ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

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.

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: ...

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.

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." 

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 Sp...

"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.

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”—in...

With the disciples this morning, we hear the Lord reminding us that the self-forgetful love and intimacy of Father and beloved Son is where we belong. Jesus begs his Father that we may be swept up into the reality of the God’s own “mutual love and indwelling.”* There is room for everybody in this divine embrace. For as Jesus tells his Father, his desire is “t hat the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” *Francis Moloney.

We share excerpts from Father Luke’s homily for Ascension Thursday. A surgeon named Shawn from Nebraska, who participated in the marathon in Boston, had crossed the finish line seconds before the first bomb exploded.  He said, “When the bombs started to explode, I instinctively ran away from them, but then I stopped and turned back because I remembered who I am and ran to the first aid tents to  care for the wounded.”  His statement is a summary of the Christian way of life: the passage from the darkness of being controlled by our instinctual passions to the light of  living in Truth and Love.  I don't know if he is a Christian, perhaps he doesn't know it either.  Yet, there is no one who acts outside the redemption won for us all by Jesus Christ.  “I remembered who I am.”  Sure, Shawn was talking about the fact that he is a doctor, but on a deeper level he was talking about the fact of his shared humanity: all of us redeemed by the...

Numerous manuscript paintings, such as this one from the early thirteenth century, show the Apostles and Our Lady gazing up  at the feet of Jesus as he disappears into the heavens. We can imagine their sorrow and confusion. But we rejoice, for where he has gone, we hope to follow. His glorious Ascension into heaven is our destiny, our promised inheritance. As members of his Body, the Ascension of Jesus is the first moment of our own disappearance into God.  "I wish that where I am they also may be with me,  that they may see my glory that you gave me," we hear Jesus tell his Father . His love has the power to draws us where he is in glory, our work is to be utterly nonresistant to this love. Yes, angels tremble when they see   how changed is our humanity;   that flesh hath purged what flesh had stained,   and God, the flesh of God, hath reigned . Lines from  Æterne Rex Altissime, the monastic   hymn for the Ascension.

Even as Jesus reminds the apostles, “It is better for you that I go, so that the Comforter can come.” It may seem like a very slim consolation. Grief seems the proper response. Confusion too, for the loss is incalculable. Now there is absence.  “We do not know where you are going, and we do not know the way,” Thomas will tell Jesus in frustration. Jesus reminds us, “I am the way," the way that leads through darkness and confusion, doubt and emptiness to a more wondrous presence that is not be limited by his earthly body. And so we are reminded again this morning that our faith, our faithfulness is deep, dark mystery. “It is better for you that I go," says Jesus. For his seeming absence will allow a deeper, more mysterious presence. This is where we live as monks- in the mystifying darkness that often feels like Christ’s disappearance. This seeming absence of Christ beckons us to notice and experience his very real but hidden presence in the Eucharist, in our...

For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to bring to light the knowledge of the glory of God on the face of Christ Jesus . 2 Corinthians 4:6 Father Edward entered Spencer in 1951 when the Abbey was being completed. Through the years he has served the brethren generously in numerous capacities. He currently works at the labeling machine in the Trappist Preserves kitchen. Father is a man of prayer, and he says that he treasures the early morning hour when he meditates on a verse of Sacred Scripture. With special permission Father Edward lives his monastic life as a hermit. He tells us, “I love the solitude of the hermitage where I have lived for 44 years. And when I am in community or at work at Trappist Preserves, I love serving the monks and being with them. They are Christ among us. We all have faults and when we love one another as we are, we imitate God who loves us in Christ without condition. Precious!” He adds exuberantly, “I w...

In the predawn darkness as we rose for Vigils this morning, coyotes were already howling their praise. All you coyotes and wild creatures of the dark woodlands, praise the Lord! Were our chanted hymns and antiphons, our murmured psalms worthy to join their praises? photograph by Charles O'Connor