Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

Alright, time for a Latin review. What are the four principal parts of the Latin verb meaning ‘to bear, carry or bring’? Ready? Go! “fero, ferre, tuli, latus.” Correct! Ten points extra credit. For those of you who haven’t gotten that far in Latin, let me explain that this is a very common verb, but also highly irregular. In the letter to the Hebrews, we hear about Jesus making offerings for sins. This English word ‘offering’ is derived from the Latin ob-fero which means to bear, carry or bring to someone for some purpose. The reason we listed the various forms of the verb earlier is that we see that the word ‘offering’ has in fact the same derivation as the word ‘oblation’. The difference is that one is active and the other passive. I offer an offering, I am called to be an oblate. Jesus is a model for us in that He is both. He offers and is offered, He is an oblation. In fact, he offers Himself, and is offered by Himself.

Today, we celebrate the oblation of Rosalie Katherine Trovato and the renewal of oblation of most of the oblates of our community. Personally, I don’t know the history of oblates and why that particular name was chosen. In a sense, all monks are oblations. The rites involved in the profession of solemn vows make this very clear, from the placing of the written charter on the altar, to the recitation of the Suscipe, in which the monk asks God to receive him. In making this step, the monk is responding to a call from God, a free choice on God’s part. The monk is elect: chosen for a specific gift of self. He imitates Christ by making this gift a radical gift of self which includes a symbolic dying: a prostration while covered with a funeral pall. This death imitates Christ’s death on the cross, with one difference. Of course the monk does not ascend a cross to make this offering. Rather, he promises to consent to the purifying power of perseverance in patience. Patience is yet another good Latin word: suffering [incidentally, another word derived from the Latin fero: here, to bear underneath]. His entire life will now take the form of the cross. Dare we say that the monk is on the cross all the time?

Oblates make an analogous offering of their lives. In doing so, they promise to conform their lives to the cross by the mediating influence of the Rule of Saint Benedict and the example of a specific community. Summing up the spirituality of the Rule is not easy, but this morning, I will summarize a few points from the gospel that I believe are central.

First of all: vigilance. The quintessential monastic office is Vigils. The monk is a watchman, straining with the eyes of his heart to catch first sight of the coming of Jesus Christ in glory. We know not the time or the hour, so we must be clothed and ready to go at all times. A monk must not be frivolous. Frivolity, however, is not the only danger. Often, our own convictions are our worst enemy. We form a picture of how the world should work and then try to fit it into that pattern. This can blind us to what is actually taking place. This often happens when we say, ‘things would be better if…’ We usually then make lists of things that other people should change. If the Lord could come at any time, however, why the worry about supposed fixes? Why not quiet oneself and watch instead? You will find the Lord nearer than you had thought.

This watching presupposes other virtues, namely obedience and faith. Let me treat faith first. No one, not even the Son, knows the time or the hour. Let us not dwell, unfortunately, on the implications of this statement for Christology. Let us rather see that even Jesus Christ had to do His Father’s will in faith. For us in the Benedictine path, this means learning not to intervene too quickly, but to listen; not to propose answers from our own hunches or feelings, but to trust; not to react but to respond. Here is our offering: that we consent to being offered in whatever circumstances given to us.

In this way we imitate Christ perfectly. His offering was not simply at one time on the Cross. Rather, the Cross was the perfect fulfillment of an entire life of faith and obedience. Indeed, the word translated in the second reading as ‘forever’, is actually closer in sense to ‘continually’. Jesus’ one offering is continual: so our lives should be a continual offering in faith. We can’t say, ‘because I don’t know what God wants, I can’t offer myself.’ Nor can we say, ‘I don’t feel fervent today, so I can’t make an offering of myself; I can’t pray.’ In both of these circumstances, we are invited to take a stance of humility. A lack of certainty in particular circumstances should be a spur to a greater certainty in God’s Providence.

Finally, this offering is done in obedience. I would like to suggest that it is only through obedience that we can make sense of God’s choices. The angels will come to gather the elect. This sounds elitist. If God chooses me and seems not to choose others, am I within my rights to refuse with the aim of trying to bring others along? I have two responses for this sort of argument.

The first is that Jesus Himself was criticized in this way. Why did He do such a wasteful thing as die on the Cross when He could have ended hunger once and for all by changing stones into bread; He could have bought peace for the world (at least so it seems) by consenting to working wonders for all to see. If I am sounding diabolical in these suggestions, good—that’s my point. It is only through the Cross that peace comes.

More nitty-gritty is the fact that God chooses different roles for different persons. Christ Himself was chosen to be the one mediator between God and human kind. Each of us is called to fulfill a certain function now within His body and within the workings of Providence. This is perhaps why solemn vows and oblation don’t rise to the level of sacrament: they are a deepening of the offering that all of the baptized are invited to make of their lives. As a monk or an oblate or a layperson, each of us is chosen by God for a certain task. It is by cooperation with God’s choices that we do the most good in bringing about peace. Refusing to cooperate with God’s election on the grounds that we know better the way to happiness is questionable indeed. So we must stick to our particular roles in the church. Oblates are not monks, nor are monks oblates. Let us listen carefully to discern God’s choices for us, and then pray for the courage to follow them.

Now the Church calls forward our oblates to renew their promise to follow God’s role for them in the Church.

All Saints 2006 - Dom Peter

[Rev 7: 2-4, 9-14
1 John 3: 1-3
Matt 5: 1-12a]

For the past several years, the monks have made a real effort at gardening. As we’ve grown larger as a community, we’ve become more and more proficient. This year, we have finished most of the harvest, and that included about two hundred pounds of potatoes, rows and rows of squash, tomatoes and all kinds of other products. I love this time of year for a number of reasons, but part of it surely is the joy of the harvest. In the midst of this plenty, we must of course remember to give thanks to God, who gives the growth, and to be generous with what we have, since this pleases God.

Life is mysterious: we can help life along, but we humans are utterly unable to make non-living things alive. We rely rather on God’s mysterious gift of vitality. We study life, to increase our crops, to grow new varieties of vegetables and so on, but it all depends finally on God.

At Mount Sinai, God Himself got personally involved with the life cycle of the seasons, at least with regard to the people of Israel. The Canaanites, who lived in the Holy Land before Israel, worshipped fertility gods to increase their crops, but these were harmful idols, not the Living God of Abraham. To protect the people against this temptation, God instructed Moses to bring the Israelites together three times a year: at sowing, at first-fruits and at the harvest. These three festive celebrations became Passover, Pentecost and the Festival of Booths. Passover and Pentecost are associated with two foundational events in the life of Israel: the crossing of the Red Sea and the giving of the Law on Sinai. The Feast of Booths, originally connected with the march through the desert (since they slept in tents), came to be associated with two other events, the first being the rebuilding of the temple of God after the Babylonian Exile: the high priest Joshua and Zerubabbel (the heir to the throne) offered the first sacrifices in the new temple on this feast. The second historical event was the re-consecration of the temple after its defilement by the Greeks. During the second century before Christ, the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes set up a statue of Zeus in the temple and defiled it during the Festival of Booths. After a fierce war of two years, the Jews, led by the Maccabee brothers, were able to drive the Greeks out and to offer sacrifice again for the very same festival.

The book of Leviticus instructs those celebrating booths to carry palm branches in honor of God. This is what we see the souls of the just doing in heaven in today’s first reading: carrying palm branches and celebrating the Festival of Booths. The celebration of the march in the desert, the harvest and the renewed temple has been reinterpreted again: now the souls are following the Lamb, whereas before they had followed the pillar of cloud. They are going to their true home, rather than an earthly Holy Land. And they are going to celebrate the consecration of the new temple of God, which is all the saints joined in the Body of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. God has purified this temple once and for all by the blood of Jesus Christ our Savior, and so the souls are clothed in white to symbolize the final and decisive defeat of Satan and of sin and death. This is the true ‘harvest of souls’. We see in our lives in Christ, we follow the plan of the seasons, as well as the history of Israel. In baptism, our Passover, we are planted: like a seed dying in the earth, we die to sin and rise to Christ. In our confirmation, we receive the Holy Spirit as at Pentecost: we sprout up with the first fruits of new life, beginning to mature into fullness. But while we still are on this earth, we do not yet attain to full maturity. That must wait for our final Passover, our final participation in the Paschal mystery, our own suffering and death in the body.

We often fear death, we fear suffering. Today, we celebrate the triumph of all those who have gone before us marked with the seal of faith. We see that to reach our final happiness, our full joy, we must consent to endure what John calls “the time of great distress.” We have certainly been warned: but today, the celebration of All Saints, we should take heart! We should take heart and rejoice in all those who have made it through this harvesting and now enjoy blessedness, happiness, peace and friendship with all men and with God. The promise of the gospel is not vain: the hope that we feel, the hunger and thirst for justice, fellowship and love is already being satisfied in the lives of the saints. And what a harvest it is: a great multitude which no one can count! Surely among these are persons like ourselves: on earth they struggled with doubt, they struggled with fear and with a variety of sins, both public and hidden. Yet in Christ, they are triumphant in the end. Let us be encouraged by the help given to the saints and by the prayers that they now make on our behalf. Let us today renew our desire for holiness, purity of heart, for meekness and mercy. See what love the Father has bestowed on us! Let us praise Him together in the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ to Whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

In the current issue of Time magazine, Professor Richard Dawkins ventures out of his academic specialty of evolutionary biology into the theological fray with the statement:

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

This does not recommened Prof. Dawkins' theological library to me. In fact, most theologians I’ve known or read would take issue with this sweeping generalization. Saint Anselm, for whom God was by definition greater than anything imaginable, might debate Prof. Dawkins on philosophical principle, as would Evagrius, who insisted that we must renounce all images we have of God, who (again by definition) is greater than anything we can imagine. Gregory of Nyssa’s writing are littered with terms for God like ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘ineffable’. I could go on, but you get the point.

So science and theology actually seem to agree on what God is like, that is, if God exists. Thankfully, in this gathering, we can assume that God exists, and so take up this definition. God is greater than anything we can imagine. Any attempted definition of God needs to take the form of non-definition, since definition means literally ‘drawing limits’, from the Latin finis: end or border.

Making peace with this reality about God is a first step in solving many of our human preoccupations. Let us take as an example Jesus’ observation about the poor widow. She gave more than the others because she gave everything she had to live on. On one hand, this is a nice, pious statement. Yet for those of us who have had to pay mortgages and remodeling expenses, is there not a nagging voice somewhere inside saying, “Well and good, Lord, but you can’t maintain a temple on a few widow’s pennies.”

That the apostles didn’t quite appreciate what Jesus was teaching is evident by the next episode in Mark’s gospel. “As they were leaving the temple,” Mark writes, “one of his disciples said him, ‘Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!’” At this, of course, Jesus begins to prophesy the destruction of the temple building.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews teaches us that Jesus entered the temple, the sanctuary, but not the one made by human hands. What kind of dwelling can we build God? Answer: we cannot build Him any suitable dwelling place. How can we reasonably build something that would limit the unlimited God whom we worship? God dwells in heaven, the sanctuary into which Jesus Christ ascended when He offered His great sacrifice on our behalf. We should note that most of us, in addition to un-defining God, need to do the same with heaven. Too often people reject what they believe heaven is without remembering that it is beyond our comprehension, just as God is beyond our comprehension.

However, God can and does communicate with us, and out of a kind consideration for our limits, he limits Himself because He loves humankind and loves to be with us. So He gave Moses a pattern for the temple, a kind of projection of God’s majesty into a human plane, almost like a projection of a three-dimensional view into a two-dimensional painting. Yet like a portrait artist who prefers the beauty of his painting to that of his models, we have a tendency to prefer a tame and domesticated God to the God of Abraham. A beautiful church makes us feel good! That’s not so bad, but are we experiencing God or aesthetics?

Why did the widow then make any gift at all? Wouldn’t she be better off keeping that money? Perhaps if she had let the rich make all the contributions, she could have kept her pennies and invested them and not be poor today. But the question then would be: would she have been worshipping God?

Perhaps she could just worship God in spirit, as Jesus says that God wants us to. Then again, Paul taught us to glorify God in our bodies. We can surely do both if we put our bodies at the service of our spirits, much as God has put the visible temple or church building at the service of the invisible. The point of the widow’s mite is that her giving, painful and difficult as it was, trained her to give true spiritual worship, whereas the best the scribes could do was to recite lengthy prayers as a pretext. If we let the body go its way and try to worship in a merely spiritual way, how do we understand the very real and bodily suffering of Christ as He entered into the true sanctuary? Like Christ, the widow gave the entirety of her life—the word Bios in Greek literally means that she gave her whole life. Can we say that we do the same when we give only the life of our souls as if they were not connected with the life of our bodies?

We should conclude by noting that Jesus Christ ascended into heaven bodily and comes to us today in the Eucharist in a body. The Body of Christ is the means by which we enter into communion with the incomprehensible who is God. This is an astounding piece of evidence of God’s love for us humble creatures, not to mention His tendency to confound all of our expectations. This happens to be the sticking point for Professor Dawkins. He says, “I don’t see…Jesus coming down and dying on the Cross as worthy of…grandeur.” Clearly God is more incomprehensible to some than they can comprehend.