Quiet!

We can imagine a typical Sabbath in the synagogue at Capernaum- people gathering, greeting one another; small groups of men in conversation, perhaps a few women; younger men entering and giving each other a nod. And then they all notice the possessed man coming in. Weariness, some irritation. “Why does his family even let him come here?” The younger men are grinning at one another, a couple of winks, as they recall a recent Sabbath when this guy blurted out an embarrassing truth about one of the elders. They loved that. This ought to be good, they think. What he will come out with today? Then Jesus enters. Some recognize him too. He sits with them, speaks a word, and teaches them simply, clearly, lovingly- not from on high but as friend and brother. For many, this is a moment of astonishment as they hear his word of truth and feel their hearts broken open. They close their eyes, their heads lowered. Then it happens, you-know-who starts up: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are- the Holy One of God.” Now there’s even more astonishment. This crazy man has uttered blasphemy on the Sabbath; even though, truth be told, some of them have been thinking the very same thing as Jesus spoke. “Could he be the One?”

Imagine the gall of that demon shouting out Jesus’ name- for speaking a name is to have power over the other. He blurts out Jesus’ name, as if to pick a fight with him. But Jesus sees into the heart. He knows it’s the demon speaking, not the man. And Jesus does not kowtow or spar with demons. He doesn’t do dialog with demons. He simply says, “Quiet.” “Stop. Enough. Come out of him; leave him alone. Get out of here. Be gone. Demons do not know me. The poor, the sick, the lost, little ones, they know who I am. They may call upon my name for I have come for them.” This most tender and most efficacious compassion of Jesus. He speaks and the evil spirit knows he’s done for. And as once Jesus spoke to the turbulent Sea of Galilee, to its crashing waves and the raging winds above, “Quiet. Be still,” so now he rebukes the demon who has taken this man’s voice away. “Be still and know that I am God.” Jesus gives him back his voice, his freedom, gives him back to himself, to his family, to his community; he no longer needs to be avoided, isolated. There’s even more astonishment now. And thus, Jesus establishes himself at the beginning of his ministry, at the beginning of this Gospel of Mark, as opposed to all oppression and misery; (See Sacra Pagina: Mark) his power expressed not in dominance but in humble loving service. He sets free, he unburdens. Satan’s power over the world has come to an end; the reign of God in Christ has definitively broken into human history. ( See Margaret Page)

A man once held fast by an unclean spirit is freed. But we do not hear from him in this Gospel, we’ve only heard from the loud-mouthed spirit. It is his voice that Jesus longs to hear. And so he quiets the demon to encounter the one whom he loves. Aren’t you fascinated, longing with Jesus to know this man? Who was he? One can only wonder what took place after the convulsion and the loud cry there on the floor of the synagogue. What was in his heart? Did he embrace Jesus once he was freed? What did freedom and fluency feel like? Did he praise God in a loud voice? Did he bow down and worship Jesus as Lord, like so many others who were cured? Did he become his follower? How did this freedom change him? Could he recognize the evil spirit’s voice from then on, detect the unclean spirit’s trickery in a heartbeat and say for himself, “Get out of here?”

“Quiet!” - a word given to us to be repeated against all the deceptive words that the Evil One would pour into our ears. We have power in Christ to dismiss them. Do you believe it? Does this sound spooky, occult, or superstitious? No, just very real. It is simply the reality of our life in Christ. For if we desire God, deeply desire Christ Jesus, desire to belong to him, to choose his way, then simple logic will tell us that the unclean spirit, the Evil One will want the opposite, and want to confuse us with many useless words. Jesus wants our freedom, our quiet. And we have the power in Christ Jesus to choose and dismiss the unclean spirit; a power given to us at our baptism when faith in Him was entrusted to us when the power of his quiet was entrusted to us. But it’s a power we need to keep choosing, that’s why we renew our baptismal promises each year at the Easter Vigil. “Do you refuse to be mastered by sin? Do you reject the glamour of evil? Do you reject Satan?” “Yes, yes, yes.”

Don’t we long for the power of his quiet over our weakness, our inner babble? When there’s too much noise, I want to know the power of Jesus over me, for his grace is sufficient, his power made perfect in my weakness. I need the power of his quiet resting on me. Not a quiet that is hollow or sad; not a dull sleepy quiet. But a quiet for… a quiet for listening, a quiet that even within these walls allows us to hear the cry of the poor. Quiet for love, quiet for him, quiet in him, for he is my Quiet, my rest, safe haven. Quiet to wait, quiet to listen for a voice of hope and peace and freedom and mercy, a quiet that is attentiveness, emptiness for him, quiet to receive, to be filled with his body and blood.

Photograph by Brother Brian. Meditation by one of the monks.

Our Lady on Saturday

This painting of Our Lady at the entrance of the Abbey church reminds us that Mary is Gate of Heaven, our Way to Christ her Son. All the houses of our Order are dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. And the name of our monastery is actually Our Lady of Saint Joseph Abbey.

In a spirit of compunction and intense desire, monks devote themselves frequently to prayer. While dwelling on earth, their minds are occupied with heavenly things, desiring eternal life with all spiritual longing. May the Blessed Virgin Mary who was taken up into heaven, the life and sweetness and hope of all earthly pilgrims, never be far from their hearts.  from the Constitutions of the Order

During the Pandemic

In today’s parables, Jesus reminds us of the promise hidden in what is small and unremarkable – seeds that grow in hiddenness and mystery.

How like our prayer, our life that is ordinary, obscure, and laborious. We dare to believe that what we bear and what we do and what we pray have an apostolic reverberation – fruitfulness far beyond the cloister with a blessing for those in need. So this morning we pray for those adversely affected by the pandemic – for healing, hope, perseverance, and courage.  

Almighty and eternal God, our refuge in every danger, to whom we turn in our distress; in faith, we pray look with compassion on the afflicted, grant eternal rest to the dead, comfort to mourners, healing to the sick, peace to the dying, strength to healthcare workers, wisdom to our leaders and the courage to reach out to all in love, so that together we may give glory to your holy name. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

We are told that late in life, Saint Thomas Aquinas was one day in prayer before the crucifix, in tears. Suddenly, Christ spoke to Thomas, “You have written well of me, Thomas. What reward will you receive from me for your labor?” His response was simply: Domine, non nisi Te, that is “Lord, nothing except you.”

Like Saint Paul Saint Thomas Aquinas will find his only joy and worth in gaining Christ and being found in him, realizing that life without him would be intolerable. As Saint Paul will put it, “I have suffered the loss of all things, that I may gain Christ - indeed, I regard them all as rubbish…” So driven is Paul by his love and conviction that he can express it only by using this most vulgar term for filth in Greek sku’balon, because it connotes total worthlessness and revulsion.

Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Stefano di Giovanni, 1423, tempera on walnut, 9.8 x 11.3 in., Vatican Pinacoteca.

Feast of the Founders of Our Order

Our Order was founded on March 21, 1098 when St. Robert and about 21 of his monks of the abbey of Molesme left their monastery to found the New Monastery of Citeaux, the first house of what was to become over the centuries the worldwide Cistercian Order.  Significantly, this date was both the feast of the Transitus of St. Benedict and, in that year of 1098, also Palm Sunday.  So, we can imagine them singing as they left Molesme the antiphon that years ago Fr. Gabriel at choir practice said can be called the Cistercian Theme Song: The Christus factus est, Christ became for us obedient unto death, sung over and over during the Holy Week trek to Citeaux. Both the feast of St. Benedict and Palm Sunday provided the themes of humility, obedience unto death, and paschal exaltation that are contained in that Antiphon sung on their new journey in Christ: a journey toward the School of Love-- where monks would be able to experience the contemplative expansion of their hearts in an overflow of the inexpressible delights of love in the Kingdom, beginning in this life.

The decision to move from Molesme and the foundation of Citeaux were, in the words of our friend Dom Mark Kirby, “conceived in compunction.”  We see this in the description of the deliberations of Robert and his companions that is found in the Exordium Parvum, the earliest chronicle of Cistercian history written about the year 1119: (quote) “For while still at Molesme, these men breathed on by the grace of God, among themselves often used to speak of, complain about, grieve over the transgressions of the Rule of the most blessed Benedict, Father of monks, seeing that they and other monks had promised by solemn profession to obey this Rule, yet had by no means kept it.” This grief over their own transgressions of the Rule, this being stung to the heart by their own lack of truthful living is a classic aspect of Benedictine and Cistercian spirituality and of Christian spirituality in general for even as the Cistercian Order was founded in 1098 on an experience of compunction of heart so also was the Universal Church more than one thousand years earlier on Pentecost.  In the Acts of the Apostles, the Pentecost speech of Peter, Michael Driscoll writes, uses “the notion (of compunction) to express the supernatural shock that leads to conversion, translated in the Vulgate as compuncti sunt corde.” “Peter stood up (on Pentecost) and proclaimed to them: 'Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.' Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and they asked Peter and the other apostles, 'What are we to do, brothers?'”   This was precisely the experience of our founders—they were cut to the heart, filled with compunction, by their transgressions of the Rule of Benedict and asked, “What are we to do, brothers?”

In recognition of the remarkable integration of what were the separate male and female branches of the Order, today, we must ask, “What are we to do, brothers and sisters?” Remember today's Gospel: “They were completely overwhelmed and exclaimed to one another,' Then who can be saved?'  Jesus fixed his gaze on them and said, 'For man it is impossible but not for God.  With God all things are possible.'”  On Pentecost, two thousand years ago, Peter answered “Repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.” Likewise, our Cistercian Fathers repented of their mediocre way of life at Molesme and went forth into the baptism of fire, which was life in the wilderness, the desert of Citeaux.  There they lived, the Exordium states, “So that, directing the whole course of their life by the Rule over the entire tenor of their life, in ecclesiastical as well as in the rest of the observances, they matched or conformed their steps to the footprints traced by the Rule. Having therefore put off the old man, they were rejoicing to have put on the new.”  The joy described here reminds us of the description of the disciples' experience of communal life after the grace of Pentecost: “They ate their meals with exultation and sincerity of heart praising God and enjoying favor with all the people.” The normal outcome of true compunction of heart is this joy we see in the texts about our early Cistercian ancestors and about the first community in Jerusalem.

 The sharp beak of the Holy Spirit tears open our hearts—punctures them-- so that the divine dove can then snuggle into our hearts and transform us as we follow St. Benedict and our founders in taking the Gospel as our guide and preferring nothing to Christ.  What better way is there for us to honor the three holy founders of Citeaux than to allow the compunction of heart that all of us feel in one way or another (morally, spiritually) to open us to the action of the Holy Spirit in renewing our lives as monks.  Having put off the old, may we rejoice in having put on the new person we are in Jesus Christ.

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Today's homily by Father Luke.

 

 

 

Called

As he called his first disciples, Jesus calls each of us. Like Saint Paul and all the saints, we long to depart to be with Christ. Daily we try to set our minds and hearts on things that are above where Christ is. We have died; our lives are hidden now with Christ in God. We consider everything to be nothing at all compared with knowing Christ Jesus, our Lord. Because of him, we have set everything else aside, because in comparison everything else is a pile of rubbish. And we want more and more to know only Christ and the power of his resurrection. We share in his sufferings even now and so are becoming like him in his death. And it is worth it, if somehow we attain the resurrection. So we keep pressing on to make it our own because Christ Jesus has made each of us his own. Our drawing closer to him, following him, is only possible because he draws us to himself. We need only be constantly available to this "drawing."

Again and again, our Lord said, I am he. I am he. I am he who is highest. I am he whom you love. I am he in whom you delight. I am he whom you serve. I am he for whom you long. I am he whom you desire. I am he whom you intend. I am he who is all. Julian of Norwich

Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, 1308-1311, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

 

 

 

 

 

Life

On this Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, we pray for the full restoration of the legal guarantee of the right to life, and we beg God's forgiveness for violations to the dignity of the human person committed through acts of abortion.

We pray that the merciful Spirit of God will help us to protect and care and reverence each person’s life. We pray for an end to the practice of abortion. And we remember all refugees and immigrants seeking a new homeland, we pray for the homeless, the house-bound, for the elderly who may be neglected, and for all those disabled, disrespected, or abused. May our hearts be broken open in compassion.

O God, who adorn creation with splendor and beauty and fashion human lives in your image and likeness, you alone have the power to impart the breath of life as you form each of us in our mother’s womb. Awaken in every heart reverence for the work of your hands and renew among your people a readiness to nurture and sustain your precious gift of human life. Confirm our resolve, that we may live always for others and cherish your sacred gift of human life.

Photograph by Brother Brian.

Brave Enough

When day comes, we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Trusting in the protection of Our Lady, patroness of our country, we pray for our new President Joseph Biden and for healing and reconciliation in our nation. In the Lord's light, let us be light for one another.

Photograph by Brother Brian. Excerpt from the poem by Amanda Gorman given at the inauguration this afternoon.

A Call

Let us pause a moment on this experience of meeting Christ who calls us to remain with Him. Each one of God’s calls is an initiative of His love. He is the one who always takes the initiative. He calls you. God calls to life, He calls to faith, and He calls to a particular state in life: “I want you here”. God’s first call is to life, through which He makes us persons; it is an individual call because God does not make things in series. Then God calls us to faith and to become part of His family as children of God. Lastly, God calls us to a particular state in life... They are different ways of realizing God’s design that He has for each one of us that is always a design of love. But God calls always. And the greatest joy for every believer is to respond to that call, offering one’s entire being to the service of God and the brothers and sisters.

...God’s call is always love: we need to try to discover the love behind each call, and it should be responded to only with love. This is the language: the response to a call that comes out of love, only love. At the beginning there is the encounter with Jesus who speaks to us of His Father, He makes His love known to us. And then the spontaneous desire will arise even in us to communicate it to the people that we love: “I met Love”, “I met the Messiah”, “I met Jesus”, “I found the meaning of my life. I found God.”

Photo by Br. Brian. Text from a recent homily by Pope Francis.

Discomforted

As we remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we are discomforted by the hard truth that racial injustice is not a thing of the past. Pope Francis reminds us in Fratelli tutti  “a readiness to discard others finds expression in vicious attitudes that we thought long past, such as racism, which retreats underground only to keep reemerging. Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our supposed social progress is not as real or definitive as we think.” We promise to accompany the excluded, all those whose dignity has been violated.  

Speak, Lord.

Today’s readings are clearly ordered around the theme of the call. In the first reading we heard the charming story of the call of the young Samuel and in the Gospel the call of the first disciples. As you remember, Samuel’s mother Hannah had prayed at the temple before the Lord, in bitter tears over the humiliation of her barrenness, that she be granted a child, and when the Lord granted her desire, in gratitude, after the child was weaned, she brought the child to the Temple to be dedicated to the Lord, as she had promised in her prayer. Eli was responsible for his upbringing, education, and initiation into a life of service to the Lord.

Eli and John the Baptist are both entrusted with the important task of preparing future servants of God for their particular mission. Both are models for us because they recognize that a divine call is a very delicate thing. It is a mystery that comes entirely from the divine initiative and is perceived by the person in the secret depths of the heart. Both Eli and John manage not to interfere in any way with the divine initiative, yet on the other hand, they don’t step away from the responsibility of giving assistance.

Eli, we see, acts with much wisdom. When he suspects that it is the voice of God that Samuel is hearing, he simply advises him in being wholly available to the Lord with an open, peaceful heart. Go back to sleep, he says, and if you are called reply, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

With John it is similar. In today’s passage, he says just one thing. “Behold, the Lamb of God.” Everything else is left to the disciples and the Lord. This one phrase sums up John’s whole life’s meaning and purpose: to point people to the Lord. He did this by calling them to “make straight the way of the Lord” that is, restore the conditions of the original covenant relationship with God, where God can communicate himself freely and everything is light and fire. It is there that the heart of God will disclose itself, in the appearance of his beloved Son. It seems to me it would have been the same with his disciples, the aim would have been to bring them to  the purity of the original covenant, insofar as this is possible in our fallen condition, where they can respond freely to God’s free self-disclosure when it comes, in a state of watchful attentiveness, free of all calculation, setting up no conditions, presuming nothing, in pure love.

When Samuel believes that it is Eli who is calling him, he runs to him. Part of what is touching in this scene is Samuel’s spontaneous, natural, unaffected, and unguarded response. He believes he hears his guardian’s voice, rouses himself immediately from his slumber, and runs to him and says, “Here I am, you called me.” It is the response of a child, of one of the ‘little ones’ Jesus held up for our example.  It is the response God is looking for. It is the straightforward, simple, trusting gift of self that John no doubt hopes to instill in his disciples. It is the response Jesus is looking for from John’s disciples.

After the third time, once Samuel had received Eli’s instructions and gone back to sleep, the text says that Lord came to Samuel’s bed and stood there, calling out to Samuel by name as before. Clearly, the intent is to portray a great paternal care and intimacy on the part of the Lord toward Samuel. God appears first as a voice that for Samuel is indistinguishable from a human voice. Next, he is said to be standing next to his bed. This is not an angel sent by God but God himself. Obviously, this is metaphoric language; nevertheless, remaining God, he all but becomes flesh. Yet he comes in the darkness of night, in the realm between sleep and wakefulness, where all is unseen and remains in mystery. By God’s own initiative the borders between the divine and the human are as thin as possible.  Samuel responds to the Lord with the same simple, unaffected spontaneous simplicity he had shown before.

In the Gospel, the two disciples in their own way show the same trusting gift of self that Samuel did. On the basis of the Baptist’s witness, they follow Jesus. There is nothing naïve, imprudent, or headlong about this. God can ask for this kind of response because once he makes himself known, we are immediately caught up to him, and he imprints us with his seal. At once a claim has been made on us and calls for a response. It cannot be ignored or undone. A choice must be made. The simpler, purer, more open, and genuine the interior space is that this encounter finds, the more spontaneous and generous the response.

The disciples ask the Lord, “where are you staying.” Jesus answers, Come and you will see.” When the disciples accept his invitation, they begin the process of being introduced into his world, which is primarily his life with the Father in the Spirit, the deepest thing he wants to share. In the farewell discourses, Jesus makes much of this staying, abiding, or remaining with him in the Father. He tells them that although he is going away, he is preparing a place for them in the Father’s house, where there are many rooms; that where he is they may be also.

Abide in me, he tells them, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me… Abide in my love, he says. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” His commandment is that they are to love one another, even as he has loved them. By this, all will know that they are his disciples if they have love for one another.

For the apostles, this loving one another will take a particular shape: carrying out their mission as apostolic witnesses. For Samuel, it meant carrying out his prophetic calling. In neither case will it be easy. Abiding in God will have its cost. To close, I want to look at Samuel’s first taste of this abiding. After Samuel says, “Speak, for your servant is listening,” the Lord tells him his intention to condemn the house of Eli once and for all on account of the blasphemous behavior of Eli’s sons Hophni and Phineas. Thus Samuel is entrusted with his first prophetic act. It is a moment of crisis for him. When morning comes, Samuel is afraid to tell Eli the vision. But Eli insists and Samuel tells him everything, holding nothing back, just as Eli has requested of him. By this act, Samuel manages to maintain the same simplicity he had before, and his union with God and his neighbor is not only maintained but strengthened. In him, the way of the Lord has been kept straight. He continues to abide with the Lord in the light and fire at the heart of the covenant.

The text continues:  "Samuel grew up, and the Lord was with him, not permitting any word of his to go unfulfilled. Thus all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba came to know that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.  The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, manifesting himself to Samuel at Shiloh through his word. Samuel's word spread throughout Israel.   

For us, this abiding takes the shape of our monastic conversatio. Through it the Lord is constantly calling us to abide with him, to remain with him where his light and fire can transform us and make our lives fruitful and where we experience a share in the joy he has with the Father. This journey does not always go smoothly, as was the case with Jesus’ first disciples. But the Lord, who loved to the end those who were his own, through his cross and resurrection established the means to right the relationship no matter badly or how often his followers have gone astray. Fortunately for us, he is always ready to begin again. So let us take up his invitation to “come and see” by continuing our celebration of this Eucharist.

Photograph by Brother Brian. This morning's homily by Father Timothy.

Alleluia with Father Patrick

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”; and when he had said this he breathed his last.

“All I can say is, Alleluia.” These are the words I mentioned in Chapter that Fr. Patrick shared with Gertrude, our night nurse. It’s a moving statement, a summing up of his life. “All I can say is Alleluia.” And in today’s gospel, we have Our Lord summing up his life in the words: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” Today’s liturgy is an opportunity to learn the similarities between these two statements and to learn from both Jesus and Fr. Patrick what it means to commend our spirit into the Father’s hands with an Alleluia refrain.

I’ve heard that among Fr. Patrick’s many contributions to the construction of our monastery, one stands out—his work on the bell tower of our church—and I can believe it. He had the strength and drive to do masonry and roofing work, climbing ladders, and scaffolding to reach the peak of the bell tower. As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of an illustration I had seen long ago which depicted little Trappists climbing up and down Jacob’s ladder and angels flying around trying to keep them from falling off. One of the Trappists had slipped off the ladder and was hanging upside down with his foot barely caught on one of the rungs. Two angels were trying desperately to keep his foot in place and pulling and tugging to get him back on the ladder. Monastic life can be like that sometimes. God allows our life to be turned upside down. He wants to shake out all the loose change in our pockets, all the lizards, all the candy, and whatever else we may have shoved into those pockets over the years. In other words, he wants to lighten our load, and hanging us upside down is a very good way to do it. Maybe this is what Fr. Patrick experienced when God allowed his world to be turned upside down with the onset of Parkinson’s disease and the accompanying dementia. But that was God’s way of preparing Fr. Patrick for the commendation of his spirit to the Father.

Today’s gospel also speaks of those helpers who assisted Jesus in his final hours: Joseph of Arimathea who took courage and asked for the body of Jesus; and the women who accompanied him from Galilee and now brought spices to the tomb to anoint his body. Fr. Patrick had his angels, too. In fact, maybe it was these helpers who helped him make his final commendation to God. Let me share with you what Gertrude recorded of their late-night conversation.

“Sometime before Fr. Patrick began hospice care, I had a conversation with him while he was having his favorite midnight snack, a bowl of cereal. Normally Fr. Patrick was very quiet, but sometimes he would speak quite freely, and this was one of those occasions."

“Fr. Patrick shared that he felt the time had come. When I asked what he meant, he replied that he had come to the end of the line, that is, his life on earth. He was not surprised and said that he was almost ready. He had had the most severe pain in his stomach days before—horrific, wicked pain all morning—but he prayed to God, and the pain passed. He said he never thought it would be so hard. When I asked what would be so hard, he gave a hearty laugh and again said the end of his life – it was a BIG challenge. He had not expected it to be this hard, but he was very happy; and all he could say was ‘Alleluia.’ Then as he finished his Cheerios, he added one more thing: 'Thank all the girls for me.' "

My brothers and sisters, Fr. Patrick said that he was almost ready to go. It is gratifying to know that he was well prepared to commend his spirit to the Father. May we, too, be ready to commend ourselves into the hands of our heavenly Father and add with Fr. Patrick the Alleluia refrain.

Dom Vincent's homily for Father Patrick's funeral, Wednesday, 13 January 2020.

 

Poor

Among the homeless poor whose lives mingle with the litter of the streets, a nuisance to many in their grime and smell and soliciting eye, not all are deranged and lunatic. Surely some are true souls of despair who have embraced a life of forsakenness to enclose and silence within themselves a mistake now long past. And if these latter have a stifled passion we do not suspect, and a recurring thought that another life was possible with a different choice, in some cases the occupied faces hurrying past them may share more kinship than they realize with their own crossroad when they could have chosen differently...‘The poor you have always with you’. And yet it is rather easy to look at the derelict poor and consider self-inflicted the scars from alcohol and drugs that mar their faces – easy to harbor disdain for their indecency. But then surely we sometimes miss a lonely man’s eyes looking up in a wish that his face will not provoke this time a glance of revulsion. And perhaps the same look of these eyes was also in the eyes of Jesus as he carried the cross to Calvary.

Lines from Contemplative Provocations, by Father Donald Haggerty.

Two Backs

Not long ago a friend showed us this image of the central tapestry of the Baptism of Christ by John Nava which hangs in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. More recently we came upon this heart-rending image of a runaway slave named Peter.

The story is told that one day in the early spring of 1863, Peter removed the shroud of rags that partially concealed his back to reveal a vast network of scars for a crowd of soldiers and medics who looked on. The wounds from the whip of an irate overseer also lashed the sensibilities of these observers and others who were soon able to see Peter’s back in a photograph that was mass-produced on a wallet-sized carte de visite. See Boston Globe, 2016.

Soon the back of Jesus, whom we see baptized this morning in the Jordan River by his cousin John, will be brutally lashed like the back of the slave Peter. One day we hope to embrace the risen Lord Jesus who, we know, still bears the wounds of his passion. Perhaps we will feel his scars.

Where is the wounded one in our midst even now? How shall embrace him?

John & Jesus

John the Baptist seems already to have had many disciples among the children of Israel, especially among the ’anawim, the simple believers who day and night begged for mercy and forgiveness from God. Implementing Isaiah, John demands that people prepare the way of the coming Lord and strive for conversion of heart in view of the remission of sins. But what precisely is the meaning of this too familiar phrase, the way of the Lord? God never asks that we build a road in front of us as do over-confident pioneers, and then walk along it in order to go to encounter him.

In fact, God asks the exact opposite: our assigned task is to clear the road which he is making, on which he is to reach us as he comes towards us, seeking us. The road is not ours but the Lord’s, and the initiative, the intention, and the project are all his! This road, in fact, is nothing other than the Incarnation of the eternal Word, an exclusively Trinitarian endeavor. As in the Parable of the Ten Virgins, the Bridegroom makes his own way toward us. Here is your God! Here comes with power the Lord God, who rules by his strong arm. In our eventual encounter with Christ, he will gather us up in his arms like lambs and carry us in his bosom, and the glorious tryst results solely from Christ’s search for each one of us, and not from our own initiative. God traces a way of mercy and forgiveness toward us, and we can meet him along that way only if we first acknowledge our sin. Our humble confession of sin is the “toll”, so to speak, that we must pay for transiting on the way that belongs to the Lord.

The Lord always precedes us, anticipates us. It is not for nothing that Jesus said: I am the way. Once John proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, he then immediately disappears from the scene, but not before uttering these weighty words: One mightier than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. Such symbolic stooping and loosening of thongs express John’s peculiar ministry as the forerunner. He is affirming that he is not worthy to serve Jesus even as his slave. John’s whole task and mission is to set the stage for another, Jesus. John doesn’t even dare to pronounce the holy name of Jesus, and yet (O wonder!) he identifies Jesus as his own disciple. Pointing to Jesus, John calls him the one coming after me, which is biblical language for the one following me as a disciple. What an inconceivable paradox, grounded in the Incarnate Word’s humility and his ardent desire to share our sinful condition! But the clairvoyant John discerns perfectly that this one following him is, in fact, mightier than he. This topsy-turvy inversion of the conventional roles of lord and slave at the social level is a mystery that touches each of us deeply. For we know that he, the Lord, Jesus the Messiah, made himself our slave, too, at the Last Supper and on the Cross, and he expects us to follow suit in our relationship with one another if we truly want to participate in his divine life.

John also confesses the difference between his baptism and that bestowed by Jesus: John’s is in water only, the other in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God that the Messiah possesses in fullness and will give to those who believe in him. Here too we have unsurpassable fulfillment: “John announces the coming of one who will immerse humanity in the Spirit of God. [Jesus], for his part, not only performs a rite to prepare for that encounter but truly realizes, enacts [in us], communion with God himself.” This happens when the divine Child is born of Mary as Bread for a hungry humanity, to nourish and heal us with the very substance of God, who has become flesh in himself.

The Baptism of Christ Piero della Francesca, c. 1448-1450,  Tempera on panel, 66 x 46", National Gallery, London. Meditation by Father Simeon.

Father Patrick

Our Father Patrick Brown passed quietly to Lord early this morning. He will be remembered as especially hardworking and patient. Many of us recall him faithfully unboxing jars at the Trappist Preserves day after day, morning after morning; and always present in Church for the Divine Office. He entered the monastery in 1952. We praise and thank God for Father Patrick's 68 years of loving service in the Cistercian monastic life.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him, he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. Hebrews 12

Photograph by Brother Brian.

With Saint André

During his lifetime, numerous healings were attributed to the prayerful intercessions of Saint André Bessette, as the sick and troubled people of Montreal flocked to him each day. He was deeply devoted to Saint Joseph and blest with tremendous humility. Amazed at what his prayer accomplished, André would say simply, “I am nothing…only a tool in the hands of Providence, a lowly instrument at the service of Saint Joseph...God chose the most ignorant one. If there were anyone more ignorant than I, God would have chosen him instead of me."

How to embrace my own lowliness?

Feeding Us

Today’s Gospel is not a story about what a friend's mother used to call a “genteel sufficiency,” just enough. It is all about overflowing abundance and the immeasurability of God’s love and compassion. This is God's dream of the kingdom; for in this scene, we see the reign of God becoming a reality in Christ. In him heaven has been wedded to earth, and so a banquet is called for. God's promised One is here to feed the poor with as much as they want. And he has invited us to join them. Jesus is presiding at the marriage banquet in the kingdom. (Reclining was only for banquets after all; daily meals were taken seated at a table.)

Perhaps you know the story of a boy from Italy who comes to America with his father; they are going to live with relatives in New York. They are very poor; the father has scraped together just enough to buy two tickets for passage on an ocean liner. The bit of money that's left is just enough to buy a giant wheel of cheese and a few loaves of bread. This will be their food for the entire trip. Then one day the little boy, precocious as he is, wanders around the ship and discovers a grand dining room. Plates full of food, so many people. He spots a family from his village. He goes to them and learns the amazing truth. Then he races back to his teeny cabin. "Papa," he says. "We can eat as much as we want; it's free, e gratuito, it comes with the ticket."

It comes with the ticket. God wants to regale us. "God is to be enjoyed," says St. Augustine. A banquet is prepared; Jesus is the banquet. But maybe too often we lower our heads and come with bowls that are much too small. We don't want to be greedy, or risk being disappointed, or seem too desperate. Jesus wants to fill us with an infinity of compassion and mercy. But are we willing to honestly tell him how hungry we are? 

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Meditation by one of the monks.

Epiphany

The day, dearly-beloved, on which Christ the Savior of the world first appeared to the nations must be venerated by us with holy worship: and today those joys must be entertained in our hearts which existed in the breasts of the three magi, when, aroused by the sign and leading of a new star, which they believed to have been promised, they fell down in presence of the King of heaven and earth. For that day has not so passed away that the mighty work, which was then revealed, has passed away with it, and that nothing but the report of the thing has come down to us for faith to receive and memory to celebrate; seeing that, by the oft-repeated gift of God, our times daily enjoy the fruit of what the first age possessed. 

And therefore, although the narrative which is read to us from the Gospel properly records those days on which the three men, who had neither been taught by the prophets' predictions nor instructed by the testimony of the law, came to acknowledge God from the furthest parts of the East, yet we behold this same thing more clearly and abundantly carried on now in the enlightenment of all those who are called, since the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled when he says, the Lord has laid bare His holy arm in the sight of all the nations, and all the nations upon earth have seen the salvation which is from the Lord our God; and again, and those to whom it has not been announced about Him shall see, and they who have not heard shall understand.  

Hence when we see men devoted to worldly wisdom and far from belief in Jesus Christ brought out of the depth of their error and called to an acknowledgment of the true Light, it is undoubtedly the brightness of the divine grace that is at work: and whatever of new light illumines the darkness of their hearts, comes from the rays of the same star: so that it should both move with wonder, and going before, lead to the adoration of God the minds which it visited with its splendor. But if with careful thought we wish to see how their threefold kind of gift is also offered by all who come to Christ with the foot of faith, is not the same offering repeated in the hearts of true believers? For those that acknowledge Christ the King of the universe bring gold from the treasure of their heart: those that believe the Only-begotten of God to have united our true nature to Himself, offer myrrh; and those that confess Him in no wise inferior to the Father's majesty, worship Him in a manner with incense.

Andrea Mantegna (Isola di Carturo, circa 1431 - Mantua, 1506), The Adoration of the Magi, 1495 - circa 1500, canvas; 54.6 cm x 70.7 cm, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Lines from Saint Leo the Great.