ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Though he seldom traveled farther than his daily walk to and from his little barber shop, my father considered himself something of a connoisseur. This became abundantly clear when he and my mother would come to visit me. Scene one. I am in California ; and among other sights I take them to the Monterey Aquarium, an incredible place, a colossal three-story, one million gallon tank, filled with life and movement. I say, “Well Dad, what do you think?” “It’s a lot of fish,” he says. Scene two. This time we’re in NYC and a friend has recommended that I bring them to a little hide-away restaurant in the theatre district frequented by movie stars. We go in. My Dad looks around. “Well,” he says to my mom, “I guess movie stars like to eat in dumps.” Scene three. I love this one. A long distance telephone call. I ask him about my cousin’s elegant wedding. “How was the reception, Dad?” “The soup was salty.” After one such conversation I remember blowing up at him. I was not proud of myself, s ...

We rejoice with Father Aquinas today as he celebrates the 50th anniversary of his priestly ordination. He entered the monastery in 1959, and hrough the years he has held many important positions in the community including prior, subprior, dean of the junior professed, vocation director, and submaster of novices. He currently serves as the Abbey's sacristan. Father Aquinas says that  f ormed by the Word of God and following the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monk is led to "the Author of Creation in the Beatific Vision."

Jesus said to the Twelve: “Fear no one. What I say to you in darkness, speak in the light.   What you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.”    The Gospel today is very challenging.   It says our being a Christian and proclaiming our faith is enough reason for the world to want to persecute and even kill us.   This may seem a very melodramatic statement, but apart from, perhaps, the USA, Canada,   Western Europe and Australia,   it is a real possibility you may be called upon to sacrifice your life for the sake of the Christian Faith.   Simply going to Sunday mass may result in your being blown to pieces by terrorists.   Archbishops, priests, religious and Catholic workers are gunned down by or permanently disappear at the hands of drug lords and immoral dictators throughout the world.   Just last May, our Pope Francis met with the Coptic Pope Tawadros II at th...

All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, "What, then, will this child be?" For surely the hand of the Lord was with him. Luke has been preparing the reader for this question since he introduced Zechariah in the first verses of his narrative. By immersing ourselves in the narrative of the events that led up to it, we participate in the Lord’s preparation of his people for John’s prophetic voice, more importantly, we become prepared to be able to recognize and welcome the visit of the Word when he comes, who by the transforming power of his grace can make us more like John, a burning and shining lamp capable of shedding light on the figure of Jesus for those whom we encounter. All who heard these things took them to heart. One way to enter into this immersion is to look at the experience of all those who heard these things , and through them explore what it might mean to take them to heart. The first of these was the great mercy that the Lord had shown Eliz...

  So confident was Saint Aloysius in God's tender love, that one day as he was playing ball with the other young Jesuits, Saint Robert Bellarmine approached Aloysius  and asked  what he would do if he were told he was going to die the next day. "I would go on playing ball," said Aloysius. So may we always trust in the Lord's merciful love and tender presence. The Vocation of Saint Aloysius (Luigi) Gonzaga,  Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) (Italian, Cento 1591–1666 Bologna), ca. 1650.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Used with permission.

  God is always working to bring us to an awareness and acceptance of our poverty, which is the essential condition of our being able to receive him, and the petty frustrations, the restrictions, humiliations, the occasions when we are made to feel poignantly and distressingly hedged around, not in control of the world, not even in control of that tiny corner of it we are supposed to call our own, are his chosen channel into the soul. It is the one who has learned to bow his head, to accept the yoke, who knows what freedom is. There is so much that we must take whether we like it or not; what I am urging is a wholehearted acceptance, a positive appreciation and choosing of this bitter ingredient of life. Detail of ancient Cistercian grisaille glass from Obazine. Lines from To Believe in Jesus by Sister Ruth Burrows, ocd

Some years ago a woman I worked with asked me to pray for her little granddaughter who had just been diagnosed with a rapidly spreading cancer. She was in anguish, I felt so bad. And so I began to pray, trying to muster the correct words that would render my request to the Lord most urgent and irresistible, it was if I were trying to wrestle God to the floor with the insistence of my pleading. And then a quiet insight - I didn’t need to get Jesus’ attention, remind what was wrong, he knew perfectly well what the matter was. He had noticed. Jesus too was heartbroken that this little girl was suffering. I needed to trust him, fall into his desire. Everything changed. Prayer became a privileged joining with him in his desire for all that his good. Somehow prayer took on new depth. Praying would allow me to participate in the broken heartedness of the God who always, always notices. The God who keeps an eye on falling sparrows, the God who has the up-to-the-minute count of the hairs on my ...

  Words have lives, they evolve. Such is the word,  passion . It comes from the Latin  passio  meaning to bear and endure. It is the origin of the word  patient . Later in its life,  passion  came to mean suffering. Further on, the  passion  would describe erotic love and soon after any ardent emotion or enthusiasm. How fitting then that we use the word  passion  with all of its nuances and resonance to describe the suffering and death of Jesus our Lord. For  all that Jesus endures because of his tender love for us is most truly his  passion .  “For the joy that lay before him, Jesus endured the cross despising its shame.” Patiently, passionately, most ardently Jesus gives himself away to us, for us. And when he feels things, he’s moved to his very guts .  Jesus is thus the perfect enfleshment of this passion of God’s self-forgetful love for us.  H e has come to establish an intimacy with us that signals our...

Living in community with brothers of different backgrounds, gifts and talents is, indeed, a gift but it also stretches our hearts open. And we recall the words of one brother some years ago, who said something like: "You know, you pray and work with a guy and you get to love him as your brother, even though maybe he's not the kind of guy you'd want to go duck hunting around the world with." Small wonder that the monastery is called a school of love, for we all need to keeping learning how to open our hearts to one another. We are especially mindful of our fraternal connectedness today, as we celebrate the memorial of Blessed Gerard, blood brother of Saint Bernard.  Gerard  followed Bernard to Clairvaux where he became his cellarer. He was Bernard's confidant and assistant. Deeply grieved at Gerard's death, Bernard lamented his passing in these tender words:  ... a loyal companion has left me alone on the pathway of life: he who was so alert to my needs, so ...

In the Holy Eucharist we celebrate not a fleeting ghost or splendid idea but Him whom we daily see at this altar and hold in our hands: “that which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life” (1 Jn 1:1). Christ came to be eaten and drunk by the hungry and embraced by the sick and lost, and adored by the desperate, and not to be coolly admired at a distance by the self-satisfied. His Presence to us is as real, as raw, as fleshly as is our crying human need for him. Could an all-loving God be content with giving us any less than the fullness of his beloved Son—body, soul, and divinity? Let us, then, take deeply into our hearts with matching extravagant gratitude the incredibly extravagant words of Jesus, “this tremendous Lover”: My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. We must believe these words, and live according to them, not because we understand them and find them easy but on account of our absolute trust in the One who uttered them. Who bu...

As I prepared this homily, I began to realize that the complaints and quarreling of the crowd against Jesus’ words were closer to home than I first thought. That includes my own thoughts when I really focused on these words. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” This is a perennial question that the Church must address, and it takes all the wisdom and patience a mother can show to once again explain this great mystery. So let us sit at the feet of Jesus and our Mother the Church to listen again to how it is that Jesus can give us his flesh to eat. First of all, we must remember Jesus’ words to Philip, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip.” Jesus is not alone. His Father is always with him, and he does only what the Father tells him to do. This is the first point. The crowd had been following Jesus for a long time and had seen many, many signs and wonders. We, too, have been following Jesus for a long time and seen our own share of signs and wonde...

On Friday, 2 June in the early afternoon the First Congregational Church in downtown Spencer was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.   The Fire Department of Saint Joseph Abbey was called into action as Spencer Fire Chief Parsons ordered their Engine 4 with crew to the scene.   Brothers Michael, Guerric and Andrew mustered to respond to the call. Upon arrival they were horrified to witness the devastation that the lightning strike had caused and awed by the response of hundreds of men and women working to fight the fire and help in any way they could.   Chief Parsons put the brothers to work helping to relay water from a pond to the fire scene.   Engine 4 was one of some  15 trucks helping to pump water to the trucks on the front line. They worked until 10 pm but managed to say Vespers and Compline privately on site in the truck. 

Our Brother Kenneth Hessemer pronounced his simple vows  and received the black scapular and leather belt dur ing Chapter on Sunday, June 4. We rejoice in his self-offering to the Lord. Abbot Vincent's exhortation follows. Br. Kenneth, the Holy Scriptures tell us, “My son, when you come to serve the Lord, prepare yourself for trials” (Sir 2.1). This seems an appropriate quote for you as you prepare to make your profession of vows to God in the presence of your brothers. And this quote is not without interest to those of us who have gone before you on this Cistercian way. If we did not prepare ourselves beforehand, we join you in receiving this exhortation now, that our striving may not be in vain. This Scripture passage came to my mind last month when we celebrated the Feast of St. Rafael, our beloved and saintly Cistercian Oblate. You may remember the second nocturn reading at vigils, all about the exalted life in La Trapa - peeling turnips during the cold of winter. St. Ra...

Homelessness . . . . There is a great deal of it in today’s world. We have only to think of the horrific “homelessness” experienced in the trenches and uninhabitable rubble in Ukraine. Or in our own country, think of the traumatic “homelessness” in detention centers for illegal migrants along our southwest border, especially for children separated from their parents and the old who have been uprooted by desperation with now no relative or neighbor to help them. Or closer to home, what about the increasingly prevalent homelessness on our streets, or the forced homelessness for nearly 2 million incarcerated men and women in prisons across our country? “Homelessness” is also a devastating reality for those forgotten in nursing homes, for the casualties of broken homes, and really for anyone suffering alienation, rejection, or isolation. If we stop to think about it, we are virtually “homeless” whenever we are lost in self-preoccupation, self-centeredness, or are stuck on ourselves—that is...

On Saturday, 3 June, we celebrated with great joy the solemn profession of our Brother Mikah Ochieng'. His family and friends joined us in prayer and celebration as he promised himself to Christ Jesus our Lord.  Br. Mikah, how can we describe the meaning of your solemn profession? First of all, it is an expression of who you are and where your treasure is. But there is another side to this. It is a moment for Jesus to express to you in a new way who he is and who he wants you to be in union with him. Your family and friends, your fellow monks and nuns, are witnessing a sacred moment of revelation between you and the Lord. Thankfully, you have given us a window into that mutual revelation through the readings you have chosen for today’s Mass. Permit us to gaze into this window. The gospel tells us about a group of Jewish elders. They interceded with Jesus on behalf of two marginal people—a Roman centurion who was a foreigner and military commander of occupation forces; and his dying...

A large, probably admiring crowd is traveling with Jesus this morning, happy and proud to be in the entourage of the wonderworker who has captivated their imaginations and their hearts. But soon the euphoria is interrupted by an annoying blind beggar, crying out. Many in the crowd tell him to quiet down; he’s disrupting things, really ruining the mood. But the guy refuses to be silenced, and he shouts out all the more insistently, begging for Jesus, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Praised be to God, for Bartimaeus knows what he wants. He may be blind, but he has clear insight - in his plea he calls Jesus Son of David, recognizing Jesus’ royal lineage as well as his reputation as a healer.* Actually, this passage often strikes me as one of the more humorous ones in all the Gospels, for at this point Jesus calls for him and asks the blind man, who probably has stumbled toward him with hands feeling the air, “What do you want me to do for you?” At this point in his ministry, Jesus has th...