The First Sunday of Advent

You may remember the story of the Johnstown flood; we read the book by David McCullough in the refectory some years ago. It had been raining for days in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in the spring of 1889. A poorly constructed damn has broken above the town; and water is rising rapidly, higher and higher, in the town below. All is pandemonium, utter chaos. But one well-to-do family residing on the hillside in a lovely Victorian home is trying to let life go on as usual. (Denial, I think is what we’d call it today.) Their lawn and garden are submerged, and water is moving up their front steps, as they calmly finish their formal luncheon, seemingly oblivious. The maid clears the dessert dishes. And finally, the father of the family puts down his napkin, rises, and declares that they must all leave the house immediately and walk up the hill outside their home to higher ground. Everyone departs. The father has his little daughter’s hand. After a few steps his wife, walking arm in arm with her sister and the maid, disgusted at all the mud and slop and chaos, declares: “I prefer to return to the house.” “I will follow you,” says her sister. They pull the little girl away from her father, and the women reenter the house. Water is rapidly filling the first floor. They climb to the second with water at their feet. Moments later they hurry up the narrow stairway to the attic. The water rushes on. There are no more steps. The women are trapped and drowned. Miraculously the little girl is thrust out of the attic window by the force of the water, and she lands on a mattress floating by! After a harrowing journey, she is eventually reunited with her widowed father. 

Something was happening right under their noses. And tragically they weren’t getting it. It had after all been raining for days. “They did not know until the flood came and carried them all away,” says Jesus. “Therefore, stay awake. For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” Perhaps something is happening right under our noses too. There’s always that possibility that God in Christ is doing something, asking something of us, making a move in our direction and we’re just not getting it. There could be a flood of mercy and divine presence right at our door.

There is a wonderful twist in this passage, for as Jesus puts it this morning we have to stay awake- not to keep our house, our very selves locked tight to keep a thief out but vigilant instead to do the opposite– to leave our door unlocked for the Son of Man is very near; keep our hearts open, for Jesus the divine Thief, hidden in the dark of night, is looking for a way in.

Now the first question of course is this: What does a thief do? Well, he breaks in to take what does not belong to him. A second question follows. What is ours that a divine Thief would want? The answer? Our very selves, our sinful selves, our flesh, the mess we find ourselves in right now. He wants it all; He wants us. He is sneaking in to take it, to take us to himself now, to become with us, to become us at every moment- at every moment bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh; in an endless, relentless incarnation that is at the heart of His desire. For nothing that we are puts Him off. Our weakness draws Him; He wants to get in and take it all.

The Lord’s approach is so often unremarkable, so quiet that we need to keep awake or we’ll miss out. Aren’t we all still learning His way of doing things, how He moves in silence and obscurity? Hidden first of all in the warm womb of a very young, virgin mother, He then lives a sheltered small-town life as a carpenter and wandering preacher. Then in the excruciating hour of his death on the cross, all his beauty and divinity will be smeared, obscured by the blood and spittle of his passion. And finally, after His resurrection as He returns to his disciples; He will sneak in through locked doors and whisper, “Peace” and ask quietly for something to eat. The divine Thief is back, wounded and resurrected. And this is perhaps the best news of all, for this time He has come in through locked doors. Apparently, nothing can really keep Him out. The fear and need, the love and desire of His disciples for His presence, all of it absolutely magnetize Jesus’ heart and draw Him in. He can’t stay away.

So, in the end, our life of faith is always like that journey of the two disciples back from Emmaus as they reflect on their mysterious encounter with the Stranger. “It was the Lord,” they say.  “It was He all the time who was speaking to us, feeding us though we did not realize.” It is the Lord accompanying us, longing to enflesh himself in our ordinariness over and over though we may not always realize it. There is so much we just do not understand. It’s got to be that way. We believe, but we never get it all. How could we? God is Mystery. But rest assured it is our love and desire that give us a clear vision. Love is knowledge and assurance, because if we want to be with Him; He wants it more than we do.

God in Christ is hidden and yet revealing himself over and over, doing anything at all to get our attention, “playing in ten thousand places,” in nature and grace, over and over, all day long. Vigilance is essential, a willingness to be surprised at every corner of the cloister, as St. Bernard would say, because angels will be there- heavenly messengers- reminding us, as one did our Blessed Lady, that Someone is here. Someone is coming, stealing in; Someone wants to be our flesh now. Someone we love has seen our sad predicament and has come down to be with us now; always eager to turn things upside-down, He makes opportunities for mercy out of the disasters of our sinfulness.

Finally, perhaps His call to us this morning may be not so much, “Stay awake. Watch out,” with a threat of impending doom and divine retribution. Maybe it is a bit like the, “Watch this” of a kid just back from the field, from gymnastics or a dance class with a new play, a new move, a leap, or a twirl that she can’t wait to show off. “Look. Watch this. See what I can do.” Quiet as a thief on tiptoe, Christ Jesus is coming, present in a morsel of broken bread; the God of tiny violets and of tall, tall trees, too tremendous for us to grasp fully but also astoundingly, disarmingly ordinary. Let us open to this Thief; open the doors of our hearts to the flood. There is no need to seek higher ground; let us stay low instead so that we will be overwhelmed by mystery and mercy.

Homily by one of our monks.

Daring to be Thankful

 

A spring morning some years ago, I am lost in thought, puttering in the garden at the Cottage. Fr. Simon drives by in his motorized wheelchair, he is off to work in the treasury office, even though he is at this point bent and twisted and practically crippled with the Lou Gehrig’s disease that will eventually take him. He cranes his head toward me and pauses to say hello. “Oh Simon,” I say, “I’m so sorry.” “Sorry,” he says without missing a beat. “What’s to be sorry about? I have this wonderful chair.” And motioning to the hills, “And look at this beautiful place, our beautiful monastery. Nothing to be sorry about.”

Was the man simpleminded, overly pious, his sensibilities dulled after too many years in this place? I don’t think so; no, it was simply Fr. Simon’s natural self-forgetfulness. He could see far beyond his present situation and, trusting in the Lord, he shifted his focus to love, appreciation, and gratitude. My brothers and sisters, mindfulness of the gift received is always reorientation. It is after all what that one leper did, suddenly feeling his face soft and clean again, he realizes and rushes back to thank Jesus. What in our own experience will lead us to such gratitude?

This morning Jesus sees his Father’s outpoured love as the source of all blessings, and he rejoices exultantly. In the first movement of our Gospel narrative, his disciples return after successfully casting out demons in his name, and he reminds them most humbly, to rejoice not because of their newfound authority in using his name but because their names are written in heaven. In other words, they are remembered by the Father, fully known and beloved as he himself is. Jesus doesn’t dampen their enthusiasm; he reorients it; he ramps it up.

The power of Jesus’ name is effecting Satan’s demise, and he sees the Accuser falling like lightning. The kingdom is being established, the defeat of evil in all its forms has begun, and the dominion of Satan over humanity is over. And so Jesus exults in the Holy Spirit. How could he not? “At that very moment,” Luke tells us, Jesus rejoices in the Holy Spirit and says, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little children.” The Greek word Luke uses to express Jesus’ exultation is agalliáō (ah-ga-lee-ow’); it means being so glad you could jump for joy in celebration. It is the same expression Our Lady uses in her Magnificat – her heart leaps for joy because God Most High has looked with favor on her lowliness. Like his mother, Jesus rejoices because he knows himself first of all as beloved child of the Father, dependent always on the Father’s “good pleasure.”

And so, his elation blossoms into this ecstatic prayer of praise, adoration, and thanksgiving, which is often referred to as the “Cry of Messianic Exultation;” it expresses his intimate communion with the life of the Father in the Holy Spirit and his self-understanding as channel for the abundant life and blessing that God is and wishes to bestow. Jesus delights that he is Son, Child of the Father. Jesus delights that he is Receiver par excellence and that all he has received from the Father, he will pour out on us his disciples.

With Jesus and in him, we too are receivers, God’s own children, ever dependent on the gifts our Father delights pours out on us. Our greatest reason for rejoicing then is that we are endlessly remembered by God, our names written in heaven. We are unforgettable to God; his faithfulness is absolutely unwavering. And the scars forever engraved on the wounded body of the risen Lord Jesus are proof of God’s everlasting remembrance of us. This is our reason for hope, a hope beyond hope, in promises beyond our imagining. Gracious, open-handed receiving is our endless duty because receiving what does not end is itself endless. What is more, by humbly receiving ourselves in this way, we truly become ourselves and become conduits of grace for others with and in Jesus.

Still, how dare we rejoice and give thanks at this time? It can seem hare-brained, crass, and insensitive. Thanks for what? Things are falling apart everywhere – endless acts of terrorism and senseless gun violence in our country, daily calamity and heartbreak in Ukraine, Haiti, and erratic shifts in climate that signal our globe’s utter precarity. It’s all too much. Thanks? Better to say our prayers quietly and forget about it. But we dare not, for that would be to give Satan ascendancy. No, we do better, for though we do not see, we believe that the Lord is endlessly at work incognito - in us, through us, through our prayer, pouring himself out in love endlessly. Our faith demands this reorientation.

Empowered by our faith in his love, we dare to hope and give thanks, and even rejoice. The kingdom is coming to birth, and Satan is falling as Jesus the Messiah comes to reign. Blessings keep blossoming in the midst of despair. Our belovedness can never be trammeled, for God is doing everything to transform all creation - with us, through us; no defeat or terror too daunting for the interruption of his love. As his very beloved children in Christ, we acknowledge his dominion in our lives and together pledge our surrender to his mercy. And so, like Fr. Simon we reorient our vision and refuse not to give thanks, thanks born of confidence in God’s power and love, thanks for the humility that Jesus is.

As one ancient sage will assure us, “though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to tread on the heights.” Hab. 3 With hope and joy and gladness then let us go up to the altar of God.

Homily by one of our monks with insights for this piece from the USCCB website, Pope Benedict, “With the Heart of a Child,” an address given in 2011, and  Jean-Louis Chrétien: A God of Speech and Beauty by Christina M. Gschwandtner and the writings of Gerhard Lohfink.

Blessed Miguel Pro

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

These words of Saint Ignatius' prayer The Suscipe, sum up most poignantly the self-offering of the Mexican martyr, Blessed Miguel Augustin Pro. As a young man, Miguel renounced everything and entered the Society of Jesus. After his ordination, he carried on his priestly ministry in spite of the grave religious persecution of the Church in Mexico in the early 20th century. Often in disguise and continually foiling the best efforts of the Mexican secret police to arrest him, Miguel was eventually captured. On 23 November 1927, after forgiving his executioners, he extended his arms like his crucified Lord and was shot by a firing squad as he proclaimed "Viva Cristo Re!"

Jesus' life, his passion, and death are all about self-offering, self-forgetfulness, and loving obedience to the Father. Indeed, Jesus reinvents the meaning of kingship. How well Miguel Pro understood this; how beautifully and completely he imitated his King. How will we give Jesus all that we have, all that we are?

The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

 

Today we celebrate the tradition that Mary was dedicated to the Lord even from her childhood. She is presented in the Temple, but she herself will become the temple of God Most High.

Mary is the perfect medium for God’s self-expression- because most of all she is the unlikeliest, so small, among the most powerless. This is the brilliance of God’s unprecedented breakthrough in Mary - her of all people. She is young in a society that values age and wisdom; female in a world where men run everything; poor at a time when poverty implies divine disfavor; unmarried in a society in which a husband and children would grant her status, protection and validate her existence.* She has nothing and is nothing at all; a nobody, but she is just right for God. God is smitten. Mary is the perfect match for a God who is always captivated by what is little, humble and small; God who always prefers the lowest place, who always notices what is seemingly incongruous, upside-down, the least likely choice; a God who always surpasses human logic or expectation. Nothing is impossible for a God like that. The “never-to-be-surpassed” self-expression of God in Christ Jesus, the immensity of God’s beauty will dwell, hidden in nothingness, in the womb of Mary.* And God’s infinite pleasure in Mary’s nothingness will effect a marvelous exchange, for when God takes her flesh, God takes our flesh, as it is now. And nothing at all is impossible.

Mary models for us our human capacity to be God-bearers: every fiber of our being, our very selves totally available to God, for what God wants. And so at the Annunciation, we are witness to the surrender of love, the surrender of mutual desire that happens in any real relationship. Mary and God lose themselves in each other. If we take the Incarnation seriously, this is perhaps exactly what is so scandalous about God becoming human. God has lost himself in love, in the self-forgetfulness of love. Through Mary God is now subject to the laws of nature, of human flesh, its smells, its aches and heartaches, its narrowness and limitations, even its unpredictableness.

---

Tempera on panel by Andrea di Bartolo, 1400-1405. And insights from Luke Johnson, Luke: Sacra Pagina and Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth.

Christ Our King

       On Thursday of this past week, we celebrated the feast of St. Elizabeth of Hungary.  I like to think of her feast as a prelude to today's Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe. She was born in 1207, the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary and Queen Gertrude who was the sister of our beloved Cistercian oblate, St. Hedwig.  At the age of 4, she was sent to Germany to be educated and prepared for her arranged marriage (which took place 14 years later) to the princely lord, Ludwig the Landgrave of Thuringia.  Despite her exalted station in life—or perhaps because of her Christian insight into what true rulership is---she devoted much of her time and eventually all of her own wealth to personally feeding and clothing the poor and to nursing the sick poor in the hospitals she founded. When her beloved husband Ludwig died she was unceremoniously thrown out of the castle with her newborn baby in her arms by Ludwig's stuck-up and horribly cruel relatives. Her devotion to the poor—personally serving them, clothing them, nursing them—was too much for these so-called “nobles” to stomach. Elizabeth had taken to heart the gospel teachings on the corporal works of mercy and had seen in them the only way that an authentic Christian ruler reigns legitimately and so gives honor to the King of Kings, Jesus Christ the Lord.  Even among the saints, she is one of the most perfect examples of a person being conformed to the image and likeness of Christ—to the point of accepting in her own life the stark experience of His rejection and His suffering in her own life because she chose to follow him so radically.

        Jesus himself never uses the title “King.”   He knew it would confuse people into thinking he was leading a violent political movement.  His own chosen designation is “Son of Man” which so identifies him with us and yet hints also at his divine nature through the prophecy of Daniel.   However, when others use the title “king” about him, he does not deny it.  In the last chapters of St. Luke's gospel, Jesus ascends the mountainous road from Jericho to the Holy City of Jerusalem.  At Jericho, a blind man with spiritual insight calls out to Jesus and his royal status, “Son of David, have mercy on me.”  Jesus does not correct him and responds to the man wholeheartedly, curing his blindness and granting him the grace to follow him.  As Jesus enters Jerusalem, He is riding on the colt of a donkey in fulfillment of the prophecy of Zechariah of how the messianic King would manifest himself to Israel and all the nations.  Seeing him, the people cry out, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven!”  Hearing the crowd so hailing Jesus, the Pharisees order Jesus to tell his disciples to stop what they consider blasphemy.  Jesus answers, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”  Yes, the very stones would shout out that He is the anointed, the messianic King come to save us.  In the trial of Jesus, Pontius Pilate asks him straight out, “Are you the King of the Jews?”  To which Jesus answers with subtlety, “You say so!”  The matter is settled by Pilate when, with great irony, he writes out the inscription above the Cross, “This is the King of the Jews.”  This is the Gospel in miniature--first written by a pagan--because we know from the words of Jesus in John that “Salvation is from the Jews.”

       Recently, we heard that King Charles III would be firing 100 of his servants from one his residences to save on costs to the Royal Treasury.  This confirmed in my mind, at least, the worldly notion that kings are people who are served by their subjects and their legions of servants.  Christ the King turns that notion on its head.  He tells us, “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.”   The life of that royal person St. Elizabeth of Hungary echoes the life of Christ in her stripping away from herself all her possessions and wealth for the sake of the poor.  But the original sound of which that was the echo was the sound of Jesus letting himself be stripped of his very life as he is nailed to the cross for the life of the world.   We see him as the true King in today's gospel nailed to his crucifix throne with the banner over him proclaiming his identity, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS and so of all the nations on earth, as the prophet Zechariah foretold.   As the King of kings, he issues forth the decrees most proper to truly noble kings, namely, pardon, forgiveness, and mercy not only to the ignorant men who crucified him and to the repentant thief but to all people of all times everywhere.  May we surrender to his reign of love and mercy! Surrender to his reign of love and mercy!

       In the lifting up of King Jesus on the throne of the cross, he drew all people to himself to such a degree that those who surrender to the grace of the Redemption won by the cross, themselves become kings and queens in his Kingdom.  As the prophet Daniel foretold: “The holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom to possess it forever and ever.”  Paragraph 786 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church sums it all up it so beautifully, “... the People of God share in the royal office of Christ.  He exercises his kingship by drawing all men and women to himself through his death and resurrection.  Christ, King and Lord of the Universe, made himself the servant of all, for he came 'not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.'  For the Christian, 'to reign is to serve him,' particularly when serving 'the poor and suffering in whom the Church recognizes the image of her poor and suffering founder.' The People of God fulfills its royal dignity by a life in keeping with its vocation to serve with Christ.”

       Royals are noted for their sumptuous banquets.  Jesus the King has prepared this Eucharist for us his royal adopted sons and daughters—a banquet to sustain us on the Way as we serve with Him and divine food to transform us into living icons of Christ the King.  He calls out, “The banquet is ready! Come to the feast!”   Today's homily by Father Luke.

Saint Elizabeth's Secret

 

With her husband not far behind, annoyed at her constant almsgiving, the young Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was saved when the bread she had been carrying became a fragrant bundle of roses.

"Keep your deeds of mercy secret," recommends Our Lord. And in His providence, He accomplishes for Elizabeth, what His love has requested.

Illustration by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale. 

With Saint Gertrude

 

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, Fountain of eternal life, your Heart is a glowing furnace of love. You are my refuge and my sanctuary. O my adorable and loving Savior, consume my heart with the burning fire with which yours is inflamed. Pour down upon my soul those graces which flow from your love. Let my heart be united with yours. Let my will be conformed to yours in all things. May your will be the rule of all my desires and actions.

These are words of Saint Gertrude the Great, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth century, whom we remember today. Her ardor inspires us to follow Christ more fervently. One of her visions finds her resting at the open wound in Christ's side and listening to the beating of his Heart. Let us go with Gertrude to Christ's side and rest there.

O God, you are my God. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water. Psalm 62

Andrea del Verrocchio, Christ and Saint Thomas, bronze, 1483, Orsanmichele, Florence.