ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

          The opening words of  today's gospel “After six days” have been  unfortunately left out of the Lectionary.  These simple words connect today's gospel of the glory of Jesus transfigured on the mount with the first prediction by Jesus of his passion--namely his being tortured and killed--including the prediction that after three days he will rise again.  The disciples Peter, James and John will be given a vision of what his “rising again” means in the Transfiguration. They are being taught that the glory that radiates from  Jesus is intimately bound up with the suffering he will endure in saving us from our sins.  Thus, the passage in Mark is about two mountains, that of transfiguration and that of disfiguration in the  Crucifixion—Mounts Tabor and Calvary. In the Synoptic accounts of the predictions of the Passion and today's miracle, St. Peter is very adverse to the notion of Jesus suffering and dying.  Pete...

It is amazing to think of all the different aspects of the Christian life that Fr. William explored and expounded during his lifetime: contemplative prayer, the meaning of Scripture, the communion that is monastic life. But there are two other aspects that are also important, both for Fr. William and for us: being a child of God and sharing in the kingship of Christ as we heard in today’s readings. They might seem like an odd combination, childhood and kingship, but they are essential to the Christian life. Let us see how they apply to Fr. William and to us?             In the first reading, we heard those remarkable words of St. John: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are.” Fr. William had a childlike streak in him, a little mischievous at times, a little stubborn at times, but with a desire to experience what a child experiences, namely, using the words he used to e...

  This arresting image of Christ is a favorite of many of us and reveals El Greco's indebtedness to the icon painters of his native Greece. But while icons have brilliant gold backgrounds signifying timelessness and eternity, in this painting Christ is shown against a background of daubed and scumbled muddy browns. Thus it is that El Greco depicts Christ as absolutely of the earth, one of us. At the same time, his diamond-shaped nimbus, his right hand raised in blessing, and his left resting in dominion over the brown orb of Earth reveal that he is truly divine. Truly human, truly divine, Christ Jesus is with us, truly with us in all things, always and everywhere. The Savior,  El Greco (and workshop), 1608-1614, oil on canvas, 72 cm x 55 cm, The Prado, Madrid.

The church is…a living reality.  She lives along the course of time by transforming herself, like any living being, yet her nature remains the same.  At her heart is Christ. Lines by Servant of God Romano Guardini.

  Jesus is just back from the Jordan River, where he has received John’s baptism. God only knows why. He certainly did not have anything to repent of. Why was he there? P erhaps it is that he could do no less. He had to be there, with his people - with us - in all that embarrasses and burdens us, our regrets and our failures, all our soggy truth. Jesus has immersed himself in all of it. Only the passion of his love can explain his desire for baptism or any other one of his actions for that matter. Jesus perfectly expresses this determination of God to “share unreservedly” 1  in our distress, to be with us in everything. Never distance or separateness but immersion and identification with us, so that we might know ourselves holy and beloved like him, through him. Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. My mother often spoke of my grandmother, sitting at the kitchen table reading the soldiers’ obituaries in the newspaper night after night during the Second World War, reading and sobbin...

Lent, the springtime of the Church situates us between two gardens - the garden of Eden, that lush middle Eastern paradise where the first Adam lost his innocence and the garden of the Resurrection on Easter morning where the new Adam wounded and resurrected will walk in peace having restored our lost innocence. In between like Christ Jesus, we will spend forty days in the desert, the place where wild beasts and demons are most at home,  the place  of trial and self-knowledge, where with Jesus we discover who we really are, what we really desire - better still, W ho  it is we really desire.

            We have been talking recently about the great good of unity in the community. Lent adds another layer to this unity; it calls for unity even as we shed our extra baggage and walk with the Lord to Jerusalem—no coppers in our belts or extra tunics. Complacency has to go, because the poor Christ has a baptism to be baptized with, and we are called to join him. Coincidentally, the prophet Joel had to shake the people of Jerusalem out of their complacency—in his case, the imminent arrival of a famine in the land. It was no longer business as usual. It seems to me that the Lord has chosen this Lent to summon us out of any complacency we may have, faced as we are with so many challenges—Covid-19, political upheaval, death in our midst—we need our communal unity to press on to Jerusalem.             Joel’s words are like a trumpet blast for us: “…proclaim a fast, call an assembly; Gather the peopl...