ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

The Feast of the Holy Family is not just about Jesus, Mary and Joseph but about our own families and our monastic community; for the Holy Family of Nazareth is a model for all families.   Pope Benedict XVI has said that   "the house of Nazareth is a school of prayer where one learns to listen, meditate on and penetrate the profound meaning of the manifestation of the Son of God, following the example of Mary, Joseph and Jesus ." May our monastic family become a school of prayer where we listen to the voice of God, who daily calls us to conversion and purity of heart. Painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner. Meditation by Father Emmanuel.

At Christmas we celebrate the huge step God takes towards us to bridge our estrangement from him, to teach us what we dearly need to know again and again: namely, how deeply and personally he loves us. He continues to do this by making himself disarmingly approachable, meeting us exactly where we are, in our human ordinariness and need. On Christmas in 1971, Blessed Paul VI said: “God could have come wrapped in glory, splendor, light and power, to instill fear, to make us rub our eyes in amazement. But instead he came as the smallest, the frailest and the weakest of beings. Why? So that no one would be ashamed to approach him, so that no one would be afraid, so that all would be close to him and draw near him, so that there would be no distance between us and him. God made the effort to plunge, to dive deep within us, so that each of us can speak intimately with him, trust him, draw near him and realize that he thinks of us and loves us . . . He loves you! Think about what this...

It takes work to get back to the peace of knowing yourself completely loved. And perhaps we never fully get there while we’re here. But the desire is set deep inside us, that incompleteness, the ache for the surprise of love to find us. Perhaps some of us follow certain old scripts handed on to us by our own histories, stories filled with fear and failure. The script often reads- don’t trust, don’t hope. Jesus, God’s tender Word comes to us and offers us a new script, new words to rewrite our story and reimagine the old hopelessness as possibility and opportunity for grace; even allowing ourselves to believe that we are rejoiced over. Jesus invites us back to this place where we can learn to receive life and love as underserved and unexpected blessings. We may sense the near impossibility of opening our hearts to make a space for love and hope, a place inside us where God’s rejoicing can sprout and blossom from the hard, unpromising stump of our tired old fear and loneliness. An...

The flesh that Jesus assumed is our flesh- human, weak, vulnerable, needy, suffering. Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth into all of these things, not his removal of them or from them. The incarnate God really is Emmanuel, God-with-us. Our world and our lives remain wounded; painfully so. But the reality of the Incarnation assures us that God really is present. The late Jesuit theologian Avery Dulles put it this way: “The Incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather, it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.” This shimmering divinity is offered to us each day in the Eucharist, at the altar manger , under the unassuming signs of bread and wine. Come, let us adore. Come, let us consume. Madonna and Child by Sandro Botticelli. Excerpts from Dom Damian's Homily for Christmas Mid-night Mass.

Shepherds are the first ones to hear the good news of great joy that a Savior has been born. Shepherding was a despised occupation in the first century. Shepherds were scorned as shiftless, dishonest people, who grazed their flocks on other people’s lands. Yet these outcasts are the ones who not only first hear the proclamation of a Savior but are the first to respond to it. For them it was more than just a birth announcement. It was an invitation, an invitation which they accepted. “When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." So they went with haste…” These unlikely outcasts really knew how to hear and respond to God’s approach. You cannot miss the echoes of Jesus own words later in his life, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”      We remember that it all be...

Later in his ministry, Jesus will remind a follower that he, “the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” But for now the Infant Jesus rests in the arms of Mary and Joseph, hidden with them in an ordinary life of pleasures, small joys, sorrows and aches and pains like ours. And still he  asks each of us if he can rest his head against our heart.

This evening in the final O Antiphon we chant to Christ Jesus: O Emmanuel , king and lawgiver,  desire of the nations,  Savior of all people: Come and set us free, Lord our God.   Emmanuel is God with us, in all that we go through, in our joys and sorrows.  As monks it is our duty and privilege to become attuned to the Lord's  continual advent. For if it is true, as we believe, that one day the Lord will return once and for all to gather us all together and bring us home to the Father in the end time, we also know that his coming toward us is a relentless, already-happening reality. And we are meant to be experts -- experts at waiting, attentiveness; experts at emptiness, the emptiness that is constantly clearing a space for him. In Christ Jesus, our Emmanuel, God has made a giant leap towards us. Jesus our Lord is always drawing near.   And attentiveness to his presence is the secret we were made for.  Photograph by Brother Brian. ...