A SMALL GIFT FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS LECTIO DIVINA

 

The birth of Christ our Savior at Christmas is a mystery that draws us into contemplation of the beloved Word Made Flesh.  However, as we all know, it is only a start, a first step into the mystery of God’s love that grows deeper and overflows with wonder as this holy season unfolds into a new year..

 Here is a small suggestion to inspire your prayer:

 Picture the scene of Christ in the manger surrounded by those who loved him – and that delightful ox and ass, which are borrowed from Isaiah 1 (a text not so complimentary to us who enjoy their presence in Christmas are!)   

Put the scene next to some of the statements Jesus made about himself and his work as an adult already plunged into his public ministry.  See what insights that juxtaposition leads you to!  (I’ve been doing this myself and have had some surprises—I wish the same to you! I’ve tucked in some examples in case you need a jump start! They’re pretty random, and spur-of-the-moment, but this reflection is one more pre-Christmas case of “finished is better than perfect”!)

Here are those  examples to start your reflection.  You probably have favorites you can add to the list for yourself.

 (These are all from the Gospel of John, which emphasizes that Jesus is, as the Nicene creed says, “God from God”.  The “I am” phrase always summons up the memory of Exodus 3, where the God who appears to Moses in the burning bush claims the name/title: “I am”.)

 I am the bread of life… (John 6:35)

 I am the Light of the world (John 8:12 …think of all those Christmas cards that depict the baby in the manger surrounded by light).

 I am the gate for the sheep (John 10:7 == the gate of the sheepfold, where the Shepherd leads us to safe refuge.)

 I am the good shepherd (John 10:10).  Think of the shepherds summoned to the Child in the crib the message of the angel. What would this image have said to them if they had lived long enough to hear it from the lips of the adult Jesus? What does it say to us, who read about the angel’s announcement to the shepherd during Christmas?

 I am the way (John 14:6)

 …to which he adds elsewhere, “unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (see John 3).

 I am the truth (John 14:6)   In himself, God’s Word made flesh, Jesus reveals both the truth of who God is and the truth of who we were made to be.  See what happens when you set that idea against the nativity scene and Jesus’ later life.

 The list goes on and on in Johns’ gospel—the resurrection and the life (John 12), the vine (John 15), the very different king (John 19), and probably more that I have missed in John’s text but also elsewhere in the gospels.  Watch out!  If you do a bit of this exercise, they may pop up all over! 

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

The Advent "O" Antiphons: a Source for Lectio Divina

 The “O” antiphon have been sung before and after the Canticle of Mary (Magnificat)  at Evening Prayer since the seventh century (or so!) We at the Abbey chant the traditional Latin texts to their very ancient melody every year.  They are called "O" antiphons because each begins with "O"!

There is a reason to their order. The first letter of each title of Christ in Latin listed from last to first form an acrostic: E(mmanuel), R(ex), O(riens), C(lavis), R(adix), A(donai), Sapientia give us “ero cras,” which means “I will be there tomorrow”.  And, of course, the last one is sung on December 23. (Liturgically speaking the celebration of Christmas begins with Evening Prayer on December 24).

 The antiphons are very rich biblically saturated meditations on Jesus Christ, the savior whose birth we will celebrate on December 27.  I invite you to use them as sources for lectio divina this week. Pick one or two (or more!) favorites to memorize and carry with you whenever you need a word from Scripture to settle, center, or reconnect you to God.

 Below is the list in order, from this evening through December 23.  They are familiar as the verses of the hymn “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and from the gospel acclamations at Mass, though in both cases the order is somewhat altered.

 A very blessed Advent and Christmas to all!

 December 17

O Wisdom of our God Most High,
guiding creation with power and love:
come to teach us the path of knowledge!

 December 18

O Leader of the House of Israel,
giver of the Law to Moses on Sinai:
come to rescue us with your mighty power!

 December 19

O Root of Jesse’s stem,
sign of God’s love for all his people:
come to save us without delay!

 December 20

O Key of David,
opening the gates of God’s eternal Kingdom:
come and free the prisoners of darkness!

 December 21

O Radiant Dawn,
splendor of eternal light, sun of justice:
come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the
shadow of death.

 December 22

O King of all nations and keystone of the Church:
come and save man, whom you formed from the dust!

 December 23

 O Emmanuel, our King and Giver of Law:

come to save us, Lord our God!

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

Advent: the Season of Hope?

(Apologies! I inadvertently failed to hit the "publish" button on this one when I posted it on December 4!  Those of you who are Abbey oblates received a copy by e-mail.)

Advent, as we all know, is the season of hope—and how badly we need that hope these days, but how hard it is to come by!

St. Benedict does not speak of Advent, which was an innovation not yet widely observed in his day, but he does speak of hope.  He might look with a wry eye on the endless solutions to endless problems that spring up in the media daily.  He proposed only one solution to the dark temptations to despair that for us may come such current events as COVID and school violence and financial distress, and for him and his monks from waves of invading barbarian forces and harsh clashes among Christians and the ever-present struggle with everything that would tempt them away from their commitment to live the Rule: “Place your hope in God alone” (RB 4:41). 

He did not mean to sit back amid clouds of incense and wait for God to do something while we  recite psalms and think pious thoughts.  St. Benedict taught an eminently practical feet-on-the-ground wisdom.  What he really meant was to live in all sorts of small, unspectacular ways toward the goal for which we hope.  He defined that goal for Benedictines with an eye on the far horizon beyond which lies the fulfillment of all our hopes:  “Let [us] prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may he bring us all together to everlasting life” (RB 72:11-12).

 In the context of the Rule, this hope requires all sorts of small steps to reach that day.  He spells them out in detail in RB 4, “On the Tools of Good Works.”  Don’t kill anybody, at least not on purpose—and elsewhere he spells out when it is acceptable to smack someone and when not.  Don’t pamper yourself—even as you look up yet another recipe for cranberry sauce or pecan pie.  Don’t take that one-too-many glass of wine.  Don’t lie to anyone.  The list goes on for seventy-eight pithy verses under the general heading of “First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul and all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself” (RB 4:1-2).  He spells out more details throughout the rest of the Rule, from the tough challenges of obedience, silence, and humility to the zillion ways in which love of God and neighbor are expressed in practice—all with the goal of reaching that final moment when “[Christ] brings us together to everlasting life.”

 As we all know, it takes some work to translate this sixth century guide to good behavior within the monastery into real-life practice both in and outside the monastery in this Year of Our Lord 2021.  Directives for hygiene and healthy eating, for example, are simply no longer acceptable.  We don’t have to do everything during daylight because the only form of artificial light is unreliable oil lamps.  We can do our lectio and pray our Hours from books conveniently printed and bound. 

 But St. Benedict’s wisdom is timeless:  look for Christ always and everywhere, keep your feet on the ground and forget about pie-in-the-sky, build God’s reign by building strong networks of mutual love wherever you can—and, his clincher, the last of the tools of good works, “never lose hope in God’s mercy” (RB 4:74).  No matter what bad news knocks on the door, no matter how great the temptation to save-yourself-and-let-God-look-out-for-the rest, no matter how dark the winter night, keep the light of Christ burning in your heart, encourage one another—AND NEVER LOSE HOPE IN GOD’S MERCY BECAUSE GOD’S MERCY NEVER LOSES SIGHT OF US.. 

 

©2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

Company!

 

As Benedictines, we belong to the great company of listeners.  These are they who listen to God “with the ear of the heart” (cf. RB Prologue 1).   They are not only Benedictines, of course.  On November 1, the Church at large celebrates the memory of all saints, all those holy people who are gathered now in God’s presence in heaven.  Some of their names we know, many we don’t.  Some of them we have known personally, many we have not.  But they are a great glad crowd who still keep an eye on us, who are called to join them one day.  On November 13, we at the Abbey celebrate a particular group within the great crowd of saints:  all Benedictine saints.  Of course all holy oblates who have run the course and dwell now on God’s holy mountain (RB Prologue 23) are among them!  Again, some of them we have known, lived with, and love; some we have not.  It is comforting to know that each of us has a place reserved for us among them, with our names spelled out in gold, or so I like to imagine.  For all those who have gone before us, Benedictines or not, saints or saints-still-in-the making, we can be very grateful.  For those still on the way, we can and should pray.

 At the Abbey, after supper every night, we read the names of all of the deceased Sisters of our own monastery and the other monasteries who make up what is called the Federation of Benedictine Monasteries of Nuns, including our motherhouse, the Abbey of St. Walburg in Germany—whose Abbess many of you knew when she was Sister Hildegard of this house and oblate director.  We read their names on the anniversary of their deaths, and we pray for them.  But the nuns of this house and of the Federation are not the only names in the book.  We also read the names of all of our oblates who have died on this day, whom we remember also with joy and gratitude.  If we live as faithful listeners, you and I can hope that our names, too, will be read out on the anniversary of our death, and that future generations will remember and pray for us. 

 This November, let us all remember the listeners who have gone before us and remember the last words they heard as they stood on the threshold of death where we will one day stand:  “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt 25:34).

 Let us pray with them; let us pray for them who have not yet  fully completed that crossing; and let us pray for one another as we walk together on the way, that we may all listen faithfully as they did and be gathered into the great company of saints in the world to come.  Amen!

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

Humility, Gospel-Style

Today’s Mass gospel (Luke 14: 7-11) is a lesson in etiquette worthy of Miss Manners.  Jesus spells out how to behave when invited to a wedding banquet (or, presumably, any other fancy occasion).  You’ve heard his advice:  in a nutshell, he says don’t seat yourself in the place of honor!  What if the host has invited someone more important than you!  He will ask you to move down.  How embarrassing!  Much better to sit in the lowest place so the host may invite you up to a more important place.  Think how good that will make you look to the other guests!

There’s a good bit of humor hidden in this lesson.  As he often does, Jesus appeals to a concern for one’s social reputation.  (Honor was highly esteemed in his culture). Taking the place of honor will make you look bad; taking a lower place and being invited to a higher place will make you look good.  Hardly a noble motive, is it?  But oh so recognizable! Memories of similar social faux-pas, our own or someone else’s, might make us laugh or blush when we hear the story!  There’s more.  Jesus’ adds another humorous note.  He says, when advising choosing the lowest place, that the host may then invite you to come higher. It makes me chuckle to think of someone (not me, of course) sanctimoniously and perhaps a bit ostentatiously taking the lowest seat in order to enjoy the prestige of being invited to take a higher one—only to discover that no such invitation is forthcoming.! 

 Being able to laugh at oneself is an aspect of humility that St. Benedict does not address in the Rule (RB 7), but he does tell us not to take ourselves too seriously, socially or otherwise.  His instructions regarding community rank may seem irrelevant if you don’t live in a monastery. The hierarchy of rank might have had more social importance for a European monastery of the old style, but it is not of much interest in monastery like ours, where no one cares about the usual claims for prestige:  high social birth, family wealth, education or a prestigious career before entering the community.  One of the great gifts of our community is that the diversity of our work means that we know that there are always Sisters who will be better than we are at the kind of work we’ve been assigned, but we might be better than someone else in some other kinds of tasks.  For us, rank is really just a tidy way of organizing community processions and meals.  

What is really important in St. Benedict’s eyes is not how much we can claim prestige among others but how seriously we take ourselves for whatever reason.  (And sometimes, as we all know, the reason may really be laughable!  I will not give you examples—they would be too embarrassing.  Well, one example, largely fictional, is that Sister So-and-So pins her veil straighter than Sister So-and-So.  There is democracy as well as humility in the fact that where you may have “bad hair” days, all of us have “bad veil” days from time to time!)

There is a very fine line between appropriate self-esteem and inflated self-esteem.  Jesus’ amusing little etiquette lesson suggests that we would do well to look at ourselves in that mirror.  Our response is a clue:  gratitude for our gifts, whatever they may be, and glad respect for the gifts of others.  Another clue is whether or not we can laugh at ourselves when we begin to resemble a peacock flaunting inarguably gorgeous plumage—and totally unaware that the plumage is all gift! There is no place for peacocks in Benedictine life!

 Humility is truth, so they say.  Jesus is the truth, by his own claim (John 14:6).  We sometimes read that as some sort of dogmatic truth, but it is really much more than that.  Jesus is God’s truth revealed in human flesh, but he is also our truth.  He is the only authentic image of what humanity was meant to be and has once more bccome in him.  That’s the only mirror we ought to consult when we want to see how good we look!

 

©2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

A Commercial:  the annual Abbey Calendar for 2022 will be available in the Gift Shop by next week, or so we hope.  It features stunning pictures of the tapestries that hang in the Abbey Church.  They were woven for us by Frau Walburga, OSB, at our motherhouse in Germany for our chapel in Boulder in the early 1960’s.  Woven of hand-dyed and handspun wool, they depict the “Mysteries of Mary,” something like but not quite identical to the mysteries of the rosary.  It also gives the days of the Church’s liturgical days and seasons, together with the liturgical calendar of the Order of St. Benedict, as these calendars are observed at the Abbey. 

 This year’s calendar is larger and more substantial than last year’s It is made of glossy cardboard rather than paper, since we got complaints about how easily last year’s paper calendars tore.  I’m afraid the price has consequently gone up to $19.95.  As you know, this is an annual fundraiser for us, a bit more important to the Abbey economy as COVID and all its variants continue to limit the accommodations in our retreat house. 

 You can order a calendar from the Abbey Gift Shop, either by telephoning us at 97-472-0612 or by ordering online at giftshop@walburga.org.

 

Thanks so much!

Seek Peace!

  

In the Prologue, St. Benedict quotes Psalm 34: let peace be your quest and aim (Psalm 34:15).  I prefer the Grail translation: “Seek after peace, and pursue it.”  One reason is that it is simply more familiar.  It’s the translation we at the Abbey pray in the Divine Office.  But there is another reason.  Hidden within St. Benedict’s injunction to seek peace is his great theme:  “prefer nothing whatever to Christ” (RB 72:11).  

The prophet Micah helps us to make the link: “he shall be peace” ( Micah 5:4).  The context clarifies that, for us Christian readers, “he” is none other than Christ himself:  “He shall take his place as shepherd by the strength of the LORD, by the majestic name of the LORD, his God;… for now his greatness shall reach to the ends of the earth:  he shall be peace” (Micah 5:3-4, emphasis added).  St. Paul adds: “he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, (Ephesians 2:14-16).

St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Christian teachers of the fourth century, enriches this idea: “Since we think of Christ as our peace, we may call ourselves true Christians only if our lives express Christ by our own peace. As the Apostle says: He has put enmity to death. We must never allow it to be rekindled in us in any way but must declare that it is absolutely dead. Gloriously has God slain enmity, in order to save us; may we never risk the life of our souls by being resentful or by bearing grudges. We must not awaken that enmity or call it back to life by our wickedness, for it is better left dead.

No, since we possess Christ who is peace, we must put an end to this enmity and live as we believe he lived. He broke down the separating wall, uniting what was divided, bringing about peace by reconciling in his single person those who disagreed. In the same way, we must be reconciled not only with those who attack us from outside, but also with those who stir up dissension within; flesh then will no longer be opposed to the spirit, nor the spirit to the flesh. Once we subject the wisdom of the flesh to God's law, we shall be re-created as one single man at peace. Then, having become one instead of two, we shall have peace within ourselves.

Now peace is defined as harmony among those who are divided. When, therefore, we end that civil war within our nature and cultivate peace within ourselves, we become peace. By this peace we demonstrate that the name of Christ, which we bear, is authentic and appropriate.” (Treatise on Christian Perfection, Office of Readings, Week 19 of Ordinary Time, Thursday).

We tend most often to think of peace as the reconciliation of all the “us vs. them” conflicts that beset our world and, to be honest, ourselves.  The daily news makes it difficult how sore a need this is, and how difficult to attain.  Since most of us are not called upon to make peace among warring nations or even warring factions in our own nation, we need to look closer to home at all whatever divides us from an “them” in our families, neighborhoods, workplaces and, sadly, even in our churches. 

But St. Gregory reminds us that there are divisions not only among us, but also within us, also crying out for reconciliation.  On both levels, outward and inward, the heart of reconciliation is living fully the life of the risen Christ into whom we have been baptized.  In seeking to live deeply in Christ, both socially and individually, we are indeed seeking Peace and pursuing it with all the means the Rule supplies in terms of prayer and relationships.

 St. Paul, St. Gregory, and St. Benedict were all realists.  They knew that seeking and finding peace is no easy task.  It is, in fact, a lifetime’s work.  But they all offer us tools, especially in prayer and in ways of living relationships ordered toward the ultimate unity that is the reign of God.  And we pray for that unity daily in the Lord’s Prayer for that very reason (RB 13:12-13).

 Peace be with you, and with us all!

©2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

Think Slow: Lectio Divina Revisited

Hurry, hurry, hurry!  Sometime it feels as if this is a shared mantra, driving many of us to get too much done in too short a time.  Even contemplative nuns face this pressure at times!  What is unfortunate is that it can creep into our practice of lectio as an unwelcome stranger cracking an invisible whip. 

 A better mantra would be: take your time, take your time, take your time—or rather take God’s time, which is rumored to open a door into eternity!  When it comes to the frequent choice between the tortoise and the hare, even the ancient Greek fabulist knew that wisdom put its money on the tortoise.  (If you don’t happen to have a copy of Aesop’s Fables in your library, you can download one for free at Project Gutenberg.  If this link does not work, just go to www.gutenberg.org.)

In a quirky book on the Liturgy of the Hours entitled Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscapes of Our Lives, English Benedictine monk Mark Barrett introduced me to the practice of slow reading by describing the experience of a World War II POW who had only one book available to him.  He disciplined himself to read very slowly to make the book last, but he discovered in the process that slow reading led him to deep reading, which was its own gift.  And I do mean slow reading, with much rereading and savoring.  With books abounding all around us, and all the books of our very large Bible available to us, we are under no deadline except the ones we give ourselves.  But reading to deadline, any deadline, works for our loss, not our gain.

  Consider taking a single psalm—perhaps one as short as Psalm 1 or Psalm 23—and putting it through a very patient inner juicer that seeks to extract every drop of meaning, every hint of reference to our real daily experience, every glimmer of insight into our relationships with those we love and those we don’t, every tiny invitation to pursue a connection with another phrase in a different psalm -- all with the patient inspiration of the Holy Spirit as our reading companion.  Consider setting a different kind of deadline:  I will NOT finish this psalm till the end of two weeks of daily lectio.  And be prepared to discover with surprise that two weeks aren’t quite long enough!  Suddenly a text  as long as the Beatitudes--with 100 stories of different people we know or have read about behind each one--seems like a six-month’s work!

 Each of has to find our own best pace, but the discipline of  “slow and steady wins the race,” as Aesop put it, is an invaluable tool for genuinely contemplative lectio. 

 Try it!  You might like it!  Or you might hate it, but if you don’t try, you’ll never know!   

 _____

Reference:

Mark Barrett, OSB. Crossing: Reclaiming the Landscapes of Our Lives.  Harrisburg PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2001.

 ©2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

 

 

Lectio Divina: Think Small!

 Think of St. Benedict in his tower at Monte Cassino.  Think of the library of codices to which he had access. (If you weren’t born knowing this, the codex was a stack of pages bound together at the left side, like modern books, as opposed to the scrolls that preceded it.  And no, I wasn’t born knowing that either!) Most likely, the library shelves held single books of the Bible separately bound and single works of the early Christian writers because a whole Bible or a collection, say, of all the sermons of St. John Chrysostom, would have been physically unmanageable. Think of reading laboriously hand written texts, before the advent of the Carolingian miniscule provided clear spaces between words, lower case letters, and other improvements made for legibility.  Think of reading by daylight coming through very small window openings.  Think of reading by the light of small wicks floating in olive oil.  Look at the books on your shelf or stacked by your chair or on the nightstand by your bed, or available on your phone or e-reader.  Different worlds!  And most of us would not prefer to return to St. Benedict’s!

 We have been well trained by our consumer culture to believe that more is better, large is valuable, and new is preferable to old.  So when we take out our Bibles, Old and New Testaments handily bound together and perhaps supplemented with other useful aids, we may think thoughts like, “I’d like to read the Book of the Prophet Isaiah from beginning to end for my lectio this year.”  If we’re organizers, we might plan to read a set number of chapters a day for and perhaps assign a set amount of time for the task—say, finishing the whole book in a year.  (Don’t laugh: I did that one year, though I didn’t set a twelve-month time limit.  Just as well.  By the end of the second year I had finished Chapter 31 out of the 66.  I wasn’t getting any younger, so I switched to the nice little Gospel according to Mark!)  We might persevere—as I did not—but then we might start looking at the Table of Contents and thinking this book is taking too long and maybe we should try something new, maybe a book we have not read.  (This is not including the times when we might be lured to put aside the Bible altogether and try that latest spiritual bestseller touted by Amazon!)   And we might find ourselves discouraged by all we have not read.

 St. Benedict would have been baffled.  As we read his Rule, we might begin to notice the number of small gems, single phrases or verses, he quotes, apparently from memory as scholars have not always been able to track down what Latin version he used.  Many of them have been lifted from their original context in the Bible, like jewels taken from a bracelet and turned over and over to catch the light reflected from different facets and treasured for what they offered, regardless of their original context.  An example for us might be one of my favorite verses: “Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light for my path,” lifted out the extraordinarily long Psalm 119 and treasured for itself alone.  Like many verses, it gathers others to itself from altogether different settings:  “I am the light of the world,” and “the one who follows me will not walk in darkness,” and “the light that cannot be extinguished,” and “you are the light of the world.”  And those never get old. 

 What St. Benedict’s tradition teaches us is that oft-repeated bit of advice:  when you are reading for lectio, word count is unimportant, pages covered irrelevant, books checked off our list in their entirety not the point.  When a single line, or a single word, reaches out from the page and jabs you in the ribs, stop and pay attention!  Turn it over and over in your mind (or, better, your heart) for as long as it yields its juice.  Return to it again later when it calls out to you.  Carry it around in the pocket of your mind to pull out and re-examine later in the day. If that’s a matter of a day, or a week, or a lifetime, think of it as gift and don’t worry about achievement.  In the library of the Reign of God they don’t put stickers on our library card for every book we finish.  And they don’t give out prizes at the end of the summer for those whose cards boast the most stars!

 When you sit down to do lectio, think “slow,” think “small,” think “deep.”  And consider do-overs a rich blessing!

Copyright 2021, Abbey of St. Walburga

June 24: Solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist

 

To see the readings from the Mass lectionary for today, click here.

He must increase and I must decrease. John 3:30

Today we remember the birth of John the Baptist, host of Jesus’ first public appearance as an adult.  The story is rich in a humor we don’t readily associate with the fierce Baptist, as everyone resorts to pantomime to get the baby’s name clear, even though the Gospel reports his father Zechariah as mute, not deaf.  The child’s mother has to step in and settle the question with the sort of common sense matter-of-factness we will not see again in her son’s dramatic life story. The story is even richer in promise, as John’s father sketches the power of God’s extravagant promise of salvation wrought by the Messiah, whose coming John will announce to a world far broader than the shepherds’ fields outside Bethlehem. 

 

John the Baptist’s self-description appears in a much later passage of the gospel when the two children, Messiah and Baptist, are adult.  The time has come when John will step back and let Jesus step to the fore.  So the words “He must increase; I must decrease” belong to his own more or less farewell discourse to his disciples, far simpler than Jesus’ would be at the last supper. They are hardly the claim of an over-achiever.  But John, for all his apparently self-sufficient ferocity, silently accomplished a goal far greater than any of us can manage without large infusions of courage and strength from the Holy Spirit.  He accepted his own truth in God’s plan and renounced all attempts to promote himself to stardom. St. Benedict would have approved of it. Here he was simply sketching the life he was called to live, a life of both obedience and humility, however unlikely it looks clad in camelhair and leather.

 John’s statement can be turned into a question to us:  “And you?  Are you willing to live the same life?”  Because we are called to.  Not in a public forum like John’s, but in the privacy of our own interior life.  One of the hidden dangers of immersing ourselves too exclusively in monastic literature, from the Rule of St. Benedict to contemporary authors like Michael Casey, OCSO, is that we can become extremely self-preoccupied, too often measuring our own success or failure in living the principles we aspire to follow.  Am I doing lectio well enough?  Am I humble enough? Am I growing in my commitment to Christ? Am I living well with others.  You probably have your own list of values on which you question yourself.  A good dose of honesty about our own fidelity to Benedictine principles is healthy, but an overdose can become deadly.  This danger has been the subject of concern for centuries, so it is not new. 

 The antidote is found in St. Benedict’s core principle:  Prefer nothing to the love of Christ.  Christ, not the state of our own souls, is what St. Benedict intends for us to make our focus.  We see in the well-known story of St. Peter’s attempt to walk on water the shift of perspective we are constantly called to: when St. Peter got out of the boat at Jesus’ invitation, he did fine till he started looking at his own feet sinking into the stormy waters.  He had to lift his eyes to Jesus’ outstretched hand to get him out of his predicament.  He was never in any real danger.  Jesus was right there, himself entirely secure on the sea.  But Peter lost sight of that essential truth, as we sometimes do.  That’s when he got in trouble. (See Matthew 14:22-31)

 Keeping our eyes on Christ in whatever situation we find ourselves takes a lifetime of prayer and practice.  The Baptist offers us the right advice:  even in our own minds, “he must decrease and I must decrease.”   The words “decrease” and “increase” are the key: it’s not a matter of thinking of this but not that.  It’s a matter of proportion.  What John the Baptist allows us to see is that an important dimension of our growth in Christ is: less me, more him!

Steadfast Presence

 Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, perhaps better known still as "Corpus Christi," Latin for "the Body of Christ."  In the centuries since it was first established, enough has been written about it to fill libraries.  This reflection offers just one small perspective.

It's a thought that first occurred to me one day when we were praying Psalm 78 about the behavior of God's people during the long desert journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. And God's behavior in return. The story offers a contrast so familiar we may not even notice it.  Over and over and over again, the people fuss, complain, and wander off into ways alien to the God who is leading them.  They gripe about food, they scream for water, they worship that golden calf, they close themselves into their tents for what must have been suffocating bouts of complaint.  One of their most ungrateful (and most understandable)  refrains is that they were better off in Egypt, where they had good things to eat in plenty.  As we all know, memory often does cast a golden glow over a past less than pleasant!  This  goes on for forty years, till the old generation of those who remembered Egypt, is dead.  Forty years!

But there is another side to those forty years. Every morning, including the mornings after their latest grousing fest,  they got up to find the desert floor littered with manna.  Whether they complained, disobeyed, or even worshipped a golden calf, they never went a day without that manna, on which their lives depended.  It was there every day, no matter what.  For forty years!

The solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ presents us with the reality of God's presence and the call to offer God our presence.  And the Exodus story, which is not read today but certainly could be, reminds us forcefully that God's presence is steadfast.  No matter how badly our fidelity may fail, God's never does.  No matter how often we wander away chasing mirages in our personal deserts, God never does.  God's presence which is condensed powerfully in the Eucharist but comes to us in all sorts of other ways as well--the Word, the daily inspirations that wake us up and guide us, the love others give us and we give them, the beauty of the world around us,  Faithful to his other name, "Emmanuel," which means God-with-us, Jesus never leaves the scene. As we saw in the Easter stories, even locked doors can't keep him out.

God's steadfast presence is the presence of creative love.  Christ is the mirror in whom we can see every day what it looks like to live more deeply and grow more fully into that same love.  In him we see the fullness of our own commitment to both steadfast stability and every living love. 

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

Into the Light

One way of looking at the events of Jesus' passion, death and resurrection is to look for the darkness and the light.  Jesus plunged into the very darkest dimensions of human experience and returned as the true Light of the World, casting the light of life into every dark corner for those who dare to look.  These past months of pandemic have plunged all of us into darkness in various ways and at various times.   It has taken great courage sometimes to believe that the Light has never gone out and to look for it in the midst of fear, confusion, and pain.  And that pull between darkness and light, though it has lessened as hope has broken through more and more powerfully, isn't over yet. And won't be.   Pandemics come and go, just as famine, war and fire come and go, but the one assurance we are given is that Christ our Light is always there, threading a network of light through whatever darkness threatens.  Part of the work of conversion is to seek the light and seek to live by it when we see it.

Powerfully prodded by St . Benedict in Chapter 49 of the Rule, we tend to focus on Lent as the season of conversion.  But St. Benedict proposed that the lives of his followers should always be a Lenten journey through the darkness of sin into the light of life in the risen Christ.  

In fact, we see in the early Church, whose story we read in the Book of Acts in the liturgies of the Easter season, that the conversion begun when those first Christians heard Jesus' call did not end with relief and celebration when he rose from the dead!  In fact, their experience of the time between Easter and Pentecost, which we celebrate tomorrow, was a whole new plunge into a life of conversion.  They had to go back to school, as it were--Jesus did urge them and us to become as little children--whom St. Benedict has since enrolled in his "school of the Lord's service" from which there is no graduation! (See the Prologue for the fuller picture!)  They had above all to learn to see differently by the new light of the risen Christ.  Mary Magdalene had to learn to let go of the Jesus she had known and loved in his pre-resurrection humanity.  The disciples headed for Emmaus had to learn to read the Scriptures differently through the lens Jesus shone on them during their journey with him--whom they thought was a stranger.  And perhaps he was in his new reality. They had to learn to recognize Jesus himself no longer in the familiar rabbi-carpenter but in the bread in which he remains perennially present.  Peter had to learn to get over himself, as one of my seminary students used to admonish himself regularly, leave his misery and guilt behind, and devote himself to feeding Jesus' sheep! And he had lots of learn about that, as we read in the Book of Acts.  We can read all of the Easter stories as classes whose essential curriculum was becoming and living as Christ's own risen Body--and image repeated again and again in the stories and letters of St. Paul.

And learning to see and hear and live differently by the light of the risen Christ now and forever present among us did not end at Pentecost. On the contrary, the disciples upon whom the Spirit was poured with the force of wind and fire were only just starting to translate their commitment to Christ into the realities of every day life in a world not particularly interested in what they had to say. 

Our clothes differ from theirs.  Our langauges have changed.  The world in which we live would be unrecognizable to them.   But the story is the same:  we have spent weeks living the Lenten journey and more weeks learning about the day-today implications of the resurrection of Christ.  Tomorrow we celebrate again the gift of the Holy Spirit who impelled those first Christians out into the lifelong conversion which our relationship with the living Christ requires of us. 

And then comes Monday.  And the Monday after that.  And the Monday after that.  And we continue to grow every Monday, every day, every week into the depths of life illumined by the presence and love of the Light of the World who continues to lead us on through whatever awaits us!

Blessed travels!

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

Ghost (Luke 24:36-37)

 

 

While they were still speaking about this, he stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” But they were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost" (Luke 24:36-37, Gospel for the Third Sunday of Easter, April 15, 2021)

What is a ghost but memory made wispy flesh?

They have good reason to fear this memory, the disciples. It comes to them clad in grief and guilt— their grief, their guilt, not his. They believed in him, or thought they did. They loved him, or thought they did. They left a lot behind to follow him. Then they left him. Terror pierces through the grief and guilt. Will their abandoned families take them back? Will their villages look at them with anything but suspicion, scorn, maybe pity if they’re lucky? Are boats and nets and tax collector’s booth still waiting, or has someone else taken them over? There they are in the upper room, the crumbs of the supper still on the floor, and they locked into an empty limbo, unable to go back, afraid to go forward.

And suddenly there he is, the reason for it all. They hope he is a ghost, mere memory made wispy flesh. He will haunt them all their days in any case, this man— surely no more than that? He died, after all, whatever he may have seemed to claim or promise. But . . . he will haunt them, clad in their grief and guilt, this man they believed in and loved and left before he could leave them. But you can live with ghosts and go about your business. The hardy reality of wives and mothers-in-law and children demanding to be fed, of nets and boats and clinking coins will hold the ghosts at bay until they fade. Except maybe at night when all the others are asleep and you’re not.

And here he is, ghost and nightmare, absolving them with a word: “Peace.” Well, he had always seen right through their blustering and swaggering to their fears and griefs and guilt. Perhaps they begin at this moment to allow a tiny fragile shoot of hope to break through the stone walls of their prison, their tomb.

Then he clinches it. He forces them to face the truth from which they’re hiding. He never has allowed evasion. Always truth with him. He makes them look at his hands and feet, touch them even. He makes them confront the fact of his wounds. They weren’t there to see him get them, you see, except John. Now he makes them face the thing they fled. The world-shattering reality of the cross, and of him hanging on it, beaten, bruised, bloody, dying, dead. It is not his strength he reveals to them there in that upper room. They have already seen and believed in that: the blind wondering at the sunlight, the deaf hearing their children’s voices, a seemingly dead girl hugging her mother and eating a bit of bread. It is not his strength they are forced to own now, but his weakness, which is theirs, his wounds, which are theirs, his mortality, which is theirs. Weakness not denied but accepted as the only source of strength for them. Wounds not refused but held open as the only source of healing for them. Mortality not rejected but embraced as the only source of life for them.

 At last they know him for what he really is.

And they are us.

Reprinted from Sauntering Through Scripture: A Book of Reflections by Sister Genevieve Glen, OSB. Published by The Liturgical Press: Collegeville, MN, 2018. Reprinted with permission from the Liturgical Press.  Copyright 2018 by the Abbey of St. Walburga.

Long-Fingered Light (Easter)

 The Benedictine Nuns of the Abbey of St. Walburga wish all of you the light, peace and joy brought from darkness by the Risen Christ--even as many are still overshadowed by the darkness of the pandemic and of the violence erupting in different places.  You are all in our prayers.

See Matthew 28; Mark 16:1-12; Luke 24:1-50; John 20:11-18

 Easter lies too far beyond our experience for us to grasp more than impressions of startling appearances by a Jesus who is but isn’t dead, is but isn’t a ghost, is but isn’t the familiar figure his followers knew so well. What was he like? Well, flesh but not flesh as we know it, wounded but not with wounds as we know them, transformed but not in any way we can really picture. He appeared unannounced in locked rooms, walked incognito with discouraged disciples, ate solid food but passed through solid walls. Conceptual explanations of the resurrection don’t help much more than our flawed images do. They make use of words we know, but they use them to expound a reality we don’t, not really.

   We’re in good company, to judge by the general confusion that seems to have left the first Easter Christians babbling contradictory accounts of who saw what when and who believed whom—or didn’t. A stammer was probably the most honest way for them to describe a reality into and over which they stumbled in happy but fearful discovery. Perhaps our own Easter alleluias are our contemporary way of stammering out a truth for which we have no coherent words.

 The risen Christ, transformed into the Fire hidden at the heart of human flesh, sheds a light so bright it blinds us. Paul discovered that on the Damascus road (Galatians 1:15-24). But he was not the first to learn it. Jesus’ resurrection appearances are stories of that light reaching out to touch one by one the dark places in which his early followers walked: the apostles’ fear, Mary Magdalene’s grief, Thomas’s angry doubt, Peter’s shame. Those stories console because the beloved Christ appears in person to cast light into murky experiences we too have known. Fear, grief, doubt, and shame are shadows through which we have all walked.

 But the story doesn’t end with those personal post-resurrection encounters. Jesus disappears from the scene at the Ascension, or seems to, but the Light does not. In the Acts of the Apostles we see a lame man, condemned to a lifetime of begging, spring up and walk at the sound of Jesus’ name (Acts 3:1-10). We recoil at an angry mob stoning Stephen, but Jesus appears to him in glory (Acts 3:54-60).  We hear of fights between Christians of differing ethnic origins settled by Peter’s creative wisdom (Acts 6:1-7). We see disciples jailed (e.g. Acts 5:1-20), apostles arguing policy (Acts 15:1-21), missionaries thrown out of town (e.g. Acts 14:11-19), communities split (e.g. 1 Cor 1:10-17). We see, in other words, all the dark corners in which Christians sometimes find themselves even now, some two millennia after the resurrection. The darkness of the New Testament Church is far from outdated.

In Acts, we do not see Jesus appearing to solve the problems, at least not as he did in the Gospels. Instead we see what he promised: the power of Spirit and Word working to enlighten flawed human beings to see things in new ways, to discover what it really means to “love your enemies as yourself,” to pick up pieces and put them back together in creative ways so that the image of God can shine more clearly in a world still deeply held in the grip of night.

 The Light still reaches long fingers from God’s hidden depths into our present shadows. I cannot really imagine the risen Christ. All my inner pictures seem unreal. But in the annals of the early Church, in the chronicle of the world, and indeed in the story of my own soul, I can see the Light at work. And that Light is very real indeed.

Reprinted from Sauntering Through Scripture: A Book of Reflections by Sister Genevieve Glen, OSB. Published by The Liturgical Press: Collegeville, MN, 2018. Reprinted with permission from the Liturgical Press.  Copyright 2018 by the Abbey of St. Walburga.

Judas

 The character of Judas looms large in the story of Jesus' Passion this week. He raises questions for us as we ponder.  The gospel passages at Mass feature him on Tuesday and Wednesday. 

Judas Iscariot went to the chief priests and said, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. (Matthew 26:14-16)

 Judas is a question mark: why did he do it? Matthew tells us what Judas did, but he doesn’t tell us why. Down through the centuries, readers and commentators, librettists and screen writers have filled in the blanks: he did it for the money, he did it because Jesus had failed to live up to his expectations of a political messiah, he did it because the devil made him do it, he did it...well, no one knows why he did it.

 As we read, Judas becomes a mirror the Gospel holds up to us. In it we see the face of our own betrayals looking back at us. Piety may forbid us to see anything but horror in Judas for what he did. After all, he sold Jesus to his torturers and murderers. But honesty requires us to admit that he is not alone in having sold for small change the one thing that mattered. How many of us have sold our prayer for entertainment, our integrity for power or prestige, our life’s work for an easy ride? Is selling God’s gifts for a handful of trifles any less heinous really than selling the Savior?

 Come now, you’re probably saying, there’s no comparison. I’ve made my little compromises, sure, but nobody died for it. Is that really true? Jesus, Son of God, died in a few hours on one particular afternoon whose echoes have reverberated among believers and doubters alike ever since, but we, now made children of God, die no less decisively when we trade away our own God-given truth over a lifetime of little compromises. St. Basil the Great defines sin as the use of God's gifts for purposes other than those for which they were given. Most grievous, he says, is the misuse of love—our love for God, our love for those among whom we were planted in this world, our love for those to whom we can offer some service through the talents and tasks God has given us. A gifted storyteller puts the gift to use writing trash for cash.  A gifted artist devotes a lifetime to producing commercials peddling luxuries rather than painting great masterpieces.  A gifted singer forces a soaring voice into a style that damages it for the sake of a place in the top ten.  A gifted parent sacrifices time for the family in favor of clean and lovely surroundings or a weekend in front of the TV or a fishing trip. Not major crimes, surely? Ah, but the serpent’s tooth poisons by small bites. And the serpent’s whisper is well disguised as “everybody does it” or “you owe it to yourself ” or “come on—be practical.”

 After a while, maybe, we forget we have options. The good news that seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the tragic Judas is laid out before us during Holy Week in all its urgency. We may well have our little stash of silver coins hidden somewhere, rewards for our betrayals of true selves, but it’s never too late to trade them in again for forgiveness, freedom, life. The loss may be painful, the prospect of change frightening, the way back long and hard. But the offer is always there.

 It was there for Judas. Jesus forgave Peter, who denied him, and the other disciples who abandoned him, and even the men with hammer and nails who crucified him. Surely he was just as ready to forgive Judas. Why didn’t Judas accept? Why didn’t he allow the Savior to save him from his own despair? Why did he hang himself after three years in the company of God’s mercy made flesh (Matt 27:5)? I wonder if it was because he had so eroded his soul with a lifetime of betrayals that he could no longer see the outstretched hand. Having walled himself into the very small cell of his own self-interest and shame, perhaps he could no longer recognize that the door stood open. And who knows? Maybe, in the privacy of one of those moments of anguish and mercy that go unreported by the evangelists--who had reason to think ill of Judas anyway--God's finally managed to pry open Judas' fist and fill it with something far better than thirty pieces of silver. I hope so. But what went on for Judas in his darkness remains as much a question as his motives.

If Judas is question, puzzle, thorn in the flesh of the Christian mind, he is also, like all of us, mystery. How many of us can really fathom in ourselves the depths where betrayal and grace meet? I would rather not reduce Judas to a simple explanation. I would rather allow him to remain a mirror. If I can’t see into his soul, perhaps he can let me see into mine. My prayer is for the courage to look. 

Reprinted from Sauntering Through Scripture: A Book of Reflections by Sister Genevieve Glen, OSB. Published by The Liturgical Press: Collegeville, MN, 2018. Reprinted with permission from the Liturgical Press.  Copyright 2018 by the Abbey of St. Walburga.

Palm Sunday: Two Faces

 As many of you know, our Abbey was founded in 1935 in Boulder, Colorado, by nuns from our German motherhouse, the Abtei St. Walburg.  We lived there until 1997, when the exigencies of a growing community and the generosity of benefactors prompted a move to our present location in Virginia Dale, Colorado, 100 miles north of Boulder.  This week, we grieve deeply with and for all those in Boulder who are suffering in the wake of the fatal shooting at a Boulder grocery store, not far from our former home. And, moved by the example of Jesus who prayed from the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," we pray for the shooter and for all those whose lives are enmeshed in violence against others.  Please pray with us during this Holy Week of Jesus' passion.

On Palm Sunday, we are confronted by a sudden and troubling transition.  As Mass opens, whether we are participating in person or watching on live streaming or simply remembering Palm Sundays past, we gather outside the church to remember Jesus' moment of apparent triumph, when the crowds greeted his entry into Jerusalem by stripping nearby palms trees of branches and taking off their own cloaks to spread on the road before him, as if he were a king.  The words of the prophet Zechariah echo in the background: Behold: your king is coming to you, a just savior is he, Humble, and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He shall banish the chariot from Ephraim and the horse from Jerusalem; the warrior’s bow will be banished, and he will proclaim peace to the nations. His dominion will be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth (Zech 9:11).  The prophecy will be fulfilled, but not as the crowds on the road to Jerusalem imagined.  We join them in spirit, processing with blessed palms in hand as we enter the church.

But then the entire tenor of the liturgy changes.  Palms are laid down and forgotten. We plunge very quickly into the somber reading of Isaiah 50:4-7, where we see Jesus' face in the prophet's description of the Suffering Servant is beaten and mocked. We sing verses of Psalm 22 with the refrain "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me," part of the story of the crucifixion as recorded in Matthew's Gospel.  And we hear the story of Jesus' passion and death as recorded by St. Mark (14:1-15:47, or abbreviated to 15:1-39). Where the story is read in parts, we suddenly hear crying out in the voice of s the crowd of spectators crying out to Pilate, "Crucify him!" (Mark 15:3).

In the space of only a few minutes, we are confronted with the truth of our own two faces.  On good days, we are more than willing to enter into the Church's prayer of praise in psalms and canticles.  "Praise the Lord" and "Thank you, Jesus" come easily when we know ourselves surrounded by God's love.  But there are other days when we might speak those words with our lips while our hearts are filled with bitter complaint against this same God who seems suddenly to have heaped us with trouble and sorrow.  In these past months of pandemic, all-consuming wildfires, and riots on every side, we have learned again that complaint is easier than hosannah's and palms.  

This Holy Week, we will hear both chapters in the life of Jesus and of his first community.  On Holy Thursday evening, we already see our own two faces in the disciples' protestations of undying loyalty when Jesus speaks of his impending death and their sudden vanishing act after his arrest just hours later.  We could avoid the whole contradiction, of course, by simply denying not Jesus, as Peter did, but our own reality as sinners in need of salvation.  We would, of course, then be proclaiming with all our frightened might that Jesus could have skipped all this week's drama because we really don't need the redemption he won for us.  

On Good Friday, we will hear Jesus saying to Pontius Pilate, "For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth," and Pilate responding "What is truth?"  He had evidently already decided that for him, truth was expediency, the value of his own skin, because he immediately went out and let the crowd decide who would die, Barabbas or Jesus.  But Jesus had said that not only was he sent testify to the truth but also, "Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” That's us, to whom St. Benedict says again and again, "Listen with the ear of your heart."  And that listening means always to keep an ear cocked for the words of the Word made Flesh, Christ, God's ultimate word of love to us and for us.

Real love is always honest.  Real love always tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in the courtroom of life.  And the whole truth is that both of tjpse faces laid bare in the Passion story are ours, whether we like to see it or not.  And the whole truth adds that we may indeed be laying down palm branches before our king and savior and then crying out "Crucify him" because we have recognized him as a danger to whatever complacent self-satisfaction we may be hiding behind. In both these sides of ourselves, repeated with far less drama in daily life, the whole truth is that are above all else loved by the One who thought death on the cross a price worth paying for us.  

Our best response is not to deny either face but to seek always, as Benedict's disciples, to allow the Crucified and Risen Savior to look upon as we are (he will anyway!) and transform these inner divisions into the wholeness we call salvation.  In other words, our best response is to continue the life of honest conversion to which we have committed ourselves.

Then on Easter, sinners and saints though we will still be, we can in all honesty and joy sing out "Alleluia!"

Mass Texts for the Solemnity of the Passing of Saint Benedict

This year the Solemnity of the Passing of Saint Benedict is celebrated on Monday, March 22, rather than the usual March 21, since the latter falls on a Sunday of Lent.  Since this feast is celebrated only by Benedictines, the texts do not appear in resources such as missalettes, so they are printed here for your prayer and reflection.  They are very rich texts that make for excellent lectio divina all week!

ENTRANCE ANTIPHON.

There was a man of venerable life,
Benedict, blessed by grace and by name,
who, leaving home and patrimony
and desiring to please God alone,
sought out the habit of holy living.


COLLECT
O God, who made the Abbot Saint Benedict
an outstanding master in the school of divine service,
grant, we pray,
that, putting nothing before love of you,
we may hasten with a loving heart
in the way of your commands.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.


FIRST READING          Proverbs 2:1-9
My son, if you receive my words
and treasure my commands,
Turning your ear to wisdom,
inclining your heart to understanding;
Yes, if you call to intelligence,
and to understanding raise your voice;
If you seek her like silver,
and like hidden treasures search her out:

Then will you understand the fear of the LORD;
the knowledge of God you will find;
For the LORD gives wisdom,
from his mouth come knowledge and understanding;
He has counsel in store for the upright,
he is the shield of those who walk honestly,
Guarding the paths of justice,
protecting the way of his pious ones.

Then you will understand rectitude and justice,
honesty, every good path.


RESPONSORIAL PSALM          34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11

R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord or: I will bless the Lord at all times.

I will bless the LORD at all times;
praise shall be always in my mouth.
My soul will glory in the LORD
that the poor may hear and be glad.

R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord or: I will bless the Lord at all times.

Magnify the LORD with me;
let us exalt his name together.
I sought the LORD, who answered me,
delivered me from all my fears.

R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord or: I will bless the Lord at all times.

Look to God that you may be radiant with joy
and your faces may not blush for shame.
In my misfortune I called,
the LORD heard and saved me from all distress.

R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord or: I will bless the Lord at all times.

The angel of the LORD, who encamps with them,
delivers all who fear God.
Learn to savor how good the LORD is;
happy are those who take refuge in him.

R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord or: I will bless the Lord at all times.

Fear the LORD, you holy ones;
nothing is lacking to those who fear him.
The powerful grow poor and hungry,
but those who seek the LORD lack no good thing.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord or: I will bless the Lord at all times.


ALLELUIA          Matthew 5:3
Blessed are the poor in spirit;
for theirs in the kingdom of heaven.


GOSPEL          Matt 19:27-29
Peter said to Jesus,
"We have given up everything and followed you.
What will there be for us?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, I say to you
that you who have followed me, in the new age,
when the Son of Man is seated on his throne of glory,
will yourselves sit on twelve thrones,
judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
And everyone who has given up houses or brothers or sisters
or father or mother or children or lands
for the sake of my name will receive a hundred times more,
and will inherit eternal life."

 

Making Space for Joy

March 14 is traditionally called Laetare Sunday because the opening word of the entrance chant in Latin is "Laetare", which means "Rejoice!"

Really?  During Lent? Only two weeks away from Palm Sunday?

Yes, really.  The Church's liturgical calendar on both the Second and Fourth Sundays of Lent urges us to look up!  Take your eyes off your feet, growing sore and weary on that desert road. Discouragement is one of the traps the Enemy sets on our Lenten way because it turns all our attention to ourselves (cf. Psalm 140:5-6; Psalm 142:4), Look instead at Jesus on that same road to Jerusalem so long ago, no doubt encountering the same snares. He kept his eyes on his destination and drew from it the determination to keep going.  He was headed toward his death, and he knew it.  But that death was only the last narrow gate through which he would pass to reach his final destination:  the Resurrection.  On Lent's Second Sunday, we caught sight of the fire of Easter already burning in the transfigured Christ.  On the Fourth Sunday, we hear the greatest argument against discouragement ever written: "...God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life" (John 3:16).  Rejoice indeed!

Not too long ago--and I'm sorry I can't remember exactly what day that was--we read "“Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you” (Luke 6:37-38).  The blog entry entitled "The Work of Lent" (February 16, 2021) considered some of the tools St. Benedict recommends for clearing away the thorns that prevent God's word from taking root and flourishing in our lives. Today, we look again at clearing space in our hearts, this time by uprooting the really bad habit of sitting down by  the roadside to contemplate all our grievances against others.  We can't keep Jesus in sight on that Jerusalem road if we do that.  But it can be so much more comfortable, can't it, in this season of penance and conversion to catalogue everyone else's faults while ignoring our own? 

Instead, says the Gospel, take that Lenten pruning hook to this particular thorn bush.  Clear out all those criticisms of everyone else, be they people you know (even people you love?) or all those people you don't know but whose faults you find readily catalogued on in the news or on the web.  Are the flaws of the British royal family or of American politicians really worth the cost of the time and energy you could otherwise have spent on your own Lenten work of conversion?  When you remove all those faces from your personal rogues' gallery, you may be amazed at how much inner space you've freed up. 

But Jesus warns of the danger of empty space recently vacated by your personal demons.  They'll be back, he says, with all their destructive families and friends (Luke 11:25).  Instead, open all your inner doors to the Holy Spirit, the breath of God's creative love bearing a new set of vocabulary into whatever dark corners you've opened up.  It's an invitation God never refuses.  Oh, and don't get preoccupied with another catalogue, this one of all the judgemental habits you've now become ashamed of.  That's another trick to make you sit down again and focus on yourself and fill up with guilt, shame and remorse.  

No, Jesus says that all the space you've made by clearing away your grudges is space God will fill with the Spirit, that love that impels God's never-ending work of redemption.  And one of fruits of the Spirit's presence, says St. Paul in Galatians 5:22, is joy! 

So, make space!  Laetare!  Rejoice!  The risen Christ is already breaking through, even here and now two weeks away from Holy Week. 

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

Into the Fire

Second Sunday of Lent 2021: Gospel: Mk 9:2-10

 Did you ever pick up a shovel as a child and set out for the flower bed to dig a hole down to China?

 When I was six years old, it was first-grade lore that you could.  Some of us tried, but as far as I know, no one ever made it.  Just as well!  If we could have dug down far enough, we would have reached not China but fire.  As we learned in later science classes, earth’s core is molten stuff called magma, not a healthy place to visit.

 But during Lent, we are in fact called to dig down into the core of our life to the fire that burns there.

 In the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, read at Mass on the Second Sunday of Lent every year, Jesus invited Peter, James and John to climb a high mountain with him. There he “was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them” (Mark 9:2-3).  This transfiguration revealed the fire that burned within him.  It was an overwhelming experience for the three disciples who would have known the story of the Exodus from the synagogue.  Before them on the  mountain,  where Jesus burned with light in the company of Moses and Elijah, they could not have escaped the memory of Mount Sinai, where both of these prophets met God. The God of the Exodus spoke to Moses in fire.  This same God led the people through the desert from Egypt to the Promised Land in the form of a pillar of fiery cloud, often called God’s glory.  And the voice from just such a cloud spoke to the terrified disciples, calling Jesus “my beloved son” and telling them to listen to him.  The disciples could have finished the sentence, had they not been so befuddled with awe and fear, “as Moses listened on Mount Sinai.” Then, “[s]uddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them” (Mark 9:8).  But they would never see him in the same way again.

Why are we reading this story during Lent?  First of all, it is grounded in the story of the Exodus,  the context in which much of Lent is situated.  The book is read almost daily in the Office of Readings.  A number of the passages read at Mass quote portions of the Law revealed to Moses on Sinai by the God of fire, and the gospel readings urge us to obey its prescriptions about how to treat other people of all sorts.  And the story of the Passover from the Book of Exodus, the story that sets off the journey from Egypt into the desert, opens the Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday evening, thus plunging us into the paschal mystery spread out before us on Thursday, Good Friday, and in the magnificent readings of the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday. 

 Secondly, we read the story of the transfiguration early in Lent because it points us toward the season's goal.  Jesus burns always with God’s presence, but the presence is veiled through much of his public life, though the stories of his ministry hint at it often for those baffled followers not able yet to see it.    For example,  we read of those possessed by the one whose aim is always to twist and derail  God’s creation as he had done in conversation with the first human beings in Eden (Genesis 3) and tried to do again in conversation with Jesus in the desert. Jesus set these possessed ones free and brought them back to themselves and their families. Similarly, he healed lepers condemned to isolation by the Law revealed on Sinai and reunited them with their communities.  Again, he provided bread in abundance to the crowds, heirs to those who gathered God’s gift of manna day after day for forty years in the desert.  

On Good Friday, darkness took over the earth, but on Easter Sunday, Jesus, the fiery Sun of Justice broke through the darkness to deliver all peoples from ultimate death.  That is where our Lenten journey is taking us through all our penitential efforts to prune away what holds us back and keeps is down beneath the thumb of sin and death.  So the Second Sunday of Lent makes the promise that leads us from this present "valley of darkness,” whatever form that takes in our lives, into the presence of the Risen Christ who embodies God’s fiery glory in human flesh.

 We think of Advent as the season of hope, but Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan offered a different perspective in his book The Road of Hope: “Keep going forward on the Road of Hope….St. Paul knew that ‘imprisonment and afflictions await me’ (Acts 2:23) and Jesus himself foresaw that the road to Jerusalem would lead to his great Passion (see Matthew 16:21). Yet both continued onwards.”  Jesus traveled knowingly toward suffering and death, but he assured the bereaved Martha after the death of her brother Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25).  St. Paul followed Jesus’ path years later, trusting that whatever he suffered was worth it because it would bring him to the risen Lord who had appeared to him on the Damascus Road  as “a light from the sky, brighter than the sun” (Acts 26:13).  Both Jesus and Paul traveled in obedient hope toward the light beyond the approaching darkness of their deaths. And we are called to do the same through Lent to Easter, when the Crucified of Good Friday will appear to us in the flame of the Paschal Candle.  So Lent, too, is a season when hope fuels us to travel on, to Easter and beyond.

 As our Lenten prayer and pruning leads us deeper and deeper into our own reality, we need not wait for Easter to discover that at the deepest heart of our being we find Christ, “in whom [we] live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).  This is the crucified and risen Christ in whose inner being burns the holy Fire of the Exodus journey seen by three disciples at the Transfiguration.  He is the glory of God into whose living flesh we have been baptized, or maybe at Easter.

 So let us take up the spiritual picks and shovels that will uncover who we really are in Christ, and let us travel on through Lent in hope until we reach that Fire!

 _____________

Note:  Francis Xavier Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan (1928-2002) was a  remarkable man. A native of Vietnam, he was appointed Coadjutor Bishop of Saigon six days before the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army.  He was imprisoned by the communist government of Vietnam in a re-education camp for 13 years, nine in solitary confinement (Wikipedia).  While there, he did not spend his time and energy brooding on his own suffering but instead found every way he could to scribble messages to his people on whatever scraps of paper he could get. The messages are not complaints, though complaints would certainly have been justified.  They are calls to hope.  They were eventually compiled into the book, The Road to Hope: A Gospel from Prison.  The most recent edition was published in 2013 by Wellspring. Pope Benedict XVI said of the book: “During thirteen years in jail, in a situation of seemingly utter hopelessness, the fact that he could listen and speak to God became for him an increasing power of hope, which enabled him, after his release, to become for people all over the world a witness to hope—to that great hope which does not wane even in the nights of solitude.”  The late Cardinal’s cause for beatification was officially opened in 2007.

Copyright 2021 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

Into the Desert

Lent is the season of the desert.  Every morning in the Office of Readings  through most of Lent, we read a passage from the Book of Exodus which centers around Israel’s years in the desert as they traveled from slavery to the Promised Land. On the First Sunday of Lent, we read about Jesus’ venture into that place of presence and memory for God’s people to confront the Voice that derails us from our own spiritual journey to the Promised Land.

 For the people of Israel and for us, the desert is a stark place of revelation.  It offers no entertainments.  It offers no comforts.  It offers no place to hide.  In the desert we are brought face-to-face with life.  And death.  And, hardest of all, ourselves.

 In the desert, the people of Israel found themselves freed from slavery but shackled by their own fears, their own insufficiencies, their own pettiness.  The fears were justified:  inexperienced nomads in that harsh landscape really did find their own survival plunged into uncertainty. Where were they going?  When would they get there? What would they eat when their unleavened bread ran out?  What would they drink?  How would they provide for families and flocks?  And who was this God who had brought them here—why?  Their insufficiencies were real.  There were no paying jobs in the desert, not even the job of slavery which actually did provide them with a place to live and some sort of sustenance.  They had no maps.  They were strangers in this unfamiliar landscape. They knew nothing about surviving this harsh climate.  They had to rely totally on this God of their ancestors who had sunk into the oblivion of forgetfulness over those 400 years in Egypt.  And on Moses, who suddenly seemed the cause of all their problems.  Their pettiness, their selfishness, their spirit of complaint, however, had all traveled with them since they left home in Egypt.  The food wasn’t right. The drink wasn’t satisfactory.  They had nothing to do beyond surviving during those long stops along the way.  They were ungrateful.  They were quarrelsome. They were low on courage.   And there was no way out but back. But that road was closed.  As we take in the picture, we see that they had no entertainments.  They had no comforts.  They had no place to hide.  And they didn’t have any Lent to motivate them to leave some of those consolations behind. 

In the desert, Jesus sought none of them.  He came face-to-face with the Tempter. who had been at work undoing God’s beloved human beings from the start.  He was brought face-to-face with his own life and his own truth: if you are the Son of God, the Tempter said again and again, here is what you should do.  And Jesus wouldn’t do it.  He was brought face-to-face with his own death when the Tempter offered him a quick escape.  And he wouldn’t accept that escape, either. He was brought face-to-face with the heart of the struggle ahead.  And he did not refuse it.

 The desert people of God  look back at us from the mirror every morning.  Jesus does too—we are his Body.  But his is the harder  act to follow.

 There is one certainty about the Lenten desert he calls us into.  We will come face-to-face with our own reality as heirs to God’s people and as members of Christ and as  sinful people of hope somewhere between those truths.  And we will come face-to-face with God.  In fact, St. Benedict says we must:  he urges us to seek God always and everywhere, even in the desert.  Perhaps especially in the desert, where our need is more apparent.  And Jesus promises: seek and you will find.

 Blessed travels!   

 Copyright Abbey of St. Walburga