Last evening our Brother Christopher passed quietly to the Lord after a prolonged illness. He was a devoted lay brother, a great lover of this place, and dedicated to caring for the monastery grounds and making our monastery more beautiful wherever and whenever he could. We recommend him to your prayers. May he rest in peace with His Lord in Paradise.
The Galilee
of Jesus’ day was a muddle of power struggles; rich elites were getting richer
and richer by burdening the poor with endless tolls and ever-higher taxes. And
religious leaders kept piling on rules and regulations that assured the poor of
their exclusion. Jesus arrives and announces a higher grace. (See David Brooks) He brings good news to the poor, sets free
those oppressed and heavily burdened, and he is teaching the people how to hope
again. Jesus is this great surge of God’s compassion rushing in with a
relentless, astoundingly gentle but ferocious urgency and energy. And he is
enacting a great reversal. He eats with sinners, casts out demons, and cures people
no matter which day of the week it is. He touches lepers and so has become
unclean. He even dares to forgive sins. Who does he think he is?
Jesus sees
things differently, he grants access to the kingdom directly to outcasts and
the downtrodden, offering not pity but blessing. He speaks to them this morning
on a “stretch of level ground” – their level. The standards of the world are
toppled. Jesus is with them, he has become poor for their sake, he is a
wandering preacher, who has nowhere to rest his head. Jesus is the love and
beauty of God, this breakthrough of God’s compassion in the midst of all the
muck, violence, and pettiness. And as he mingles openly with his often underfed
and unemployed followers, Jesus assures them: “You are seen by God. You may be
poor and hungry, weeping and hated, but you are blessed, never ever forgotten.”
In and through Jesus, they have been found by God’s compassion. We can well
imagine their surprise as they hear his message this morning. More than one
looks over their shoulder to see who he’s talking to. “Oh, I think he means
us.” Jesus is not joking around nor offering false hope but assuring them of
the fullness and joy that God wants for them. Jesus topples the values of the
world and invites us to see the world in terms of God’s values. He names the
poor makarios, truly blessed and fortunate; they can rejoice in the
midst of their suffering for in God’s eyes they are favored.
Now, it’s
embarrassing to admit, but most of the time I come to the Gospel Beatitudes,
wondering how I’m doing. You know like: how m’I doin'? Would Jesus number me
among his blessed ones? Did I make the cut? After all, I’ve had some tough
breaks. Right? But am I poor enough, have I suffered enough? Fool that I am. At
this point I sense the Lord giving me the time-out sign. Time out, this isn’t
tryouts for the kingdom. The invitation is simply to listen, just listen to
Jesus, stay with him, abide with him and notice those whom he names blessed.
Notice who it is that is getting his attention and allow my priorities to be
shifted.
Any of us
who have had the privilege of working with the truly poor have experienced
this. I remember working in Belize many years ago. I would often go to the very
simple home of one family; it was a little wooden house on stilts. I loved
being there with these friends. They didn’t have much. One evening they
announced, “We have something special for you.” What could it be? Jello. (I
hate jello.) But that night jello became sacred. Holy Communion. I savored
every bit of my lime jello like never before.
The
Beatitudes are not a checklist for the spiritually ambitious, but an invitation
to see as God sees. An invitation to notice who Jesus is speaking to and
quietly, gratefully, graciously, humbly find our place with him among those who
are disadvantaged and oppressed and learn to live by a new set of standards.
Abiding with the poor, staying with the poor Christ, we learn what is truly
important. It’s about welcoming vulnerability and being unattached to anything
less than God. It’s not about doing anything but responding to the hope and higher grace that Jesus relentlessly offers. He is our true
Beatitude, though
he was rich, yet for our sake he became poor, abandoned even unto death on a
cross.
But woe to
us, woe to us if, stranded in our selfishness, we are forgetful of our constant
dependence on God’s mercy and compassion. Woe to us if we forget that our
blessedness demands that we learn to see as God sees, and to love as God loves. Woe
to us if we ignore the poor. Beatitude is about stepping into the blessedness of
those who know their desperate need for God, those who have no other treasure
but him.
I am reminded of an afternoon some years ago, as I was trudging down Broadway in Manhattan feeling terribly despondent as I made my way to class. I was stopped in my tracks, as I noticed, written in large letters with colored chalk on the sidewalk, these words: “I am well-pleased.” It was as if the sidewalk itself was crying out – “You are seen, you are noticed, even blest, you have been found by God’s compassion.” Maybe we could write that all over the cloister floors, on all the hallway floors: “I am well pleased.” Might be helpful.
Who is Jesus noticing? Who am I noticing? Whom have you seen? Who do you see each day around here? A brother with Lou Gehrig’s disease literally dragging himself into this church to pray Vigils. A young monk in a rush interrupted and now leaning down to an elder who wants him to read the latest notes on the bulletin board to him. The one I judge, the one I take for granted, the one I’ve made invisible. How will I notice the poor one I am liable to miss, the ignored or forgotten one - in my world, in my heart, in my mirror?
In the kingdom proclaimed by Jesus this morning, a revolution is happening, with vulnerability at the center. Inadequacy and vulnerability are the keys to beatitude, the source of all that can give us life and joy, love, belonging, and connectedness. For when I am vulnerable, I realize that I desperately need God; I realize that I desperately need others. And I come to understand that I am perfectly incomplete, perfectly inadequate, and on the way, certainly not poor like the truly economically disadvantaged whom Jesus addresses this morning, but somehow, connected by the grace of self-knowledge. Then real prayer becomes possible. And Eucharist becomes real. How blessed are they who trust in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord. How truly blessed are those who know their desperate need for God.
Photograph by Brother Brian. Reflection by one of our monks.
"Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!”
The Gospel passage chosen for our
celebration of the feast of the Holy Founders of Citeaux concerns the problem
of wealth. Wealth is an obstacle to following Jesus and to participating
in his kingdom. It follows immediately upon Jesus’ encounter with the rich man.
In that passage, as we well know, a man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him,
and asks him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” After he
has assured Jesus that he has observed all the commandments from his youth, and
yet finds his heart yearning for something more, Jesus, Mark says, looks at him
and loves him and says: “You are lacking one thing. Go, sell what you have, and
give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow me.”
Mark tells us that “At that statement [the man’s] face fell, and he went away
sad, for he had many possessions.”
The rich man was without doubt a pious man. He had for many years dedicated himself to following the commandments. But he lacked the one thing necessary: the gift of being free enough from his possessions to follow Jesus’ call wholeheartedly. Despite Jesus’ clear signs of affection for him, despite his penetrating and loving gaze (he is the only person in the whole of Mark’s Gospel that it is explicitly stated that Jesus looked on him with love) a gaze that pierced through to the truth of the man, recognized his possibilities, saw what was lacking in him, and with fatherly affection showed him the way forward, he rejected the call, preferring to remain in his gloom yet surrounded by his many possessions. The vision of this man, his face fallen with and grieving, going away from the expectant, hopeful Jesus and his band of disciples is a powerful and disturbing image of the alienating power of sin. The rich man is to all appearances and by regular human standards a good man, but in the encounter with Jesus, which the rich man initiated, when faced with the offer of fellowship and communion, he chose isolation instead. In going away and in his isolation he denied himself the possibility of hearing the promise of the hundredfold Jesus just a few minutes later spoke to his disciples.
The disappointment and frustration of Jesus
are apparent in his response: Jesus then looked around and said to his
disciples: “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of
God!” The disciples are amazed at what he said, so he says a second time, (which
is where today’s Gospel takes up the narrative): “Children, how hard it is to
enter the kingdom of God!” Then he extrapolates, “it is easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for one who is rich to enter the kingdom
of God.” The image of alienation and separation is strengthened when he
remember that Jesus looked around and said to his disciples. The image I have
is of the rich man walking away in the other direction by himself, shoulders
slumped, head down, while Jesus now looks on his group of disciples with the
attention and fatherly affection the rich man so recently enjoyed, gathering
them by his attentive and penetrating gaze. Throughout the history of the
interpretation of the camel and the needle’s eye there have been a variety of
attempts to modify or soften its meaning, as one scholar puts it, by dwarfing
the camel and expanding the needle’s eye. For example, the explanation that
Jerusalem had a small gate called “the Needle’s Eye” through which camels might
pass, an idea we can find that already in St.Thomas Aquinas’ Catena Aurea ascribed to
St. Anselm. In the apocryphal work, The Acts of Andrew and Peter, a needle’s
eye actually grows miraculously until a camel is able to pass through it.
St. Jerome, on the other hand, in his commentary on Matthew, has the camel loaded down with possessions, making the task of an already large beast passing through the eye of a needle even more absurd. I follow the opinion that the saying fits better with what follows if it is left to its straightforward meaning of an impossible task. For when the apostles say to one another, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus’ answer shifts the whole matter away from human endeavor and capacity and onto God: "For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. All things are possible for God." So God can save even the rich man. Jesus has not given up on him.
We cannot save ourselves, it is a gift. We
cannot so to speak pull ourselves into eternal life by our bootstraps. But we do
have to receive the gift as and when it is given. And as the encounter with the
rich man shows, it is not received passively but requires discipleship and
leaving behind everyone contrary to it. We must allow the look of Jesus to
penetrate our hearts and tell us who we are in his eyes and what our response
is to be. The call to the rich man was specific to him. It was tailored to the
particular idea Jesus and therefore God had of him. Jesus did not tell everyone
he encountered to “Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor”. This was what was fitting for this man. But
everyone he encountered was invited to enter his kingdom, to be part of the new
family he was forming, each in his own way. None less or more than the others,
but each according to the idea God has of them, conceived in eternity from the
abundance of his love.
Wealth is a problem for Jesus because it
stifles the capacity to hear and to respond.
In Jesus’ view this capacity is found most of all in the child. In fact,
the passage just before that of the rich man is that in which people are
rebuked by the disciples for bringing children to Jesus and he says, “Let the
children come to me…for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. And then:
Amen, Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a
child will not enter it. In our Gospel for today, he calls his disciples
“children”: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! (Mar
10:24 NAB). From one perspective, Jesus is like a father to them, begetting
them into his new family. But from another perspective, that of the relation of
Jesus to his Father, Jesus is the Child, the archetypal child, and the
disciples are children in him of the one Father. From this perspective, Jesus
is the archetypal example and teacher of what it is to be a child before God. Therefore
there is no paternalistic attitude here on the part of the Jesus when he calls
his disciples ‘children’. Rather, it belongs to his desire to share with his
disciples his communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit by granting them a
share in his Sonship.
Ever-begotten anew by the Father, who is
“greater than I”, Jesus lives in the amazement of having received himself as
sheer gift. The Father has handed everything over to him and this knowledge is
for Jesus a source of infinite amazement, wonder, and gratitude. In love, he
receives the gift and hands it over again to the Father in total surrender. Jesus’
thirst is for his Father’s love and in everything he does he strives to abide
in it. Jesus loves children because they thirst for love, they feel his love,
surrender to it and take it with them into their lives as a matter of course.
In order to remain in this love, which is precious to them because it
corresponds to their yearning, they do or at least try to do, what love
demands. When children behave badly, they do what they can to come back into
love. They yearn for love. They receive the gift of the kingdom as the answer
to their yearning.
Personally, I find it helpful to see the
hopes and ideals of our Cistercian Founders, and of St. Benedict before them,
in terms of an attempt to create a space for a life of spiritual childhood,
that is, a space in which the freedom to receive the kingdom of God as Jesus
offers it in a disposition of wonder and gratitude is fostered and realized. Of
course, spiritual childhood is a grace, it cannot be manufactured, but certain
conditions can be set up in which the grace
may be received and flower. In his circular letter of 1998, Dom Bernardo Olivera
synthesized the ideals of our Founders as expressed in the primitive documents
as follows:
Authenticity in monastic observance in the
spiritual life and in liturgical life.
Simplicity and poverty in everything, so as
to follow and be poor with, the poor Christ.
Solitude so as to be able to live with God
while building up a communion of brothers.
Austerity of life and of work, so as to
promote the growth of the New Man.
Conformity to the Rule of St. Benedict that
is absolute, that is, without additions contrary to the Rule’s spirit and
letter.
In offering us the grace of our Cistercian
charism, Jesus asks us to make the simple act of trust of embracing its ideals.
Since it is our call, it is through them and nowhere else that he will be able
to pull us out of and beyond our private, personal and complicated selves, into
conformity with his spiritual childhood, and therefore into the joy of his
fellowship with the Father and the Spirit and the whole communion of saints.
Our charism is our wealth. The particular
interpretation of the Gospel and expression of its values that have been handed
over to us by our Founders belongs to us and represents our unique place in the
Church and in the history of salvation. Jesus has promised us that when we
embrace the charism it will bear much fruit and we receive much in return. As a
gift, it is something we cannot know the extent of unless we receive it. It is
only in the living of it that we gain understanding. Likewise, when like the
rich man we reject it we really do not know what we have missed out on, except
perhaps indirectly in the sadness, restlessness and discontent we may feel. With
joy and gratitude for the gift, we have received and confident that the Lord
sees our desire to serve him more faithfully, generously and simply let us turn
now to the celebration of this mystery in which he gives himself most fully.
Icon of the Founders written by Brother Terence. Homily by Father Timothy.
The most important thing of all
to him was that he knew himself to be loved by Christ. Enjoying this
love, he considered himself happier than anyone else; were he without it, it
would be no satisfaction to be the friend of principalities and powers. He
preferred to be thus loved and be the least of all, or even to be among the
damned than to be without that love and be among the great and honored.
To be separated from that love
was, in his eyes, the greatest and most extraordinary of torments; the pain of
that loss would alone have been hell, and endless, unbearable torture. So
too, in being loved by Christ he thought of himself as possessing life, the
world, the angels, present and future, the kingdom, the promise and countless
blessings. Apart from that love nothing saddened or delighted him; for nothing
earthly did he regard as bitter or sweet.
Paul set no store by the things that fill our visible world, any more than a man sets value on the withered grass of the field. As for tyrannical rulers or the people enraged against him, he paid them no more heed than gnats. Death itself and pain and whatever torments might come were but child’s play to him, provided that thereby he might bear some burden for the sake of Christ.
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus, oil on canvas, 1600-01, Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome. Quotation by Saint John Chrysostom.
I am hungry for the work and I wish with all my heart to be one of the chosen ones, whose privilege it will be to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the souls of the poor Islanders…I am not afraid of any disease, hence, It would be my greatest delight to minister to the abandoned lepers.
We imagine that all the Gospels answer questions likely posed by a second generation of Christ’s followers, perhaps the children and grandchildren of the apostles and disciples. “What was Jesus like? What was it like to know Him? What was it like to be with Him? What was it like when He called you to follow Him?” The Gospel is then a living recollection recounted by those whose hearts burned within them as Jesus spoke to them.
How extraordinarily attractive Jesus must have been. Indeed, the truth, and goodness that He was and that He proclaimed were irresistible, for He is God enfleshed. And this morning we watch and listen as His simple invitation touches the hearts of four fishermen. Without hesitation, these first four apostles abandon father, nets, and boats to follow Jesus, immediately.
Like them, our work is to make ourselves more and more available to the irresistibility of Jesus and His call and to live our lives with an urgency and attentiveness, that will make us ever available to be drawn into the Beauty of God, drawn by Jesus into a life of self-forgetfulness and self-offering.
The bells are our constant summons to put all things aside and go to prayer. “The monks will always be ready to arise without delay when the signal is given and each will hasten,” says St. Benedict. “On hearing the signal the monk will immediately set aside what he has in hand and go with utmost speed.”
Truly, at the first stirrings of His call, were not our hearts burning within us? Let us remember and continually go to him without a second thought. Let us go to him again this morning,
the Living Water, our Life and our Hope, as he gives us Himself and teaches us how to
give ourselves away in love and service to one another.
Photograph by Brother Brian.
The Spirit of God always surpasses our dreams or desires. The Spirit expresses for us the God in Christ who cannot be managed, who is “continually spilling over,” the God who is exquisitely present within yet ungraspable, indescribable, the Spirit who is the vital atmosphere that gives us breath and life, surrounding us and granting us greater intimacy with God, who keeps us open to the More that God is, beyond our imaginings or our manipulation. The Spirit brings unity, always respecting difference, and enlivening reciprocity.
“The Spirit is at the place of our desiring,” the inarticulate groan that begs for Christ to surround and indwell and sustain us in the incompleteness of love. And as monks we know that this is where we live- in this land of desire, somehow suspended between heaven and earth, getting glimpses of heavenly communion, visits of the Word, noticing his kind and loving presence but more often left hanging, because our desire always outstrips our present capacity. And so, we’re left suspended, longing for more, but often losing our way. We live in an in-between place- poised in faith between a promised heavenly homeland and an earthly home; puzzled and sometimes impatient because earthly existence even for all its ambiguities is at least tangible and real. And as we wait, we keep on doing what we’re doing- trying to notice the ordinary charged with mystery, in this place of already and not yet.
Some years ago, it was my privilege to work with mentally disabled children at a home in Chicago, operated by the Sisters of Mercy. It was called Misericordia- literally in Latin the home of the pitying heart. Eventually, it became a L’Arche village. I helped each week at a Mass for the children; they were wonderfully affectionate; I got so many hugs. Since they could not articulate well, they had been taught the sign language of the deaf. And all during the Eucharist they signed the hymns and responses exuberantly. "Lord" was an L that flew out from the heart; "Jesus", fingers pointing to the wounds in his hands. Mass there was like nothing I had ever experienced. I remarked to my friend, the priest who presided there, how amazing it was. "It's no wonder at all," he said. "You see, they're inefficient, not good at accomplishing tasks all week long, but they are perfect at Liturgy. They're perfectly at home praising and praying and loving. They get easily absorbed because they're so inefficient."
With our best Cistercian intuition, we are always trying to be efficient; more jam, more chasubles in fewer minutes, for we are after all called to work, faithful to Benedict's Rule. "They are truly monks when they live by the work of their hands." But very soon we come to realize that the efficiency, proficiency, and productivity we need to make some great jelly or the perfect vestment are not going to work when we go to prayer. We need another set of skills, skills for suspension and inefficiency- learning how to be satisfied with waiting, learning how to depend totally on Christ’s kind favor, his timing; practicing being at home with powerlessness, for Christ only wants our weakness.
Such is the continuing mode of God’s coming toward us in Christ. And our work here in this school of love, this house of his Misericordia, this home of the pitying heart of Christ, is to continually stoke our desire for Christ, so to be available for his pleasure, his timing. We know that Christ Jesus our Lord likes to sneak in like a bandit into the grey inefficiency of our ordinariness. As Michael Casey likes to say, contemplation, true prayer, depends on this “rubbish of our lives,” for it happens when we have nothing to be proud of.
