions sometimes make him out to be! The Father, rather, has sent Jesus in order to restore us to health, to wholeness, to the integrity and dynamic fullness of our human nature as he created it in the beginning. In the Book of Wisdom we hear this beautiful praise: You spare all things, because they are yours, O Ruler and Lover of souls (Wis 11:26).

And so, here, Jesus seems to be addressing his busy disciples as if they were so many Marthas, saying to them: ‘Stop your frantic activism! Come here and sit by my side and learn how to simply be. Don’t become alienated from your own true being, and therefore from me, your Creator, by your compulsive need to be always doing, doing, doing…. Don’t be so intent on impressing me by your deeds of service that you end up overlooking my person and thus impoverishing your own souls by denying both you and me the mutual delight I came to establish between us!’ 

Next, Jesus turns from the intimate circle of his disciples to the vast, anonymous multitude. When he had disembarked to go to a deserted place with the disciples, Jesus saw the large crowd that had gone ahead of them on foot, and he felt compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Compassion is clearly the foundation of all of Jesus’ pastoral action toward every person he meets. We might say he is “disembarking” in this world from his native homeland, which is the Father’s compassionate Heart; and he comes to our desolation humbly, quietly to offer humble yet potent remedies: his comforting presence, his wisdom, his goodness, his healing and, ultimately, his very Body and Blood.

Just as he had seen the need of his disciples for contemplative rest in his company amid their labors, Jesus now sees the need of the crowds to be shepherded, brought into his merciful embrace. He does not send them away as if they were an obstacle to previously decided plans. Was it not, in fact, precisely to engage in such compassionate caring for the needy that he had come from the Father in the first place? The substance of Jesus’ life as Incarnate Word is clearly to give himself as Eucharistic gift to a starving and wretched world, especially to the powerless and marginalized who seem to have been abandoned by the powerful.

Jesus also perceives these people’s hunger for God’s Word, and he began to teach them many things. Graciously, he allows himself to be put upon, and he commits himself to the arduous task of preaching. In this way he is teaching his disciples that spontaneous availability to the needy, without advance warning, is a primordial Christian virtue: “Eucharistic availability”, I would call it—becoming bread for others, since “we are what we eat”. The gaze of Jesus the Shepherd is powered by the light of the Word of God that indwells him. In this light he sees in the crowd an opportunity and invitation to obey the word of Scripture that bemoans God’s people having become “a flock without a shepherd”. Jesus is so much the Shepherd after God’s own Heart that he is eager to lay down his life for his sheep. This Shepherd is no other than the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Lamb in whose blood you who once were far off have been brought near. In the Book of Revelation we see how, in the glorified Jesus, the images of shepherd and lamb converge into the One who leads all his disciples in the resurrection dance: These follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb (Rev 14:4).

For us disciples to follow the Lamb implies not only our being shepherded by the Lamb but also for us, in turn, to become loving and caring shepherds to all to whom the Lamb sends us. By our close association with Jesus our Teacher and, above all, by our interior union with Jesus as oblation in the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, we have been transformed into envoys of the Lamb of God. Popes, bishops and priests are shepherds in a formal, hierarchical sense; but all Christians are by nature “shepherds” in an even more fundamental sense by virtue of Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist, which communicate missionary energy. This is the indispensable energy that the Holy Spirit infuses into our souls along with the life of the Blessed Trinity. The Christian vocation as such necessarily draws all of us into the pastoral mission of Christ himself, whether in a more eye-catching or in an utterly hidden form.

Not many of us may spontaneously think of ourselves as “shepherds”; and yet this is precisely what we have been made to be by the grace of God-like compassion that the Christ-life activates within us. We are to shepherd everyone we encounter into the circle of our mutual delight—holy delight in Christ and in each other. 

Absorbing the Psalms

For decades now and every day within them I have been singing the psalms—scores and scores of them, hours of each day. I sing them all—every one—and then start them all over again. I have become a long line of words, and arc of sound, a tone that tries to spin the dividing spaces that keep the world from what can save us.

I do not get across. I call from the far side. I stretch all my being into the narrow lines that say those right and only words, words that every day trace our fall and point the path of return. I crawl over every word. I grope my way over and around every syllable, each phrase.

JEREMY DRISCOLL, OSB A Monk’s Alphabet