The Past and the Present

The past casts its shadow over the present whenever we brood about old failures and yesterday's choices. Of course we should ask God's forgiveness for our faults and should learn from them where appropriate. But once we've said we're sorry and meant it, that is enough. While seeking to make amends where possible for the harm we have caused, most of the time we should simply leave things in God's hands, trusting him to put everything right. We must put a stop to attitudes or thoughts that keep us from living trustingly in the present moment.

JACQUES PHILIPPE Interior Freedom

Where God’s Love is Concealed

So every day God works with us, calling us to repentance: “Oh that today you would hear his voice: Harden not your hearts…" (Ps 95:7-8). God speaks in various ways. He speaks through his Word, through the people with whom we live, through all sorts of circumstances, joyful and painful. We dread the latter especially. We know all too well that God has something to say to us in affliction, sickness, death or misfortune. If we still sense this fear in our heart, it is because as yet we have eyes only for the wrath of God, and this means we have not yet discovered how, behind the external signs of wrath, his immeasurable love is concealed.

ANDRÉ LOUF Tuning Into Grace 

Holy Liberty of Spirit

I have noticed that when we are very careful to mortify and humble ourselves in everything, we sometimes become depressed and less ready to serve God. This is a temptation which we can conquer by thinking that God only asks these things of us through love. We should aim at humbling ourselves to please God as a good friend tries to please his friend, or a son his father. There must be no constraint but a holy liberty of spirit, for this liberty is one of the best signs of true love. It is easy to do things which we know will please one whom we love.

ST. CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE

Homily — 17th Sunday C

When the disciples ask him to teach them to pray, Jesus does not offer method or technique. “I like to sit quietly in a deserted place, focus on my breathing, and simply relax…” No. He tells them to say something. Speak. “Say, Our Father…” Jesus the beloved Son teaches us that we are as he is, children of a loving, attentive Father. And if Jesus’ opponents often expressed shock and outrage that he dared to call God his very own Father, thus making himself equal with God. It is perhaps little less shocking that he advises us to pray as he prayed. Jesus places us within his relationship with God, a relationship marked by tenderness and confidence. 

And so each morning, at his command and formed by his divine teaching, we dare to say these words, to repeat Jesus’ own words. So accustomed to praying the Our Father, do we believe that we are doing something really daring? The prayer is not a formula but more a “shape, a pattern,” better still a situation. For when we pray the Our Father, we are situated with and in Jesus, thus intimately connected with God. We too are beloved children, and so we dare to pray with real confidence. 

And after naming God our Father, a series of petitions follows. In the first place we ask that God’s name be sanctified. This hallowing of God’s name expresses the ancient desire that all people be gathered into one and given a new heart filed with God’s Spirit, so that all nations may witness God’s blessings and so reverence God’s name. There then follow a further series of petitions: for the coming to birth of God’s reign of true shalom, then for bread, for forgiveness, not to be led into temptation and to be delivered from evil. We are putting demands on God, as we depend on his initiative.

And if in another place Jesus will tell us not to babble on in prayer “as the pagans do,” assuring us that God knows our needs before we speak, here he tells us to ask. Tell God what you want. And to amplify the message, Jesus will follow with a parable of a desperate friend who comes at midnight. Could God be at least as responsive as that grouch, unhappily roused from his sleep by the persistent knocking and entreaty of a friend at midnight? 

And it’s just what Abraham does in the First Reading with his relentless deal-making with God. There’s such tension in that passage, for even as Abraham is reverent and respectful as he repeats his requests, you fear God will suddenly lose his patience, get ticked off and tell Abraham, “Enough already.” But God does not. 

Could it be that God wants to be entreated so insistently? Apparently so because he continues to comply with Abraham’s persistent pleading. And it seems Abraham knows his relationship with God can tolerate it. Perhaps we could even say that the relationship demands it. Abraham has chutzpah, that’s the Yiddish word derived from the original Hebrew, meaning nerve, audacity. It’s daring and in-your-face.. 

This is just what Jesus emphasizes in that parable of the persistent friend this morning. The friend who just won’t back down and keeps knocking.  That’s chutzpah. The actual word used in the parable is the Greek a-nai’-daya; it means shameless persistence, refusing to take no for an answer. Could Jesus be telling us that our relationship with a loving Father God demands such chutzpah? 

It brings to mind that little widow demanding her rights from the corrupt judge. “Because this widow keeps bothering me,” he says. “I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come back and hit me with her handbag.” Or that Syrophoenician woman. “Alright,” she says to Jesus. “Call me a dog if you want, but even the dogs get the scraps. Give me a scrap.” It’s all about persistence and a faith that asks for more.

Prayer can never be a time for ambivalence but daring desire. A great confidence, audacity grounded in our belovedness. The relationship that prayer is puts us in our place as sons and daughters of a loving Father who wants to hear. As children of our Father we know our incompleteness, our utter dependence on him for everything, and so we ask.

I am reminded of my first retreat. First meeting, I sit across from the director, and he advises me to tell the Lord what I want, what is my deepest desire, in my heart of hearts. “Oh no,” I assure him. “I’ve read a lot of Thomas Merton books. He says you don’t do that, you just trust and open your heart, and you know, you pray.” “That’s great,” says this priest. “I love Merton. Read a lot of his books myself. Terrific author. Now go tell God what you want and get back to me tomorrow morning.” I did. Things happened. For when we acknowledge our deepest desires, we step into God’s desire for us. For he wants our good. In our prayer we are not trying to wrestle God to the ground. We beg earnestly, with chutzpah and we trust his desire for us.

Our prayer even at its most apophatic, in its greatest simplicity and deepest imageless quietude, no matter how far beyond words and concepts is always grounded in our deepest desiring. Ultimately we seek union, the consummation of our relationship to God, that Jesus assures us is ours in our Father.  Joyfully falling backwards into the Father’s attention, into the Spirit’s groaning on our behalf, into the Son’s ceaseless pleading for us, we surrender. Jesus is the Father’s best gift to us, the Heart of all desire, let us go up again to this altar to receive him our Daily Bread. 

Don't Rack Your Brains

When you are praying, don't rack your brains to find words. On many occasions the simple, monotonous stammering of children has satisfied their Father who is in heaven. Don't bother to be loquacious less the mind is bewildered in the search for words. The tax-collector gained the Lord's forgiveness with a single sentence, and a single word charged with faith was the salvation of the robber. Loquacity in prayer often fills the head with foolish fancies and provokes distractions. Brevity on the other hand (sometimes only one word is enough), in general favours recollection.

JOHN CLIMACUS Stairway to Paradise, 28

Selfless Love

Love makes us free if it is selfless, and it is selfless if it is ready to sacrifice pleasure, advantage and independence for the sake of the beloved.  And since no earthly love is initially perfect, it must go through these purifications. Moments and times must come when love is tested through sacrifice, when it becomes clear whether the enthusiasm of the first encounter was love at all, when the naïve first love—if it really was love—is refined and deepened in the fire of renunciation.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR Prayer, 128

The Word of God and Poverty

The beginning of the path of life is continually to exercise the intellect in the words of God, and to live in poverty. For when a man waters himself with one, it aids in the perfection of the other. That is to say, to water yourself with the study of the words of God helps you in achieving poverty, while achieving freedom from possessions affords you the time to attain to constant study of the words of God. But the help provided by both of them speedily erects the entire edifice of the virtues.

ST. ISAAC THE SYRIAN Ascetical Homilies, 1

Conversion

Conversion always means a break with the past and an entry upon a new world. In no way does conversion constitute a stopping-place; nor does it bring the repose and satisfaction of a goal attained. Faith is never ready-made and finished. Our knowledge continually needs to be renewed. The life of faith always demands an active fidelity.

YVES DE MONTCHEUIL, SJ

Prayer

If you want to pray, you need God, who gives prayer to one who prays.

EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS On Prayer, 59

When You Dream of Happiness

It is Jesus you seek when you dream of happiness; he is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal.

POPE JOHN PAUL II

Homily — Feast of Saint Benedict

No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead, what he judges better for someone else. RB 72.7

Today’s Gospel is situated in the midst of Jesus’ final discourse to his disciples at the Last Supper. By this point in the meal, Jesus has alluded to his coming Passion, saying to them at the opening, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer…” (Lk 22:15), he has instituted the Eucharist in the offering of bread and wine, and he has just revealed that he is to be betrayed by one them at table with him. With this news, the disciples begin to question one another, “asking which of them it was that would do this.”

Jesus had warned them of his coming passion, saying in his second passion prediction back in chapter nine, “Let these words sink into your ears, for the Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men” but, as the narrator tells us, “…they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, that they should not perceive it; and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.” (Lk 9:44-45). 

Now it appears that the inconceivable, that God’s anointed should suffer at the hands of men, is not only a possibility but an imminent reality that is now pressing down upon them. Moreover, this evil will be initiated not from some obvious and external enemy but as a deliberate act of betrayal from within their own company. 

They look about the room at one another, as people whose personal and communal sense of identity has been thrown into confusion. The common reference points around which they have been accustomed to ordering their understanding of God, world, neighbor and God’s chosen people Israel have been upended, yet they have not yet grasped what is to be set up in its place. So they grasp about for something to hold on to. 

At this point, our Gospel begins, “Then an argument broke out among them about which of them should be regarded as the greatest.”

With all these relationships in disarray from their point of view, they turn to one another, but now not like a community in process of formation by Jesus, but more like a group of individuals striving against one another in a futile attempt to reestablish order among themselves but from no other source than themselves. The Greek word, translated here as “argument” is “philoneikia” and appears only here in the NT. It means first of all “love of strife, contention” but it can also mean “love of victory”, “desire for glory”. 

Succumbing to the “love of strife and contention”, they have separated themselves from the way of Jesus, which in its own right, is a love of victory and a desire for glory, but his victory is the victory of the Cross and his desire for glory is the glorification of the Father. His way is not that of strife and contention but of peace. 

Jesus intervenes in order to steers the disciples back to his way, by placing it in contrast to worldly social models built on power and domination. 

“Benefactor” was a common term in the surrounding Greek culture of the time that in the words of biblical scholar James Edwards, “identifies a widespread class of individuals of power, position and means who celebrated themselves and were celebrated by others in public places.” The apostles would have recognized this title immediately and as members of an oppressed class who suffered under these individuals would have been quick to disassociate themselves from this term and its implications.

In Jesus’ model, the greatest are to be as though they were the youngest, like a child in antiquity, one who has no status of his own. Or like a servant who places himself lower than those whom he serves, as though they were greater, like one who serves those who sit at table. This is the way of Jesus himself. He is among them as the one who serves.

The question for us this morning is how does St. Benedict help us in a practical way to be a community that faces its trials and difficulties, including the small ones of daily life, without succumbing to the human tendency to fall back on the way of strife and contention but walk the way of transformation with Jesus, the path to true victory and glory through humble service in the patience of the Cross?

I suppose we could say that the whole of his Rule that strives to bring this about. It’s basically its purpose. Be that as it may, I propose that a good entry point is the great chapter 72 of the Rule, The Good Zeal of Monks, and its presentation of the classical “two ways”. 

The way of “philoneikia”, “argument”, would correspond to “the evil zeal of bitterness” that leads to hell, whereas the way of Jesus, humble service, would correspond to the good zeal, “which separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life.” 

We can get a better grasp of the content of this “good zeal” in all its fullness if we read this chapter backward from v. 11, that is, “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ”. For he is “good zeal”, it’s source, embodiment and full realization of all of the prescriptions in this chapter, which serves a kind of summation of the whole Rule. 

“Zeal” indicates intense striving. Good zeal, St. Benedicts says, must be practiced with “ferventissimo amore”, the most ardent love. It is the soul that has been overtaken by this most ardent love that is able to drive out the promptings of evil zeal from the heart. The love of contention and strive that the apostles experienced we can arouse easily enough on our own, but this most ardent love for the good zeal that is Christ is a gift, always only the fruit of grace. 

St. Benedict grounds the practice of this good zeal in chapter 12 of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other (Rm 12:10). This striving after mutual respect is a competition for a new kind of greatness in which everyone is raised up and that builds community. A greatness that is that is rooted in the dignity of the human person and his true status as being “in Christ.” 

Many things could be said about each of the verses of this rich chapter, but I will conclude with v. 7, as a practical example of good zeal, which St. Benedict places at the center of Chapter and which Aquinata Bockmann claims is the goal toward which the whole of the Rule wishes to train us: “No one is to follow what he judges useful to himself, but what seems more useful to the other.”

To follow what I judge more useful to myself is to allow myself to be guided by ego-centric choices that may seem good to me and to my fulfillment and happiness, but do not actually have their origin in Christ and are thus exercised outside of him and place us at the margins of the community as his body. 

It is matter of being habitually turned to the other in a self-forgetfulness that truly sees the other in the light of Christ and is ready to serve him in this light. It means seeing my brother not first of all as someone that needs to be changed according to some personal ideal but being open to seeing him in his uniqueness, in his mystery in Christ, as someone whose qualities, abilities, history and so on are different than mine. In him there is a ray of the divine glory that is to be discovered as well as the reality of what St. Benedict says in the next verse, weaknesses of body and character that are to be borne with the utmost patience. 

This task is easier to the degree that each of us recognizes in himself his own weaknesses and need to be borne with with the utmost patience. For in some respect each of us is weak and each of us is strong. It is from this self-knowledge that we can genuinely see ourselves as lower than the others and look up to them. Here, it is helpful to recall the seventh step of humility: if we see ourselves as the least and believe it in our hearts it is quite natural to give honor to others. 

Lastly, St. Benedict concludes this chapter with the words, “and may he bring us altogether to everlasting life.” The Lord leads us “all together”.  When I love my brother with good zeal, I walk along with him at his side, at his pace, speeding up where I need to or slowing down where it is called for, always attentive to what is useful to him, and always mindful that it is “all together” and not simply as individuals that Christ is leading us to everlasting life. 

St. Benedict shows us the path in service of the true king, Christ the Lord, victor over sin and death, who leads on to everlasting glory. 

Let us pray that the Lord may bring about this mystery among us. 

Prayer is of the Heart

We are seeking in our prayers that God might be attentive to us, according to the text: Be attentive to me and hear me (Ps 55:3). Now how likely is it that he will do this, if we are not attentive to ourselves? It is from the heart that prayer takes most of its power. According to Saint Isidore: "Prayer is of the heart, not of the lips." For God does not attend merely to the words of the one beseeching him, but he looks rather on the heart of the man who prays. So the man who does not have his heart in his prayer takes away from prayer what is best in it. So it is clear from all this that the heart’s intention is necessary in prayer. So that this may be more easily done, the heart must be first recollected when one comes to pray.

BLESSED HUMBERT OF ROMANS, O.P.

Self-knowledge

When a house is shut up, the sun's ray's do not enter, and so we don't see how much dust is found therein. But when the sun's rays penetrate, we soon realize how full of dust the house is. Self-knowledge is just such a ray...

ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA

The Holy Eucharist

Let us learn the wonder of this sacrament, the purpose of its institution, the effects it produces. We become a single body, according to Scripture, members of his flesh and bone of his bones. This is what is brought about by the food that he gives us. He blends himself with us so that we may all become one single entity in the way the body is joined to the head.

JOHN CHRYSOSTOM Homily on John, 46

Homily — Cistercian Disciples

Pentecost happened four weeks ago, and Ordinary Time started the next day, but today is the first Sunday in Ordinary Time on which we are not celebrating a particular solemnity of the Church Year. It’s the first truly ordinary Sunday in Ordinary Time this year. I remember how Father Eddy used to breathe a sigh of relief around this time and exclaim with a big smile: “Thank God for Ordinary Time!” Beyond no longer needing to worry about special Easter texts and rubrics, he understood that Ordinary Time has a special character of its own. It isn’t a blank liturgical period. Though he never said so explicitly, I would guess that what Father Eddy had in mind was that, after we have delved deeply over many months into the mysteries of our salvation as lived by the Lord Jesus, now comes the moment when we are invited to hunker down personally and live these mysteries ourselves, in our “ordinary, obscure and laborious” Cistercian existence. Ordinary Time urges us to make the Paschal Mystery permeate our concrete, ordinary circumstances. Despite the mostly nose-to-the-grind exterior of our life, it is only here that our mystical transformation into other Christs can take place.  

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke gives us the perfect theme to explore the actualization of the Paschal Mystery in our lives: namely, Christian discipleship, the existence of those Jesus first calls to himself as disciples and then sends out as apostles after making them into “a new creation in the Spirit”. For us monks, discipleship means specifically Cistercian discipleship, a topic of great relevance as we enter our yearly retreat today as a community and ponder our specific charism. 

Christ Jesus himself is, in a real sense, the one and only Apostle, the One sent forth from the Father as bearer of the world’s salvation. And yet he has chosen to share his redemptive mission with us through our active participation in it. No one, least of all we monks, can honestly bear the name of Christian without becoming a disciple through intimacy with the Lord and then sharing, as apostle, in Christ’s mission to save the world.

Today’s gospel contains a rich teaching concerning the particulars of Christian mission. The disciples are explicitly sent out to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus into people’s lives. Our mission, whether visible or hidden, is always a clearing of the way for the person of Jesus so that he will come to mean to others what he already means to us. The Lord is himself the greatest treasure we possess, the Peace that inhabits our hearts; and the quality of our love for both Jesus and others is shown by the intensity of our desire to share that treasure with everyone. The disciples are sent out two by two because our fraternal communion with one another as disciples is already in itself a manner of proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom. In this Kingdom, interpersonal communion and joyful unity reign supreme as the visible realities that best reflect God’s Trinitarian nature as continual circulation of love. The very heart of Jesus’ Gospel is love, and this truth can best be witnessed to not primarily through words but through lived relationships by persons who help and support one another, who find the meaning of their individual lives within a God-established network of relationships. In our lives as Christians, we are called to become the visibility of Jesus as the loving Heart of God’s Kingdom. Such should be the witness borne by the monastery as an ecclesiola or “small local church”.

Those whom Jesus sends out are very few indeed, considering the enormity of the harvest, and they are not given many provisions and even fewer certainties. The disciples are poor, a tiny minority hidden in a huge mass of people, and their existence is precarious. All of this, in and of itself, is obviously quite negative; and yet Luke presents these facts not at all as regrettable obstacles impeding the mission but, paradoxically, as the very conditions that Jesus himself imposes on the mission! The poverty of those sent, it seems, is meant to underscore the fact that the Christian mission has to be enacted by the whole of a person, with nothing held back, and relying on none of the gimmicks (like colorful appeal and guarantees of success) that the world considers essential. The apostles are, after all, proclaiming the Word made flesh, and so it isn’t enough for them to lack sufficient means: they must be poor in actual fact. Nor is it enough for them to proclaim the Kingdom of God with words: they must actually be men of God. And it isn’t enough for them to proclaim peace: they must actually be peace-makers. 

All the requirements made of the disciples by Jesus are, thus, at the level of personal identity and existence. At bottom, the many necessary actions and words of Jesus’ followers have to flow forth from their unique personhood as Christians, that is, from their joyful and vital symbiosis with the Lord Jesus. Their ministry does not at heart have to do with pre-set official functions performed exteriorly, or with precisely worded formulas and definitions, divorced from personal experience. Their highly personal identification with Christ—the fruit of grace, prayer and intense struggle—is what enables the disciples to truly become lambs who follow the Lamb of God himself wherever he goes, and who therefore offer themselves as an oblation in union with Christ. 

When you are poor in fact and not only in theory, then, as an evangelist, you have only yourself to give away, as conformed with the Word of God living in you. “Mission” has meaning only if it is but a single thing with the following of Christ. This truth has particular significance for us Cistercian monks that we are. Our special contemplative mission in the Church has nothing to do with going out physically from the monastery into the world, but everything to do with our actually becoming conformed with Christ in our inner being. The brunt of our monastic missionary effort consists in concentrating all the energies of our heart on intimate union with Christ, so that the Lord may then take the substance of our surrendered being and do with it as he wishes throughout the body of humanity and the cosmos.

And yet, we monks are very ordinary human beings, living physically in this world for the time being and, thus, coming into contact more or less directly with all sorts of people. In faith we believe that Jesus is subtly “sending us out” to every person we encounter in whatever manner. In every case, the personal poverty and vulnerability we have deliberately embraced by our vows can become the space where God’s Spirit is manifested. Radical poverty, both material and spiritual, freely embraced, brings with it extraordinary power: Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your Name. The disciples have renounced all earthly power and personal influence, and therefore the power of God is free to work the most splendid things through them. And the disciples’ necessarily self-effacing attitude makes their mission to be a non-threatening invitation to those who welcome them. They, therefore, inspire trust. Through their smallness as individuals, they open up a space for the miracle of conversion to Jesus. The witness of their own harmony of hearts, furthermore, shows clearly that authentically lived Christian faith drives out all fear, distrust and mutual recrimination. Where faith dwells, a truly Edenic condition flourishes which all rational beings yearn for. Isaiah embodies this condition of pure, universal joy in a glorious vision of Jerusalem as mother of all nations, where God will spread prosperity like a river and all may suck fully of the milk of her abundant breasts, a vision made real at this Eucharist.

Jesus does not send out missionaries who carry food, clothing or money to the needy. Rather, he sends persons without any money or provisions. The only thing they take with them is the all-sufficient Word of the Kingdom, which proclaims the necessity of conversion. This conversion has such urgency that the disciples musn’t waste any time along the way, greeting people and engaging in idle chatter. The radical Jesus excludes everything non-essential from the disciples’ words and actions, and this gives their mission a very ascetical, almost monastic flavor. Those Jesus sends are bearers of nothing but the living and naked Word, a Word they are called to embody in their existence as other Christs. This requires of them that, like St Paul, they never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Being Jesus’ intimate companion on the redemptive cross is both the form and the means of the Cistercian monk’s apostolate, which as such never requires that he leave the enclosure. Welcome, at last, to Ordinary Time! 

The Last Judgment

The Last Judgment will come when Christ returns in glory. Only the Father knows the day and the hour; only he determines the moment of its coming. Then through his Son Jesus Christ he will pronounce the final word on all history. We shall know the ultimate meaning of the whole work of creation and of the entire economy of salvation and understand the marvelous ways by which his Providence led everything towards its final end. The Last Judgment will reveal that God's justice triumphs overall the injustices committed by his creatures and that God's love is stronger than death.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1040

A Holy Calling

Do not be afraid to set your sights higher, to allow yourself to be loved and liberated by God. Do not be afraid to let yourself be guided by the Holy Spirit. Holiness does not make you less human, since it is an encounter between your weakness and the power of God's grace. For in the words of Leon Bloy, when all is said and done, "the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”

POPE FRANCIS Gaudete et Exultate

Homily — Saints Peter & Paul

Today’s solemnity honors two conversions that underpin the entire foundation of the Church. Two saints who were converted, literally turned around, by their discovery of mercy, better still by their discovery that they were discovered by Mercy in the person of Christ Jesus the innocent victim, who though he has suffered and died for his people’s sinfulness comes back from the dead without recrimination as forgiving victim. In fact he absolutely refuses not to forgive. This continues to astound and unnerve us just as it did Peter and Paul. Because if God will not punish us, we often try to figure out ways to punish ourselves because of our guilt. But God in Christ will have none of that. None of it. He returns from the dead full of wounds and speaks only, “Peace.” It does not mean nothing happened, too much has happened; sin has made a horrendous mess of his body, but forgiveness is more powerful. This is the confusing grace and ridiculous truth that both Peter and Paul experience in Christ. And we are invited as Church to find ourselves as they did, within the overwhelming reality of a wounded, resurrected and forgiving God. 

Peter says he is ready to die with Jesus; then betrays him in a heartbeat to save his skin. “Wait a minute; you’re one of that Galilean’s followers,” says the maid in the high priest’s courtyard. “I’d know that accent anywhere.” “Get out of here,” Peter mutters. “I don't know who you’re talking about.” Meanwhile, Jesus is next door being slapped, ridiculed and roughed up by soldiers. Regret over this will break Peter’s heart. But the risen Jesus will appear to him first of all the disciples, without any hint of blaming. And later he will forgive Peter over breakfast at another charcoal fire on a beach, as he gratefully receives Peter’s confession, “Lord, you know well that I love you.” Peter’s heart has been transformed.

And Paul. Well, as an expert in the Law, he knows that Jesus the blasphemer has been rightly executed for leading the people astray. So he has been ruthlessly tracking down Jesus' followers, dragging them from their homes to prison and persecution, and most recently cheering on those who stone the deacon Stephen. But soon during a journey northeast to Damascus, in a blinding light the resurrected Jesus will introduce himself to him with a heartbreaking question, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” The God who is purely and unambiguously love has raised this Jesus from the dead; the Law has been fulfilled and radically eclipsed in the person of Jesus the forgiving victim. Paul the angry persecutor becomes Paul the messenger of grace.

Peter and Paul have hurtled headlong into divine Mercy. And so they must revise their whole lives; for a deeply affective personal love for Christ now grounds their entire existence. They have fallen in love. Their encounter and ongoing relationship with Jesus have transformed, reformed them. And it is this radical reprioritization that gives such power and authenticity to their preaching and ultimately leads them most willingly, even joyfully to suffer the loss of all things even their very lives for Christ’s sake. Paul will say it best, “All I want to know is Christ Jesus and him crucified and the power flowing from his resurrection.” Surely Peter would agree. 

Today we celebrate with joy what mercy can accomplish in hearts emptied, made available to Christ because of bitter self-knowledge. Neither Peter nor Paul have anything to boast about but their dependence on Christ. For Peter and Paul, as for each of us, the resurrected Innocent Victim will always be “made present to us as forgiveness.” Willing at last to admit that we have reached the limits of our own prowess and possibilities, we no longer need to “fortify ourselves against” our own shabby embarrassing truth. Perhaps then with our hearts broken open, we will be ready to surrender like Peter and Paul, finally able to make ample space for the incomprehensibility of grace, because we realize that we like them have nothing to boast about except our dependence on Christ Jesus.

Finally, Jesus’ question to Peter and to each of us in this morning’s Gospel, situates us with him, poised to listen to our Master as he whispers this most compelling question, “Who do you say that I am? Who am I for you? What is your experience of me in your life, in your history?” What will each of us answer? Perhaps when we come to understand ourselves as sinners desperately beloved by God in Christ and found by his mercy incessantly, then with Peter we can say, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” For as forgiving victim, Jesus, ever marked by his wounds, has radically reinterpreted and expanded the meaning of Messiah. 

He, who is our Lord and Master, invites us once again to feast on his Body and Blood.

Mystical Prayer

Lifestyle and prayer grow or diminish together. If people today or in any age lack mystical prayer, it is not because it has been tried and found lacking. It is the Gospel that has not been tried.

THOMAS DUBAY, S.M. Fire Within

Talking to Mary

Talking to Mary is very simple. She will tell you about her Son who took upon himself your pain and mine, your sin and my sin. She will tell you about the fantastic obedience to his Father that her Son had…. She will speak in a low voice about her own fiat which simply means “yes" to God…. Mary is as powerful as an army ready for battle. The Holy Trinity fills her and she is a help to everyone who has recourse to her…. She is the most powerful enemy of Satan, next to the cross of Christ, next to the Holy Trinity itself….

CATHERINE DE HUECK DOHERTY

Homily — Corpus Christi

The Church draws her life from the Eucharist. This is the theme of Pope St. John Paul’s encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Something similar could be said about our community: Our community draws its life from the Eucharist. Without it we might as well pack up and go home. Today’s feast is our opportunity to affirm this and adore Our Lord Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament.

It is good to remember that Our Lord had our community in his heart on the night he was handed over. “Father, I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one…” That we may all be one. We have difficulty with this. It means setting aside our own wills, being on time for meals and prayers and lectio divina. But that is precisely what Jesus did for our sake. He was always on time. And when the ultimate hour arrived, he was there with his community of disciples, and he “…took bread, and after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you.’” He would go so far as to hand over his body and blood to make our community possible.

St. Paul understood this. He had received a share in our Lord’s mission to gather communities. When we read the Letter to the Corinthians, we can see how difficult a task this was. Paul emphasizes that it is Jesus who made the community at Corinth, not Paul, not Apollos, not Cephas. He says: “I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over…” Paul was referring to the handing-over that took place on the cross. It was not Paul who was crucified for the Corinthians but Jesus. He goes further and warns them not to receive the gift of God in vain: “…whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord…For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.” We must discern daily how our very life and the life of our community depends on the Eucharist. Any goodness we have flows from the body and blood of Christ. 

Finally, it is not only Paul who has received the mission to build up a Christian community. This mission has been entrusted to us also. Community flows first and foremost from Jesus, but we are responsible to draw from this source and to imitate him. Jesus made this clear in today’s gospel when his disciples urged him to send the people away to get food. He said very simply, “Give them some food yourselves.” We need to gather what bread and wine we have, even the hidden portions, and bring them to Jesus. A response like “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” will not do. We must be ready to help others with the necessities of life. We must give ourselves as Jesus did in order to sustain our community. 

The Eucharist makes our community possible, because it makes present the Lord Jesus, to quote, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do…If you understand this, blessed are you if you do it.” Let us begin anew today and eat this bread and drink this cup worthily that we may proclaim the gift of Jesus’ life and death until he comes. 

Making It In Life

No one makes it in life unless he possesses a deep, exclusive love. By "makes it in life" I do not mean simply surviving. Anyone can survive without love. By "makes it in life" I mean reaching a fullness-of-person beauty and happiness. By "deep, exclusive love" I do not refer to any merely human love, not even love found in an ideal marriage. No merely natural relationship is the ultimate answer to the human puzzle. By "deep, exclusive love" I refer to a love that is given to one alone and with no reservations whatsoever. That kind of love can be had for God only.

THOMAS DUBAY, S.M. …And You Are Christ’s

 

Who is a Saint?

The saint is the person who is so fascinated by the beauty of God and by his perfect truth as to be progressively transformed by it.

POPE BENEDICT XVI

An Infinite Love

From his human heart, the Son of God prays to the Father in these words: "I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” Let us listen with amazement to these words. Jesus is telling us that God loves us as he loves himself. The Father does not love us any less then he loves his only begotten Son. In other words, with an infinite love. God does not love less, because he loves first, from the very beginning! Christ himself bears witness to this when he says to the Father: "You loved me before the foundation of the world.” And so it is: in his mercy, God has always desired to draw all people to himself. It is his life, bestowed upon us in Christ, that makes us one, uniting us with one another.

POPE LEO XIV Homily, June 1, 2025

The Presence of God

In truth God is hidden everywhere, but He reveals Himself only to the heart which is capable of discovering Him and converting itself. For the presence of God is coextensive with the totality of beings. There is nothing His gaze does not penetrate. There is nothing in which His action is not felt. Thus we should strive to rediscover ourselves as being immersed in the life and the light of the Trinity. We should realize—and this is already a form of contemplation—that all things at all times emanate from the Father of light through the Son and through the Spirit; we should therefore dwell in their presence and their radiance.

JEAN DANIELOU God’s Life In Us

Creation Out of Love

The reason for creation lies entirely in the unfathomable mystery of God, who is self-originating and self-communicating love. While the world is the gracious result of divine freedom, God's freedom means necessarily being who and what God is. From this standpoint the world is not created ex nihilo but ex amore, ex condilectio, that is, out of divine love.

CATHERINE MOWRY LACUGNA God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life

Progress

Therefore my advice to you, friends, is to turn aside from troubled and anxious reflection on your own progress, and escape to the easier paths of remembering the good things, which God has done; in this way instead of becoming upset by thinking about yourself, you will find relief by turning your attention to God… Sorrow for sin is, indeed, a necessary thing, but it should not prevail all the time. It is necessary, rather, that happier recollections of God's generosity should counterbalance it, lest the heart should become hardened by too much sadness and so perish through despair.

ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX Sermons on the Song of Songs

Homily — Pentecost

The mystery of Pentecost is sometimes referred to as God’s way of reversing the Tower of Babel story in the Book of Genesis. It is a movement from disunity to unity. The sacred author describes how the people had a common language and were able to cooperate and plan with a common purpose. But what was their plan? To make a name for themselves, to build a tower above everyone else lest they be scattered abroad. But God, in his inestimable wisdom and mercy, would not allow our human race to mount up a tower of pride from which they could look down on others and insulate themselves from others. So, the Lord scattered them over all the earth and made it difficult for them to communicate with one another, the very opposite of Pentecost. 

The inability to communicate leads to all kinds of fear and mistrust. We see this in the world today even among ourselves who speak the same English language. The desire to make a name for ourselves makes communication more like the babel of many tongues. But on this great feast of Pentecost, we have the Holy Spirit creating a bond of unity. People from every corner of the known world could understand the disciples as they proclaimed the mighty acts of God!

I like to connect this scene with Jesus’ last discourse in chapter 17 of John’s gospel which we have been listening to this past week. Jesus prays earnestly to his Father that his disciples may be one. This is his constant refrain: “That they may be one”—not scattered, not trying to build a name for themselves but focusing on the one thing necessary: the mighty acts of God. For what acts are greater than what Our Lord Jesus Christ has done for us. Though he was rich, he became poor for our sakes. He always took the last place. Not only did he give us his body and blood as our spiritual food, but he gave us his very breath that we might live, he in us and we in him.

The Holy Spirit is this breath, the life-giving breath that Jesus breathed out from the cross and likewise on the evening of the first day of the week. On that evening Jesus said to his disciples, “Peace be with you…And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” It is the Holy Spirit that fulfills Jesus’ prayer “that they may be one.” He makes it possible for our community, our families, our Church to be united—not isolated, not fearful. If we try to go it alone and try to make a name for ourselves, the Spirit will mercifully humble us somehow—and don’t underestimate his ability to do so! We have to come down from any towers we have built and allow the Spirit to pour into our hearts the miracle of hope, for “We have all be given to drink of the one Spirit.” Let us drink deeply, then, of this breath of God and unite our voices in prayer, “O Lord, send forth your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!”

God’s Embrace

If we keep talking to God, we come to experience something utterly unexpected (at least, the first time that it happens): we feel his hand, as it were, gently raising our downcast and tearstained face to look into his face. And what do we discover in his face? Not fury, not disappointment, not rejection. We see compassion for the pain we are suffering, we see appreciation for the efforts that we are making out of the desire to please him, and above all we see loving acceptance—pardon that is more than pardon, pardon that is an embrace.

BERNARD BONOWITZ, OCSO Truly Seeking God