ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Repentance arises from realizing that I am truly loved, and have always been loved, by an unconditional love that has remained faithful and never failed even when I have misunderstood it or not even realized it existed. Therefore, he arose and came to his father . The text says that he came , not that he returned . There is a wholly fresh quality to this particular journey that, rather than a “return”—a going back in time and place—transforms it into the beginning of something radically new. And the father, who before had done nothing but wait and hope and love silently and painfully, now gets very busy indeed! He runs, welcomes, embraces, kisses, celebrates, gives orders for the party to end all parties, and provides for all material needs—all to honor his son as if he were a prince on his coronation day. What had at first seemed like emptiness was really not empty at all! Inaction is now a memory that crumbles in the face of the many actions the father performs in his ecstatic joy. H...

  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.

The Parable of The Return of the Prodigal Son has been a source of inspiration for many artists over the centuries. Perhaps the most famous illustration of this story was painted by Rembrandt in the late seventeenth century. It was completed during the last two years of his life. According to the eminent British art historian, Kenneth Clark, it ranks among the greatest paintings ever. He writes, “In the painting, we see the father like an Old Testament patriarch, lays his hands on the shoulders of his repentant son with shaved head and threadbare clothes. The father’s act of forgiving becomes a blessing of almost sacramental dignity. The painting is full of emotion and truly illustrates the father’s forgiveness and love for his son.” The parable is normally referred to as the “Prodigal Son” but in fact, the central character of the story is the father, who clearly represents a merciful, loving God. No one can deny the appalling behavior of the younger son, his immaturity, and selfishn...

  When Father Joseph was novice master 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 probably spoke each day in the Shema – promising to love the 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...

The life of grace and the fruits of love are truly a symbiosis between God and us, as the natural symbiosis between tree and earth. The earth, the water, the fertilizer, our very existence, and even Christ, our fellow wayfarer: all this has God given us. But we are the tree itself, and we must fully exercise all the faculties given to us by divine mercy and goodness, all the while cooperating with the richness of the earth in which we have been planted, wherever a wise Providence has seen fit to place us. If we do not do so, if we do not do our best to thrive and produce fruits of charity, then our useless presence impoverishes the land we occupy parasitically, and this death-in-life will have its consequences. What a consolation it is to realize that all along we have had at our disposal all we need, for Jesus in the Eucharist we celebrate is, all at once, our earth flowing with milk and honey , our abundant energizing water, our nourishing fertilizer, the chastising hoe that encourag...

I had been visiting Brother Matthew Joseph every day during the week before he died. The onset of his final decline was steep and difficult. One morning he asked Lorinda to call me at Trappist Preserves with the message: “This is it.” That is what started the daily visits and the opportunity to listen to him reflect on what has meant most to him over the years. There was a big change from day to day and a growing sense of immediacy. I chose the passage from Lamentations for our First Reading this afternoon, because those words could very well have been Brother Matthew Joseph’s own when I last saw him the morning before he died: “My soul is deprived of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is; I tell myself my future is lost . . . But I will call this to mind, as my reason to hope: my portion is the Lord, therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to those who seek him; it is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” In just a coup...

O Mother of God. Beholding your pure image, we fervently cry to you: "Encompass us beneath the precious veil of your protection. Deliver us from every form of evil by entreating  Christ , your Son and our God, that He may save us." Image of Our Lady of Ukraine. Lines adapted from an Orthodox Troparion.

Thanks to science and technology, we know that the highest point on the planet earth is Mt. Everest at over 29,000 feet.  We know that the lowest point on the planet earth is the Mariana Trench, which extends almost seven miles beneath the ocean. We have been told the world's circumference is 24,901 and one-half miles and has 7.7 billion inhabitants. Science and technology can give us the measure of many things, but they cannot answer the question, "Why is there a Mt. Everest to measure? "Why is there a Mariana Trench to fathom?" "How did the planet earth and its 7.7 billion current inhabitants of the previous more than 100 billion inhabitants come to be? Science and technology cannot answer the question why is the anything to measure?" As human beings, we feel a little better about ourselves and more in control of things if we can ask questions like why and how and get satisfying answers or lay the blame when things have gone wrong. Our egos will not allow...

  Your father and I were looking for you in anguish, Mary says to Jesus in the temple. The Gospel passage repeats four times that Mary and Joseph were the parents of Jesus, with Our Lady herself here referring to her husband specifically as your father. In intimate union with his wife Mary, St Joseph “loved Jesus with a father’s heart”, as Pope Francis affirms in the rich Apostolic Letter Patris corde that he wrote about the holy carpenter from Nazareth. The Pope highlights the paternal mission of St Joseph. Although according to the Gospels, Joseph had only the status of a legal father, nevertheless he took his paternal vocation as divine grace and mandate, and so “he [truly] loved Jesus with a father’s heart”. Such intensity of love and commitment of heart wholly transcend the limits of the law. Joseph was, in fact, Jesus’ human father because of his tender love, his attentive solicitude, and his immense attachment to Jesus in every aspect of his life. Clearly, this is a case ...

Forgive us, Lord, for the war. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners. Lord Jesus, who were born under the bombardment of Kyiv, have mercy on us. Lord Jesus, who died in the arms of your mother in the shelter of Kharkov, have mercy on us. Lord Jesus, who was sent to the front for twenty years, have mercy on us. O Lord Jesus, for you still have iron in your hands in the midst of your cross, have mercy on us! Forgive us, Lord, forgive us for not being satisfied with the nails with which your hands were pierced, but we continue to drink the blood of the dead, torn by weapons. Forgive us that the hands that you created to comfort one another have turned into tools of death. Forgive us, O Lord, for killing our brother again and again; forgive us for gathering stones on our field, like Cain, to kill Abel. Forgive us for continuing to justify our cruelty with our hardships, for allowing our pain to legitimize the wickedness of our crimes. Forgive us, Lord, for the war. Fo...

Think of the Son of God, how he  Died on the tree our souls to save,  Think of the nails that pierced him through,  Think of him too, in lowly grave.    Think of the spear the soldier bore,  Think how it tore holy side.  Think of the bitter gall for drink,  Think of it, think, for us he died.    Think upon Christ who gave his blood,  Poured in a flood our souls to win,  Think of the mingled tide that gushed  Forth at the thrust to wash our sin. Crucifix in the south cloister.  Lines from a Gaelic hymn at Friday Lauds.

Early this afternoon our Brother Matthew Joseph passed to the Lord. He was a devoted lay brother, a great lover of simplicity, and served in humble ways all around the Abbey, always available for even the most trivial tasks. We recommend him to your prayers, even as we, his brothers, trusting in the Lord's mercy, already beg his heavenly intercession.

Hypocrisy, as we know from our own bitter experience, is also an “occupational hazard” of all committed Christians, no matter how well-meaning. Quite simply, the Word of God is always greater than our capacity to live it. The bar of virtue is raised too high for us by Jesus’ radical teachings. And yet, is not Unconditional Love always necessarily radical ? Recently, for instance, we have heard from the Lord’s lips commands such as “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” “Be merciful as your Father is merciful,” and “Love your enemies; pray for those who persecute you”. Here, the little word as means that we are to be perfect and merciful in the same way and to the same extent that God is! Who can live up to these sublime standards all the time, except God himself? The solution lies in taking seriously the name “Father” which Jesus habitually gives the eternal God. If Jesus and we are indeed this God’s true offspring, it follows that we possess the divine DNA that puts perfect ...

And so we pray in order to be transformed into the Lord’s likeness and thus counteract the opposite force, which is the prevalence of temptation that seeks a negative transformation for the worse that is in fact a de-formation of our good, God-given nature. In this light, we should think of prayer not so much as a virtuous action but rather as a measure of human and spiritual survival, as what prevents evil from deforming us, from making us bad or indifferent or cynical or unmotivated. In fact, giving up praying, giving up the struggle against our own innate laziness, leads us to fall into temptation not once but again and again. Above all, it leads us to no longer have hope, to atrophy our will to love, to no longer believe in ourselves, to distrust others, to no longer believe in prayer itself, indeed, to no longer believe, period. To give up prayer and the interior struggle leads us to live without the Lord and to close ourselves in on ourselves, thus shutting out the whole vital di...

Every year on this Second Sunday of Lent the Gospel is an account of the Transfiguration as told by Matthew, Mark, or (as is the case this year) Luke. In the passage we just heard, Luke highlights the way in which the transfiguration was preparing Jesus himself for his “departure” ( exodus ), which he will fulfil in Jerusalem. This mountain-top experience is a sign of Jesus being totally caught up with and bathed in the love, power and kingdom of God, so much so that it transfigures his whole being with light, and he is identified as the true prophet, the Messiah. But what did Peter, James and John make of all this? They were stunned, confused, unable to understand how the glory they had glimpsed on the mountain (the glory of God’s chosen Son, the Servant who was carrying in himself the promise of redemption) would finally be unveiled on a very different hill, an ugly little hill outside Jerusalem. In each evangelist’s account, all that the disciples have to go on is the word that ca...

  Jesus, the Law of God made flesh, does not demand of us, his followers, more than the Law of Moses did; he demands something entirely new and wildly different, something really impossible to perceive (much less enact)  unless we put on the mind of Christ and begin to see the world through the eyes of a Redeemer who is incarnate Love. As far as our Lord is concerned, deliberately holding on to a grudge or harboring hatred in our heart has the same weight as out-and-out murder! To our conventional reason, this is something preposterous, unbearable; and yet it cannot be otherwise if it is true that God is Love, if God is indeed our common Father and has given us all rebirth to his own life in the Spirit, and if all my fellow human beings are, therefore, my very own sisters and brothers. And notice how far Jesus’ demands to his disciples go. He does not say, ‘If you have offended your brother or sister, go first and ask for their forgiveness and then offer your gift at the...

  Over the past two weeks we—like Queen Esther praying to the Lord God of Israel for the salvation of her people—have “fled to our God, seized with deadly anxiety” for the people of Ukraine. We trust utterly in God’s goodness and compassion, and in God’s power to establish justice, right and a reign of peace in this world, against the destructive will of the enemies of the human. However, as we flee time and again to take refuge from evil in the indestructible goodness of God, let us not forget this: God our Father knows what we, his children, need before we even ask him, even before we become conscious of this need. Therefore, we do not pray because God somehow needs to be informed about what is going on in the world, about how much people are suffering, nor does God need to be persuaded by us to activate (finally!) the power of his love and intervene to set aright horrible situations such as the present genocidal invasion in Eastern Europe. No! What kind of an ignorant and hard-h...

  To rejoice without purpose in the darkness To plunge beneath the earth and retrieve shades To await the emergence of the light from the bosom of night To be astounded at each day’s rebirth To love the piercing light To be gladdened by the least leaf’s tremor in the first breeze of dawn To hear with kindred thrill the merry racket of warbling summer songsters To make your whole chest gape as a wide window for all the sky’s swift traffic to flow through To thank for the invention of all flowers by scattering your life’s bouquet To feel in your veins melt down the rigid border between eternity and time To sense future and past embrace in one fond kiss in the keen breath of Now To have your heart play host to a new fire that frightens as it burns and brightens as it yearns To jolt at midnight pierced by another’s pain To bear about the ocean in your heart To hurl past loves into the Heart of God To see all the world’s faces focus into One Face To sit in empty ...