ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

“This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Jesus responds to this charge of the Pharisees and scribes with three parables: first, the Parable of the Lost Sheep, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine in order to bring back the one lost sheep; and then the Parable of the lost coin, in which a woman with ten silver coins loses one and searches diligently until she finds it. Both cases are causes for calling together friends and neighbors to rejoice and celebrate, for what they once had lost but has been found and restored to them. Jesus concludes the parable of the lost sheep by saying, “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.” And at the end of the Parable of the Lost Coin: “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents. He concludes with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which we have just heard. Today, Laetare Sunday, the Church a...

The Church lives Christ’s redemptive sacrifice throughout the liturgical year. However, in the season of Lent we would like to immerse ourselves in it in a particularly intense way, as the Apostle urges us: "Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation!” (2 Corinthians 6:2). In this important season, the treasures of Redemption, merited for us by Christ crucified and risen, are dispensed to us in a most particular way. Thus the Psalmist’s exclamation: "Create in me a clean heart… and put a new and right spirit within me" becomes during Lent a strong call to conversion. ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II Homily, Ash Wed., 12 Feb. 1997

The New Testament uses the language of the Body of Christ so as to drum in a message about unity not simply as cooperation but as a sort of mutual creation: we constitute each other… In the central act of worship, the Eucharist, we come together to be fed—fed buy a reality wholly other to us yet made wholly accessible to us; fed so that we can feed one another. The Eucharist isn't an occasion when we set out to celebrate our togetherness and to encourage each other by the degree of our warm fellowship and close agreement. It is as we meet that we are fed by Christ, and because we are fed by him that we become able to feed each other. Somehow, no account of unity that doesn't bring us to this place is going to be adequate. ROWAN WILLIAMS The Tablet, 18 Jan. 2008

Two unavoidable things about fire: it both gives light and burns. In 1955 Flannery O’Connor said the following to one of her correspondents on her difficulties in being a Catholic writer: “One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, the whole reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation: that is, nobody in your audience.” Now, why would she refer to the central mystery of our faith as awful in its effects? Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t put it past her to be playing on the two meanings of the word “awful”: at the same time the everyday one of “terrible, off-putting” and then the other more exalted one: “full of awe”. Indeed, the fact that God at a certain point decided to become a human being is at the same time the most comforting and the most problematic of events, if we take it with all the earnestness of a believer like Flannery O’Con-nor, or o...

Let us ask for the grace to believe that with God things really do change, that he will banish our fears, heal our wounds, turn our arid places into springs of water. Let us ask for the grace of hope, since hope revives our faith and rekindles our charity. It is for this hope that the deserts of today's world are thirsting. POPE FRANCIS Custodians of Wonder: Daily Pope Francis

MOSES, MY BROTHER, MY SELF Conversion is the central theme of the readings from Sacred Scripture for this Third Sunday of Lent, following on the heels of faith on the first Sunday and covenant on the second. The call to conversion is evident in the Gospel text, where we twice hear from Jesus himself the poignant warning: Unless you are converted, you will perish. The call to conversion is also present in St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in the second reading, in the form of an admonition not to fall into idolatry and to fight bravely and continually against temptations of all sorts because such a fight is what the drama of conversion looks like in the concrete. And in the first reading from Exodus, conversion appears as a decisive turning point in the life of Moses. The crisis occurs at the moment when Moses receives from the Lord the explicit commandment to do something that Moses had already decided upon on his own, namely, the task of delivering the children of Israel f...

The perfect person does not only try to avoid evil, nor does he do good for fear of punishment, still less in order to qualify for the hope of a promised reward. The perfect person does good through love. His actions are not motivated by desire for personal benefit, so he does not have personal advantage as his aim. But as soon as he has realized the beauty of doing good, he does it with all his energies and in all that he does. He is not interested in fame, or a good reputation, or a human or divine reward. The rule of life for a perfect person is to be the image and likeness of God. CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA Miscellaneous Studies, 4, 22

  It was on this day one dozen years ago that our beloved Pope Francis inaugurated his papal ministry. In the course of the ceremony he received the Fisherman's Ring as one of the symbols of his office, the Petrine Ministry.   This ring is like a wedding ring that symbolically binds him as Christ's Vicar to his beloved bride, the Catholic Church. I think of what is said to husbands in the Epistle to the Ephesians: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over to her.”          We celebrate today the Solemn Feast of St. Joseph, the husband of Mary.   With a grace filled love for her and obedience to God, Joseph handed himself over to her.   Mary was, indeed, the sole member of the Church of Jesus Christ.   In handing himself to her as husband he became, to use the word of Pope Francis in his inaugural sermon, he became the “Protector” of the seedling Church that was Mary with Jesus within her.   ...

And what is tenderness? It is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other, our ears to hear the other, to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. A child's love for mom and dad grows through their touch, their gaze, their voice, their tenderness. I like when I hear parents talk to their babies, adapting to the little child, sharing the same level of communication. This is tenderness: being on the same level as the other… POPE FRANCIS Video Message, April 26, 2017  

That we are poor sinners doesn't mean we should feel guilty for existing, as many people may unconsciously do. God's look gives us full rights to be ourselves, with our limitations and deficiencies. It gives us the "right to make mistakes," and delivers us, so to speak, from the imprisoning sense that we ought to be something other than we are. That feeling does not originate in God's will but in our damaged psyches. JACQUES PHILIPPE Interior Freedom

Love, therefore, is the origin and source of all good things; it is a most excellent defense, the road that leads to heaven. Whoever walks in love can neither stray nor be afraid. Love guides, love protects, love leads to the end. Christ our Lord, brethren, set up for us this ladder of love, and by it every Christian can climb to heaven. You must, therefore, keep a firm hold on love, you must show it to one another, and by progress in it climb up to heaven. ST. FULGENTIUS OF RUSPE

The real problem in prayer is not the absence of God but the absence of us. It's not that God isn't there; it’s (nine times out of ten) that we are not. We are all over the place, entertaining memories, fantasies, anxieties. God is simply there in unending patience, saying to us, “So when are you actually going to arrive? When are you going to sit and listen, to stop roaming about, and be present?” ROWAN WILLIAMS Being Disciples: Essentials of the Christian Life

Lent, the springtime of the Church, situates us between two gardens-- the garden of Eden, that lush middle Eastern paradise where the first Adam lost his innocence and the garden of the Resurrection on Easter morning where Jesus the new Adam wounded and resurrected will walk in peace restoring our lost innocence. In between we spend forty days with him in the desert. Named by the Father, Beloved Son at his baptism, Jesus is now led by the Spirit into the desert to be tested by Satan. The ache of hunger, the lure of cheap, empty success, the enticement of having all nations under his control by misuse of his power. These temptations are all about the nature of Jesus’ vocation and his ministry, and the Evil One’s determination to have Jesus deny his identity as Beloved Son and to doubt the mission he has received from the Father. As if to say: “Just forget this Incarnation thing. Why bother? It will be too messy. Why trouble yourself? Just be God, you know, heavenly, far away. I’ll take ...

Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that Source. It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith… It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words, or even in clear concepts. THOMAS MERTON New Seeds of Contemplation

“Even now, says the LORD, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God. …” This is the summons from the prophet Joel that opens our Lenten season: “Return!” I couldn’t help but hear resonances from St. Bernard’s sermon 74 which we read in our Experientia program, only with an unexpected twist. In that sermon it was the soul crying out to her beloved to return. As St. Bernard put it, “When the Word leaves the soul, the enduring desire for him becomes a single, sustained cry of the soul, a single, sustained call of “Return” until he come.” The Word inspires this cry in the soul. But today, we have a reversal. It is not the soul, crying out for her Bridegroom. It is the Lord crying out to our souls and to the entire Church to return with her whole heart.   The entire Church needs to hear this call to return. Holy as she is, she has strayed on all too many occasions. At times she come...

Saint Benedict is almost ruthless on the question of self seeking—self-will. What he is aiming at is to eradicate from our lives—to save us from ourselves—those forms of self-seeking and assertiveness which lead us into misery and constitute a barrier between ourselves and God. There is nothing so subtle, so pervasive, as the enthronement of “self” at the expense of others and of God. CARDINAL BASIL HUME, OSB The Intentional Life

Through persistence in the Jesus prayer the intellect obtains a state of sweetness and peace… The more the rain falls on the Earth, the softer it makes it; similarly, the more we call upon Christ’s Holy Name, the greater the rejoicing and exaltation it brings to the earth of our heart… The sun rising over the Earth creates the daylight; and the vulnerable and Holy Name of the Lord Jesus, shining continually in the mind, gives birth to countless thoughts radiant as the sun. The Philokalia, Vol. 1