ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

In today’s Gospel Jesus is “resolutely determined” to go to Jerusalem, but the Greek text uses the Hebrew idiom “he set his face” to go to Jerusalem.  This expression is found in the mouth of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah: “The Lord GOD opened my ear; I did not refuse, did not turn away. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who tore out my beard; My face I did not hide from insults and spitting. The Lord GOD is my help; therefore, I am not disgraced; Therefore I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.” Jesus, the Servant, is resolutely determined to go to the cross, fully aware of the torture and humiliation involved; as the only way to procure salvation for humanity. Now the fullness of time has come, God the Father has sent his Son into the world to reveal, once and for all, that at the heart of reality is unfathomable mystery of infinite love, of a God who is willing to undergo every humiliation, torture, rejection ...

This morning we listen again as the Lord Jesus asks Peter, asks each one of us this most compellingly beautiful question: “Who do you say that I am?” Put another way – how do we, how do any of us experience Jesus? Certainly, it is their experience of Christ Jesus that has transformed both Peter and Paul. Who were they after all but both forgiven failures, transformed by Christ in his tender mercy? Peter tells Jesus he is ready to die with him; then betrays him a few hours later. “I’d know that accent anywhere,” says the maid in the high priest’s courtyard. “You’re one of that Galilean’s followers.” “I don’t who you’re talking about,” mutters Peter.  Meanwhile Jesus is right next door being slapped and spat upon. But Jesus will welcome and forgive Peter by another charcoal fire at a seaside breakfast after his Resurrection, allowing Peter to say, “Lord, you know well that I love you.”  And Paul so well-schooled in the Law, so sure he’s got all the answers; he has b...

Today’s feast of the Sacred Heart represents the fruit of a theological inquiry that seeks to understand who Jesus is by meditating on his humanity, particularly as summed up by his human heart, the seat of the emotions, the fount of love, courage and compassion. Instead of leaving us with a completely transcendent, impassible God, the Sacred Heart reveals a God truly with us: it shows us God who so loved the world, that he sent his only-begotten Son to share our humanity in the fullest way possible.   He lived a fully human life from its beginning to its natural end.   He certainly knew its joys and delights, but also fully tasted its pain and suffering.   The Sacred Heart reveals to us that our God is not just merciful but compassionate, that literally  He   suffered with us. This recalls Saint Paul:  “For our sake made him to be sin who knew no sin.”   It is not too far-fetched so say that when Christ was “made to be sin who knew no ...

Towards the end of his poem,  The Wreck of the Deutschland,   Gerard Manley  Hopkins speaks of his hope that Christ will enter our lives: “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us.” He understands Easter as verb - a reminder that Easter is about action, living and transformation. It strikes me that everything Hopkins poetically alludes to concerning Easter can be said of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is not simply something we receive; it is something we do. It is not simply a noun; it is fundamentally a verb. We believe many significant things about the Eucharist. We believe that the bread and wine become for us the real Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, a sublime mystery, a tremendous treasure of our faith. We cannot fully appreciate the body and blood of the Lord, the noun of the Eucharist, if we separate it from the verb of the Eucharist. For it...

John the Baptist is a towering figure  in the history of our salvation. His importance is amply attested by all four Gospels and also the Acts of the Apostles.  It is difficult to imagine the development of Jesus’ earthly history without John’s presence and ministry from the very beginning. John’s intimate involvement in Jesus’ life and destiny, and the significance of John’s ardent devotion to his slightly younger cousin (who also happened to be the Son of God), are perhaps the outstanding instance of how Jesus brought us salvation by meshing his divine life inextricably with our human existence. How I would love to allow my own destiny to become as totally bound up with that of Jesus as was John the Baptist’s!  Is not this an excellent definition of “sanctity”: for one’s life to be wholly intertwined with Christ’s and lost with his in God?  So closely united was John’s earthly life to Jesus’ work of sanctification that he is the only saint besides the Mother of ...

O precious and wonderful banquet that brings us salvation and contains all sweetness! Could anything be of more indispensable worth? Under the old law it was the flesh of calves and goats that was offered, but here Christ himself, the true God, is set before us as our food. What could be more wonderful than this? No other sacrament has greater healing power; through it sins are washed away, virtues increased and the soul enriched with an abundance of every spiritual gift. It is offered in Church for the living and the dead, so that what was instituted for the salvation of all may be for the benefit of all. Ultimately no one can fully express the sweetness of this sacrament, in which spiritual delight is tasted at its very source, and in which we renew the memory of that incomparable love for us which Christ revealed in his passion. It was to impress the magnitude of this love more firmly upon the hearts of the faithful that our Lord instituted this sacrament at the Last Sup...

Born in Ravenna, Italy in the mid-tenth century, Saint Romuald was a mystic who led an eremitical life.  Saint Peter Damian composed the Romuald’s biography and tells us: Frequently he was seized by so great a contemplation of divinity that he would be reduced to tears with the boiling, indescribable heat of divine love. In this condition he would cry out: “Beloved Jesus, beloved, sweet honey, indescribable longing, delight of the saints, sweetness of the angels, and other things of this kind. We are unable to express the ecstasy of these utterances, dictated by the Holy Spirit.” We are inspired by the great ardor of Saint Romuald and long to be filled the grace of the Holy Spirit that so fired his heart.

Icons can help us visualize what cannot be  easily  explained. They hover between two worlds, rendering in color and form what cannot be easily grasped by the intellect, somehow making the invisible visible. As such they are considered visual equivalents of Sacred Scripture.  Probably the best-known of all icons is that of Andrei Rublev.  Rublev’s icon of the Trinity was painted around 1410 in Moscow. It is a visual depiction of the mysterious story from the Book of Genesis of the three angels who visited Abraham. Abraham serves them a meal, and it seems that these ‘angels’ are metaphor for the three persons of the Blessed Trinity. In the background we see a house in the upper left and a tree in the center. A rocky hillside lies in the upper right hand corner. The whole composition forms a great circle around the table, drawing our attention to the chalice-like bowl at its center, a clear reminder of the altar at communion. Although the ‘angels’ are shown ...

Once some years ago there was a note tacked to our community bulletin board by a departing monastic observer. It seems he  had opened his broken heart to the Lord and experienced the overwhelming everything of God’s forgiveness and great love for him. The note read something like this: “I think this monastery should be called Saint Joseph’s Heart Surgery Unit, for here my heart has been broken open, healed and put back together.” To begin open-heart surgery, first of all the sternum is sawed in half, then the  rib cage is  cranked open the to make the heart available to the surgeon’s hands. How like the hands of God, the careful fingers of the Spirit who embraces our broken hearts, exposing them to the fullness of Father’s love for us, revealed in the wounded heart of Christ.

As we remember Saint Anthony today, we recall our mothers and dads, uncles and aunts begging him to help them find lost objects. "Dear Saint Anthony, please look around. Something is lost and must be found." Saint Anthony always helped. The saints after all are our family and on their "constant intercession...we rely for unfailing help." They care for us, because they are with Christ in God. We are not forgotten, we are connected. The witnesses who have preceded us into the kingdom,  especially those whom the Church recognizes as saints, share in the living tradition of prayer by the example of their lives, the transmission of their writings, and their prayer today. They contemplate God, praise him and constantly care for those whom they have left on earth. When they entered into the joy of their Master, they were "put in charge of many things."  Their intercession is their most exalted service to God's plan. We can and should ask them to interc...

Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one…  Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself…. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name… can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love. Photograph by Brother Brian. Lines by Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Christ has no hands but yours; no feet but yours; no voice but yours. Saint Teresa of Avila Jesus said to the disciples, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” He then promises them, “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you…I will love those who love me and will reveal myself to them.” That promise of Jesus is fulfilled with the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Advocate, the Holy Spirit has been breathed into them, into us. Jesus has not left us orphaned. In Scripture orphans and widows are those alone, abandoned, defenseless and vulnerable. We all fear being orphaned - alone, vulnerable, powerless. It is a fear that points to a deeper reality that by ourselves, we are not enough, we were not created to be alone. We were created to love and to be loved; to live in relationship; to dwell, abide, remain within one another as the Father is in Jesus and Jesus is in the Father. This is the reality that Jesus offers us in br...

The kingdom happens when the love of Christ Jesus becomes the truth that inspires us into acting in his name. As one prayer will put it, “In the midst of conflict and division, we know it is you who turn our minds to thoughts of peace. Your Spirit changes our hearts: enemies begin to speak to one another, those who were estranged join hands in friendship, and nations seek the way of peace together. Your Spirit is at work when understanding puts an end to strife, when hatred is quenched by mercy, and vengeance gives way to forgiveness.' The Spirit is always draws us together, always heals divisions  -  in our world, in our family, in our community, in our hearts. On this Pentecost we pray that, Spirit-filled, we may be healers and unifiers. Photographs by Brother Brian.

This day we pray and prepare for the Solemnity of Pentecost. Come, thou Holy Spirit, come, and from thy celestial home shed a ray of light divine! Come, thou Father of the poor! Come, thou Source of all our store! Come, within our bosoms shine! Thou, of comforters the best; thou, the soul's most welcome guest; sweet refreshment here below. In our labor, rest most sweet; grateful coolness in the heat; solace in the midst of woe. O most blessed Light divine, shine within these hearts of thine, and our inmost being fill! Where thou art not, man hath nought, nothing good in deed or thought, nothing free from taint of ill. Heal our wounds, our strength renew; on our dryness pour thy dew; wash the stains of guilt away. Bend the stubborn heart and will; melt the frozen, warm the chill; guide the steps that go astray. On the faithful, who adore and confess thee, evermore in thy sevenfold gift descend. Give them ...

Come, Creator Spirit, visit the minds of your children, and fill the hearts you have made, with heavenly grace. You are called the Comforter, the gift of God most high, living spring, and fire, love, and spiritual anointing.  You are sevenfold in your gifts, the finger of God’s right hand; you are the Father’s  true promise, endowing our tongues with speech.  Enkindle your light in our senses, infuse your life in our hearts; strengthen our bodies’ weakness by your never failing might. Drive far away our foe, and grant peace without end, that with you to lead us on, we may escape all harm.  Grant us, through you, to know the Father, also the Son; may we ever believe in you, the Spirit of them both. Amen. In preparation for the great Solemnity of Pentecost, we pray our novena to the Holy Spirit. And each evening at Vespers, we chant this ancient Latin hymn. We share a fine translation completed by one of the mon...

We want to keep choosing to love, to stir up our ardor,  to follow Jesus moment to moment. And we are inspired today by the witness of the young martyrs of Uganda, Charles Lwanga and his companions. R efusing to accede to the sinful demands of their king, they were condemned to death. T hey sang and prayed as they were burned on a giant pyre.  Doing our small duties with love and faithfulness is the least we can do.

Father, they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, the world also does not know you, but I know you, and they know that you sent me. I made known to them your name and I will make it known, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.   John 17 We are the Father's gift to Jesus, and he wants to bring us to be with him always, that we may see him face to face. Jesus wants us to know the Father and be known by him just as he is known by him. Through the Spirit Jesus Christ our Lord draws us into the beauty and truth that God is - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This union with the Triune God is not a reality too high and well beyond our reach but totally accessible to us because God always wants to give Godself away to us more and more and more than we can imagine. Photograph of the Abbey garth by Broth...