Cross out the word ‘discouragement’ from your dictionary of love; the more you feel your weakness and the difficulty of recollecting yourself, and the more hidden the Master seems, the more you must rejoice, for then you are giving to Him…. What does it matter what we feel; He is the unchanging one…. He loves you today as He loved you yesterday and will love you tomorrow.
ELIZABETH OF THE TRINITY
FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
(Sir 3:2-6, 12-14; Col 3:12-21; Mt 2:13-15, 19-23)
December 28, 2025
And the Word was made flesh, and he pitched his tent among us (Jn 1:14). Yes, the Son of the most high God chose to live right in the midst of our lowly lives, just as they are right now, filled as they are with all manner of wonders, sorrows and incongruities. He loved us so much that he ardently desired to take upon himself all the consequences of sharing our lives totally, intimately, holding nothing back. Though we do not see him materially, nothing in the universe is more intimately and vividly present to us than Christ Jesus, the Word made man, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, in whom and for whom we were created. Therefore, as we see in the gospel we have just heard, from the very beginning Jesus’ life on earth was marked by neediness, threats and hostility, just like the lives of the most vulnerable human beings among us.
In her liturgy of the first Sunday after Christmas today, the Church invites us to contemplate the event of the Incarnation not in the sublime and eternal manifestation of St John’s Prologue, as on Christmas morning, but rather as reflected in the nitty-gritty reality and circumstances of the peculiar family into which the Son of the eternal Father was humanly born. Today we behold Christ simultaneously both in his dazzling “glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:14), and as a vulnerable Babe sheltered in his blessed Mother’s gentle arms, having to be carried off hastily into foreign lands in order to survive this world’s violence.
Although the theme of “the family” is, thus, very relevant on this Sunday, it must be said that this gospel of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt by no means offers us an idealized portrait of a middle-class family from the first world, secure in its autonomy and comfortable in its enjoyment of privileged status, though Jesus is the royal heir of King David, and thus has every right to entitlement. In the Christian dispensation and according to Jesus’ very words, the decisive reality presented to us in the Holy Family as our model is the new family of Jesus, the unheard-of society, at once human and divine, which our Lord came into the world to create: that is, the supernatural family of his disciples, gathered around him by the proclamation of the Word of God—Jesus himself—and founded not primarily on the strength of blood ties but on the Trinitarian power of “doing the will of God” in synergy with the Word Incarnate.
“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?”, Jesus once asked. And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” (Mt 12:48-50). Unique and irreplaceable as Joseph and Mary are in their persons and in the crucial roles they play in the life of the Infant Jesus, our Lord’s parents are, above all, Christian disciples to whom the Word of God has been proclaimed by angels, entrusted to them by the Holy Spirit in a super-eminent manner in enfleshed form. And, before our very eyes, they are being radically transformed by the event. As such, the blessed Mother of God and her God-appointed husband are wholly intent on serving God’s plan of salvation through Jesus. They are not at all seeking to fit conventionally into the social expectations of their clan and culture.
The chronic contradictoriness that Jesus brings into the human lives that welcome him is already writ large in the distressing perplexity of both Mary and Joseph as they try to deal with the mystery of the Incarnation invading their lives and beginning to shape their existence together in strange ways. Whether they like it or not, the hidden identity of their Son as Savior of the world is involving them massively in the tumultuous events of world history, although naturally speaking they would desire nothing more than to offer their newborn Son a tranquil and harmonious domesticity. But the Father in heaven has other, riskier plans which he reveals only gradually, as they are able to accept them.
The event portrayed in today’s gospel is traditionally called “The Flight into Egypt”. Though the word “flight” can connote cowardice, on this particular occasion we can, rather, observe Joseph exercising an array of virtues through his decision to take his family and flee. The poor and destitute don’t often have much choice in such matters. We see here displayed virtues such as anguished discernment of a course of action, courage in the face of mighty threats, humility in admitting his own and his wife’s limitations, resistance to the onslaught of evil, responsibility for the task entrusted to him… But all of these admirable virtues are really only practical aspects of the central theological virtue of faith, more specifically flight into the unknown as an act of obedient faith, as with all the patriarchs beginning with Abraham.
Matthew records that the angel of the Lord appears to Joseph in a dream and tells him to flee to Egypt. This expression, “angel of the Lord appeared”, refers to a providential intervention by God in human affairs that comes mercifully to resolve a desperate situation, when all seems lost and there appears to be no way out. In the first two chapters of Matthew, in fact, the angel of the Lord intervenes to this purpose no fewer than three times: first, to resolve Joseph’s dilemma and guide him to take Mary as his wife; second, to urge him to flee to Egypt with the Child and his Mother; and, third, to tell Joseph to bring Jesus and Mary back to the land of Israel after the danger is past. There is no doubt that Joseph is a saint who habitually lives in intimate and frequent communication with God, because his fidelity and humility enable him to do so.
These multiple interventions of the angel of God demonstrate what high stakes the Lord God of Israel holds in the evolving story of Yeshúa‘ ben Yosef. The reason for such personal involvement by God is that this story is nothing other than the personal living-out by Jesus of the whole history of the People of God, to whom the Lord refers in Exodus as “Israel my firstborn son” (4:22). Israel had gone down to Egypt of old to escape extinction by famine, and had then returned to take possession of the land of Israel. It is as if all of salvation history is now being recapitulated in the person and concrete story of little baby Yeshúa‘ ben David. By saving his own dear family from imminent danger Joseph, whether he knows it or not, is also safeguarding the wh0le history of God’s salvation of humanity. Yet he strives not to understand clearly and to command sovereignly, but only to love and obey and care for. Incredible to our ears and reason, the salvation of the world, Christ Jesus, was now astoundingly held in the hands of Mary and Joseph.
I don’t know whether you noticed, but our reading today from the lectionary curiously omits three verses in the middle of our flight-into-Egypt story, the verses that refer to the extermination of those we call the Holy Innocents, whose feast day falls on December 28 and this year is naturally overshadowed by that of the Holy Family: Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men (Mt 2:16). Matthew portrays this slaughter of the Innocents as an intrinsic part of the Jesus mystery and story, both as a retrospective allusion to the extermination in ancient times by Pharaoh of the children of the Hebrews and as a prefiguration of the redemptive death of Jesus himself on the cross.
Through their unselfconscious martyrdom, the Holy Innocents play the providential role of sparing the life of Baby Jesus for the moment, so that he can grow to maturity and perform his work of redemption. These children bear the most resounding witness possible to Jesus as Savior but they do so, as the Latin hymn says, non loquendo sed moriendo (“not by speaking but by dying”), a motto that should be dear to us monks. With their tender bodies the slain Innocents literally form a shield around the sacred body of Jesus, to “save” him for a more transcendental death at the appointed time of the Father’s own choosing.
So it is that the one who, according to the angel, “will save his people from their sins” is the very one who himself first had to be saved by his parents’ devoted care {and the substitution of baby martyrs}. In this way, and at the prompting of divine grace, Joseph and Mary saved the Savior physically so that he could one day save the world spiritually. Thus is each disciple called to co-operate in a peculiar way in the task of the world’s redemption! In fact, considering the present state of our world, it is impossible for our Christian hearts not to hear the Holy Family knocking at our door on their flight into dark exile. They are, in fact, knocking loudly and urgently right now at the door of our conscience in the persons of today’s persecuted children of God, whom dire poverty and political hatreds are driving out of their lands into the vast and grim unknown.
Just as Christ, as Pascal affirmed, will “hang on the cross until the end of time”, so will the Holy Family always be fleeing into precarious exile on this earth with us as eyewitnesses. Shall we be indifferent bystanders or ardent participants and helpers in the drama of Jesus, Mary and Joseph as lived in the lives of today’s fleeing refugees?
With astounding precision our Holy Father, in his Christmas message on Thursday, underscored the pressing relevance to our contemporary world of the Holy Family’s ordeals. Pope Leo insists that, “in becoming man, Jesus took upon himself our fragility, identifying with each one of us: with those who have nothing left and have lost everything, like the inhabitants of Gaza; with those who are prey to hunger and poverty, like the Yemeni people; with those who are fleeing their homeland to seek a future elsewhere”; and he adds that, as we Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, we should remember that the Lord of the universe “accepted poverty and rejection, identifying himself with those who are discarded and excluded”. And Jesus did this not once or twice but on a permanent and irreversible basis. Note, for instance, that even after returning from Egypt to the land of Israel, Joseph was still afraid to go back to Judea; and so he cautiously took the Holy Family into an internal exile in far off Nazareth in northern Galilee. Indeed, more absolutely speaking, in this world the Son of Man truly “has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20).
I think you will agree that something essential would be glaringly missing from our faith as Christians, and the joy and gratitude we feel at Christmas would border on the shallow, if we failed to see the luminous presence of our blessed Lord in the millions of human beings on this planet today who on a daily basis are ravaged by poverty, rejection, injustice, hunger, disease and persecution, and who often enough must fear for their very lives and the lives of their innocent children—one and all glorious yet suffering images of God whom rapacious men (some of whom style themselves “faithful Christians”) choose to label as “disposable garbage” so as to get them out of their world-conquering path. What else is the holy Incarnation we celebrate in this season all about if not about Jesus’ free and generous identification of his divine Person with human beings, above all with each and every person who suffers? And how shall we, who aspire to be his eager followers, react to this presence of our beloved Lord in the lowly manger of outcast yet precious human lives?
To live without hope, to barely subsist feeling abandoned by all, must be the most terrible of all human tragedies. We, who are blessed with an abundance of hope through the gift of faith in the newborn Christ and in the Holy Trinity— we must become hope and light for those submerged in despair. We ought never forget the tremendous paradox that the spiritual treasures we possess, received without cost, by sheer grace and through no merit of ours, can continue to be possessed only by being given away. The key to the paradox is that these treasures we possess are nothing other than God’s dynamic life active within us, demanding to be shared.
Brother and sisters, during the octave before Christmas, we prayed the following words from the preface: “…The Virgin Mother longed for him with love beyond all telling…” On this Christmas night, enveloped as we are by the great mystery of God become man, let us try to enter into Our Lady’s love beyond all telling: What moved her to so great a love? How did she express this love? And how can we share in this exchange of love? Her love beyond all telling includes her desire that we, too, should share in the great mystery of our religion, that is, her Child Jesus who is our God and savior, Christ and Lord.
Of course, Our Lady did not approach mystery of the incarnation with the erudition of a Church Father. She was a young woman, a simple Jewish maiden and wife, and in the last days of her pregnancy. I assume she would have been familiar, at least to some extent, having listened to her parents and the synagogue liturgy, with the words we have just heard proclaimed: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light, upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom, a light has shone.” Darkness and gloom are all too present in our world today, but what seems to have inspired her love beyond all telling was God’s fidelity. God is faithful. God wants to penetrate the gloom of this world and bring to light the mystery that surrounds us. He, indeed, shows his fidelity by binding the strong one, that is, the devil, retrieving his spoils, and smashing the rod of this taskmaster that afflicts us; but even more, he shows his fidelity by the gift of a little child, his only begotten Son. At the same time, he shows us the matching gift of a woman who accepted the call to bear this child. We have here a mutual exchange of love that is beyond all telling.
In the second reading we heard another reason for Our Lady’s love: “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation…” The Lord could not have made his grace more tangible then in this pregnant woman whose time had come to have her child. Who could understand this grace better than Mary. She never had relations with a man, but by God’s grace she was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit as in the days of old when the cloud covered the meeting tent and led the Israelites through the desert. Now, the glory of the Lord is manifested to us by a child in a manger lying beside his mother. This is the blessed hope we await, “the appearance of the glory of our great God and savior Jesus Christ…” But why did our Lady long for this manifestation of God’s grace with such longing? I think she was inspired by God’s desire that “all people be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” God’s desire for our salvation was the source of Our Lady’s love beyond all telling. She realized she had received the grace to bear the Prince of Peace who could bring God’s desire to fulfillment despite all the efforts to destroy it. This holy virgin was the first to know this tangible, overwhelming grace that has appeared and she wants to share it.
Finally, after the child is born, we hear this phrase repeated in the Gospel narrative: “She wrapped him in swaddling clothes…you will find an infant in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger…” Women know how to care for newborns, to keep them warm and safe in swaddling bands. These bands serve as a transition from the warmth and security of the mother’s womb to the environment of the outside world. How intimate a scene. Mary was not a passive spectator, but an active cooperator. Our Lady’s time had finally come to see with her own eyes the mystery hidden for ages or at least for 9 months in her womb. The intimacy and care she lavished on her son were certainly love beyond all telling.
Today’s Christmas mystery is certainly an exchange of love beyond all telling, beginning with the fidelity of God’s mercy and the reciprocal fidelity of the Virgin Mother, who is full of grace and truth. With her help we, too, have seen a great light that drives out darkness and gloom. It is reflected back to us in the mutual love of Our Lady and her child. Let us rejoice in this exchange of love and join the angels in singing “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
Of old, God the incorporeal and formless was never depicted, but now that God has been seen in the flesh and has associated with humankind, I depict what I have seen of God. I do not venerate matter, I venerate the fashioner of matter, who became matter for my sake and accepted to dwell in matter and through matter worked salvation, and I will not cease from referencing matter through which my salvation was worked.
SAINT JOHN DAMASCENE
Merry Christmas from all of us here at St. Joseph's Abbey!
Mother church places John the Baptist before her children precisely as we are preparing for Christmas for a good reason…. His life and message remind us that Advent is not yet Christmas—that this penitential time leads to joy only if we heed it's message. John the Baptist—who leaped for joy in his mother's womb—is joy's perfect messenger because he shows us it's necessary elements: Repentance, humility, and sacrifice.
FR. PAUL SCALIA
Let us arise, then. Let us shake the sleep out of our eyes—the sleep of emotions run amuck; the sleep of indifference, of tepidity, of self-pity, of fighting God… Let us arise from that sleep…and begin our journey to Bethlehem. But let us understand that this Bethlehem we seek is within our own souls, our own hearts…. It is an inner pilgrimage, a pilgrimage in which we don't use our feet…. So, then, let us enter, you and I, into the pilgrimage that doesn't take us from home. For ours is a journey of the spirit, which is a thousand times harder than a journey of the feet. Let us “arise and go.”
SERVANT OF GOD CATHERINE DE HUECK DOHERTY
There is more value in a little study of humility and in a single act of it than in all the knowledge in the world.
ST. TERESA OF JESUS
God always answers, maybe today or tomorrow, but he always answers, in one way or another. He always answers. The Bible repeats it countless times. God listens to the cry of those who invoke Him. Even our reluctant questions, those that remain in the depths of our heart, that we are ashamed to express: the Father listens to them and wishes to give us the Holy Spirit, which inspires every prayer and transforms everything. Brothers and sisters, in prayer there is always a question of patience, always, of supporting the wait. Now we are in the time of Advent, a time that is typically of expectation; of expectation of Christmas. We are in waiting. This is clear to see. But all our life is also in waiting. And prayer is always in expectation, because we know that the Lord will answer.
POPE FRANCIS General audience, 9 December 2020
When one of my grandnephews was born, he was so tiny that when I first met him, he fit easily into his father’s hands. Today, he is a tall, strapping young man. I suppose that I could apply to him the saying, “From tiny acorns mighty oak trees grow.” The acorn is the seed of an oak tree, and today in the gospel we hear of the miraculously fertilized ovum of Mary, now a noticeable fetus; the divine-human seed of her son has been growing in her womb. At first, this is to the consternation of Joseph who has not yet taken her into his home, the second stage of a Jewish marriage at that time. But he is calmed by a heavenly message which informs him that the child is conceived of the Holy Spirit, and that this child will save us all from our sins. Yes, he will be our Savior, Emmanuel, God with us.
What does that in face mean, that Jesus is our Savior, or Redeemer? I certainly could never buy the medieval ideas that “redeemer” meant the Father, as actual Redeemer, redeemed or ransomed us back from Satan and that Jesus was the redemption price that was paid. No. I have in the last few years tried to find the best simple statement of how we are saved or redeemed. Reading our Trappist brother Dom Eugene Boylan’s book This Tremendous Lover, I came upon this passage, “When we ask ourselves the question, ‘How did Christ redeem us?’ we find the answer is: by making us part of Himself.” Yes, by making us part of Himself. He became part of Mary, his Mother, in order to make Mary and all of us part of Himself—members of his Mystical Body, the Church, divinizing us by our union with him and truly humanizing us by our union with his resurrected and glorified human nature and with the glorious Ever Virgin Mary.
Here let me explain why I brought up the word “seed.” I will have to discuss a little biology. Please bear with me. The word “seed” significantly appears in the second reading this morning from Romans where it is prudishly buried by the translation: the words “descended from David” are literally in the Greek “of the seed of David.” That was indeed the translation in the Douay-Rheims Bible when I was young. This word “seed” reflects the ancient understanding that the complete seed (or sperma in Greek) came from the man and that it contained a very tiny human being who upon entering the womb was nourished into a full-sized fetus. It was thought that the woman contributed nothing but nourishment through her blood. Great minds in the Church (such as St. Thomas Aquinas) inferred that there must be more to the story than this, but they lacked the precise instruments and science we have today.
In the 17th century and especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, as the microscope was developing greater and greater accuracy, scientists discovered the woman’s ovum or egg which was, in fact, the other half of the human “seed.” Thus, for most of Christian history the source of the human nature of Jesus could incorrectly be understood as not coming from Mary at all, but from a complete divinely implanted seed—Mary’s physical contribution being only nourishment and protection. Both the ovum and the sperm are in themselves incomplete cells until they combine with each other to form the zygote cell (the real human seed) that then divides and differentiates into a fetus. In Mary the fecundating power is from the Holy Spirit, but the fertilization of the ovum from her results in a natural zygote, and so the fetus grows naturally. The human soul of Jesus is miraculously infused by God in the same way it is miraculously infused into every human person. It is important to remember that everyone you meet is not only a wonder of God’s creation in nature but is also a miracle of God’s intervention in nature. No one is “garbage” as some people are now saying.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 485 we read, “The Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, is sent to sanctify the womb of the Virgin Mary and divinely fecundate it, causing her to conceive the eternal Son of the Father in a humanity drawn from her own.” IN A HUMANITY DRAWN FROM HER OWN. The paragraph describes, using general terms, the miraculous fertilization of the ovum of Mary and its implantation in her womb as the zygote. With the science we now have we can say that Jesus and Mary share the same DNA—his humanity is drawn from her own. Mary of Nazareth is truly the physical mother of the man Jesus in the same sense that I am the son of my mother Mary Truhan. A contemporary canard against Mary that she is a surrogate mother is shown to be baseless. Indeed, Jesus is the Son of God, but also Mary’s son without question. Also, the miraculous conception of Jesus through the creative power of the Holy Spirit prevents any haploidy or chromosomal anomaly in the child.
The Catholic Church and our religion are often criticized for being too Marian. I would answer that if the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is seen as very Marian in its nature, culture and prayer, it is because the humanity of Jesus Christ himself is Marian and that St. Luke implies that the teaching and example Jesus received from Mary as a child blossomed in his teaching as an adult. Perhaps, he resembles her not just spiritually, but also physically. After all, Mary and Jesus share the same DNA. We are called to share in a grace of spiritually resemblance to Christ and Mary through the Holy Spirit who overshadows us all with his transformative power.
The Vatican Council proclaimed in its first document Sacrosanctum Concilium that the humanity of Jesus united with the divine person of the Word is the instrument of our salvation. Thank you, Mary, for your Son and for the encounter with his body and blood, soul and divinity that you helped to make possible for humanity in Christ’s earthly life, then in our Baptism and now in this and every Eucharist, our living Bread of Eternal Life, our Cup of Blessing, and the pledge of our salvation. Through it we become ever more and more part of Jesus Christ Himself in his Mystical Body and grow personally in holiness. As Dom Eugene Boylan wrote, “When we ask ourselves the question, ‘How did Christ redeem us?’ we find the answer is: by making us part of Himself.” Let me close with a quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church which connects our membership in the Body of Christ with Mary’s holiness—the first sentence of which is profound, “The Church’s structure is totally ordered to the holiness of Christ’s members. And holiness is measured according to the ‘great mystery’ in which the Bride responds with the gift of love to the gift of the Bridegroom. Mary goes before us all in the holiness that is the Church’s mystery as ‘the bride without spot or wrinkle.’ This is why the ‘Marian’ dimension of the Church precedes the ‘Petrine’”
You must accustom yourself to make a little sanctuary in your heart where you will always find our Lord even in the midst of occupations and distractions; and then, as soon as you are alone, as soon as you have a few minutes a fire shall flame out.
BLESSED COLUMBA MARMION Union with God
Jesus, the Lord, expects us to have the simplicity of a dove. This means giving a straightforward opinion about things in the way we honestly see them, without needless reservations. It also means doing things without double dealing or manipulation, our intention being focused solely on God. Each of us, then, should take care to behave always in the spirit of simplicity, remembering that God likes to deal with the simple, and that he conceals the secrets of heaven from the wise and prudent of this world and reveals them to little ones.
SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL
Many appear full of mildness and sweetness as long as everything goes their own way; but the moment any contradiction or adversity arises, they are in a flame, and begin to rage like a burning mountain. Such people as these are like red-hot coals hidden under ashes. This is not the mildness which our Lord undertook to teach us in order to make us like Himself.
ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX
Trinitarian life is also our life…. There is one life of the Triune God, a life in which we graciously have been included as partners…a comprehensive plan of God reaching from creation to consummation, in which God and all creatures are destined to exist together in the mystery of love and communion.
CATHERINE MOWRY LACUGNA God for Us
For Christians, the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ constitutes an extraordinary revelation of divine love in the act of overcoming the human sinfulness that lies at the root of evil in our world. The relevance of this…needs to be further elaborated by drawing out its implications in a number of areas, beginning with the sinfulness of human beings and how that sinfulness distorts fundamentally our understanding of God. In this Christological perspective, conventional human wisdom is subverted and turned entirely on its head by the foolishness of God. Likewise, the conventional perception of risk is shattered, for the death and resurrection of Christ revealed God to be utterly reckless in wagering everything on human freedom, in surrendering the success or failure of the entire project of creation into human hands, and to be utterly vulnerable in having to pay the price of that wager.
JOE EGAN The Godless Delusion
We must remember that the Word, the Son of God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is hidden in essence and presence, in the inmost being of the soul…. Oh thou soul, then, most beautiful of creatures, who so long to know the place where your beloved is, that you may seek and be united to Him, know now that you are yourself that very tabernacle where He dwells, the secret chamber of His retreat where He is hidden.
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS Spiritual Canticle, st. 1.6-7
Our soul is so preciously loved of Him that is highest, that it passes the knowing of all creatures. That is to say that there is no creature that is made that may fully know how much, how sweetly and how tenderly that our maker loves us.
JULIAN OF NORWICH Revelations of Divine Love
The heart of Jesus will dilate our hearts by teaching us to love above all else the glory of God and the salvation of souls.... We rely far too much on our own strength when our helplessness is obvious, and because we do not depend enough on the heart of Jesus, on his love for us. The heart of Jesus is able and desires to give us the saintly powers we need, confidence and love, which inspire adoration, thanksgiving, and atonement, by placing the glory of God above all else.
FR. REGINALD GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, O.P.
The world, when it comments upon the shortness of life, does so with a note of sadness, it complains about the brevity of things; man often lives on his memories. And the past, what good does it serve? It can't be changed. He keeps searching in the time remaining to him for what he missed in the past; he comes to his last years, and in these the nostalgia for the past and the sense of the brevity of things is even sharper. How sad the old age of the world!
SAINT RAFAEL ARNÁIZ BARÓN
Is there anything He can refuse us in the future, if already in the present He gives himself to us as our food? The Eucharist is our one happiness on earth.
BLESSED JOSEPH CASSANT, OCSO
The re-building of the hermitage was substantially completed mid-December 2024. Our abbot Dom Vincent and a substantial cohort of the community came out on Gaudete Sunday to bless the hermitage and the hermit, placing both under the care of Santa Maria del Silenzio. Fr. Vincent noted that the hermitage shares in the monastery’s mission as a “monastic institute wholly dedicated to contemplation”. Likewise, the hermitage in particular makes present the life of Nazareth in its silence, hiddenness and ordinariness.
The Vigil Mass of Christmas 2024 resumed the Liturgy at the hermitage and was offered in thanksgiving for the generosity of all of you who supported this endeavor in every and any way. The everyday life of the hermitage was resumed on the feast of the Holy Family and continues uninterrupted for 11 months now.
In our previous photo we showed the building stripped down to the rough-cut studs that formed the frame of the building. The framing of the original hermitage was entirely of white pine from the abbey forest, which was milled locally and built by Fr. Edward and Br. Peter. While we saved the framing, the hermitage now has a new roof, new windows, an electrical and plumbing upgrade, plus new insulation, siding, dry wall and flooring. Happily we were able to save Fr. Edward’s original rough cut pine altar.
The interior is a combination of original pine paneling, with some replacement pine. The larger room is the “Work of God” space for prayer, meditation, Mass, lectio divina, reading and also houses the wood-burning stove. The smaller room has the sleeping space and a kitchenette space. Additionally there is a compact bathroom with sink, toilet and shower. It’s adequate, minimalist and everything a hermit needs for a life of prayer, outdoor manual labor, and not too much extra.
Thank you for your generosity with your gifts of prayer, labor, materials, supplies, money and your belief in our community’s mission of prayer. Always be assured you are included in our daily prayer and Holy Mass.
A blessed Advent to all.
Fr Isaac
P.S. God willing, I hope to get back to you next year with an update on life in the hermitage.
Be mindful of God, so that in every moment he may be mindful of you. If he is mindful of you, he will give you salvation. Do not forget him, letting yourselves be seduced by vain distractions. Do you want him to forget you in your times of temptation? Stay near him and obey him in the days of your prosperity. You will be able to rely on his word in difficult days. Because prayer will keep you safe in his continuous presence you may constantly be before his face.Think of him, remember him in your heart. Otherwise, if you only meet him from time to time, you risk losing your close friendship with him.
ISAAC OF NINEVEH Philocalia
In general, the reason why many souls have no love or inclination towards virtue is that they harbor affections and desires which are neither innocent nor directed wholly towards God. He therefore who loves anything beside God renders his soul incapable of the divine union and transformation into God.
ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS The Ascent of Mount Carmel
Believe more and more intensely in God's love. Or, better, that God is Love: that, for Him, to be and to love are one and the same thing. Remember what Saint Augustine wrote on the text: "I am, Who am". Change the word being for loving and you will still be far from reaching the limits of that truth which is Love. Despite all the penetration of his genius Saint Augustine never reached those limits. No one ever will— there are no limits! The Love of God is boundless Light.
A CARTHUSIAN They Speak by Silences
Back in the late 1950s, in my early teenage years, just before Castro’s Revolution and his accession to mock-messianic power, I attended an all-boys’ school in provincial Cuba run by the Marist Brothers. First Fridays of the month were rigorously consecrated to devotion to the Sacred Heart, a focus of Catholic piety that at that time was inseparable from the veneration of Christ the King. On First Fridays the whole student body of about 200 would gather in the garth first thing in the morning, and we would rededicate ourselves to the enthralling mystery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. During the almost 70 years of living I’ve done since then, one phrase from the consecration prayer that we all recited in schoolboy unison—like the multiplication tables—has stuck firmly in my memory and gently haunted me: Tuyos somos y tuyos queremos ser: “Yours we are and yours do we want to be.” My mind stored away this formulation as a memorable puzzle, and its singsong rhythm and mystery have never loosened their grip on my heart.
In recent years I think I’ve begun to understand the deeper import of this generous public confession we made corporately, Yours we are and yours do we want to be, which at first may seem but typical religious rhetoric. However, all on its own it has gradually filtered down into my consciousness, to become the guiding light of my spiritual journey, a sort of standard against which to measure my movement. When you delve into it, you can see that the phrase actually conveys the invitation to a complete and profound spirituality because it puts on our lips two essential things: first, faith’s proclamation of God’s most sublime deed in creating us, and, second, our personal affirmation of that deed of God’s. To consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus the King, I’ve come to see, means to embrace with every fiber of our being the magnificent truth that Jesus has already made us his own. As a matter of fact and not of vague imagining, we do belong by rights only to Jesus and not to ourselves or to the world or to anything or anyone in it! They sang a new hymn: Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth (Rev 5:9-10, NAB).
However, now comes the all-important practical question: Is this factual reality, this condition of gloriously belonging to Another, to our Creator and Redeemer who has given his all for us as expressed by the wound in his Heart—is this belonging what we really want? And do we, consequently, dedicate the bulk of our thoughts and time and energy to cultivating this central and unique reality of our lives? The fool-proof test that reveals the actual and central love-interest of our lives is the answer to two further questions: To what is it that I spontaneously dedicate the greater part of my waking hours? And toward what object do my thoughts and desires instinctually gravitate? One major practical reason for giving ourselves to contemplative prayer is to discover where exactly the deepest love of our heart really lies.
In the article in the Catechism titled “The Battle of Prayer” in Part IV, we read these helpful words: “A distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve” (no. 2729). There you have it: the choice of which master to serve. That crucial choice is what the kingship of Jesus is all about. As Bob Dylan used to sing with his gritty twang, “you gotta serve somebody. Now, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody”. It would be pure delusion for any of us to think that we are not in thrall to some “king” or other. Why not, then, deliberately choose the King of Love and Truth with all our hearts, to serve whom is synonymous with eternal freedom?
The reality of our already belonging objectively to God in Christ takes the form of a solemn hymn of praise in our second reading from Colossians today: All things were created through Christ and for Christ. Christ is before all things, and in Christ all things hold together. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us, by being included in this all things, has already been swept up from the beginning of our existence into the spiraling process of divine transformation and glorification that constitutes the ongoing cosmic drama of redemption, which is also the true drama of our lives and the only one that ultimately matters. Yet, vast and all-inclusive though it is, such a universal drama is not at all abstract or impersonal because it is, in fact, the careful and love-guided joint work of the heavenly Father and his only-begotten Son, steered at each step in the process by the goodness and wisdom of their Holy Spirit.
St Paul continues: The Father delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved Son. This is the Kingdom of Light and Life where Jesus alone is King, he in whom all the Fullness [of divinity] was pleased to dwell, through Christ to reconcile all things for God, making peace by the blood of his Cross. Jesus is no merely hereditary or man-made monarch. Here is a King who has earned his kingship over creation literally by the Blood of his brow and Heart, out of sheer love for his Father and for the creatures they co-created and co-redeemed with one generous accord. For us to dwell joyfully and permanently in this Kingdom of peace and love is what Jesus has gained for us by the shedding of his Precious Blood. This is our unassailable birthright as God’s children.
And yet, as that childhood formula also ingrained in me, not only must we affirm Yours we are, but at the same time also and yours do we want to be. The thing we have first been made to be by the immense work of God’s mercy and generosity, that very thing we also need to embrace for ourselves and make our own through the ardent desire by our willing heart and the way we live our daily lives. God’s act of creating and redeeming us, to become complete and vital, has to be reciprocated by our act of desire, assent and conversion of life. Obviously I could not yet understand this in the 1950s when I was 10 and 11 years old, as every month we piously recited our act of consecration. But we human beings do actually possess at every moment the power of becoming forever something unsurpassably magnificent: the Children of the Light, the Children of the Living God in Christ. We must not remain indifferent to this invitation. The crucial thing for each of us in our Christian adulthood, as grace continues to mature us, is to embrace with all our heart and in our concrete lives what we have already been made to be at our creation through Christ, the eternal Word, and again at our redemption through Christ, the crucified and risen Savior.
This urgency to make a radical decision and choose for ourselves what God has first chosen for us is dramatized in today’s Gospel text, from St Luke’s account of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Luke’s first message to the reader concerns the division that arises between the people and the leaders in the face of the crucified Jesus, over whose head was nailed an inscription that read This is the King of the Jews. People and leaders each chose to have a different reaction to the Jesus phenomenon. The people stood by and watched, while the leaders mocked Jesus. The attitude of the people is positive. Luke says that they “stood there”, that is, “they abided”, “stood with perseverance”. These are not people who, passing by, stopped out of mere morbid curiosity. Their being and standing there expresses a decision, a will, an interest, we might even say an involvement. The other aspect of the people’s attitude is expressed by the verb theoreîn, which here should be translated as “to observe reflectively” and not simply as “to see”. When an event is observed attentively, this is reflected inwardly on the observer and it will bring about a transformation. It is in fact from this careful observation, from this contemplation of the “spectacle” of a mocked and humiliated Messiah, that the repentance of the crowds in the face of the crucified Christ will arise.
On the cross Jesus the King is so stripped of himself that he does not respond to insults but remains silent, with only his nakedness as royal robes of state. I would be tempted to say that he responds with silence; but I wonder if his inner freedom and his being now with the Father in the depths of his heart (vv. 34, 46) do not take him even deeper than that, take him to where he no longer even hears the insults, taunts, and provocations, but listens only to the words of truth and humility of the “other criminal”, to whom he spontaneously promises communion with himself that very day in his Kingdom. At the beginning of his public ministry Jesus responded, as any good rabbi would, with words from Scripture to the temptations of Satan, the Divider (Lk 4:1-13), thus expressing his closeness to the Father and oneness with him. Now on the cross Jesus dwells in silence, and this silence is the seal of his intimacy with the Father. Jesus’ silence of compassion and self-surrender is itself the throne of selfless love and peace from where Christ rules as King of all the universe and of all ages. In brief, King Jesus will renew his surrender of himself to us at this very altar.
We should find God in what we know, not in what we don't; not in outstanding problems but in those we have already solved…. We must not wait until we are at the end of our tether: he must be found at the center of life and not only in death; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in activity, and not only in sin.
DIETRICH BONHEOFFER Prison Letters
The “bodily” union of humanity with God made present to it has been, in a manner beyond all comprehension, presented to us in terms of eros, as the fulfillment of what the Song of Songs had celebrated long before: existence as a bridal state.
HANS URS VON BALTHASAR A Theology of History