ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Saint Catherine of Siena is so amazed by the unfathomable mercy of God that she calls God “crazy.” In her  Dialogues  she writes, “O eternal beauty! O eternal goodness, O eternal mercy! O crazy lover! You have need of your creature? It seems so to me, for you act as if you could not live without her. Why are you so crazy? Because you have fallen in love with what you have made! You are pleased and delighted over her, as if you were drunk with desire for her salvation. She runs away from you and you go looking for her. She strays and you draw closer to her.” Perhaps very often, as God draws near, we foolishly run in the opposite direction; let us confess our own craziness born of foolish fear, and beg God’s mercy.

When it was already dawn, Jesus was standing on the shore; but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus . John 21 In today's Gospel the disciples encounter the  risen Lord Jesus in the ordinariness of their work. We pray that we will be attentive for the Lord is constantly coming to meet us in the ordinariness of our day.  Photograph by Brother Brian.

Our lives seem like a continuous repetition of that trek to Emmaus. Disappointed, our best hopes dashed, we very often plod glumly along. So self-absorbed, we often forget that Jesus is right beside us. He notices our sadness and inquires, “What are you going over in your heads? What’s the matter?” We are astonished. Doesn’t Jesus see? Everything’s falling apart. Our best hopes for success, accomplishment, holiness are all over. The world in turmoil. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Jesus reminds us, "This is where I rise. This is where the kingdom happens. I am with you, beside you. I understand."  Duccio di Buoninsegna

“On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb.” This Gospel opens in the dark . . . and moves into a very special light which darkness can never overcome. We recall the words of the Irish poet, philosopher and scholar John O’Donohue: We are always on our way from darkness into light. Every morning we come out of the dark territories of dreaming into waking awareness of the day. Every night, no matter now long, breaks again and the light of dawn comes. At birth, each of us made a journey from darkness into light. So we are no strangers to darkness, and we are special friends of the light. On that first Easter morning, a day that began with the discovery of an empty tomb, Mary Magdalene, Peter and the Beloved Disciple could never have anticipated what a primal threshold they would cross as darkness gave way to the light.   Just a few days before, Jesus had take...

At the entrance to Jerusalem’s Church of All Nations, next to the Garden of Gethsemane, there is a sign warning every visitor: No explanations inside the Church. It’s intended to discourage overly talkative tour guides from disturbing the church’s prayerful atmosphere with lectures.   I don’t have any explanations of the resurrection for you. I’m convinced that one must experience the resurrection for oneself. The gospel proclamation always involves an invitation. And receiving that proclamation and accepting the invitation is always new and personal to each one of us. Authentic gospel proclamation always carries with it a  shift from before to now. A shift from the lives of the disciples who came to the tomb those many years ago, to our lives here and now. God wants to deepen our Easter faith experience through the gospel. The story begins with the obvious - Jesus is dead, and his followers assume that he remains dead. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been coming to the...

Something strange is happening - there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh... In the stillness of Holy Saturday we await all that Christ's Resurrection will bring. Lines   from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Today is the most enigmatic day of the Church Year. Enigmatic means mystifying, inexplicable, baffling, perplexing, bewildering, confusing, incomprehensible, unfathomable… We come today to glory in the cross of Christ. This makes no sense. Jesus has died a cruel death. How can we glory in all this pain, suffering and death? I don’t understand how God can be all powerful and yet apparently choose to do nothing. Does this all-powerful God simply refuse to intervene in the tragedies of our lives? Maybe the cross of Christ is showing us a different kind of God. Maybe this day offers the truest image of who God really is. Maybe “the only God worthy of our belief is a vulnerable and powerless one who suffers with us.” (Richard Kearney ( Anatheism) . I’ll end with a passage from the theologian Jurgen Moltmann: “When the crucified Jesus is called the ‘image of the invisible God’, the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this. God is not greater than he is in this humiliation. G...

“Then, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” Some translations say a psalm instead of a hymn. They do this because what is called the ‘Great Hallel’ is sung at the Passover Seder and includes Psalm 136. The refrain from this psalm comes from the prophet Hosea who has the Lord saying “I will betroth you to me forever. Yes, I will betroth you to me. In righteousness and justice. In loving kindness and mercy. And his mercy endures forever.” The refrain is sung throughout the psalm praising God for all his mighty deeds of deliverance. This sets the tone, the atmosphere for what follows. “Then after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.” The Mount of Olives – Gethsemane, the place where Jesus’ passion begins. The passion that was just anticipated ritually in the words and gestures of Jesus at the supper with his disciples. Gethsemane is the place, the entryway into a whole new dimension to the meaning of the word ‘God’. Who Jesus is and what he ...

Up to now we have been comforted by the luminous aspects of the Paschal Mystery. But we must pursue our meditation into the dark side of the Redemption, because this is a darkness we all carry within us. We must glimpse into the abyss of suffering into which our Lord Jesus was plunged in the hours that led him into the desolation of abandonment by the Father and, ultimately, to a horrendous death.  In the days of his Passion, Jesus, obeying the will of the Father, willingly and even joyously (Heb 12:2) entered into what Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity” (2 Thes 2:7). Fully aware of what was involved, and with full consent of heart and will, Jesus handed himself over into the hands of sinners, to be treated by them as they pleased.  But who are these “sinners” into whose hands Jesus so willingly hands himself? Ourselves, of course. And yet Jesus sits at our table and eats with us, scandalizing the Pharisees. He surrenders himself into our sinful hands just ...

The most striking aspect of Jesus’ actions in the text of the Mass is what can be called Jesus’ creative anticipation of his death. Christ sacramentally institutes in the present an action that overtakes in time the destructive historical action of his murder that hasn’t yet occurred, while at the same time giving to it a startling redemptive meaning. Thus, the interior significance and effects of the future action of betrayal are radically changed by divine intervention before the betrayal occurs. The malice of man is overtaken by the goodness of God. Love swallows up hatred, even though the lover dies of its poisoning. A hate-filled enemy—including both his evil intentions and his murderous deed—is embraced as brother and friend.   In the Sacrament, Jesus’ death becomes the source of our life because the power of his love anticipates the mangling of his body and the shedding of his blood, and it transforms their vital meaning and effect: from an act of violent hatred ...

Where can the weak find a place of firm security and peace, except in the wounds of the Savior? Indeed, the more secure is my place there, the more he can do to help me. The world rages, the flesh is heavy, and the devil lays his snares, but I do not fall, for my feet are planted on firm rock. I may have sinned gravely. My conscience would be distressed, but it would not be in turmoil, for I would recall the wounds of the Lord: He was wounded for our iniquities. What sin is there so deadly that it cannot be pardoned by the death of Christ? And so if I bear in mind this strong, effective remedy, I can never again be terrified by the malignancy of sin. Surely the man who said: “My sin is too great to merit pardon,” was wrong. He was speaking as though he were not a member of Christ and had no share in His merits, so that he could claim them as his own, as a member of the body can claim what belongs to the head. As for me, I can appropriate whatsoever I lack from the Heart of the Lo...

I would like to welcome you all to the discomfort of another Holy Week. In Matthew’s gospel reading of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, he says that when Jesus “entered into Jerusalem the whole city was shaken (in turmoil)”… The Greek word here literally means to shake or to quake, as in an earthquake. Matthew likes this word. He will use it to describe the shaking of the earth and the splitting of the rocks at Jesus’ crucifixion; at the earthquake that accompanies the angel rolling the stone away from Jesus’ tomb and the shaking of the guard who stood at the tomb. Holy Week is meant to be one earthquake after another. On Monday Mary will pour costly oil on Jesus’ feet and everyone in the house will be shaken with dismay. (Why is she wasting this costly oil!) On Tuesday, Peter (and each one of us) will hear Jesus’s invitation to die before we die. And that invitation becomes the epicenter of our faith. On Wednesday Judas’ betrayal will reveal the fault line that runs through eac...

The Fourth Century pilgrim nun Egeria has left us a vivid account of the ritual for the veneration of the cross on Good Friday in Jerusalem. The true cross had become a nexus of holiness, sacred presence and healing. Egeria even writes of one overzealous devotee caught biting off a chunk of the cross during the Good Friday Liturgy! The Fathers of the Church loved to find in every reference to wood or tree, staff, rod or ark in the Hebrew Scriptures a type of the cross of Christ. Cyril of Jerusalem declares, "Life ever comes from wood!" Paulinus of Nola chants to the cross, "You have become for us a ladder for us to mount to heaven." And in an anonymous Easter homily inspired by Hippolytus, the tree of the cross reverses the destruction wrought by the tree of Eden: “For me this tree is a plant of eternal health. I feed on it; by its roots I am rooted; by its branches I spread myself; I rejoice in its dew; the rustling of its leaves invigorates me...I freely enjoy...

Christ Jesus is the Bridegroom. Our fast and Lenten observances are meant to increase our longing for him and deepen our awareness of his love for us. As Cistercian monks we are called to cling to Christ, the Bridegroom of the Church and of each Christian. Especially through the Eucharist, he teaches us the intimate nature of what it means to belong to him: gratuitous, total, ongoing and life-giving love that invites reciprocity. And so we are called to give concrete priority to prayer, understood as gratuitous giving and receiving,  experienced as loving faith anticipating the coming of the longed-for Bridegroom.  We promise to work at the discipline of love, a love based on truth that opens us to self-knowledge and mercy in the face of our own misery and the misery of others. Icon of Christ the Bridegroom.  Lines adapted from Dom Bernardo Olivera,  2002.

As a deer longs for running streams, So, my soul longs for you, my God. My soul is thirsting for God, the God of my life. When can I enter, And see the face of God? Photogrphs by Brother Brian.

Jesus said to them, "When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. John 8 We know that it is on the cross that Jesus will be lifted up. And it is when we gaze upon the crucified Jesus that we see that he is the great I AM of the prophecies, He is God most high who has become become God most low for us.  “Nowhere is God greater than in this humiliation," writes the theologian,  Jürgen Moltmann . "Nowhere is God more divine than in this disfigured humanity.”  God is crucified love. Peter Paul Rubens, Raising of the Cross , 1610, oil on panel, central panel: 460 × 340 cm, Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp.

During Sunday's Chapter Brother Mikah  pronounced his simple vows and was clothed in the black scapular and leather belt of the professed. We rejoice with him. As the ceremony began Abbot Damian asked Brother Mikah , "What do you seek?" Mikah responded, "The mercy of God and of the Order." This brief dialogue reminded all of us that our life as monks is a life of total, loving dependence on Christ our Savior who constantly invites us to draw water in joy from the fountains of his mercy. Here are excerpts from Abbot Damian's exhortation to Brother Mikah. Saint Benedict reminds us, “The life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent.” And at the beginning of Lent, we read that Jesus went into the desert wilderness. The wilderness is not so much a geographical place or landscape. It is life - your life, my life, our lives. Life is wild. In other words, there is something untamed, uncontrollable, and full of the unexpected about it. Reflect for a moment on h...

Jesus eats with sinners, heals outsiders, cures people no matter which day of the week it is, even touches lepers and so has become unclean. Everybody knows a Messiah is not supposed to do that kind of stuff. He shocks by his unpretentiousness, by the directness of the God he reveals. He forgives sins; even dares to forgive a woman caught in the very act of adultery and then embarrasses her male accusers into dropping the stones they’re aiming, not because she isn’t guilty, but because we all are guilty. He knows we’ve all failed over and over again. This is our shared identity, our shared truth, the reason he has come – because all are sinners. We are all with him beloved of the Father and all desperately in need of his mercy.  Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for us, there to take on the burden of our sin, because he knows we could not possibly have borne it on our own. Even more than that, he has become our sin - to dupe it, remove its vicious sting and halt the death sentence ...

Spring always surprises us. Suddenly, it seems, more light. The sound of a bird chirping very high up, out of sight in a treetop. We notice this more acutely living in the relative silence of the New England countryside. Lent is of the same root as lengthen. Days are longer now; more time in God's light to notice what needs to be cleaned, even rooted out, so that new growth can flourish and increase.  Clumps of snowdrops are blooming outside the windows of the Abbey lavabo.

For thirty-eight years a sick man has been unable to reach the healing waters of the pool with five porticoes called Bethesda. Jesus heals this very desperate man, for he is himself the living spring, the healing pool with the five porticoes. In his death on the cross this will all be made perfectly clear, for then his body will be pierced in hands and feet and side – five gateways pouring out blood and water, grace and new life for all. Ezekiel's vision will be fulfilled -  the cross will be the tree bearing Fruit that cannot fade or fail – Fruit that will be for us our true food and medicine – the Body and Blood of our Savior and Lord.  Etching by Rembrandt.