His Word

The seed is the Word of God. How do we receive the Word that is given to us each day, his Word spoken to us in prayer, in our lectio divina, in our hearts? Are our hearts broken enough, open enough, to receive the abundance he longs to give?

Let us bow our heads and beg his mercy.

Photograph by Father Emmanuel.

Uninterruptedly

Now, today. What keeps us from living the urgency of the now of Jesus’ presence and action in our lives? "Today.” says Jesus. “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing." Gratefully the Lord Jesus is relentless. Indeed God uninterruptedly uninterruptedly converses with us, even today, right now. Today his Word is being fulfilled in our hearing, if we will allow it. Today. Now, Jesus wants to free those who are oppressed, now he wants to remove our blindness, now he comes with great good news for us. Now he wants to make of us his compassion and his mercy-makers. Mercy-makers. But too often, perhaps, we find ourselves, despondent, walking to a nearby village with our heads down, much too slow to understand.  

Living in the todayness of Jesus’ compassionate presence always involves a surrender and a passover with him into a place of precariousness and uncertainty, where we are invited to abandon ourselves and depend on God alone, even unto death, just as he did on the cross. This happens most often when we crash headlong into our own limitations, when we do not know how to go on, when finally, in desperation, exasperation and near despair, we hand ourselves over into God’s hands, so that he can save us. Then our today comes.

Probably for most of us some great, earth-shattering revelation never comes. What we get instead are “daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”* And that is enough, more than enough for a day, today, the now of Jesus’ inbreaking. Each morning at Mass, Jesus opens the scroll and reveals himself, reveals our true selves in his Word and in the Sacrament of the Altar, and then we understand that we are enough in him.

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Meditation iincludes insights from Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth. What He Wanted, Who He Was. * Quote by Virginia Woolf.

Today

This morning Jesus proclaims his truth and his heart’s desire in a passage from Isaiah, one which probably he had heard and read more than once before. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” But today it's different; he understands himself in what he reads. He is this Word. The Word made flesh reads the scroll of the prophet and recognizes himself, his mission in and through the Word. He simply cannot keep this good news to himself and so he says, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing." And we hear an echo of the words he will speak later on to a Samaritan woman at a well, “I who am speaking with you am he; I myself am the mercy and compassion of the Father that Isaiah wrote about. This Word is me.”

Like Jesus, we too will come to understand ourselves, our truth in in the Word. And surely, like Jesus, each one of us has a passage that is ours, a word, words that have touched our hearts and describe something we perhaps always felt but never knew how to describe. This is our word, written by an author we never met, for Sacred Scripture is our Book. And best of all, whenever we engage with the Word, our reading is not just reading, it is encounter - with the Person of Jesus, Word made flesh and Splendor of the Father. Such is the truth of our own lectio divina - as we read, we discover, more often than not, that we ourselves are being read. The life we live is not our own. We are Christ’s body, part of him, in him.

And our stories are one with his. In Christ Jesus God “has become not only one of us but even our very selves.” Jesus himself is our story, our book, our destiny - now, today; Jesus is the Book - with "the power to reflect and illuminate our life; the one Book that forever informs how we navigate the life we have been given." The wounded and risen Jesus is the template that makes sense of each of our lives. 

Quotes from Thomas Merton & Katharine Smyth . Photograph by Father Emmanuel.

Solemnity of the Founders of Our Order: Saints Robert, Alberic & Stephen

When I think of Moses I dwell particularly on his leading Israel through the desert wilderness on the way to the promised land.  It was our Father Saint Robert who led the hermits of Colan from their solitude there even deeper into the wilderness forest of Molesme with the two “tablets” of the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Gospel as their guide. When this was no longer a place of solitude and fervent monastic life, he once again took up those tablets and led a monastic Israel to the inhospitable wilderness, “the desert place called Citeaux” there to found the first house of our Order. And, like Moses, Robert was denied the joy of really entering into the Promised Land that Citeaux would become. He was called back by the Pope to his original monastery of Molesme after only about eighteen months at the New Monastery.  We today still hold tenaciously to Robert's ideal of the monastery set in the wilderness in imitation of Our Lord's own predilection for deserts, mountain tops and wilderness as places of  prayer, where without  the distractions of the city,  one can come to better know oneself and God in Christ, God who allures us into the desert  there to speak to our hearts personally and communally through the Holy Spirit.

  Words from the Letter to the Hebrews were used to describe Saint Alberic in the early 12^th century narrative of the founding of the Order, the Exordium Parvum.  In Hebrews 11:36 our ancestors in the faith are described as those who “endured mockery, scourging, even chains and imprisonment.” Likewise Alberic is described in chapter 9 of the Exordium as “a learned man, that is to say, well versed in things divine and human, a lover of the Rule and of the brethren, who had for a long time been carrying out the office of prior in the church of Molesme...and who had striven and labored much and long so that the brethren could pass from Molesme to this place (of Citeaux); and who for the sake of this affair, had to endure many insults, imprisonment, and stripes.”   We, who are so inspired by the purity of heart of our founders, can easily forget how much shock, scandal and anger the decision of Abbot Robert, Prior Alberic and 20 other monks to leave Molesme must have caused. This probably led to Alberic's suffering so many insults and even violence from the abandoned monks of Molesme. The decision to found Citeaux took real courage and tremendous faith in the face of hostility.

  Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Mark made me think of the one authentic letter of Saint Stephen Harding in our possession. There in Chapter 10 Jesus speaks lovingly to his disciples as his “sons,” his own children and encourages them to the renounce earthly riches and even the  the joys of home and family for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven with the promise of a new kind of wealth in God and in human relationships that goes beyond anything they have known - a hundred-fold increase.

  A few years before his death in 1133. Stephen wrote to Abbot Thurstan and the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Sherborne in England which he had entered as a boy. While still a young monk, Stephen became discouraged and left. He writes, “Fear Christ, but with love; and love him, but with fear.” Stephen says that he who ran off encountered “the riches of God's mercy,” so that he “the empty vessel” who had left the monastery of Sherborne was himself filled by “the living fountain” that is the Lord, for at his death Stephen was head of an Order with 40 monasteries.

  We see here the fulfillment of the Lord's promise in Mark’s Gospel of a hundred times more brothers and sisters and homes. Stephen concludes, “I exhort your love to strive to make the good repute you have... the occasion for further progress in virtues, so that, progressing from what is good to what is better and cleaving firmly to monastic observance, you may never cease to observe chastity and humility, submitting yourselves to the zealous practice of frugality together with charity even unto death that you may see the God of gods. Amen.”

 Icon of the Holy Founders written by Brother Terence. Excerpts from today’s homily by Father Luke.

Put All Things Aside

My happiness lies in you alone...Your will is my delight.

Our life in the monastery makes us available to be drawn as completely, as immediately, as constantly as the disciples were - to be completely open, vulnerable to the compelling presence of Christ. He beckons us even now. And it is never too late to love him with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength. Perhaps we feel that there is always too little to give, but it is never ever too late to give all that we can, for he is incessantly drawing us to himself.

The bells are our constant summons to put all things aside. “The monks will always be ready to arise without delay when the signal is given,” says St. Benedict. “On hearing the signal the monk will immediately set aside what he has in hand and go with utmost speed.” Such attentiveness is grace and gracefulness. And it is why we have come here,  a way to name our deepest desire. At the first stirrings of his call, were not our hearts burning within us? Let us go to him once again without hesitation, without a second thought, for our desire is itself his gift and his desire for us. 

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Meditation by one the monks.

Protection & Welcome

A great prayer for life is urgently needed, a prayer which will rise up throughout the world. Through special initiatives and in daily prayer, may an impassioned plea rise to God, the Creator and lover of life, from every Christian community, from every group and association, from every family and from the heart of every believer. 

We pray that that every human being will be protected in law and welcomed in life. 

Photograph by Father Emmanuel. Excerpt from Evangelium Vitae of Pope Saint John Paul II. 

With Mary at Cana

When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
"They have no wine."
And Jesus said to her,
"Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servers,
"Do whatever he tells you." John 2

Mary cares for us, always attentive to our needs, to whatever we lack. She always speaks to Jesus on our behalf, "They have no wine." Perhaps, in other words, "They need you, they depend on the joy and gladness and consolation only you, my Son, can provide."

In turn Mary always says to us, "Do whatever he tells you." As if to say, "Never despair, be attentive to him, to his invitation, trust that he will always fill you with good things and  transform your ordinariness, your emptiness, if you make it available to him."

The Marriage Feast at Cana, Juan de Flandes (Netherlandish, active by 1496–died 1519 Palencia), ca. 1500–1504, Oil on wood, 8 1/4 x 6 1/4 in. (21 x 15.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Used with permission.