ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Each morning at the end of the community Mass, we pray the following prayer: O God, whose Only Begotten Son bore the weight of human suffering for our salvation, hear the prayers of your Church for our sick brothers and sisters and deliver us from this time of trial. Open our ears and our hearts to the voice of your Son: Be not afraid, for I am with you always. Bless all doctors and nurses, researchers and public servants; give us the wisdom to do what is right and the faith to endure this hour, that we might gather once again to praise your name in the heart of your Church, delivered from all distress and confident in your mercy. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. We go constantly to the Lord Jesus. To whom else can we go? He promises to hear us. Photograph by Brother Brian.

In these Lenten days of isolation, the temptation is always to divert ourselves from the very stillness that can lead us to ponder and pray by by ourselves.  Silence is a participation in the world to come,  a participation in  eternity, in God’s simplicity, a great Mystery beyond words. Love seeking me is the reason for silence. The monk's wonder-filled response to God’s seeking is the silence of love and the longing to be absorbed in wordless, quiet rest in the presence of the One who loves him. Those in love need not say anything. They want simply" to be with," to be  agendaless , resting in each other's presence. God longs for our openness, a great empty space within us, an emptiness that is not nothing but is availability. In silence, I can notice God noticing me. In practicing silence, allowing silence, allowing the empty space, I make an open space for God.  Ancient statue of Saint Benedict brought from the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley in ...

        The older I get the more overwhelming I find the mystery of our religion. It just keeps getting deeper and deeper. That is why I was grateful for today’s responsorial psalm, in which the Church sums up in a few words a great mystery. And what is this mystery? “With the Lord there is mercy and fullness of redemption.” It is a great and consoling mystery, but also a disconcerting one at times. This is what Martha and Mary experienced when the Lord raised their brother from the dead. They had waited in vain for Jesus to come, and now their only hope was that he would show mercy and bring some kind of resolution or at least give some explanation for the death of Lazarus. They needed to make sense of it all. They cried out to him like the psalmist from the depths of their hearts, each in her own way: Martha by a direct appeal, face-to-face, with a boldness born of friendship; Mary by falling at his feet in a single act of grief and worship. It had all been to...

Hail, the wound in the side of our Savior, from which rushed a spring and fount of blood. Medicine for the sorrow of those who suffer; And healing for the wound of sin and error. Hail, the wound in the side, wide and fruitful. Wash and cleanse thoroughly all our sins... in the sight of God may our hearts rejoice.  Amen . Crucifixion by Diego Velasquesz, 1632. Lines from Ave vulnus lateris by Walter Erle (c.1515-1581). 

When Father Joseph was novicemaster, before he met a candidate, he would ask the vocation director, “Has he fallen in love?” In other words, does he have a heart that’s available and ready for love, a heart that will know what it’s like to be in love? Surely Mary’s heart was ready; her heart formed by the faithful love of family, the love she spoke each day in the shema – promising to love Lord, her God, with all her heart, with her whole being, and with all her strength. More recently her virgin heart has opened with tender love for Joseph. Today we celebrate this heart ready for love. We call this event Annunciation, but truly it is not an announcement at all but a request, better, a proposal. For we are witness in this scene to the pursuit of love, the God of love seeking love in response. And as God’s total outpouring is met by the loving openness of Mary, two loves are made one. Heaven is wedded to earth, and Mary becomes the Ark of this new Covena...

Noting the significant relationship between King David and Saint Joseph, we explore how God works in each of them to achieve his saving will. In both cases we find a sincere desire to do God’s will, an intervention by God, and an obedient response. Mary, Joseph’s betrothed, has been “found with child through the Holy Spirit”. Being a “just man” he tries to discern the proper course of action. The way a “just man” in the tradition of the Old Testament expressed his love of God was mainly through his love of the Law. Joseph’s experience of God then would come almost entirely through his faithful observance of the Law. The Law would have been his way of access to God and of discerning his will. He would have been well aware that according to the Torah an adulteress was to be stoned. Under Roman rule, however, capital punishment was not an option and the standard practice was divorce with a public trial. In any case Joseph thinks along much different lines. Joseph loves Mary and he...

Yesterday we listened and watched as Jesus looked for the once-blind man and revealed his true identity as Son of Man - “I who speak with you am he.” Then the man gazing on the beauty of God in Christ sees and believes and instinctively bows down in worship. It’s what we all desire most ardently - to see his face,   to hear his voice; for his voice is sweet, and his face is lovely. We too have experienced his presence. We could deny it and slip back into a cozy darkness. It is always a possibility. But Jesus has come near, very near and changed everything. We have been anointed with the blood and water flowing from his wounded side; we belong to him. There is no going back. We were all once darkness, but now we are light in the Lord.  My brothers and sisters, the winter is over and past, the light is increasing now, flowers are already appearing on the earth; the voice of doves and little birds already fills the air, the day of our redemption dra...

Many of us may fear the dark, but he had grown accustomed to the quiet isolation of what could never be changed. There was a strange peace to it, a grateful predictability that had become even comforting.  But always you had to be attentive, that was survival. Feeling for the corner of the table and knowing you were in the right place. Counting off the paces to the square; then sitting on the ground with an open hand, hoping for a coin or two. Folks pitied you; and maybe that wasn’t so bad. But there was always the murmuring. “Whose sin was it?” He’d heard it since he was a little boy; he could remember hiding under the table one day, listening to his parents whisper. “What did we do wrong? I don’t remember anything serious.” And then, “It must be his sin then.” The eerie possibility was that, without even knowing it, he himself had done something really horrible, maybe even while still in his mother’s womb. Blindness was the direct consequence of sin; everybody knew that, all ...

On 21 March 1950, the Feast of Saint Benedict, the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley in Lonsdale, Rhode Island was ravaged by a devastating fire. The original wing was destroyed; the church was rendered structurally unsound and would have to be demolished. The community of 140 monks was homeless. Well before the fire the monks had been searching for a new location that would insure their solitude and economic stability, since the population in the area around the monastery had increased considerably. And by 1949 the community had purchased a large agricultural property, Alta Crest Farms in Spencer, Massachusetts. The 1950 fire merely accelerated the community's projected move. In God's providence the end of one story became the seed for a new one. As we live through the confusion and suffering of the current pandemic, we continue to trust God's providence. God's tender mercy will never be outdone.

Our richness, then, is the poverty of having nothing, no power other than that of begging with faith. And this is a charism that are given not for ourselves alone, but to be able to bring to fulfillment the mission of the Son who is the salvation of the world...The need to safeguard or recover one’s health, which all feel in this moment, perhaps with anguish, is also a need for salvation, for the salvation that keeps our life from seeming meaningless, buffeted by waves without a goal, without the encounter with Love that is given to us in every instant to reach and eternally live with Him. This awareness of our primary task of prayer for all must make us universally responsible for the faith we have, and the liturgical prayer with which the Church entrusts us. In this moment in which it is imposed upon the greater part of the faithful to renounce the communal Eucharist that gathers them into churches, how much should we feel responsible for the Masses that we can continue to ce...

Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife.  For that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit. As we celebrate the Solemnity of Saint Joseph our patron, we go to him as our great exemplar in faith and faithfulness. Perhaps brokenhearted, disappointed, surely confused, Joseph trusted God, and he trusted Mary. He let his life be turned around by God's desire to take our flesh. Saint Bernard will say that God had found in Joseph one to whom He could entrust His dearest secret. Joseph made a home for God in Christ. Statue of Joseph at the lavabo; photographs by Brother Brian and Father Emmanuel..

As we hear the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman at the well,  “If only you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him instead and he would have given you living water,” we are struck  with the breathtaking beauty of our call as Christians - to be filled with the fullness of God in Christ; he in us, we in him.   Christ Jesus is moving near, longing to surround us. If only we knew. If only we understood who it is who wants to make his home in our hearts, we would ask him over and over, and he would come to us in secret and fill us. Photograph by Brother Brian.

Both of today’s Mass readings point to the painful reality of jealousy and competitiveness in our lives. Joseph is sold by his brothers for twenty pieces of silver, and the son in the Gospel sent to the vineyard is put to death. Both of these images point us to Jesus, our Brother, God’s Beloved Son sent to us – our best Hope, our Mercy, our Freedom and Redemption, who is rejected and finally crucified. How does my selfishness compete with or ignore all of the messages and inklings of Jesus’ kind presence in my day? How can I open my heart more and more in compassion, moment by moment to all that he presents? Photograph by Brother Brian.

"It is in deep solitude that I find the gentleness with which I can truly love my brothers. The more solitary I am the more affection I have for them…Solitude and silence teach me to love my brothers for what they are, not for what they say, because I come to see who I am." Photograph by Brother Brian. Lines by Thomas Merton.

Actually the opening three words of today's Gospel are, “ After six days , Jesus took Peter, James and John...and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them...” What happened six days ago? Peter had his day in the sun when, illumined by the Father he acknowledges Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Jesus blessed him and told him the Church would be built upon him, that is, upon Rock Bar Jonah. Also, six days ago, Peter and the other apostles had their day in the depths of sadness, as Jesus followed this blessing of Peter with the first prediction of his suffering and death.  Peter, still basking in the all the glory, protests strongly, “You, suffer, die? God forbid!”  As we know, Jesus then calls Peter a satanic tempter who is an obstacle to him and to what God wills. The three words “After six days” also send us back to the Book of Exodus and the story of Moses wrapped in the cloud of God's glory for six days, before ...

Lent is…a time of grace, a time for letting God gaze upon us with love and in this way change our lives. We were put in this world to go from ashes to life. So, let us not turn our hopes and God’s dream for us into powder and ashes. Let us not grow resigned. You may ask: “How can I trust? The world is falling to pieces, fear is growing, there is so much malice all around us, society is becoming less and less Christian…” Don’t you believe that God can transform our dust into glory? All around us, we see the dust of death. Lives reduced to ashes. Rubble, destruction, war. The lives of unwelcomed innocents, the lives of the excluded poor, the lives of the abandoned elderly. We continue to destroy ourselves, to return to ashes and dust. And how much dust there is in our relationships! Look at our homes and families: our quarrels, our inability to resolve conflicts, our unwillingness to apologize, to forgive, to start over, while at the same time insisting on our own freedom and ...

This morning Jesus raises the bar, calling us to more, fine-tuning the Law to fever pitch. There is to be no name-calling; we’re not allowed to call anyone a blockhead (that’s what raqa means after all). That kind of language, any hurtful words, are out of the question in the Kingdom. Jesus the Word reminds us, that tiny as they are, words can be deadly, even murderous. We know it, we’ve all felt it. And so  Jesus invites us to love, as God loves. But as Jesus calibrates and ups the ante on discipleship, we may wonder, “Who can measure up?” We are trapped, wonderfully trapped; it is impossible for us, but not for God. We will have to lose our footing and fall backwards into his mercy. Christ Jesus mercies us into loving, as we have been loved. Photograph by Brother Brian.

We begin the Lenten Season by receiving ashes.... The dust sprinkled on our heads brings us back to earth; it reminds us that we are dust and to dust we shall return. We are weak, frail and mortal. Centuries and millennia pass, and we come and go; before the immensity of galaxies and space, we are nothing. We are dust in the universe. Yet we are dust loved by God. It pleased the Lord to gather that dust in his hands and to breathe into it the breath of life. We are thus a dust that is precious, destined for eternal life. We are the dust of the earth, upon which God has poured out his heaven, the dust that contains his dreams. We are God’s hope, his treasure and his glory. Ashes are thus a reminder of the direction of our existence: a passage from dust to life. We are dust, earth, clay, but if we allow ourselves to be shaped by the hands of God, we become something wondrous. More often than not, though, especially at times of difficulty and loneliness, we only see our du...

‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did  for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’ These words of Jesus from Matthew's gospel are echoed in those he will speak to Saint Paul on the road to Damascus - "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." What we do to the least, we do to the Lord. How am I noticing the Lord in the midst of my day?  We pray to be more attentive to Christ Jesus, for as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us,  "...Christ plays in ten thousand places,  Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.  To the Father through the features of men's faces." The Conversion of Saint Paul  by Caravaggio.

Jesus is the blessed face of God’s mercy. [1] And in who he is, in all that he does, he reveals the tender compassion of the Father for us, and so he shows us what it would be like if God were always in charge. [2] This is what the kingdom of God means. And so my brothers and sisters, we can be certain of this - if Jesus wants the kingdom, desires to establish God’s reign of mercy with every fiber of his being, Satan always, always will want the opposite. It’s that simple. So it is that this morning in the desert, the battle lines are set. And we see Satan desperately trying to beguile Jesus the warrior. T hough he is vulnerable and weakened after a prolonged fast, Jesus holds his ground. Fresh from the waters of his baptism, he has heard the Father’s voice, “You are my Beloved One.” He knows who he is, to whom he belongs, what he is about. And so he rebuffs Satan’s attacks decisively. Jesus won’t be fooled. He is the new Adam who will remain faithful just where the first A...