Self-Giving

To give oneself to God one must leave one's own self behind. Love is ecstatic by nature: in loving strongly, one lives in the other more than in oneself. But how could we practice that ecstatic dimension of love in our prayer, even to a small degree, if for the rest of the day we seek ourselves? If we are too attached to material things, our comfort and our vanity? If we cannot bear the slightest setback how can we live in God if we cannot forget ourselves for the sake of our brothers and sisters?

JACQUES PHILIPPE Time For God, Ch. 1 

What the Early Church Taught About the Eucharist

You shall see the Levites bringing loaves and a cup of wine, and placing them on the table. So long as the prayers of supplication and entreaties have not been made, there is only bread and wine. But after the great and wonderful prayers have been completed, then the bread is become the Body, and the wine the Blood, of our Lord Jesus Christ. And again: Let us approach the celebration of the mysteries. This bread and this wine, so long as the prayers and supplications have not taken place, remain simply what they are. But after the great prayers and holy supplications have been sent forth, the Word comes down into the bread and wine—and thus His Body is confected.

ST. ATHANASIUS THE GREAT (A.D. 293-373) Sermon to the Newly Baptized

The Core of All Mankind’s Questions

The modern technological world may have tremendous problems that seem utterly remote from the Gospel, but ultimately it comes down to the attitude adopted by Jesus in his living and dying; the attitude of perfect, selfless love, service to the very last and the fruitfulness that comes from it. This is the innermost meaning and core of all mankind’s questions, including those of politics, economies and other fields. And the attitude shown by Jesus is the attitude of God himself to the world. Thus anyone who follows Jesus is walking in God’s footsteps, in the footsteps of absolute truth and goodness.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR You crown the Year With Your Goodness, 255

Homily: 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sunday Ordinary 17B 2024 | 2 Kgs 4:42-44/Eph 4:1-6/Jn 6:1-15

When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.

When Jesus sees the crowd coming toward him, he recognizes their need. He sees that they are physically hungry. Jesus, too, feels this physical hunger. He is poor and shares in their bodily weakness and needs. He knows that that he is the only one who can satisfy them with the bread that they need, but he does not want to do it alone. He wants to give his disciples a share in what he is about to do. So he turns to Philip and asks him what he suggests that they do.

Jesus wants an answer from Philip that arises from out of the depth of his own experience; first, of physical hunger. Jesus has called Philip from the beginning to follow him as part of the group of his most intimate disciples. He has been set apart from the crowd as a believing disciple, but not as one who has been separated from their needs. He is to have a sense of solidarity with the crowd, just as Jesus himself does, who has come into this world from the Father precisely to take upon himself the whole of our humanity, in the full range and variety of human experience, not separating himself from anything, ultimately, going all the way to god-forsakenness. Here, the disciple is called by the Lord to be moved to love of neighbor through a share in the simple common everyday human experience of physical hunger. 

Our monastic way of life is built on this principle, that being called apart by the Lord and consecrated to his service we will be conformed to Christ in his poverty and simplicity, that we will become poor with the poor Christ, and as we are conformed to him we will be drawn more closely to the human family and its experience than we would be otherwise. Here it is matter of sharing a fundamental experience with Christ and the crowd. The disciple must possess both solidarity with the people on the level of a common human need and unity with the Lord in poverty, self-surrender and self-emptying love. 

Jesus wants to form Philip in this mode of service and so he prepares to lead him through each step of the miracle through which he wants to open the crowd to faith and love. 

“Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”  Philip gives Jesus an estimate: two hundred denarii would not be enough. A number that falls short of the mark, but in any case, represents an enormous sum that lies well beyond their means. By his calculation it cannot be done, it is impossible.

Philip has not closed himself off to the possibility of what Jesus is about to do, but he doesn’t consider it either.

Nevertheless, Philip leaves himself open to what the Lord is about to do, awaits his instructions and will carry out what he is asked to do without grumbling or stubborn resistance. He in no way obstructs the Lord’s action but enters into it from within his own limited horizon of the range of human possibility. Philip does not have a grasp of the  overall plan, but he knows that the Lord does. His task is to be ready to respond to Jesus and be led in whatever direction he leads him. In that way he will be able to participate in the Lord’s answer even without being able to imagine the outcome himself. So we, too, must be ready to be led by the Lord step by step along the path of the spiritual life despite our limited understanding and blindness. By responding to the Lord’s question in the best way he can he already shows he possesses the readiness that the Lord needs from him.His response is already a ‘yes’ to all that is to follow. A ‘yes’ within a limited faith but one that leaves the Lord room to work. 

By asking the question Jesus shows that he takes Philip seriously as a free partner. He doesn’t just order him to do such and such but truly elicits his cooperation. Philip and Jesus can go forward now together. Although Philip does not have access to the Lord’s comprehensive plan his yes strengthens and enriches their relationship and binds them together in a deeper unity as they move through the steps of the miracle. Philip is ready, open and expectant for all that is to follow. 

His own physical hunger has played no small role. He is hungry and he wants to be satisfied. His physical hunger is preparing him for the satisfaction of his spiritual hunger in the manifestation of the Lord’s glory which about to be revealed. At the same time, love for his neighbor has been aroused as he stands at the Lord’s side and contemplates the need he sees before him and how to address it.

If we see Jesus simply as a man, the demands placed on him by the crowd are utterly excessive, even crushing. There is no way to meet them. No matter how much he might have dedicated himself to them, he would quickly be overwhelmed.

Andrew brings the boy with the five loaves and the two fish to Jesus’ attention.  Indirectly, both Philip and he highlight the infinite gulf that exists between the demands of the world and the possibility of meeting those demands by Jesus seen as a man. Jesus will use the bread and fish that in themselves signify human impossibility to reveal the fullness of divine possibility.

Jesus asks the disciples to have the crowd recline. He creates an atmosphere of expectation within the crowd. Yet what follows contains nothing sensational about it, it is not even visible. The miracle itself is only perceived when it has been completed, once everyone has received their fill and the amount gathered is shown to exceed the amount that was originally distributed. 

Whereas Philip’s response was based on a sort of economics of human possibility, on the availability of money and materials, Jesus’ response introduces a new supernatural order which moves according to the economics of grace. Philip’s response evokes a world of measure, limit, sufficiency and insufficiency, all that can be quantified, delineated and determined. Jesus’ economics of grace on the other hand, comes from the world he knows with his Father: a reality without measure or limit, characterized by excess, overflow and surplus, the world of the endless exchange of their mutual love. 

When the bread passes through his hands in blessing and thanksgiving, it passes from something finite to becoming something that can be passed on infinitely and is always accompanied by surplus. However many people there might have been present on that mountain, the bread would have always been multiplied in such a way that each one would have been satisfied and, in the end, there would be discovered that there was a surplus. Every grace that the Lord bestows is given without measure and ends in surplus. 

So it is in every Eucharist, the grace that we received is given to each as we have need, in a way that satisfies our wholly personal hunger. In fact, the grace of the Eucharist overflows our need, increasing our desire and leading us forward to ever greater grace as we move in love ever closer to the ever greater God. 

Finally, this miracle does not concern simply an individual person but a crowd. The profoundly personal gift that is received by each takes place only within the crowd and forms what is simply a transient crowd gathered for a moment into a people united in a profession of faith: “This is truly the prophet who is to come into the world.” Here we have a beginning of the fellowship of the Church, in which each member is touched personally within the uncountable numbers that constitute her body and yet only has life within that body. Let us open ourselves to this economy of grace as we continue our celebration of this Eucharist.

Being Mothers of God

What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God hundreds of years ago, if I do not give birth to the Son of God in my time and my culture. We are all meant to be Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.

MEISTER ECKHART

The One Great Thing To Love On Earth

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste – or foretaste – of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

J.R.R. TOLKIEN The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

Not Curing But Caring

When another comes to us in his loneliness, the quick comforting word is not the first or best response. First let us respond to the real loneliness that is there by sharing it. In the deep emptiness and nothingness we need to experience the potential and the hope. Not curing but caring.

M. BASIL PENNINGTON, OCSO Jubilee: A Monk’s Journal 

Holiness Cultivated In Silence

The call to holiness is accepted and can be cultivated only in the silence of adoration before the infinite transcendence of God: “We must confess that we all have need of this silence, filled with the presence of him who is adored: in theology, so as to exploit fully its own sapiential and spiritual soul; in prayer, so that we may never forget that seeing God means coming down the mountain with a face so radiant that we are obliged to cover it with a veil; in commitment, so that we will refuse to be locked in a struggle without love and forgiveness. All, believers and non-believers alike, need to learn a silence that allows the other to speak when and how he wishes, and allows us to understand his words.”

POPE JOHN PAUL II Vita Consecrata, 38 

Saint John Cassian Quotes

Fasts and vigils, the study of Scripture, renouncing possessions and everything worldly are not in themselves perfection, as we have said; they are its tools. For perfection is not to be found in them; it is acquired through them. It is useless, therefore, to boast of our fasting, vigils, poverty, and reading of Scripture when we have not achieved the love of God and our fellow men. Whoever has achieved love has God within himself and his intellect is always with God.

If you wish to attain to true knowledge of the Scriptures, hasten to acquire first an unshakeable humility of heart. That alone will lead you, not to the knowledge that puffs up, but to that which enlightens, by the perfecting of love.

True spiritual knowledge has sometimes flourished most grandly in some who were without eloquence and almost illiterate. And this is very clearly shown by the case of the Apostles and many holy men, who did not spread themselves out with an empty show of leaves, but were bowed down by the weight of the true fruits of spiritual knowledge: of whom it is written in Acts: 'But when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were ignorant and unlearned men, they were astonished' (Acts 4:13).

Prayer and Work

Following Mary’s example, the fundamental practice for healing the wounds of the false-self system is to fulfill the duties of our job in life. This includes helping people who are counting on us. If prayer gets in the way, there is some misunderstanding. Some devout persons think that if their activities at home or their job get in the way of praying, there is something wrong with their activities. On the contrary, there is something wrong with their prayer.

THOMAS KEATING The Mystery of Christ

Shepherd of Delight—Homily

16-B Sunday in Ordinary Time

(Jer 23:1-6; Eph 2:13-18; Mk 6:30-34)

Spencer, July 21, 2024

We encounter the Lord Jesus in today’s gospel first of all as the shepherd of his own disciples. Returning from the mission Jesus had sent them on, the disciples are eager to tell their Master what they have accomplished. We see Jesus here gathering his disciples together and uniting them into a community around himself. This action starkly contrasts the evil shepherds in Jeremiah who, rather than gathering, violently scattered [the Lord’s] sheep and drove them away. Then Jesus listens attentively to the stories the apostles tell him about how their mission had gone. This exchange between Jesus and his disciples shows that authentic Christian mission cannot consist only in “doing and teaching”. Those who are sent also need to communicate their experience of mission to Jesus so as to internalize it, but above all in order to make sure their sacred mission remains centered on the person of the Savior and his service, and does not degenerate into one more enterprise of the self-serving ego.

This process of intimate dialogue between Jesus and those he’s called to himself is really a form of intense prayer. In this context, the disciples’ pastoral and personal experiences create an opportunity for something they urgently need in their formation: namely, to be both consoled and corrected by Jesus. Proclaiming the Gospel, bearing living witness to Jesus the Lord, is a laborious process that every Christian has to learn by patient trial and, at times, embarrassing error, but always as a result of intimate contact with the person of the Lord. Only communion with Jesus’ nourishing presence—never mental analysis alone—can guarantee the disciple’s spiritual growth.

We are also here struck by the fact that, in his dealings with his followers, Jesus does not show himself at all interested in the success of the mission. Jesus is no hard-nosed “pragmatist”! First and foremost he cares about the persons of those he has sent out. He truly acts as the good shepherd who knows his sheep by name, that is, intimately, individually, in each one’s uniqueness. The “success” or “failure” of the mission, as the world defines success and failure, seem to matter very little to the Lord. As he listens to the stories the apostles recount, the Master is sensitive to their fatigue. So he invites them to go off with him to a remote place away from it all so that he can personally tend to their weariness. How can we fail to be moved by the tenderness of such a Master who, like a mother hen, seems to anticipate his followers’ every human need? 

Mark’s text continues: There were many crowds coming and going, so that [the apostles and Jesus] no longer even had time to eat. Could the disciples at this point be suffering from the typically modern phenomenon of activism? Jesus continues to act as good shepherd by exhorting his exhausted disciples to rest. Jesus cannot here have in mind only physical and mental rest, but rather contemplative repose. He awakens in them the responsibility to stop all exterior activity now and then and make time to enjoy this silence and this solitude in their friend Jesus’ company. There is always deep wisdom in an alternation of modalities. God is not the slave-driver our own obsessions sometimes make him out to be! The Father, rather, has sent Jesus in order to restore us to health, to wholeness, to the integrity and dynamic fullness of our human nature as he created it in the beginning. In the Book of Wisdom we hear this beautiful praise: You spare all things, because they are yours, O Ruler and Lover of souls (Wis 11:26).

And so, here, Jesus seems to be addressing his busy disciples as if they were so many Marthas, saying to them: ‘Stop your frantic activism! Come here and sit by my side and learn how to simply be. Don’t become alienated from your own true being, and therefore from me, your Creator, by your compulsive need to be always doing, doing, doing…. Don’t be so intent on impressing me by your deeds of service that you end up overlooking my person and thus impoverishing your own souls by denying both you and me the mutual delight I came to establish between us!’ 

Next, Jesus turns from the intimate circle of his disciples to the vast, anonymous multitude. When he had disembarked to go to a deserted place with the disciples, Jesus saw the large crowd that had gone ahead of them on foot, and he felt compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Compassion is clearly the foundation of all of Jesus’ pastoral action toward every person he meets. We might say he is “disembarking” in this world from his native homeland, which is the Father’s compassionate Heart; and he comes to our desolation humbly, quietly to offer humble yet potent remedies: his comforting presence, his wisdom, his goodness, his healing and, ultimately, his very Body and Blood.

Just as he had seen the need of his disciples for contemplative rest in his company amid their labors, Jesus now sees the need of the crowds to be shepherded, brought into his merciful embrace. He does not send them away as if they were an obstacle to previously decided plans. Was it not, in fact, precisely to engage in such compassionate caring for the needy that he had come from the Father in the first place? The substance of Jesus’ life as Incarnate Word is clearly to give himself as Eucharistic gift to a starving and wretched world, especially to the powerless and marginalized who seem to have been abandoned by the powerful.

Jesus also perceives these people’s hunger for God’s Word, and he began to teach them many things. Graciously, he allows himself to be put upon, and he commits himself to the arduous task of preaching. In this way he is teaching his disciples that spontaneous availability to the needy, without advance warning, is a primordial Christian virtue: “Eucharistic availability”, I would call it—becoming bread for others, since “we are what we eat”. The gaze of Jesus the Shepherd is powered by the light of the Word of God that indwells him. In this light he sees in the crowd an opportunity and invitation to obey the word of Scripture that bemoans God’s people having become “a flock without a shepherd”. Jesus is so much the Shepherd after God’s own Heart that he is eager to lay down his life for his sheep. This Shepherd is no other than the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Lamb in whose blood you who once were far off have been brought near. In the Book of Revelation we see how, in the glorified Jesus, the images of shepherd and lamb converge into the One who leads all his disciples in the resurrection dance: These follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb (Rev 14:4).

For us disciples to follow the Lamb implies not only our being shepherded by the Lamb but also for us, in turn, to become loving and caring shepherds to all to whom the Lamb sends us. By our close association with Jesus our Teacher and, above all, by our interior union with Jesus as oblation in the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, we have been transformed into envoys of the Lamb of God. Popes, bishops and priests are shepherds in a formal, hierarchical sense; but all Christians are by nature “shepherds” in an even more fundamental sense by virtue of Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist, which communicate missionary energy. This is the indispensable energy that the Holy Spirit infuses into our souls along with the life of the Blessed Trinity. The Christian vocation as such necessarily draws all of us into the pastoral mission of Christ himself, whether in a more eye-catching or in an utterly hidden form.

Not many of us may spontaneously think of ourselves as “shepherds”; and yet this is precisely what we have been made to be by the grace of God-like compassion that the Christ-life activates within us. We are to shepherd everyone we encounter into the circle of our mutual delight—holy delight in Christ and in each other. 

Absorbing the Psalms

For decades now and every day within them I have been singing the psalms—scores and scores of them, hours of each day. I sing them all—every one—and then start them all over again. I have become a long line of words, and arc of sound, a tone that tries to spin the dividing spaces that keep the world from what can save us.

I do not get across. I call from the far side. I stretch all my being into the narrow lines that say those right and only words, words that every day trace our fall and point the path of return. I crawl over every word. I grope my way over and around every syllable, each phrase.

JEREMY DRISCOLL, OSB A Monk’s Alphabet

The Courage To See Everything Is Sacred

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance—for a moment or a year or a span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light…. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)

By virtue of the creation and still more of the incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.

PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN Le Milieu Divin

Dismantled and Created Anew

Whenever we come together to listen to the Word of God, what we are seeking at bottom is not mental information or moral instruction or even a sentimental influence that will make us “feel” the presence and goodness of God. What we seek with all our soul, rather, is the possibility of opening ourselves up in prayer to God's transforming action. Whether we are fully conscious of it or not, in other words, we desire a change of life, a conversion from what we presently are to a more precise embodiment of the likeness of Christ at the center of our being, radiating out from us through all our thoughts, words, and actions. This is why the life of contemplation is the boldest and most adventuresome of undertakings, for what could be more radical, more truly earth-shattering, than the willingness to be dismantled and created anew, not once or twice in a lifetime, but day after day?

ERASMO LEIVA-MERIKAKIS The Way of the Disciple, Ch.1

Christian Hope

Hope would not exist if it did not come from the immense fire at the heart of things, if eternal love—contrary to appearances—were not the meaning of life. The Christian, together with everyone who has genuine hope, fights his way through the meaninglessness of the world. He establishes cells and islands of conspiracy, networks of hope in the kingdom of the dark lord of the world. Right from the beginning Christianity was seen as a total, highly dangerous revolution. Why else was it so persecuted? It is meaning’s revolt against the meaninglessness of dying, which cast a shadow of absurdity on all that lives. It is the revolt of Resurrection against the finality of bodily disintegration. The revolt of love’s absoluteness against any resignation on the part of the heart.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR You Crown the Year With Your Goodness, 97 

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, or Virgin of Carmel, is the title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary in her role as patroness of the Carmelite Order. The first Carmelites were Christian hermits living on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land during the late 12th and early to mid-13th century. They built in the midst of their hermitages a chapel which they dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, whom they conceived of in chivalric terms as the "Lady of the place." Our Lady of Mount Carmel was adopted in the 19th century as the patron saint of Chile.

The solemn liturgical feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel was first celebrated in England in the later part of the 14th century. Its object was thanksgiving to Mary, the patroness of the Carmelite Order, for the benefits she had accorded to it through its difficult early years. The institution of the feast may have come in the wake of the vindication of their title "Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary" at Cambridge, England, in 1374. The date chosen was 17 July; on the European mainland this date conflicted with the feast of Saint Alexis, requiring a shift to 16 July, which remains the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the Roman Calendar.

Saint Bonaventure—Quotes

"Although you feel tepid, approach with confidence, for the greater your infirmity the more you stand in need of a physician."

"The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner. A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue."

"Chastity without charity is a lamp without oil."

“If you learn everything, except Christ, you learn nothing. If you learn nothing, except Christ, you learn everything.”

“When we pray, the voice of the heart must be heard, more than the proceedings from the mouth.”

Distractions During Prayer

When we are distracted during prayer and find the time long because of our impatience to pass on to something else, it is good to say to yourself: My soul, are you tired of your God? Are you not satisfied with him? You possess him and do you seek for something else? Where can you be better than in his company? Where can you profit more? I have experienced that this calms the mind and unites it with God.

SAINT CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Spiritual Direction

The Ground and Center of Our Existence

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once observed, God is not simply a stopgap for the holes in our knowledge of the world, nor is He merely the source of ultimate answers to personal and human problems. In other words, God is not simply the one Whom we reach when we are extended to our limits. He is, on the contrary, the ground and center our existence, and though we may conceive ourselves as “going to” Him and reaching out to Him beyond the sphere of our everyday existence, we nevertheless start from Him and remain in Him as the very ground of our existence and reality.

He is not merely “out there” in a vague beyond. He is not merely hidden in the shadows of what is unknown and pushed further away in proportion as we come to know more and more. He is the very ground of what we know and our knowledge itself is His manifestation: not that He is the cause of all that is real, but that reality itself is His epiphany.

THOMAS MERTON Opening the Bible

Homily for the Feast of Saint Benedict

“There was a man whose life was holy. His name was Benedict, and he was blessed by grace and by name.” With these words St. Gregory the Great begins the “Life of Saint Benedict”, found in the second book of his “Dialogues” which is the source for most of what we know about him. It continues: “Forsaking his father’s house and wealth, with a mind to serve only God, he sought for some place where he might attain to the desire of his holy purpose; and in this sort he departed, instructed with learned ignorance and furnished with unlearned wisdom” (Dial. St. Greg., II, Into.). 

  

After receiving the monastic habit from a monk named Romanus, Benedict spent three years in solitude at Subiaco, where he matured in both mind and character, in knowledge of himself and of his fellow-man. In time people were attracted by his sanctity and came to Subiaco to be under his guidance. It is there that he began to establish monasteries. The remainder of Benedict’s life was spent in realizing the ideal of monasticism which he has left us in his Rule, which St. Gregory says is his real biography (ibid.,36). 

The Rule of Saint Benedict very much resembles the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, especially the book of Proverbs. In our first reading today we heard, “My son, if you receive my words and treasure my commands, turning your ear to wisdom, inclining your heart to understanding; then will you understand the fear of the LORD and find knowledge of God.” 

(Prov.2:1-2; 5-6). 

The opening words of the Rule begin, “Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart” (Prol. 1).  

The Rule is intended to be a guide to wise living in the practical situations of life. However it depends far more on the Gospel and the New Testament, not only concerned with life situations, but with living the monastic life wisely. It stems from lived experience of the monastic life and represents an effort to preserve and to pass on the wisdom learned from that experience. What today we call ‘generativity’.

  

One practical way in which the Rule can be relevant for us is that it provides a doorway to this whole body of wisdom concerning the spiritual life. It also provides a common source and a common language for those seeking to live the monastic tradition. Our tradition is embedded in our history. Without a history, persons and institutions have no identity. It is the same with religious communities. The weaker the knowledge of the past, the weaker our identity will be. As we prepare to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of our community next year, it’s important for us to remember those who came before us, from Petit Clairvaux to Our Lady of the Valley to Saint Joseph’s Abbey. Their legacy has formed us into who we are today.

Along with a common identity, all monasteries need a common vision in order to live and grow in unity. This vision is not an intellectual understanding or a program of life. As Saint Gregory said in the Dialogues about Benedict, he was furnished with an ‘unlearned wisdom’. According to Mother Martha Driscoll “Vision is more a matter of the heart than of the brain, or perhaps we should say that it is the fruit of the new unity between head and heart brought about by faith, conversion and transformation in the spirit. However, if that vision is only on paper, it does not become a living reality.” 

Concerning the individual monk, Father Michael Casey writes, “First and foremost the call that comes to us today from Benedict’s Rule is to become what we are meant to be. To embrace whole-heartedly our Benedictine and monastic identity, and to assert our distinctiveness in respect of ‘this age’, which espouses so few of the values that characterize our seeking of God. Our conversatio and our citizenship, as St. Paul says in the letter to the Philippians (3:20), is in heaven.” For those of us who follow in the footsteps of Benedict there are aspects of a monastic outlook, a way of seeing, that should define and identify us. Benedict tells us in chapter four of the Rule: “The love of Christ must come before all else” (4:21). He is not only the ‘way’ but our goal. “The heart of all monastic observance is communion with Christ realized in prayer and in love for all the brothers”, according to Casey. (Strangers to the City, M. Casey)

 

Benedict describes the monastery as a school for the Lord’s service. However, this education is not academic. This ‘school’ in which we live is that place where Christ teaches us the way to eternal life. This ‘way’ demands obedience, perseverance, and at times, suffering. We also have our share of trials and disappointments, but it is here where our transformation, our ‘conversatio’ takes place.

In the history of monastic life since the time of Benedict there have been times of tremendous growth and expansion, times of decline and dissolution and times of reform and renewal. When monasteries have lost their bearings and turn from the ‘way of life’ the Rule lays out for them, prayer ceases to become a priority, observance slackens, secular values creep in and the purpose of the monastic vocation becomes vague, or as one writer describes it, “infected by the spirit of the times.” Perhaps the most serious of all is that the desire for holiness, both individual and communal evaporates. In the First Letter to the Corinthians Saint Paul insistently reminds us; “This is the will of God: your sanctification” (I Thes 4:3) Every monastery of every age needs to be reminded of this. Even St. Bernard had to remind his monks at Clairvaux that they were called to be saints, dedicated to living holy lives. He writes: “This community is made up not of the wicked but of saints, religious men, those who are full of grace and worthy of all blessing. You come together to hear the word of God, you gather to sing praise, to pray, to offer adoration. This is a consecrated assembly, pleasing to God and familiar with the angels. Therefore, brothers, stand fast in reverence, stand with care and devotion of mind, especially in this place of prayer and in this school of Christ where the Spirit is heard.”

(Sermon for St. John the Baptist, 1; SBOp. 5, 176, 17-22).

Lest we think we are something special a quick look around shows that God has not called the brightest and the best, but ordinary people, distinguished by one common characteristic – we have been called by Christ to this community, in this place, in this monastery. Jesus tells us that we have been chosen, not just given an invitation. “You did not choose me but I chose you”, he said to his disciples. (Jn 15:16) Sometimes it’s hard to know why we were ‘chosen’ to be monks. It would be impossible to live this life without God’s grace. It is he who brought me here and keeps me here. If we feel that we are where we belong, and that we are becoming what we are meant to be, then God has called us to this particular vineyard to take root and bear fruit that will last.

The final words of Jesus to his disciples in today’s gospel are the core of his message: “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another” (Jn 15:17). Saint Benedict tells his monks: “Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way; the love of Christ must come before all else. Rid your heart of all deceit. Never give a hollow greeting of peace or turn away when someone needs your love (RB 4:20, 26).

May the prayers of our Father, Saint Benedict help and support us so that “We can set out for the loftier summits of the teaching and virtues (in this Rule), and under God’s protection (we) will reach them. Amen”(RB 73.9).

From The Rule of Saint Benedict

“Now, brethren, that we have asked the Lord who it is that shall dwell in His tabernacle, we have heard the conditions for dwelling there; and if we fulfill the duties of tenants, we shall be heirs of the kingdom of heaven. Our hearts and our bodies must, therefore, be ready to do battle under the biddings of holy obedience; and let us ask the Lord that He supply by the help of His grace what is impossible to us by nature. And if, flying from the pains of hell, we desire to reach life everlasting, then, while there is yet time, and we are still in the flesh, and are able during the present life to fulfill all these things, we must make haste to do now what will profit us forever.”

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“No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead, what he judges better for someone else.”

SAINT BENEDICT OF NURSIA

A Question For Saint Bernard About Anger

How would you advise a person who is angry with another, not to the extent of wishing to harm him, but yet enough so that he would be glad to see harm befall this person? May one approach the altar in these dispositions, or should one rather stay away until the disturbance has passed?

I can only say that I hope I will never find myself going to the altar of peace in such a state, or partaking with wrath and quarrelsomeness of the sacrament in which God is unquestionably present, “reconciling the world to himself.” If God will not receive my gift until I have restored peace to any brother whom I may remember having offended, how much less will he do so if I haven't even restored peace within myself.

SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX On Precept and Disposition

Charity and Obedience

The charity of God and obedience are bound each to each with an unbreakable bond and are in no way separated from each other. The Lord shows us that there cannot be charity without obedience when he says: ‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word’ (Jn 14:23): that is to say, he will observe my commandments, and in observing them, he will obey me. He also shows that there cannot be obedience without charity when he says: ‘Whoever does not love me does not keep my words’ (Jn 14:24). If, then, he who loves obeys, and he who does not love does not obey, it follows that just as there cannot be charity without obedience, neither can there be obedience without charity.

BALDWIN OF FORD Spiritual Tractates, Tr. 3

Holy Mountains

In all religions, mountains had been regarded as a link between heaven and earth: the center and image of the world, a place where the deity was met, where this world was left for his, the natural site of the temple to which he descended, and at which union with him took place. The place where all this happens is a holy mountain. This symbolism and this reality occur in the Bible, where the New Testament takes up the images and ideas of the Old, particularly the “favored mounts” where God revealed himself, to Moses, to Elijah and to Elisha, and those hills on whose summit a cult was practiced in his honor, where he was worshiped and sacrifice was offered to him. Jerusalem with her Temple was to be the mountain par excellence. In the Gospels and apostolic writings, she has a symbolic or geographical significance—sometimes both. Elevation, height, is the sign of a sublime mystery, of God made manifest and of his dwelling among men, and of the fulfillment of the prophetic utterances.

JEAN LECLERCQ Aspects of Monasticism

Depending on the Grace of God

The more a soul is dependent on grace, the higher the perfection to which it aspires. The grace of God is the more needful for each moment, as without it the soul can do nothing. The world, the flesh, and the devil join forces and assault the soul so untiringly that, without humble reliance on the ever-present aid of God, they drag the soul down in spite of all resistance. Thus to rely on God seems hard to nature, but grace makes it become easy, and brings with it joy.

BROTHER LAWRENCE OF THE RESURRECTION The Practice of the Presence of God

Spiritual Darkness

What is a religion worth which costs you nothing? What is a sense of God worth which would be at your disposal, capable of being comfortably elicited when and where you please? It is far, far more God who must hold us, than we who must hold Him. And we get trained in these darknesses into that sense of our impotence without which the very presence of God becomes a snare.

FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL Letters From Baron Von Hugel To a Niece

In the Beginning it is usual to feel nothing but a kind of darkness about your mind. You will seem to know nothing and to feel nothing except a naked intent toward God in the depth of your being. You will feel frustrated, for your mind will be unable to grasp him, and your heart will not relish the delight of his love. But learn to be at home in this darkness. Return to it as often as you can, letting your spirit cry out to him whom you love.

ANONYMOUS The Cloud of Unknowing

Taking On Every Assault

Death could never have been defeated except by the death of the Savior, nor any of the other sufferings of the flesh: for unless he had felt dread, human nature could not have become free from dread; unless he had experienced grief, there could never have been any deliverance from grief; unless he had been troubled and alarmed, no escape from these feelings could have been found.

Every one of the emotions which assault human nature can be found in Christ…so that they might be thoroughly subdued by the power of the Word dwelling in the flesh, thereby changing the nature of man for the better.

SAINT CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA Commentary on the Gospel of John