ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Do you want to show honor to Christ’s Body? Do not neglect him when naked; do not neglect him perishing outside of cold and nakedness, while here you honor him with silken garments. For he that said, “This is my body,” and by his word confirmed the fact, also said, "I was hungry and you gave me no food"; and, "as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me” (Matt. 25:42, 45). For this indeed needs not coverings but a pure soul; but that requires much attention. Let us learn therefore to be strict in life, and to honor Christ as he himself desires. For to him who is honored, the honor that he desires is most pleasing, not the honor we consider best. Peter thought he was honoring Christ by forbidding him to wash his feet, but doing so was not an honor—just the contrary. Even so do you honor him with this honor, which he ordained: spending your wealth on poor people because God has no need at all of golden vessels but of golden souls. ST. JOHN CH...

Without courage we can never attain to true simplicity. Cowardice keeps us “double-minded”—hesitating between the world and God. In this hesitation, there is no true faith—faith remains an opinion. We are never certain, because we never quite give in to the authority of an invisible God. Hesitation is the death of Hope. We never let go of those visible supports which, we well know, must one day surely fail us. And this hesitation makes true prayer impossible—it never quite dares to ask for anything, or if it asks, it is so uncertain of being heard that in the very act of asking it surreptitiously seeks by human prudence, to construct a makeshift answer. What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer? THOMAS MERTON Thoughts in Solitude

IMMOLATION AND TRANSFIGURATION A fter triumphing over the temptations of the Adversary last week, today the Lord Jesus takes us with him from the depths of a dark desert to the shining heights of Mount Tabor. Unlike the dreadful solitude of the desert, here on Tabor we experience a true fullness of communion. The text structures the narrative at three levels, and in three groups of three persons each. First, there's the triad of disciples—Peter, James and John—whom Jesus takes with him up the mountain. A second triad sums up the history of salvation: Moses (the Law), Elijah (the Prophets), and Jesus (the Fullness) converse peacefully with one another, in a profound accord that symbolizes the unity and harmony of all Revelation. But, in this ascending hierarchy, the summit will be the manifestation of the divine Triad: the Father , whose voice can be heard speaking only of the Son; the Son , the Mediator, who is integrated into both the divine and human orders; and the Holy Spirit ,...

Oftentimes it’s enough merely to meet one day a true man or woman of prayer for an irresistible desire to pray to emerge in oneself. There are many today, it seems, who carry this wound in their hearts, this obscure but insistent longing. Let us call it an attraction for prayer. It is an initial call of the Spirit in the heart of a believer that moves him to abandon himself to the mysterious current whose meaning and orientation are barely glimpsed. This attraction brings with it a certain facility for recollection, a spontaneous stripping-off of all that could distract from its activity, which takes place entirely in the interior depths. ANDRÉ LOUF In the School of Contemplation , Ch. 10, pg. 146

"Fasting makes sense if it really chips away at our security and, as a consequence, benefits someone else, if it helps us cultivate the style of the good Samaritan, who bent down to his brother in need and took care of him." POPE FRANCIS

“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” SAINT JOHN PAUL II 

Let us not be troubled when it befalls us to be plunged into darkness, especially if we are not responsible for it. You must realize that this darkness enshrouding you has been given you by God's providence for reasons known to him alone. Sometimes indeed our soul is engulfed by the waves and drowned. Whether we give ourselves to the reading of scripture or to prayer, whatever we do we are increasingly imprisoned in darkness… it is an hour filled with despair and fear. The soul is utterly deprived of hope in God and the consolation of faith. It is entirely filled with perplexity and anguish. But those who have been tested by the distress of such an hour know that in the end it is followed by a change. God never leaves the soul for a whole day in such a state, for then hope would be destroyed…rather he allows it to emerge very soon from the darkness. Blessed is he who endures such temptations… For, as the Fathers say, great will be the stability and the strength to which he will com...

We have to take particular care to follow the Gospel precept that bids us go into our inner room and shut the door to pray to our Father. This is how to do it. We are praying in our inner room when we withdraw our heart completely from the clamor of our thoughts and preoccupations, and in a kind of secret dialogue, as between intimate friends, we lay bare our desires before the Lord. We are praying with our door shut when, without opening our mouth, we call on the One who takes no account of words but considers the heart. We are praying in secret when we speak to God with the heart alone and with concentration of the soul, and make known our state of mind to him alone, in such a way that even the enemy powers themselves cannot guess their nature. Such is the reason for the deep silence that it behoves us to keep in prayer… Thus our prayers should be frequent but short, for fear that if they are prolonged the enemy might have an opportunity to insinuate distraction into them. This is tr...

In the Holy Land, the Judean desert, which lies to the west of the River Jordan and the Oasis of Jericho, rises over stony valleys to reach an altitude of about one thousand meters at Jerusalem. After receiving baptism from John, Jesus entered that lonely place, led by the Holy Spirit himself who had settled upon him, consecrating him and revealing him as the Son of God. In the desert, a place of trial as the experience of the people of Israel shows, the dramatic reality of the self-emptying of Christ who had stripped himself of the form of God (Phil 2:6-7) appears most vividly. He who never sinned and cannot sin submits to being tested and can therefore sympathize with our weaknesses (Heb 4:15). He lets himself be tempted by Satan, the enemy, who has been opposed to God's saving plan for humankind from the outset. ...even in the situation of extreme poverty and humility, when he is tempted by Satan he remains the Son of God, the Messiah, the Lord. POPE BENEDICT XVI

It is not true, as some maintain who are led astray by error, that the human being is irremediably dead and can no longer do anything good. A small child is incapable of anything; it cannot run to its mother on its own legs; it tumbles on the ground, cries out, sobs, calls out to her. And she is gentle with it, she is touched to see her baby seeking her so impatiently with so many sobs. It cannot reach her but cries out to her tirelessly, and she goes to it overcome with love, she kisses it, presses it to her heart and feeds it, with unspeakable tenderness. God loves us and he behaves like her towards the soul that seeks him and cries out to him. In the eagerness of that infinite love that is his…he takes hold of our spirit, unites himself to it, and we become ‘one Spirit with him’, as the apostle says (I Corinthians 6.17). The soul is linked with the Lord, and the Lord, full of compassion and love, unites himself to it and it dwells in his grace. Then the soul and the Lord are one spi...

“Every human being who performs a free act thereby projects his personality into infinity. . . . Wherever and whenever it occurs, an act of love, a movement of genuine compassion sings the praise of God from Adam to the end of time, heals the sick, consoles the despairing, quiets tempests, frees prisoners, converts the unbelieving and protects all mankind.” LEON BLOY

“We love because he first loved us.” I decided to take this Scripture text as my guide this Lent. It puts things in the right order. All our efforts at repentance and reconciliation—important as they are—ultimately, are a response to God’s love. It is God’s love that goes before us, accompanies us, and brings our repentance to completion. Lent is a perfect time to reflect on this love. Today I would like to look at one particular form of God’s love, a rather extreme one, at least as St. Paul describes it. In the second reading, Paul as God’s ambassador was imploring us to be reconciled to God. He builds his case by showing us how God has closed the gap between us and to what lengths he will go to break down the dividing wall of enmity between us: "For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.” But how can it be that “…he made him to be sin who did not know sin…”? Our Lord Jesus never sinned. He was wholly orde...

It was a common practice within the early Church that those who were found guilty of grave public sin needed to do public penance before they were admitted back into communion with the Church and admitted to the Most Holy Eucharist. The public sinners came forward in sackcloth forty days before Easter and were sprinkled with ashes, in keeping with many Old Testament examples of public penance. They fasted and prayed for forty days and then, on Easter, were readmitted into full communion with the Church. Eventually, prior to the end of the first millennium, this practice was extended to the entire Church as a way of highlighting everyone’s need for penance. One of the earliest mentions of this practice becoming universal comes from an English Benedictine monk who wrote:  We read in the books both in the Old Law and in the New that the men who repented of their sins bestrewed themselves with ashes and clothed their bodies with sackcloth. Now let us do this little at the beginning of ...

Let not the Christian say: “I am free; I have been called unto liberty. I was a slave, but have been redeemed, and by my very redemption have been made free so I shall do what I please; no one may restrict my will, if I am free.” But if you commit sin with such a will, you are the servant of sin. Do not then abuse your liberty for freedom in sinning, but use it for the purpose of not sinning. For only if your will is pious will it be free. You will be free if you are a servant still—free from sin, the servant of righteousness. SAINT AUGUSTINE Tractates on the Gospel of John

This unity [among the three Persons of the Trinity] is nothing other than pure being-for-one-another. If there were a definition of God, then one would have to put it in the form: unity as being-for-one-another…. One cannot understand the Father except in his giving of himself in the begetting of his begotten Son, nor can one understand the Son except in his being for the Father. The self-giving of both to each other’s further a “being-for-one-another” which in the writings of the New Covenant is clearly distinguished as “Holy Spirit” both from the Father and from the Son; it is personified “being-for-one-another" itself and the total self-giving of God to men. HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Elucidations , 92-93 [Christ’s “forness”] has no other goal than to free men from the prison of “for self” and to introduce them to the shape of divine freedom. HANS URS VON BALTHASAR You Have Words of Eternal Life, 89

At times in the silence of the night, and in rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of communion of myself and something great that is not myself...it takes on the effect of a sympathetic person and my communion has a quality of fearless worship. H.G. WELLS

The Knowledge of God without a perception of man's misery causes pride, and the knowledge of man's misery without a perception of God causes despair. Knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our own misery. BLAISE PASCAL

God's own being is not only conformed to His intellect, but His act of understanding is the measure and cause of every other being and of every other intellect, and He is Himself His own existence and act of understanding. Whence it follows not only that Truth is in Him, but He is Truth itself, and the Sovereign and First Truth. SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS Summa Contra Gentiles , i, q. 16, a. 5.

Do you know the feeling in matters of this life, of expecting a friend, expecting him to come, and he delays? Do you know what it is to be in unpleasant company, and to wish for the time to pass away, and the hour strike when you may be at liberty? Do you know what it is to be in anxiety less something should happen which may happen or may not, or to be in suspense about some important event, which makes your heartbeat when you are reminded of it, end of which you think the first thing in the morning? Do you know what it is to have a friend in a distant country, to expect news of him, and to wonder from day today what he is now doing, and whether he is well? Do you know what it is so to live upon a person who is present with you, that your eyes follow his, that you read his soul, that you see all it changes in his continents, that you anticipate his wishes, that you smile in his smile, and are sad in his sadness, and our downcast when he is vexed, and rejoice in his successes? To watch...

But for the searching and right understanding of the Scriptures there is need of a good life and a pure soul, and for Christian virtue to guide the mind to grasp, so far as human nature can, the truth concerning God the Word. One cannot possibly understand the teaching of the saints unless one has a pure mind and is trying to imitate their life. Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so. Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds. Thus united to them in the fellowship of life, he will both understand the things revealed to them by God and, thenceforth escaping the peril that threatens sinners in the judgment, will receive that which is laid up for the saints in the kingdom of...

I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer. Many words and long discourses are often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the Lord. If your mind sometimes wanders and withdraws itself from Him, do not become upset. Trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it. The will must bring it back in tranquillity. If you persevere in this manner, God will have pity on you. One way to re-collect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and preserve it more in tranquillity, is not to let it wander too far at other times. Keep your mind strictly in the presence of God. Then being accustomed to think of Him often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in the time of prayer, or at least to recall it from its wanderings. I have told you already of the advantages we may draw from this practice of the presen...

He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up. Then the fever left her, and she waited on them. Last week, we heard the story of Jesus’ first exorcism. Today, we heard his first physical healing, each of them a manifestation of the presence of the kingdom in our midst. Peter’s mother-in-law was healed through physical contact with Jesus. She lay sick with a fever, restricted to her bed, prone, in the posture of a dead person. Jesus came to her, entered her house, and helped her up, literally, “he raised her” (ἤγειρεν αὐτὴν (Mar 1:31)), grasping her by the hand. This is the same word used by the angel to announce the resurrection at the empty tomb at Easter: “He has risen, he is not here” ἠγέρθη (Mar 16:6). Mark presents us here, at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, with an intimate connection between the physical touch of Jesus, his power to heal, and his resurrection. His resurrection, of course, implies his Cross and cannot be separated from it. By faith, we know that by ...

What is the meaning of the ark? What appears? For the Old Testament, it is the symbol of God's presence in the midst of his people. However, the symbol has given way to reality. Thus the New Testament tells us that the true Ark of the Covenant is a living, real person: it is the Virgin Mary. God does not dwell in a piece of furniture, he dwells in a person, in a heart: Mary, the one who carried in her womb the eternal Son of God made man, Jesus our Lord and Savior. POPE BENEDICT XVI Homily

When the days were completed for their purification according to the law of Moses, Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, just as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord,” and to offer the sacrifice of “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,” in accordance with the dictate in the law of the Lord. ~Luke 2:22–24 Mary and Joseph were faithful Jews who obeyed the Law of Moses. Jewish Law prescribed that two ritual acts needed to take place for a firstborn son. First, the mother of a newborn son was ritually unclean for seven days, and then she was to “spend thirty-three more days in a state of blood purity” (Leviticus 12). During these forty days she was not to “touch anything sacred nor enter the sanctuary till the days of her purification are fulfilled.” For this reason, today’s feast has at times been called the “Purification of Mary.” Second, the father of the firstborn son was to “redee...

Three times a day the bells toll and I interrupt whatever I have been doing, turn towards the church or the tabernacle and silently recite the Angelus. The words of this prayer repeat the dialogue of the annunciation scene: God’s invitation to Mary through the angel, and Mary's response. The Angelus, which developed in stages beginning at least in the 13th century, is more than a manifestation of monastic devotion to Mary. It is possible to discern a connection between the Angelus and the central goals of monastic life. The annunciation scene recalls the mystery of God’s respect for human freedom to accept or refuse his continual gift of self-manifestation. God will not enter my life or my heart without my free consent. The Angelus is a daily opportunity, presented in a ritual way, for me to consent to God's gift of himself to me, and to say, ‘Here I am, Lord… I am ready’. Repeating Mary's words of acceptance becomes my act of yielding to God's will for me in the presen...