First Vespers of the Anniversary of the Dedication of the Abbey Church

Today we celebrate the Anniversary of the Dedication and Consecration of our Abbey Church. This is a special solemnity that is ours alone. This rose window pictured above, composed as it is from fragments of glass from the large lancet window in the church of the monastery of Our Lady of the Valley, is an apt symbol of the many transitions that have marked our community's history.

Our community first took root at the monastery of Petit Clairvaux in Tracadie, Nova Scotia in the mid-nineteenth century. But in 1892 and again in 1896 disastrous fires devasted the monastic buildings.

Soon the monastery moved from Nova Scotia to Lonsdale, Rhode Island. The small community, accompanied by their livestock arrived in the summer of 1900, and regular monastic life was resumed on August 2. Their new home was called Our Lady of the Valley. When in 1950 this abbey was ravaged by fire, the community of one hundred and forty persons was homeless.

Fortunately, benefactors had already helped them purchase a large dairy farm in Spencer, Massachusetts in 1949. And the fire only accelerated the community's projected move. The monks soon adapted the farm buildings for monastic purposes. And on December 23, 1950, eighty monks took possession of Saint Joseph's Abbey. We continue to discern God’s loving plan in our common life in this place and look forward with great hope to the future.

Depending on Him Alone

If we only knew the gift of God. If only we knew; if only we understood Jesus’ desire to refresh us. For even as he invites us to come to him with our thirst, it is he who is thirsting for us to thirst for him. His thirst is his unending desire for us.

 Christ Jesus longs to fill us with himself, to heal and console and “mercy” us. But there’s a hitch; we have to remember who we are- sinners, who are indescribably loved by God in Christ and desperately in need of his sweet mercy; parched, thirsting, longing for the water that he is. If as Pope Francis reminds us over and over, we are to go to the fringes to be with the poor and forgotten, it is first of all to the fringes, the frontiers of our own poverty, sinfulness, and brokenness that we must travel. For down there in the dry, dark recesses of our broken hearts, we will discover just how thirsty we are; there we will discover the breadth of our desire, our need for a Redeemer; discover how dry, how barren and desolate we really are. We need to get down there and bear in peace the reality of our poverty. Our poverty makes Christ Jesus happy, not because he wants to make us sad, but because it allows him to fill us with himself, which is all he really wants to do. And our unending work is to let ourselves be defenseless, utterly defenseless, in the face of such love; utterly nonresistant to Jesus’ desire for us and so discover him continually thirsting for us.

 Jesus desires to surrender himself to us. It is the secret we were born for. If only we realized God’s gift and who it is who is thirsting for us, we would ask him over and over, and he would give us the living water that he is. The only condition is desire. Indeed, to “come to the living water of Christ, you do not need merit, all you need is thirst.”1 I invite you to be disarmed by God’s desire for you, “the intensity of His blessed longing for you; for he longs to be longed for, loves to be loved and desires to be desired;”2 “he thirsts to be thirsted after.”3 We know this is how St. Ignatius concludes the Exercises, in the “Contemplation on Divine Love.” There he asks the retreatant to ponder “how much the Lord desires to give himself to me”: Quanto el Señor desea dárseme. Probably this was what filled his heart with such gratitude that he would often sob and sob at the altar during Mass.

Our prayer affords us the extravagance of luxuriating in our helplessness and utter dependence on God, our confidence in a God who loves and loves. Indeed, the love of Jesus for us is unmanageable. And most of all it is the unmanageability of Jesus’ desire for us that is most baffling. He can’t help himself. God is helpless, hopelessly in love. He has fallen in love with what he created.4

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Reflection by one of our monks. References: 1. Guerric of Igny, 2.  Maximus the Confessor, 3. Saint Augustine,4. Catherine of Siena..

With Our Lady on Saturday

 

Sacred Scripture often instructs us in the ways of God by the use of extreme contrasts. Today we recall the essential role the Mother of God plays in our lives as she accompanies us every step of our way to the Kingdom. Startlingly, the Church puts before us the distressing scene in Matthew’s Gospel of the lascivious dance of Herodias’ daughter before Herod at his birthday party (Mt 14:1-12). In the narrative, you can practically hear the hiss of the serpent as it slithers around Herod’s banquet hall. The girl’s dance bears the fruit of death in the beheading of John the Baptist. She performs a grim dance of lustful enticement and manipulation, which keenly contrasts our Lady’s lovely dance of humility and obedience before the throne of God—a dance of grace, this, that bears us the fullness of life in the fruit of her womb, Jesus.

 The dazzling contrast between stubborn Eve and gracious Mary, respectively our mothers in the orders of creation and of redemption, is to be found on every page of the Bible if you look for it. It is intended to provoke in us a crisis that makes us choose between haughty self-will and loving obedience, which is to say between death and life. To what, then, do we want to give birth in this world? For whose delight shall we dance? Without hesitation, let us joyfully join our Lady in her virginal dance of life!

Photograph by Brother Brian. Reflection by Father Simeon.

Hosts of the Lord

We celebrate today Mary, Martha, and Lazarus- Hosts of the Lord, and our Gospel took us to Bethany. After Lazarus has been raised by Jesus there is a dinner in the house of his dear friends and Mary washes Jesus’ feet. This often reminds us of another scene in John’s Gospel- Jesus washing the feet of his disciples on the night before his crucifixion. We know that foot washing was something a Gentile slave could be required to do, but never a Jewish slave. Wives typically did foot-washing for their husbands, children for their parents, and disciples for their teachers. There is undoubtedly a level of intimacy involved in these last scenarios. And in Jesus' case, there is an obvious reversal of roles.* Jesus calls his disciples his friends. And by washing their feet he overcomes in this act of loving intimacy the inequality that exists between them. And so he establishes an intimacy with them that signals their access to everything he had received from his Father, even the glory that is his as Beloved Son.* 

We like to imagine that Jesus was inspired to wash their feet because he had been so touched by what was done for him at Bethany six days before Passover when Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil and anointed his feet most tenderly and dried them with her hair. Was this something that inspired his own most loving action on this night before he died? Perhaps. In any event, Peter cannot bear the thought of his teacher doing this. We can imagine that it was probably something his wife had done for him many times. And doubtless, he, like the others, is embarrassed by the intimacy of it, the touch, the loving condescension, and the unaffected tenderness, the unmanageability of the love that is so available. It’s disorienting. We see now it is a parable, a parallel to what he would do for us on the cross the next afternoon.

How can we allow Christ Our Lord and Our Honored Guest to regale us with a love that is truly unimaginable and unmanageable?

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*See Biblegateway.com. and Sandra Schneiders Written That You May Believe,.

Blessed Stanley of Oklahoma

 

We rejoice this day celebrating the American martyr for the faith, Blessed Stanley Rother. An Oklahoma priest he became a missionary in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, where he served the native tribe of the Tz’utujil. Father Rother was surrounded by the extreme poverty of the Tz’utujil and ministered to them tirelessly.

During his time in Guatemala, a civil war raged between government forces and guerrillas. Despite great pressures, the Church continued to catechize and educate the people. Thousands of Catholics were killed. And when Father Rother’s name appeared on a death list, he briefly returned to the States. But he was so dedicated to his people that he soon returned to Guatemala insisting, “the shepherd cannot run.”

A few months later three men entered his rectory around 1 a.m. on July 28, 1981, fought with Father Rother, and then executed him. The people of Santiago Atitlan mourned the loss of their leader and friend and requested that Father Rother’s heart be kept in Guatemala where it remains enshrined today.

As monks, we pray that our lives of hidden prayer and work may be filled with ardor and devotion like that of Blessed Stanley.

Biography adapted from the website of the Diocese of Oklahoma City.

What Takes Your Breath Away

In the finding of the treasure and the finding of the pearl, there is a certain element of surprise, unexpectedness and wonderment. It is almost like it is too good to be true. Like finding the one special person that you want to spend the rest of your life with or the vocation that you cannot wait to embrace. It is breathtaking, and you are willing to spend the rest of your days catching your breath. 

Let us breathe deeply the air of God's breathtaking, merciful finding of each one of us.

Photograph by Brother Guerric. Meditation by Father Damian.

 

Saints Joachim & Ann

Filled with wonder at the mystery of the Incarnation, the Church continually imagines and reimagines the ramifications of God’s enfleshment in all its ordinariness. And so today we celebrate the maternal grandparents of Jesus, named by ancient tradition as Joachim and Ann. Jesus had grandparents. Did they babysit? Did they spoil him? Perhaps. Probably.

Christ Jesus is always more ordinary and available to us than we know, longing to be hidden with us day by day, moment by moment. It is God’s ordinariness in Jesus our Lord that reveals the immeasurable beauty of his humble love for us.

Giotto di Bondone, The Meeting at the Golden Gate, 1305, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. This is thought to be one of the earliest depictions of a couple kissing.