ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

  Last evening our Brother Christopher passed quietly to the Lord after a prolonged illness. He was a devoted lay brother, a great lover of this place, and dedicated to caring for the monastery grounds and making our monastery more beautiful wherever and whenever he could. We recommend him to your prayers. May he rest in peace with His Lord in Paradise.

  The Galilee of Jesus’ day was a muddle of power struggles; rich elites were getting richer and richer by burdening the poor with endless tolls and ever-higher taxes. And religious leaders kept piling on rules and regulations that assured the poor of their exclusion. Jesus arrives and announces a higher grace. (See David Brooks)  He brings good news to the poor, sets free those oppressed and heavily burdened, and he is teaching the people how to hope again. Jesus is this great surge of God’s compassion rushing in with a relentless, astoundingly gentle but ferocious urgency and energy. And he is enacting a great reversal. He eats with sinners, casts out demons, and cures people no matter which day of the week it is. He touches lepers and so has become unclean. He even dares to forgive sins. Who does he think he is?   Jesus sees things differently, he grants access to the kingdom directly to outcasts and the downtrodden, offering not pity but blessing. He speaks to them t...

"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!” The Gospel passage chosen for our celebration of the feast of the Holy Founders of Citeaux concerns the problem of wealth. Wealth is an obstacle to following Jesus and to participating in his kingdom. It follows immediately upon Jesus’ encounter with the rich man. In that passage, as we well know, a man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him, and asks him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” After he has assured Jesus that he has observed all the commandments from his youth, and yet finds his heart yearning for something more, Jesus, Mark says, looks at him and loves him and says: “You are lacking one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.” Mark tells us that “At that statement [the man’s] face fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.” The rich man was without doubt a pious man. He had for many years dedicated himself ...

  In the midst of every conflict and division that the human heart can contrive, the Spirit of Jesus always seeks to draw us together and make us one. How often we resist; insisting that we know better, our individual plan will work best. Overwhelmed by the nearness of the persecuted Jesus calling to him and blinded by the divine radiance, Paul falls to the ground, helpless and needy at last; all his old answers suddenly meaningless. That’s what it took for Christ Jesus to get Paul’s attention and change his heart. What will it take to break our hearts open- as churches, nations, individuals? What have we heard and seen that will make us understand once and for all that unity, forgiveness, blessed compromise, and deferring to one another out of love for Christ surpass everything? As we complete this Octave of Prayer for Unity, let us pray that now, today we would listen to his voice and harden not our hearts, so that all may be one in him. __________________________________________...

In a kind of fortuitous liturgical coincidence, today's memorial of  Saint Marianne  coincides with the Day of  Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children. And so at this morning's Mass, we heard   this opening prayer:   God our Creator, we give thanks to you, who alone have the power to impart the breath of life as you form each of us in our mother’s womb; grant, we pray, that we, whom you have made stewards of creation, may remain faithful to this sacred trust and constant in safeguarding the dignity of every human life. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. In 1883 Sister Marianne Cope left New York with six sisters to minister to leprosy patients in Hawaii. She planned to remain only long enough to get them settled. But the patients’ great needs led her to remain in Hawaii for four decades; she would die there in 1918. Courageous, energetic, and never daunted...

We imagine that all the Gospels answer questions likely posed by a second generation of Christ’s followers, perhaps the children and grandchildren of the apostles and disciples. “What was Jesus like? What was it like to know Him? What was it like to be with Him? What was it like when He called you to follow Him?” The Gospel is then a living recollection recounted by those whose hearts burned within them as Jesus spoke to them. How extraordinarily attractive Jesus must have been. Indeed, the truth, and goodness that He was and that He proclaimed were irresistible, for He is God enfleshed. And  this morning  we watch and listen as His simple invitation touches the hearts of four fishermen. W ithout hesitation, these first four apostles abandon father, nets, and boats to follow Jesus, immediately .  Like them, our work is to make ourselves more and more available to the irresistibility of Jesus and His call and to live our lives with an urgency and attentiveness, that will ...

The Spirit of God always surpasses our dreams or desires. The Spirit expresses for us the God in Christ who cannot be managed, who is “continually spilling over,” the God who is exquisitely present within yet ungraspable, indescribable, the Spirit who is the vital atmosphere that gives us breath and life, surrounding us and granting us greater intimacy with God, who keeps us open to the More that God is, beyond our imaginings or our manipulation. The Spirit brings unity, always respecting difference, and enlivening reciprocity. “The Spirit is at the place of our desiring,” the inarticulate groan that begs for Christ to surround and indwell and sustain us in the incompleteness of love. And as monks we know that this is where we live- in this land of desire, somehow suspended between heaven and earth, getting glimpses of heavenly communion, visits of the Word, noticing his kind and loving presence but more often left hanging, because our desire always outstrips our present capacity . And...

In any story or play, we pay special attention to the moment when the protagonist or leading character makes a first appearance. Jesus first appears in the 4th Gospel in today’s opening verse:  When John caught sight of Jesus coming toward him, he exclaimed: “Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Aha, say I to myself, this “Lamb of God” is what I will preach about this morning. And indeed, I did get well into my preparation when it slowly dawned on me: but in this scene, Jesus stays on the sidelines and says nothing. The focus, rather, is on John’s witness – not even on John’s baptizing Jesus, for actually the Johannine Jesus is not said to be baptized by John (or baptized at all, for that matter). No, the focus here is entirely on John’s witness, his testimony. One clue in the text is that it consists almost entirely of direct discourse, and thus speaks powerfully to the hearer. Notice that the 4th Evangelist does not talk about John’s witness, but allows u...

In Christ God has become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is in the wounded and risen Christ that friendship with God becomes real, for there we can see and understand the depth of God’s desire to share everything with us. For in the hour of his crucifixion, God pours out his entire self for us, desiring to unburden us, to free us from sin and death, wanting what is best for us, as any friend would. True friendship with God is now accessible, and possible because, in the brokenhearted Christ, God most high has become God most low; God has opened his heart to us, longing for our friendship. It is the wounded face of Christ that reveals the love of Father, Son, and Spirit. This everything of the Father’s love for us is most clearly expressed in the self-offering of Jesus, in his disfigured humanity. A God who is love would be inconceivable without the reality of the incompleteness that is love, the inner voice, the deep desire that says, “I cannot be me with...

Lord Jesus, please have mercy on the souls of your servants! Once a month during Ordinary Time, we celebrate the Office and Mass of the Dead, praying for our deceased brethren, relatives, friends, and benefactors. Once again on this frosty winter morning, it was our duty and privilege to pray these prayers.   In his Rule, Saint Benedict admonishes the monks, "keep death daily before your eyes." The Abbey cemetery is located just outside the south cloister and provides a fitting  memento mori.  As we pass through this cloister, back and forth all day long, we can see the crosses marking our brothers' resting places. Our deceased brethren are still with us. Death is not fearsome but part of our monastic rhythm, a gateway to deeper intimacy with Christ Jesus who died and rose for love of us. Requiem aeternam, Domine, dona eis.

When I was a little boy, the most exciting day of the year for us kids was January 6 th . Only in church was it called by the strange Greek name of ‘Epiphany’; to us it was the feast of the ‘Three Magi Kings’— los Tres Reyes Magos, as we called them . It was the year’s big day of presents. These were brought to us in Cuba not by Santa Claus, that unknown Nordic figure, but by the very same biblical characters that brought gifts for Jesus. ¿Qué te trajeron los Reyes? was the incessant question friends would ask one another in the following days, eager to compare the bounty: What did the Kings bring you? On the eve of the feast, I would be bursting with hope and expectation. On one such occasion (I must have been around 8), something extraordinary happened to me. I was in the restroom preparing to go to bed. When I turned off the light I happened to look up at the window. What I saw stunned me. Plain as could be, I saw the star of Bethlehem shining in the night sky exactly as portrayed o...

Let us gaze upon what Mary gazed upon, the ultimate fulfillment of all God’s covenants, namely, the whole mystery of Christ. On the one hand, she saw in her infant son one like all other Jewish male babies – the Gospel says, “And when eight days were completed for his circumcision…” What greater proof that he was one of us and a child of Abraham than the fact that He was circumcised! Yet at the same time, Mary could not doubt the word of the angel: “He will be called holy, the Son of God,” because “the power of the Most High will overshadow you...” The divine and the human: these are the two mysteries Mary held in her heart, not mixing or confusing them or leaving one aside. But at the same time, Mary maintained but one focus: taking her child in her arms and holding him close as only a mother can, she gazed on her little Son, this little person in whom somehow the divine and the human were personally united. Her embrace was like that Sabbath rest with which God embraced the whole myst...

Research has shown that learning begins in utero. There the infant is picking up cues about the world he will enter. Will it be a place of scarcity or abundance, conflict or peace? And though the voice he hears is muffled and low, an infant soon begins to recognize his mother’s voice and her heartbeat. Soon after birth, the baby will prefer her voice to all others. The mother’s voice, her beating heart, her face become the child’s first world, his emotional sustenance. She is the one who can assure him that he is treasured and loved. This among so much else is what Mary gave the  infant Word of God -  the assurance and security he required to begin his life with us. God depended on Mary to become a person. Through Mary, the sublime beauty God reaches down to us to “become a person available to our senses,”* at last bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. And in her quiet, brave surrender, she has given us the little Child “who is the beauty of all things beautiful.”...