ST JOSEPH'S ABBEY, SPENCER MA

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said that “joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.” Certainly, joy is the fruit of real confidence in God's ineffable mercy. This is our joy as monks- we see over and over again our foolishness and sinfulness, but we learn to rejoice because Christ's mercy is always available.  This is certainly reason enough for us to rejoice always, for as Saint Paul says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” S o amazed is Saint Catherine of Siena at the endless mercy of God that she will call God “crazy.” In her  Dialogues,  she writes, “O eternal beauty! O eternal goodness, O eternal mercy! O, crazy lover! You have need of your creature? It seems so to me, for you act as if you could not live without her. Why are you so crazy? Because you have fallen in love with what you have made! You are pleased and delighted over her as if you were drunk with desire for her salvation. She runs away from you and you go looking for...

Br. Guerric, I understand that you like to read stories about the desert fathers. Well, on this day of your clothing as a novice, I thought we could look at a story that describes the clothing of one of St. Anthony’s disciples, namely, Paul the Simple. Paul’s story is recounted in a number of sources, but the one I like best is from the Lausiac History by Palladius. As Palladius tells it, Paul was a “rustic herdsman, simple and entirely without guile, who was married to a most beautiful woman…” who, unfortunately, had a hidden weakness of character. Paul came home unexpectedly one day and found her with another man. He realized that God’s Providence had revealed this to him, and so he said “Ok,” and left the two to themselves, saying, “…I am going off to be a monk.” Maybe a first lesson to take from Paul is his attentiveness to divine Providence. He watched for the signs that God slips into our lives and tried to discern what was best and in accord with God’s will. From there he t...

  We all recognize the voice of someone we love; we can recall what that voice stirs up in our hearts - joy, peace, expectation, longing. When we are attentive, we can hear the voice of the Lord Jesus our Shepherd. He assures us that we belong to him. We have been given to Jesus by his Father. As we belong to the Father, so we are the Father’s gift to the Son; we are and will always be God’s children in the Spirit. “No one can take you out of my hand, no one,” says Jesus. This is our truth, our reality. Jesus whispers this truth, calling us by name. But perhaps too often, so often there are other voices that beckon us, competing with Jesus’ voice for our attention - desires, temptations, the things we think we need. But the Shepherd keeps calling, searching; he won’t stop.   He is always drawing us, rescuing us from the brambles of our foolishness and pride, calling us away from the things that cannot possibly satisfy us. He wants us to come to him for everything we need. ...

  When we consider the conclusion of Jesus' life in the Passion and the Cross, we have an important revelation as to the precise nature of his "compassion" and his act of interiorizing human distress. Jesus heals human distress by assuming it, and the rude implication follows that this willingness must also form an essential part of his teaching and of the mind of one who welcomes the arrival of his Kingdom. What we here call the creativity of Jesus' poetic imagination is quite precisely his ability—at the same time moral, aesthetic, and redemptive—to behold human suffering, accurately sum up its symptoms in a pregnant image, and assume that image's content as his own life's reality. In the divine logic at least, visceral compassion—a churning of one's "innards"—is the only fitting response to the sight of innocent, flayed sheep. In the Passion and on the Cross, Jesus himself would become flayed, mangled, torn asunder, not merely "harassed...

“How can this man give us his Flesh to eat? We hear this question in today's Gospel. Given who Jesus is and who he longs to be for us, a better question might be - how could he not? How could he not desire most ardently to feed those he loves with his very Self? How could he not long to be hidden in us? To whom else shall we go when we hunger but to him who  is truly our Portion, our Food.   Photograph by Brother Brian.

I do not try to reach your lofty heights, O Lord, since my understanding is in no way equal to that. But I do desire to understand your truth just a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand. For … unless I believe, I shall not understand. Saint Anselm of Canterbury The dark mystery of  a hidden humble faith  brings us to a depth of understanding born of humility. W e believe, even as  we acknowledge what do not know or may never know or completely understand. In humility, we acknowledge our limits and finiteness. We let God be God,  magnificent, extravagant but also hidden and quiet and unremarkable.

Sometimes we think that humility is to go quietly, perhaps head-down looking at the floor… but even pigs walk with their heads down: this is not humility. This is that fake, ready-to-wear humility, which neither saves nor guards the heart. We have to be aware that there is no true humility without humiliation, and if you are not able to tolerate, to carry humiliation on your shoulders, you are not truly humble: you pretend you are, but you are not. This reflection of Pope Francis is a sobering reminder. How to welcome humiliations?