July 11: The Solemnity of St. Benedict

 

Today the Benedictine world celebrates the memory of Our Holy Father Benedict.  He appears on the daily Catholic liturgical calendar as an optional memorial, but for us here at the Abbey, this day is a solemnity.  We invite you to join us in spirit as we give thanks for St. Benedict, for his Rule, for his wisdom, and for his constant care for all of us who live under his tutelage and patronage, both monastics and oblates.

 A key part of St. Benedict’s legacy is his vision of a life of prayer and his invitation to all of us to take part in it.  We have only to read his chapters on lectio divina and the Divine Office to recognize what a large portion of the monastic day is devoted to prayer.  Oblates cannot, of course, follow St. Benedict’s schedule, but oblates and monastics alike are encouraged to make regular prayer a serious part of our lives.  Commentators often note that St. Benedict tells very little about how to pray. He describes the appropriate attitude with which to pray, especially (but not only) when we pray the Divine Office: “¹We believe that the divine presence is everywhere and that in every place the eyes of the Lord are watching the good and the wicked (Prov 15:3). ²But beyond the least doubt we should believe this to be especially true when we celebrate the divine office. ³We must always remember, therefore, what the Prophet says: Serve the Lord with fear (Ps 2:11), ⁴and again, Sing praise wisely (Ps 46[47]:8); ⁵and, In the presence of the angels I will sing to you (Ps 137[138]:1). ⁶Let us consider, then, how we ought to behave in the presence of God and his angels, ⁷and let us stand to sing the psalms in such a way that our minds are in harmony with our voices” (RB 19).  But he offers no instruction about a particular method of prayer beyond is general references to “reading,” which we presume refers to lectio.  (See Note 1 below)

 St. Benedict knew and belonged to the rich tradition of writing about prayer by the ancient Christian writers and, assumed his monks were also conversant with that literature, so he referred to it often but did not repeat it. (See Note 2 below) What he gives more specifically is instruction not in how to prayer specifically but in how to live a life that frames and inspires prayer.  A great deal of the Rule teaches us how to live with others in the spirit of the gospel.  He encourages respect, charity, concern for others, and especially the pursuit of peace.  He describes, in other words, a life governed by the two-fold law of love of God and neighbor set forth by Jesus (Matthew 22:36-40) as “the one thing necessary,” as it were.  In such a context, we will find it possible to grow more and more deeply into the habit of God-focused prayer that seeks a personal relationship with God but also the well-being of the world around us.  It’s a bit hard to contemplate the person and life of Christ, whom we are to prefer beyond all else, when are focused on our own wants, our own gripes, and our own interests. We can grow into the traditional monastic goal of unceasing prayer (a goal not reserved for monks but enjoined on all Christians)  because our energies will not be sapped by mutual competition for power and reputation,  internal grumbling about what is wrong with everyone else,  and me, me, me!  St. Benedict offers ways and means  to switch to "you and You".

 As we very well know, some of the specific ways and means St. Benedict describes for reaching this end have changed over the centuries, both in monasteries and in oblate life, but the essential gospel framework for living in growing love for God and neighbor has not.  And that perennial vision of life we still find in St. Benedict’s Rule and the tradition of spirituality it has fostered and maintained.

 Today is a good day to give thanks to God for the gift of his wisdom!

Notes

 Note 1: Note that in RB 19, St, Benedict does speak about praying with humility and brevity:” ²How much more important, then, to lay our petitions before the Lord God of all things with the utmost humility and sincere devotion. ³We must know that God regards our purity of heart and tears of compunction, not our many words.  ⁴Prayer should therefore be short and pure, unless perhaps it is prolonged under the inspiration of divine grace. ⁵In community, however, prayer should always be brief; and when the superior gives the signal, all should rise together.”  The phrasing suggests he is referring primarily to prayers of petition. 

Note 2:  Annotated editions of the Rule such as the large red RB1980 provide references to the many works upon which  St. Benedict seems to have drawn.

Copyright 2020  by the Abbey of St. Walburga

 

The Ascension

 

On Sunday, May 29, many dioceses in the United States celebrate the Solemnity of the Ascension.  Others keep to the original tradition of celebrating the Solemnity of the Ascension on the Thursday prior to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, which would have been last week.  The Archdiocese of Denver, where the Abbey is located, follows the custom of celebrating the Ascension on Sunday.

 

The Ascension always seems to me to carry a small note of sadness among all the alleluia’s.  Jesus’ disciples have spent a long, intense time with him since they were first called.  At his invitation, they have been in his company almost constantly.  Even after his death and resurrection, he has spent time with them personally, although we have no real count of how much.  Now they are gathered with him for the last time on the Mount of Olives near Bethany for a final farewell as he is taken from their sight by a cloud.  The cloud calls up memories of the cloud that led the Israelites out of Egypt and through their long desert years to the Promised Land.  It is a powerful biblical image of the Presence of God.  In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’ final words to the disciples is this promise: “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt 28:20).

 

During the time between Jesus’ resurrection and his ascension, he has in fact taught them how to see and hear him differently even when he is no longer visibly present among them.  He warned a weeping Mary Magdalen when she wanted to cling to him in the garden that she will have to let him go now.  But, “apostle to the apostles,” as she is now known, she would also be included in his promise to be always present, even though not in his familiar bodily form.  He didn’t explain, but when he met the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, he gave them two ways in which he would be with them in the future:  in the Word of God—which he taught them to hear differently now, as assurances of his presence and love—and in the breaking of the bread—which the Church from the time of the Book of Acts has celebrated faithfully.  To St. Paul he broke open in a new way the command to watch how we treat people because “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matt 25:40). To St. Paul the risen Christ explained, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:5)  St. Paul himself broadened this into his vivid (and, to be, honest, humorous) description of all of us actually (and really) baptized into the Body of Christ ( 1 Cor 12:12=36; Gal 3:28).

 

The scene of the Ascension gives us to imagine that Christ has left, but in fact he never has.  True to his promise, he has always been with us and always will be.  But the New Testament passages quoted above set out our post-Easter agenda:  to look for him and listen for his voice (RB Prologue 1!) not in long-ago Palestine but in our own household, our own workplaces, our own streets, our own Churches now—and also, painfully, in the all those places torn apart by disease, violence and war.  Ukraine remains  a continuing vivid example, but, as I write, so does the devastated community of Uvalde, Texas, the scene of the most recent school shooting.

 

Whatever the scene, whatever the joys and sorrows, whatever the welcome peace of humdrum realities, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ is with us always!  It is in the context of this faith that we are called to live the wisdom of St. Benedict and share it with one another.  Alleluia!

 

Copyright 2022, Abbey of St. Walburga

The Easter Mystery of the Cross: Holy Week 2022

 

Today, as I write, it is Holy Thursday.  This evening the holy Three Days of Easter open with a focus on Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, on the eve of his crucifixion.  The Three Days (Triduum) moves from darkness into glorious light at the Easter Vigil, where we proclaim Christ our Light.

 But the darkness between, filled as it is with Jesus’ intense suffering amid his disciples’ desertion, the trials before Herod and Pilate, the way of the cross that follows, and finally that terrible time when the darkness seems to win out at last.  As Jesus hangs on the Cross, “From noon onward, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:47).   

 That apparent triumph of darkness over even the Light of the World, Jesus Christ himself, seems appallingly relevant as we read the news of the escalating war in Ukraine, with its horrifying violence.  As people and families are subjected to wrenching separations, hideous torture and agonizing death, we are shaken by the darkness that covers the land, with no immediate relief in sight.  And the victims with and for whom we agonize are only a part of the picture of humanity wiped out.  The perpetrators are the other part.  “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” is prayer we might say with and for victims and perpetrators alike. 

 Those who inspire our prayer and energize it might seem far away and long ago.  Millennia have passed since the events of that first Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday in Jerusalem.  And thousands of miles stand between us and the war in Ukraine.  But a line from the Catholic Church’s Good Friday liturgy seems to me to call us to our very real responsibility in the midst of this tragedy: “We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world.”  Please bear with me as I try to spell out at least bits of the mystery that is really beyond words.

 The Triduum condenses into intense, powerful confrontation with the truth that the Cross, instrument of horrible torture and death, is in fact a not an end to the human story—either Jesus’ or ours or our brothers’ and sisters’ in Ukraine and all other places of violence and war. The Cross is a doorway that opens out into unending life at its full.  At the Easter Vigil, as the lighted Candle, with the sign of the cross drawn upon it enters the darkened Church, the Catholic liturgy invites us we to hail Christ, the light of the world. Those of you from other churches may experience this differently, but it is nevertheless the backbone of Easter prayer for all believers. It is God’s promise that through Jesus’ death and resurrection, the closed container of mortality to which we seem to be confined is broken open into a life we cannot yet even imagine.

 It seems to me that we who acclaim that truth in the safety of our churches and our homes bear a responsibility to carry it into all those places, like Ukraine, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia, where death seems to conquer all (and in so doing, though we rarely say it out loud, make all our life’s efforts pointless in the end).  The death of faith is death indeed.  The task seems Quixotic—Quixote being that deluded old knight who tilted at windmills, mistaking them for jousting opponents.  And it would be, if it were not for our belief that we, all of us, everywhere, are together members of Christ.  St. Paul assures us that whatever happens to one member of the Body affects the whole body (see 1 Corinthians 12:24-26).  So, if we, even amid our securities, hold fiercely to the claim that the Light of Christ triumphs over every darkness in the end, we are surely feeding that truth into the whole Body, even those trapped in unendurable nigh and, in so doing, offering them the strength to abide.  And, if only at moments, abide without returning hatred for hatred, drawing however briefly and slightly from Jesus on the cross praying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

 Before those of you who have known combat from any perspective--military, medical, chaplaincy— or have done policing tell me this will do nothing for those who live in the neighborhoods become battlefield (and I honor your experience and your courage in embracing it), I own again that it seems Quixotic.  And all of us who have suffered the dark streets of suffering and loss that are not confined to battlefields, can readily agree.  But faith deals in realities we believe exist but cannot see, taste, touch or feel.  And the reality of the Cross as ever-open doorway from awful night into glorious day is the most important of them all.

 So as we sit, stand and kneel in our churches during the holy days ahead of us, or as we sit before the daily news reports, let us at least dare Quixote’s venture and pray with all our strength: “We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your holy cross, you have redeemed the world!”  And let us pass it on through the invisible strands that bind us inexorably to all those everywhere held tightly in the unconquerable love of God made flesh in Jesus Christ.

 

©2022 Abbey of St. Walburga

Lent's Best Weapon

 

The question asked by Lent is often read as, “What will you give up this year?”  St. Benedict focuses on this question when he directs us: “let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting” (RB 49:7).  Most of us have memories of caffeine free, sugar free, or snack free Lent, with accompanying withdrawal pains—not all of them physical!  Refusing our own stubborn self-will whatever its little heart desires, even craves, is a salutary exercise, open to expansion into other areas of life such as habits of judgement, criticism, and complaint.  And, of course, their often-hidden companion, gossip.

 However, I would like to suggest a different image for self-denial.  We do not have to look very far or very deep to discover the issue of “too-muchness” in our lives and in the world around us: too much food and drink, too much money, too much “stuff,” too much activity, too much of everything except time!  Lurking behind all this too-muchness is the specter of unchosen deprivation: too little food and drink in countless places at home and abroad, too little money for necessities, too little clothing, too little shelter, too little education, too little employment.  Lent does not forget these harsh realities:  one of the strong traditional practices of the season is alms-giving in all its forms. 

 However, for many of us “too-muchness” deafens us to the sufferings of those who have too little.  Lent sharpens our attention on what hinders generosity at its root: the tiny world of me and my personal too-muchness in all its forms.  For Benedictines, devoted to and defined by the Scriptures as we are, St. Paul points to a powerful tool for addressing correction imbalance in ourselves, before we try to take on the world’s problem and our own contribution to them.  After reminding us that the real battle in which the cosmos is immersed is not with flesh and blood but with the powers of evil that so often manipulate humanity to its mutual destruction.  The monastic tradition, since all the way back in its desert days, has always taken that battle very seriously.    And so must we.  St. Paul proposes a list of armor and weapons that is well worth pondering in this season (Ephesians 6:10-17, to which I would add vs.18), but among them is one that particularly strikes my attention: “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17).

 The Letter to the Hebrews adds: “the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword” (Heb 4:12). Further, it penetrates “between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and [and is] able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart” (also v. 12),  Surely at one time or another, all of us, in the course of our lectio or praying of the Hours have had the experience of being cut to the heart by a word, a phrase, an image, a story from this bottomless well of life that is always at our fingertips.  As we travel through Lent, we can make ample use of this very powerful weapon, not of our own design but of God’s, to cut through the layers of our life, exposing various cherished bits of too-muchness, and, deeper, exposing what needs or desires drive us to accumulate them.  We may sometimes want to make use of those needs and desires as excuses—hark back to Adam and Eve in the garden, hiding in the bushes and defending their “little” dietary transgression by all sorts of finger-pointing (Gn 3)!  It can be very enlightening and empowering to uncover the deeper reasons for our too-muchness in our past, but translating reasons into excuses is just finding a better set of bushes to hide in.  The Sword will free us by cutting away all the bushes, if can find the courage to see ourselves naked, stripped of all our subterfuges, disguises and, yes, excuses.

 This Sword comes with no instruction manual.  There is only one real instruction we need in the process of our Lenten conversion from slavery in all its varied and sometimes subtle forms to the freedom of the Spirit.  It’s the one St. Benedict himself puts in our hands: “Listen!”  Not, of course, with the ears attached to the sides of our head, but with “the ears of the heart”.   While sharp objects are not generally recommended for dealing with wax-deafened ears, the Sword that is God’s Word cannot be bettered as a remedy against self-chosen deafness! 

Try it!  You might not like it—I often don’t! —but you will certainly come to hear more and more clearly St. Benedict’s encouraging words: “What, dear brothers and sisters, is more delightful than this voice of the Lord calling to us? See how the Lord in his love shows us the way of life…. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love"  (RB Prologue 19-20.48-49).

Oh, and when you take up this sword in the form of your Bible or book of Hours, remember that it is “living and active” because the Word is not primarily a book.   The Word of God is a Person, the Person we are called to prefer above all else:  Jesus Christ (see John 1:1-14).  

©2022, Abbey of St. Walburga

 

Lent 2022

 

Lent is upon us.  Ash Wednesday is March 2.

Every year, Lent looks toward Easter, when we hope to celebrate what the prophet Micah promised “the sun of justice will arise with healing in its wings” (Mal 3:20). In RB 49, the chapter of the Rule dealing with Lent, St. Benedict describes that moment as one of “joy”.

This year, neither daybreak nor joy is much apparent as we continue to live under the dark clouds of pandemic and now war.  Of course, St. Benedict and his monks knew long-ago versions of both.  But then as now, Easter light—not a “thing” but the person of Christ, the “light of the world”—refused to succumb to the darkness of danger and fear (see John 12:12). As St. John assures us, that light has never yielded to the suffocating clouds of long nights like the ones we are living through (see ; John 1:3-5).

The stories which lie ahead of us in the Easter gospels suggest that when the risen Christ appeared to his disciples, whether the grieving Mary Magdalene in the garden near the tomb or the two disheartened disciples on the road to Emmaus, what he gave them was a new way to see and to hear in the wake of what seemed so disastrous a death.  As you likely remember, Mary Magdalene mistook him for a gardener (a very biblical mistake, as we will explore some other time) and was forced to see him differently.  The disciples, who are never named, were baffled by the conflicting news of his death and his startling appearance, alive, to various people.  As he walked with them, he set out again the meaning of the Scriptures till their hearts burned with new life—and fire gave light as well as warmth on their cold, dark journey (see John 20:11-18; Luke 24:13-32). .

In RB 49, St. Benedict offers us various traditional ways of refocusing our attention and centering it on the living Christ, in line with his admonitions to prefer nothing to that Christ, the epicenter of love.  Reading the Word with renewed fidelity will banish the darkness that leads us into a confusion of priorities caused by so many uncertainties about the future.  Compunction of heart—the traditional monastic description of a door opening onto the road to conversion—allows us to regret and walk away from all the forms of selfishness inspired by fear and loss such as those that still surround us.  Cutting down on some of the ways we comfort ourselves without reference to the love of God and neighbor frees us to see more clearly what really does matter when we look with Gospel-washed eyes. All of these simple tools ready us to see the reality of the presence of the risen Christ burning around us and within us, clouded but undimmed by the suffering that seems to prevail over all else at times like this.  Lent offers us an invitation and concrete ways to look again, see again, and strengthen one another in faith, hope and love, despite the terrible damage wrought by the despair caused by sickness, violence, power struggles, and utter disregard for any good but their perpetrators’.  By the light of Christ, we can look through and past all of these devastations to the real human love, generosity, service and self-forgetfulness that are also there but less dramatic to observe. 

At Easter, the candidates for baptism will be washed clean in the life-giving waters that flow, ultimately, from the pierced heart of the crucified Lord (John 19:34, with Ezekiel 47:1-12, Revelation 22:1-2)  , but even on the way, those waters wash over all of us, making blind eyes see, despair-constricted hearts expand, and lamed spirits too timid to walk the paths of God kick free and run the way of the gospel, as St. Benedict promises we will.  And, to put it at its simplest, the way of the gospel is always love, no matter how fierce the forces against it may seem.

One of St. Benedict’s key values is community, so let us join forces with one another to strengthen us on that gospel journey and to inspire us to invite others to come along toward the Easter sunrise on the horizon, beyond whatever obstacles attempt to block it! And let us raise our prayer together for all of those caught in the dark nights of disease and war, with all their consequences.

For Reflection:

These are not in the order to which the reflection cites them, nor are they the only references possible. As you read some or all of them, think and pray about how God might be calling you to translate them into the reality of your life during this Lenten season.

RB 49

John 1:3-5

John 12:12

John 19:34 (with Ezekiel 47:1-12, Revelation 22:1-2)

John 20:11-18

Luke 24:13-32

Matthew 22:34-40

Copyright 2022, Abbey of St.Walburga

 

The Scholastica Strategy

Today Benedictines celebrate the feast of St. Scholastica, St. Benedict’s twin sister.  Our only record of her is found The Dialogues by Pope St. Gregory the Great ( ). There we read the story of their last meeting, and quite an entertaining one it is, especially for those of us who have siblings!  The twins were accustomed to meet once a year at a place near the gate of St. Benedict’s monastery.  With some of Benedict’s disciples, they spent the whole day praying together and discussing “holy things.” When evening came, they had supper together and went on with their spiritual conversation till it grew late.

St. Benedict must started looking at what would have been his watch in later times, though St. Gregory does not say.  St. Scholastica evidently knew what he was thinking and  pleaded with him not to leave her but to continue their conversation until morning.  St. Benedict was horrified!  “Sister,” he said, “what are you saying? I simply cannot stay outside my cell.” (He was, after all, the great western monastic rule maker!) His sister didn’t argue. She simply joined her hands on the table, put her head down, and prayed, apparently along the lines of, “O God, do something!”. 

And what an answer she got!  “There were such brilliant flashes of lightning, such great peals of thunder and such a heavy downpour of rain that neither Benedict nor his brethren could stir across the threshold of the place where they had been seated.”  She didn’t say, “so there!” but she might have been thinking it!  Again her brother was horrified:  “May God forgive you, sister. What have you done?” (His lack of logic tickles me—the God he is asking to forgive his sister, who actually did nothing but pray, is the God who sent the storm!)  St. Scholastica spells it out clearly for him: “Well,” she answered, “I asked you and you would not listen; so I asked my God and he did listen.” 

This is what I call “the Scholastic strategy.”  If you are caught in a dilemma and are seeking a God-inspired solution, and the people around you dig in their heels and refuse to cooperate, just ask God.  I find this especially helpful when I catch myself brooding over all the things I could say to get others to do what I think would be the right thing and rehearsing the necessary conversations in my head—only to realize that the only one who has a biblical right to brood over challenges and resolve them is the Spirit of God (see Genesis 1:1).  This is a development of a sort of mantra I used to recite to myself often: “I am not the Messiah.  I only “work for him!” Unfortunately I was often apt not to listen to myself, but “the Scholastica strategy takes it out of my (non-messianic) hands and puts the responsibility where it belongs: in God’s ear.  And, of course, God sees much farther and deeper into matters than I ever could.

Try it sometime.  You might like it!  I hope even St. Benedict went home chuckling at the two of them.

 ©2022 Abbey of St. Walburga

 

 

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.