The Monastic Preacher

Third Sunday in Lent Year A - Dom Peter

2008-02-24T13:31:00.000-06:00

The past decade or so, perhaps dating back to an episode of Sienfeld, there has a new trend in Christmas gift-giving. It is called ‘regifting’—the idea being that if you receive a gift that you don’t like, you can hang onto it and give it to someone else next Christmas. That is, you can ‘regift’ it. Our own federal government has caught the spirit in the form of the coming ‘economic stimulus’, though here they commit one of the five biggest regifting No-no’s: don’t ever give a gift back to the same person who gave it to you!

Actually the idea of passing gifts around is not new. Many cultures, particularly tribal ones, use this method as part of the formation of alliances and consolidation of power. In other cultures, especially in monarchies, the accession to power includes the king or queen distributing gifts to the people. We see King David do this is the story of him dancing with abandon before the ark. He slaughters an ox and a fatling every six paces, and then once the ark has arrived in Jerusalem, he distributes the meat to all the people, along with bread and raisin cakes. The distribution of the sanctified Body and Blood of Christ this morning to the assembled Church has a similar connotation to it.

But to what does Our Lord refer when he tells the Samaritan woman, “If you knew the gift of God,” she would have asked Him for living water? What is this gift of God? I wonder if it would be too much of a stretch to construe this phrase ‘gift of God’ with an objective rather than a subjective genitive. That is to say: what if the gift is not simply what God gives, but as in the phrase ‘a gift of flowers’, the gift of God is…God. St. Paul teaches us that there are many gifts but one Spirit. Jesus, who is the One Who will baptize with the Holy Spirit, will say to the crowds in Chapter seven of John’s gospel, “Whoever believes in Me,…Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.” John goes on to tell us that He was speaking of the Spirit, though the Spirit had not yet been given. The Spirit was finally given when Jesus Christ broke the bonds of death and ascending on high, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, “He led captivity captive, and he gave gifts to all.”

Today’s gospel has traditionally been used for the catechesis of newcomers to the faith who were preparing to receive the gift of God in baptism at the Easter Vigil. Perhaps we can hear it best if we cast ourselves in the role of the catechumen, and try to hear Jesus’ words afresh, in preparation for the renewal of our baptismal graces at Easter, at Jesus’ triumph over death and coronation as the true King enthroned on high. To do this, we must put ourselves in the place of the remarkable woman at the well, the woman of Samaria.

When she hears that there is a kind of water that wells up eternally within, so that those who drink of it do not thirst, her response is, “Sir, Kyrie, please give me this water, so that I don’t have to come to this darn well every day.” There is a certain plaintiveness to her request. She is there at midday, the time of day that another Mediterranean native, St. Benedict, recommends for resting and not being out-of-doors. She is there at this uncomfortably hot time of day because then no one will see her, a woman whose choices in life have left her an outsider, a concubine who has known five husbands before her present significant other. The very obligation to provide the necessities of life is a painful daily reminder of her shame and disgrace in the eyes of the others of her town. It was shocking enough when the disciples saw that Jesus was speaking alone to a woman, and worse that she was from the heathen Samaritans. What if they had known of her dicey background?

Jesus saw something else in this woman of course, as our God always does in each of us. Our God comes to the rescue of sinners, the lonely and outcast, the destitute and hurting, and He always comes not merely to save, but with a mission for us. Tradition remembers this woman as Photina or Svetlana, equal to the Apostles. Something about her, perhaps the very fact that she was far removed from the levers of power in her world, made her receptive to Jesus’ message. Her conviction that Jesus is the Messiah allows her to win over the very villagers whose company she had been avoiding. She becomes, like Mary Magdalene, the model for the Apostles, sent by Our Lord to share the Good News: if you knew the gift of God, you would ask, and I would give you living water, my very life, the Holy Spirit, communion with the God who loves you.

Do we know the gift of God? Are we, who have received the Holy Spirit, alive to the Divine Life within us and within those Christians around us? How would our lives change if we really knew the gift of God? How might we learn to love the Church more and to love Her members more, the Church whose very soul is the Holy Spirit, flowing from the heart of our loving Savior on the Cross? How might we learn to listen to one another?

If we struggle to know this gift of God, is it because we are comfortable? Because we are afraid to expose our hidden hurt and shame to God’s healing embrace? Do we spend all of our time hewing out cisterns of our own, cisterns that hold no water, thinking up ‘economic (and other) stimuli’, all the while forgetting the gift of God already in our hearts? Do we search for meaning and happiness by avoiding others who remind us of our woundedness, either by their talents or by their own poverty?

My sisters and brothers in Christ, our Lord is seeking us out in our pain and weakness. Let us in simplicity say with the Samaritan woman, “Lord, give us this gift of the Holy Spirit, that we may no more thirst!”

Twenty-Eight Sunday in OT - Dom Peter

2007-10-14T12:29:00.000-05:00

This past month, my mother and her siblings had to help move my ninety-one-year-old grandmother into assisted living. She is one of the most energetic people I have ever known, a tough German, and so this transition has been especially poignant. Moreover, she has been praying for years now (and she is famous for her intensity in prayer) that God would allow her to die in her home. Last year, my oldest uncle asked her if it wouldn’t be better to pray that God’s will be done and for the grace to accept it. She thought about it for a moment and then responded with her characteristic Teutonic honesty, “I can’t trust Him!”

Many people come to the monastery to learn how to pray. Often times, people have learned to pray as children, have memorized all kinds of prayer, which is good, but are longing for some kind of genuine conversation with God. Other times, people are quite comfortable sending up petitions of various sorts, but are not sure how to interpret whether God is answering and so become discouraged and perplexed; they begin to wonder if God is really listening or if they maybe aren’t cut out for prayer.

In his ninth Conference, the monk John Cassian develops a tradition from the early church on prayer. This tradition goes back to a passage from Paul’s first letter to Timothy: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings be made.” Cassian interprets supplications to mean confession of sin and begging pardon. “Prayers” are then considered to be vows and good resolutions made to God. Intercessions are what they sound like, as are thanksgivings. Today’s gospel gives us a good lesson in prayer: intercessions come easy, thanksgivings are easily gone. Just as I suspect that a desire for prayer is just as lively today as it was in the time of the Apostles, I suspect that the neglect of thanksgiving is just as prominent. Is the bewilderment we face in prayer connected to a lack of thanksgiving?

Today’s story is, like so many of the stories in the gospels, much more complex on close inspection than it appears on first reading. Are we sure that the ‘other nine’ did not give thanks to God, maybe on their way to see the priest, maybe with a votive sacrifice of some sort? This is a question that has cropped up for me in this passage since I was a child. Is Jesus then saying that He is God? Or how about the final word from the Lord that the Samaritan’s faith has saved him? Are the others not saved? Why is only this man said to be ‘saved by faith’? Did not the others take Jesus’ word on faith to go to the priests? Would they have gone off if they only thought that they would be turned away again? What exactly did these others do wrong?

St. Luke’s gospel sometimes gives the impression of stringing together random incidents, but generally rewards closer study of adjacent texts. So last Sunday, we had this other curious incident. The Apostles ask Jesus, “Increase our faith!” What a fine, direct prayer. Should we not all be asking this when our prayer falters? And yet, Jesus does not answer to the effect that this desire for an increase of faith is somehow meritorious and then grant their request. In fact, He seems to scold the disciples, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed…” He then gives this puzzling example of the unworthy servant doing only what he was told.

Yet, here we seem to be getting closer to an answer. The ten lepers did ‘what they were told’; they went off to show themselves to the priests. Well, actually, the one who receives praise today hasn’t yet completed the task given to him by the Lord. Is there some connection between the fact that he is a Samaritan and the fact that he alone turned back? Perhaps he didn’t have as far to go to see a priest, since they are on the border of Samaria already, whereas Jews probably would have needed to get to Jerusalem. He had time to swing around and head back toward Jesus. Or perhaps since he took the chance of hanging out with Jews and approaching a Jewish rabbi, he wasn’t expecting his request to be heard and so was more overjoyed at recognizing the miracle. Is this the meaning behind “Your faith has healed you?” Have the others figured on the reward based on obedience to the Law by contrast?

We should, of course, not be too quick to contrast faith and obedience. I suggested earlier that obedience is often an act of faith. But there is a formal side to obedience and a material side, as Jews and Christians alike have always known. “God loves a cheerful giver,” while the person who “fasts twice a week [and] gives tithes of all that he gets,” is not thereby justified if he expects his reward. There is always this danger to the Law, which is meant to bring us to God: that we will turn it into something by which we try to prove to ourselves and to others that we are succeeding in the contest of self-generated holiness.

At the monastery, we have been receiving an increasing number of mailings from all sorts of initiatives for vocations to the priesthood and to religious life. I’m all for increased numbers of priests and religious—if they are genuinely called to that life by God. But often times, these sorts of initiatives strike me as efforts to manufacture success out of increased effort, even effort in the area of prayer. The idea goes that if we offer so many novenas and spend so many hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament, then God has to do what we think he ought to and reward us with more priests. At the end of this, how often do we thank God for the priests that we already have and even more, for the good being done in all the Body of Christ by the laity as well as by the clergy and consecrated persons?

Similarly, how often do we fret over details when things don’t go the way we want in other areas of life? We so often today hear things like, “Someone ought to fix that; heads ought to roll; we need to find competent bishops/presidential candidates/people to run the CTA, ad nauseum. Or on a more personal level, we interpret areas of our lives that we find unacceptable as evidence that we are doing something wrong, that we need to try harder. I suspect that we suffer more profoundly by the anxiety over having to figure out what God wants so as to make life easier. Maybe we can do everything right and still suffer; certainly it happened to someone I know. Do we take these concerns to God and then remember to thank Him for the incomparable salvation that we already have received? I condemn myself first of all in saying this, so I hope that my offering this reflection is not thereby too much diminished, because it is the truth. We are never going to present ourselves perfected to God by our own obedience. On the other hand, God has already saved us, healed us, forgiven us in Jesus Christ. We gather today to celebrate the Eucharist, that is, thanksgiving. Let us not forget that this Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith. If we are a people of faith and thanksgiving, we can be healed and saved wherever we are.

On Humility (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter)

2007-09-02T11:36:00.000-05:00

Apart from the chastity practiced by Christians, there is hardly a more controversial Christian virtue than humility. This has always been the case, but is probably more so today, for reasons that will give shortly. Before diagnosing the situation, let us first hear from one of the great modern opponents of Christian humility, Freiderich Nietzsche. In about 1885, he wrote, in Beyond Good and Evil: “Christianity has been the most calamitous kind of arrogance yet.” This is because the virtue of humility and the care and concern for the poor enjoined by our Lord, according to the German philologist, “break the strong…cast suspicions on the joy in beauty, bend everything haughty, manly, conquering, domineering, all the instincts characteristic of the highest and best-turned-out type of ‘man’ into unsureness, agony of conscience, [and] self-destruction.” Now some of this language is so strong as to sound like a parody even of principled opposition to the Church. But we should not dismiss it too quickly.

So I pose a question: Do we Christians in fact do this? Do we, by embracing humility lay the ground work for the destruction of what is best in humanity? Unfortunately, I must answer that many of us do indeed. The good news is that this is more a consequence of our living in the modern world than of being Christian. To explain what I mean by this, let me turn to another insightful commentator on the modern West, the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut. His short story Harrison Bergeron, begins, “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” In the story, anyone above average is burdened with a government-issued handicap. The parents of Harrison are watching television, and there they see ballerinas “burdened with sash-weights…and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in.”

This would indeed be the problem that Nietzsche diagnosed: a preference for the weak and condemnation of the strong, but is it motivated by a desire for humility, or by envy? In this case, the problem lies not in the Christian virtue of humility, but in aspects of the modern ideologies of democracy and socialism.

So if we are to be truly humble as Christians, it should not be after the form of those who treat the gifts of life as bad because God distributed them in a way not to our liking. Phrased as such, this is clearly presumption and not humility. But it is a danger in the modern Church, precisely because it is a danger in our society. Even in monasteries, a man can work for years at a craft at a high level and receive no encouragement from his brothers. I glimpsed this while visiting another monastery. I happened to be seated across from a monk who is a scholar of Gregorian chant. Seizing the opportunity, I asked him some questions, but when he attempted a reply, a monk sitting to my right made noises indicating that such rarified discussion was out of bounds, as if it were more virtuous to discuss the divorce of some celebrity (which is where such conversations often stray). By insisting that we reduce the conversation to the lowest common denominator, the brother was, in my opinion, contributing little to the humility of the chant scholar, but instead taking the first place at table of democratic righteousness.

In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, the Church’s liturgy invited us to ask God to bring to perfection the gifts He has given. How can we perfect our gifts if we are trying to shame each other into pretending that we don’t have any? That sometimes special talents bring about pride is not disputed, but the idea that only excellence causes pride is an insult to the Creator. It was through the devil’s envy that death entered the world, and it is possible to be proud in any station of life, just as it is possible to be the Son of God Himself and be meek and humble of heart.

Humility, of course, holds a central place in the Rule of St. Benedict. The Chapter on Humility towers over every other chapter and has been the subject of whole book-length commentaries. There are two particularly excruciating steps to this ladder, both of which require a pitched spiritual battle in the heart. In the fourth step, we read that under “difficult, unfavorable, or even unjust conditions, [the monk’s] heart quietly embraces suffering and endures it without weakening or seeking to escape.” The way of the world is to locate the problem outside ourselves and, when we are in a good mood, pronounce ourselves superior to it by offering sage advice, and when we are irritated to lash out against difficult and unjust situations. While understandable, this will stunt our growth in humility because a ready judgment freezes us into our own limited perspective, whereas patience gradually opens us to God’s solutions. Let me complete this observation by noting that there can hardly be quiet in the heart if there is not quiet in one’s life. Thus perpetual busyness is also an escape from the hard work of humility. Workaholism and fussiness substitute our own energy for God’s wisdom.

If that all sounds difficult and inhumane, how about step seven? In this we are exhorted “not only to admit with [the] tongue,” but also be convinced in our hearts that we are inferior to all and of less value. Surely this is the kind of groveling that drew Nietzsche’s ire. Let us first recognize what sort of thing this humility is not, and then embrace it for what it is, a celebration of human solidarity.

What St. Benedict is not endorsing is fawning flattery. St. Basil the Great taught that it is not humility to take the lowest place if we do this in disobedience. Put in another more up-to-date light, I had a teacher who once said, “If God gives you a Stradivarius violin, it’s a sin to use it to flip burgers.” Sometimes we make this mistake by replacing appreciation of others with that peculiar modern pseudo-virtue “Niceness.” People who want to sell you something useless can be very nice in the usual sense of exuding a facile kindness and painless friendliness, but the goal is not communion with the other person, but acquisition of their money.

This opens the door for a true appreciation of humility as leading to communion and not self-degrading isolation. The good zeal required of a monk involves being the first to show respect—real respect again, not a showy gift of attention that aggrandizes the giver, but honest to goodness respect. Real humility requires doing what we judge better for others. How can we truly assess what will benefit another if we do not take the time to know and appreciate that brother? If we not only fail to show the ‘greatest patience [in supporting a brother’s] weaknesses of body or behavior,’ but even actively criticize his strengths in the name of fairness and equality?

On the other hand, when I honor my brother, his gifts become mine. When we are in communion with one another, we all share in the goods that God has given. Every human life, in fact, is a gift from God, and by learning to be attentive to my brother, especially the needy, the breadth of God’s generosity increases by leaps and bounds. And the greater God becomes in our lives, the lesser we become. We see God’s glory reflected in each person we meet, created in God’s image, and we can honestly come to a place where we simply take the lowest place, with the poor and the lame, awaiting with joyful hope the resurrection of the righteous and the triumph of our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and power forever. Amen.

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time--Dom Peter

2007-08-19T11:26:00.000-05:00

Every family has its injury stories. We’ve all had those conversations where we begin to relate all of the funny accidents suffered by our brothers and sisters when we were kids. In my family, my oldest sister was by far the most accident-prone, but one injury I suffered always made the highlight reel. I was playing basketball in the seventh grade championship tournament. In the opening minutes, we ran a play in which I was supposed to look to pass the ball to a teammate under the basket. I underestimated the size of the defender and tried to toss the ball over him to my teammate. The fellow on the opposing team swatted the ball back to me. Now needing to improvise, since I had messed up the play, I started toward the basket myself. This same defender leaped up in the air to try and block my shot, and as he came down his top teeth came crashing down on my head.

What was funny about the injury was what followed. The poor fellow fell to the ground holding his mouth, and everyone gathered around him, though it turned out that he had nothing wrong; he had just met a hard head. Meanwhile, my coach screamed at me to come over to the bench, where he proceeded to forcefully remind me of the efficacy of the bounce pass; that is, until he saw blood spurting from my head. He started screaming, and everyone left the poor guy on the ground and ran to me. An ice pack was produced and plopped on my head and I was rushed, in uniform, to the emergency room. By the time I got there the wound, which only appeared great because it was to the head, had healed over. I waited for some four hours as serious injuries were treated first. My coach even came by and apologized for yelling at me. When I finally saw a doctor, he gave the good news and the bad. Good news: you only need one stitch. Bad news, you’ve suffered a human bite. We need to reopen the wound, disinfect it and then give you a tetanus shot. All of this, while hardly grievous suffering, certainly caused more pain that the initial wound. Worst of all, my basketball team lost.

This story comes to mind whenever I hear our Lord’s teaching today, “Do you think I have come to establish peace on the earth?” Some commentators puzzle over this saying, seeing that it seems to contradict the fact that at the birth of Jesus, angels sing, “Peace on earth.” We can just as easily say, “Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better.” From one perspective, I had already healed before I saw the doctor that night in the emergency room. From another perspective, I was in far greater danger by this premature healing than I would be by reopening the wound and causing greater pain. IN this light, we can say that sometimes, under the banner of compassion, we allow injustice to go on or even allow those we love to go on hurting themselves. We can pride ourselves on being more patient and understanding than others when in fact we are enablers and co-dependents. On the other hand, this also does not mean that every well-meaning rebuke we offer to those who irritate us is spreading the fire of Jesus’ word. How do we recognize the peace that the world gives and the peace that only the Father can give?

Peace, both in the Hebrew language, shalom, as well as in the Greek of today’s gospel, eirēne, connotes not merely the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice and harmony between persons. The peace that Jesus brings is characteristic of the harmony of the Kingdom of God. This Kingdom opposes the kingdoms of this world, but most particularly the vast web woven over all nations that has turned values upside down. Pope Paul VI famously said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” To this, I as a monk might add, “If you want justice, work for purity of heart.” That is to say, we should begin by recognizing that we are part of the problem. The problem of conflict is not simply “out there.” The false peace of the world is a projection of the détente that we have made with our inner dividedness. To achieve purity of heart, we must acquiesce to the project of repentance and conversion urged on us by the gospel.

When we embark on this struggle against the inner demons that each of us harbor, we discover that before we can realize the kingdom of God even in the one place where we exercise the most control of our lives, in our hearts, we must be willing to be divided, aware that our good motives are typically bound up with bad, and that good intentions father forth malicious actions. We must take the word of God into our hearts, where it can change us.If we do not take this step, our interpretations of the events around us will always be clouded by these suspect motives and actions; the peace we find will be the world’s peace and the fire we spread will be merely destructive and not purifying. Conversely, if we truly become pure in heart, one with Jesus Christ, then we can expect to receive the baptism that he received, and the anguish that accompanies it. But we will do so with the confidence in the Father that our Lord showed in going to the cross, confidence that God’s Kingdom will come, whether we hasten it or not. Let us pray that through the grace of the sacrament we receive today that we will indeed hasten, and not hinder, the coming of God’s Kingdom.

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

2007-08-06T10:39:00.000-05:00

In 1707 the English satirical poet Alexander Pope wrote a long poem in heroic couplets called “Essay on Criticism” which attempted to define the rules governing poetry. The poem is almost as long as one of the Harry Potter books though only marginally less interesting. If J.K. Rowling had written her novels in heroic couplets a la Pope we’d probably all find ourselves rooting for Lord Voledmort.

I would go so far as to say that the poem is eminently forgettable were it not for the fact that in it Pope coined a phrase that would go on to become a Johnny Mercer song and a big hit for Frank Sinatra who sang it with exquisite poignancy on an album called Nice and Easy recorded in 1960: “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.

In the popular imagination this saying cautions against involvement in questionable situations or becoming entangled in someone else’s unsolvable problems. And it comes to mind in this portion of Luke’s Gospel. But it will take me a minute to explain why.

A man comes to Jesus and says: “Teacher tell my brother to give me my share of the inheritance.” There are two odd things about this request. First, he calls Jesus teacher. Usually in the gospels whenever someone addresses Jesus as “teacher” it is an indication that this person does not have a clue about the true identity of Jesus Christ.

The second thing is the way the request is phrased, or more to the point, the way it is not phrased: He does not say “Rabbi, my brother and I are quarreling over our inheritance, will you help us arbitrate this dispute?” Instead, he tries to pressure the Lord Jesus to carry out his own desires by telling him to command his brother to give him his rights.

Maybe this is why Jesus, who is usually more than willing to help others in their need, refuses to get involved in a dispute and so, pointedly—and uncharacteristically-- ignores the man’s request. Instead, he tells a parable about a rich fool and his bigger grain barns.
The parable never looses its impact because rich fools go on forever. They are fools, not because they are rich, but because they are greedy. That is why, beneath this parable, lurks a verse from Psalm 48: In his riches man lacks wisdom, he is like the beasts that are destroyed.

How does it happen that we lack wisdom in our riches? My grandmother once made a wry comment about a neighbor whose death had provoked a family quarrel over who was getting what. She said: “people would fight over a pair of dirty socks.” She could not have known how prophetic she was. When she died in 1983 she left behind the only two things of any value that she really had, a lazy boy recliner rocker and a Christmas club account at a local bank in the amount of $96.00.

A cousin dropped by to claim the lazy boy within a few hours of her death. One of my brothers and an aunt fought over the money. Accusations were made and harsh words were spoken. In the end they didn’t speak to each other for eight years. The price of their mutual silence comes out to about $12.00 per year. But can you really put a price on family loyalty? Obviously two people in my family did.

Homilies that address the question of money and wealth usually provoke restlessness on the part of the listeners. People fume that the clergy are always talking about money because, like politicians perpetually campaigning for office, they have a vested interest in the generosity of others. But I am not running for office nor am I interested in persuading you to higher levels of personal stewardship. The gospel is addressing attitudes that lie behind wealth and money: because although someone may be rich, their life does not consist in what they possess.
At the same time we cannot use the Gospel to portray the Lord Jesus as 1st century paleo-Marxist rabble-rouser issuing condemnations of the bourgeois capitalist elite on behalf of the downtrodden proletariat.

Christ is not for the poor and against the rich: neither does he condemn possessions and riches. In the end he is saying something far more subtle, and for that reason, far more disturbing to the ears of those living in a consumerist culture glutted with luxuries: a greater abundance of goods, or a higher level of consumption, does not mean a greater abundance in the quality of life.

The real problem is not our net worth. The problem comes in trying to answer the only question that really matters in assessing the quality of any human life: who or what am I living for? I suspect that even Paris Hilton knows the answer to that question.

Rich fools build barns to store their grain, rich families build huge mansions to house their shrinking families. Their children, who have everything they want, complain that life is boring so they smoke dope, medicate themselves with mood enhancers or drink themselves senseless (not necessarily in that order) in order to escape from the burdens of their meaningless existence.

In the meantime, we are bombarded by the media and their marketing strategists with the deceptive message that this life is all there is or at least the only one worth living for; that peace, joy and happiness are achieved by the avoidance of pain and suffering and the fulfillment of our desires for wealth, fame, and pleasure and that self-sacrifice, suffering and death are the ultimate evils to be avoided at any cost.

And if this were not enough to shake our Christian faith, there are preachers who do not hesitate to present these same secular distortions in the guise of Christian principles based on the Bible. Who turn the Gospel into a cargo cult by teaching that if there is anything God hates it is suffering and that he’ll take it all away if we just pray hard enough: that the reward of faith is prosperity and riches.

In one of his other, less famous poems, Alexander Pope made a wry comment that would probably have had Christ nodding his head in approval:

Satan now is wiser than of yore,
and tempts by making rich, not making poor.

Martha and Mary - 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2007-07-22T12:17:00.000-05:00

by Dom Peter

When Cardinal George was here about seven weeks ago, he recounted an anecdote from the time he was a young priest. He was looking for ways to increase discussion in a committee, and when he asked for advice from an older priest, it was suggested that he start talking about Martha and Mary. So I beg your indulgence this morning as I attempt to say something fresh on this somewhat controversial story, and not only that, but I need to do so seven weeks after my cardinal archbishop has preached on the same story seven weeks earlier.

The controversy stems from an interpretation of the story that, while having its roots in the reading of the Church Fathers, was not really standardized until the high and late Middle Ages. Mary was taken allegorically to be a symbol of the ‘contemplative life’, lived by monks and nuns in cloisters, dead to the world, attentive only to the voice of the Lord. Martha, who in this interpretation doesn’t come off very well, figures in the allegory as a type of the ‘active life’ lived by the laity and secular clergy as well as by the newer orders, first the Franciscans and Dominicans and then somewhat later the orders of hospital sisters, servants of the poor, and so on. The active life was seen to be less impressive and perhaps less meritorious than the contemplative which, after all, would seem to be the better portion chosen by Mary.

In more recent times, especially through the fruits of Vatican II, we have a much livelier sense today perhaps of the Church as the Body of Christ in which every member is called to holiness, not merely those graced with the charism of contemplative life. The goal ‘that we may present everyone perfect in Christ’, to use St. Paul’s phrase in the second reading, really means everyone; perfection is attainable even outside the cloister. There are varieties of service but the same Lord. Both Martha and Mary are engaged with Jesus Christ, but in their different ways. When the Lord chides Martha, He does not say, “Martha, you should stop being busy with many things and come and sit here with Mary.”

In preparing this morning’s homily, I was struck by two hints, one from the lectionary and the other from the Benedictine calendar, that open up the richness of this episode. The first obviously is the first reading. Abraham, newly circumcised, bear in mind, and a spry ninety-nine years old to boot, bounds about in haste to show hospitality to his mysterious guests. Oddly, in this capacity, Abraham is considered by monks to be a model for themselves. Saint Benedict wrote that guests are never lacking in a monastery. He does not therefore go on to say that all precaution should be taken so that they might not interrupt the contemplative life. Rather guests should be received as Christ.

Furthermore, in the Roman calendar, parishes normally celebrate the memory of St. Martha on July 29. We might expect, if there be a difference in the Benedictine calendar, that we monks would instead celebrate St. Mary’s day on the same date. Instead, we find Ss. Mary, Martha and Lazarus, hosts of the Lord. The virtue of hospitality is truly that essential to the life of a monk.

That said, we must return to this challenging teaching of Jesus Christ: Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her. St. John Cassian, speaking through the Egyptian Abba Moses, writes, “We take the view that the other virtues, although we consider them necessary and useful and good, are to be accounted secondary because they are all practiced for the purpose of obtaining this one thing. For when the Lord said: ‘You are concerned and troubled about many things, but [only one is necessary],’ he placed the highest good not in carrying out some work, however praiseworthy, but in the truly simple and unified contemplation of him.”

What we see in Cassian is the older distinction between the active and contemplative life. In this older understanding, they are stages of life to be practiced by every Christian. The active life, called the ‘practical life’ as far back as the priest Origen in the early third century, is the life of renunciation to which all Christians are called. In our baptisms, we renounced the Devil and all his works, evil and all its pomp. This initial renunciation at baptism did not automatically remove from us the inclination toward the vices, however: we must rather take up spiritual weapons in order to root out from ourselves immorality, licentiousness, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like. As we gradually replace these vices with the opposed virtues and gifts of the Holy Spirit, we grow more and more in the likeness of Christ, Christ lives in us and no longer we ourselves.

Wait a minute, what happened to Martha and Mary?

Just this: just as Mary could not have had the leisure to sit at the feet of Jesus without Martha’s help, so Martha could not see the true goal of her own work without Mary’s help. We can read this if we want as a tiny image of the Church, in which we monks rivet ourselves as best we can to a mystical gaze toward God, not for ourselves but for the sake of being a target for every Christian, and in which we monks cannot properly survive without the important work that goes on in the world. We can also read Martha and Mary as a sign of what must take place in every Christian heart. We do not do our work to make the world a better place, or to feel good about ourselves. These effects make actually happen and are in themselves not wrong, but if we lose sight of prayer, if we lose sight of God, what are we? We can do all kinds of service, all kinds of mortifications, we can give our bodies over to be burned: if all the while we are grumbling and envious of others, what point is there?

In fairness, I cannot end without saying something of the dangers of the choice made by Mary. Contemplation of God is indeed something that will not be taken away, since good works will not be necessary in heaven, but contemplation of God will be, nevertheless, we are all in the world, and the active life is necessary for us all. Martha and Mary have the distinction of appearing not only in Luke’s gospel, but in John’s as well. In chapter 11, their brother Lazarus dies and Jesus makes his journey to Bethany where He intends to raise Lazarus. Both sisters are bewildered and even hurt by the fact that Jesus did not come in time to heal Lazarus. But only Martha seeks out the Lord, running to him as he arrives at Bethany. Is it possible that Mary is angry at the Lord for disrupting her contemplative ideal and therefore withdrawing from Him? So there is a universal call to holiness, but there is also a universal temptation to turn away from God. Each of us, in our own roles as members of the Church has an edifying role to play for the whole, so long as we order our every action toward our true heavenly goal: purity of heart for the sake of God’s Kingdom. All glory and honor to our Lord Jesus Christ who has instituted this Kingdom and who invites each of us to partake in it even in this life. By the grace of the Holy Spirit, may each of us work like Martha, pray like Mary and love like the Lord Jesus.

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C: Dom Peter

2007-07-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI issued the long-awaited motu proprio that grants a more widespread permission for priests to use the 1962 Missal when celebrating Mass. Contrary to published reports, the document does not restore Latin or turn the priest around. In fact, Latin has never ceased to be the language of the liturgy and the celebration of the Mass with the priest facing the people, while almost universal, is only one option in the revised rite.

The hope of the Holy Father is that more widespread use of the old rite will help us to see the revised in clearer continuity with the whole historical development of the Mass, and help to reaffirm the teaching that the Holy Spirit is at work in the Church in all ages, not merely our own.

I grew up in the wake of the more sweeping reforms, many of which were intended to give more authenticity to the liturgy by making it more emotionally immediate and exciting. These efforts had the problematic but largely unseen downside of making our faith something of the moment, something dependent on the emotions. It is not easy to drum up the right emotions of a whole group of people at the same time. How many people stopped going to church because their own emotional needs were being ignored while the rest of the community seemed to be having such a good time? Those who have stuck it out run the risk of being thought of as grouches and cranks for not joining in the newest hit offertory song.

This morning’s Gospel ends where the First Reading begins, with the command to ‘rejoice’. Taken unreflectively by the talented and naturally happy sort of person, this means that I need to be happy, even exuberant, and I and you need to be exuberant now.

A closer reading of these two texts gives a different sort of picture of what rejoicing is all about for the Christian. Are we to say simply, ‘all things considered, life is really good’ and paper over suffering? By no means. The prophet Isaiah is surveying the devastating wreckage of the holy city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C. Thousands had been slaughtered, the city burned, the temple looted, the best and brightest blinded and carried off into exile. How can the prophet survey that and tell the people to rejoice?

Isaiah doesn’t say, “Look on the bright side!” Instead, he prophesies: Whatever riches had been carried off from Jerusalem will be restored ten fold from the wealth of the nations, and the Lord himself will console and comfort his people.

Notice that all of these verbs are in the future tense. As Saint Paul puts it, we rejoice in hope and therefore are patient in present trials.

Jesus goes so far as to correct the improper rejoicing of His disciples. They came back pretty fired up, not unlike a good charismatic revival meeting. “Even the demons are subject to us because of your name!” The Lord tells them, “Do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”

Our rejoicing is because we have God’s assurance that heaven is in our future, and not because if we try hard enough to be cheerful, we can succeed in bringing heaven to earth in the present.

This can only be the case if our rejoicing is not on the raw level of emotion, but on the deep level of conviction and decision, of the mind and of the will. It is rational to hope: whatever suffering there is, God will put an end to it forever, and we will come to pass eternity in a place where there is no suffering or pain. Now that is something to rejoice over.

Does this bring us back to the criticism leveled at the pre-Vatican church, that it is closed off from the concerns of the world? By finding our joy in the life to come, are we sacrificing joy here and now and denying the good things of God’s creation in this life? As disciples of the man who sent his disciples to cure the sick and who was criticized in his lifetime for being a glutton and drunkard, this is obviously not the case. However, since our passions tend to be unruly and unpredictable, we can be fooled in good times into thinking that the well-fed are blessed rather than the hungry, that the happy and jolly are blessed and not those who mourn. In times of plenty, remember want, as the Proverb says.

But whose names are written in heaven? If you are baptized, then God has chosen you to be His son or daughter. Your name is written in heaven.

That said, we should learn to read the Gospels not as stories of things that happened long ago to some other persons chosen by God, but as the activity of Jesus Christ in the Church and in my life. The Lord has gathered us here at the banquet of heaven not to cut us off from those who are suffering and in need of the Good News, but precisely to appoint us as His new ambassadors of hope. The question for us as we depart from the Mass today is, “Will I bring to others the Good News of the Kingdom of God, or will I bring myself?” I will inevitably have only myself if I do not make time in my life to nurture the life of Christ within me. I will hardly have time to pray and flame this life into fire if I am constantly scrambling around trying to ‘feel good’, worried about my money bag, sandals and what to eat. Let us rather travel with the lightness of a purified spirit. An unshakeable hope in God will spread the peace of the Gospel more surely than any scheme to rid the world of evil by our human efforts, and hope for heaven more than forced rejoicing on earth. Whichever rite we use, we should celebrate the Mass so as to point ourselves toward our true hope, Jesus Christ, to whom be praise and adoration forever. Amen.

Easter Vigil: Dom Peter

2007-04-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

There is a theological debate going on in certain Catholic circles right now. You might shudder at the prospect of hearing me talk about ‘theology’: it is late after all. However, this particular controversy seems to touch on the possibility of hearing the Good News in our present day and ago. The debate centers on the disturbing teaching of Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian who died three days before he was to receive the red hat of a Cardinal from the hand of Pope John Paul II, an admirer.

Balthasar’s dangerous idea is that the abandonment of Jesus on the Cross by God the Father was total, that Jesus suffered the consequences of sin that real sinners suffer: death accompanied by the loss of hope. The dissenters to this idea hold that Jesus could not have suffered in this total way.

At the center of this debate, as I see it, is the question of whether we worship a credible God. We have just been through a century of suffering, death and cruelty on a scale never before encountered in human history, and this has been accompanied by a new idea in human thought: real, radical atheism, a self-conscious rejection of God. It seems to me that Jesus would have to suffer the desolation of modernity in some sense if He is to ask us, the members of His Body, to do the same. If there is something new in von Balthasar’s theology, perhaps it is because we are faced with a new crisis in anthropology.

The newness of our situation is perhaps simply a willed ignorance of the many trials and travails of humankind in the past. In our constantly changing new-and-improved world, it is easy to forget that in the thousands of years in history that have gone before us, women and men have struggled as we have to live lives worthy of the God whom we are told is All-Holy. We are blessed this evening to have the opportunity to have heard chapters of the long story of God’s history with His chosen people. A modern American would think, if the Jews were simply making up the story about God, that they would have been tempted either to make themselves look a little better or, given the many sufferings that they have endured, to have given up on God at some point.

This is a point to keep in mind when we view our situation in the Church today. Certainly events of the past several years have served to discredit the Church in many ways. We in the Church suffer for this; I take walks in Roman collar, and mothers cross to the other side of the street. Many of us, perhaps most of us, resist this suffering. We distance ourselves from it, blaming bishops, priests, theologians, feminists, atheists, Masons, the Sexual Revolution, the Supreme Court, the internet, and the pope. Someone should do something about this disgraceful state of affairs.

But I ask: this rejection of suffering and the pointing of fingers, is this the gospel?
Let’s take this to a more personal level. We all try to get around suffering if we can. Our society has a taboo against suffering: it is impolite. A suffering life is a life that lacks in quality and perhaps, for the sake of decency, should be ended. Even unhealthy unborn persons, if we anticipate that they might suffer, are spared suffering and put to death instead. People who are in a bad mood don’t get much sympathy, “What’s his problem?” We are supposed to buck up and, importantly, not impose our troubles on anybody else. Precisely where the suffering need human solidarity, our world turns its back. Even people who claim to care about the suffering often prefer to care about those far away, overlooking the suffering of those in front of them, thereby adding to it.

Is this the gospel?

During the forty days of Lent, we made resolutions to try and live more nearly the way God asks us to live. This effort at conversion ought to have opened us up, not to our strengths, but our weakness, our inability to do what God asks, our failures as human beings to love as we want to be loved, to be free and not subject to sordid addictions to food, alcohol, sex, or drugs. Many give up on the whole conversion experience because of the hell it puts us through. Indeed, we experience the hell that we have chosen for ourselves. Again, our culture tells us to flee from that realization that we are choosing hell for ourselves. Those of a certain age had a saying for this strategy: Turn on an tune out!

Hold that thought!

“He suffered, died and was buried.” We profess that Jesus, far from shying away from real suffering, embraced it. Not because He was Clint Eastwood or Indiana Jones, but because He loves us. The creed goes on, or at least did in less polite days, to affirm that “He descended into hell.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that we do not know if anyone in particular goes to hell after death; we can’t even say that Judas is there. However, we do know one Person who has been there and back: Jesus the Christ. Whether He entered hell crashing the gates and throwing down demons with pitchforks, or whether He simply went to this place of torment to be raised up by God the Father, what does not change is the fact that out of love for weak and failing men and women, Jesus went to hell. Hell is a state of being, and I just got done saying that all of us in some way choose it, or perhaps are simply subject to it. When we experience our own versions of hell, do we think about the fact that our Savior has been there and now has the keys and that the gates of hell cannot prevail against Him? Our Lord ‘became man’. He didn’t just imitate being a man: he desired to experience the whole of human existence, including the sense of alienation from God, the product of our weakness, failure and sin. If we experienced this Lent, some of that weakness, failure and sin, well, blessed are we because Christ is waiting there to save us. Christ saves us where we need saving, not where we are self-sufficient.
Here is the Good News according to St. Paul: we were baptized into Christ’s death, and buried with him, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we might not simply wait to be raised, but that we might begin to live ‘in newness of life’. Can we experience this resurrection and a life of blessedness without experiencing death and hell? Surely we are not asking to be spared what Christ undertook for us any more than we should fear, out of a misplaced and unhistorical respect for God, to imagine Jesus be spared any of the sufferings of which we are capable.
This is the Good News: who of you are suffering tonight? Our Risen Lord Jesus is calling to you, and He says, “Fear not! I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of death and Hades. Believe in me and live!”

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

2007-01-31T08:55:00.000-06:00

January 28, 2007

Three weeks ago I received some good natured razzing after mass for my homily on the “da Vinci Code”. In matters of preaching I take a measure of comfort from today’s Gospel: even the Lord Jesus had his critics. At least none of mine have attempted to throw me off the bell tower.

Given the sad state of preaching in the Church today it may surprise you to know that homiletics is actually taught in theology as a required course before ordination. I took one of those courses at Washington Theological Union in the later half of the last century. And while I have long forgotten the name of the instructor I have always remembered his 4 short rules for effective preaching: stand up, speak up, shut up, sit down.

Standing up and sitting down are the easy parts, it’s what happens between speak up and shut up that’s crucial. This is because the goal of a homily is not to inform but to transform. Unfortunately, this guarantees that every homilist will inevitably defeats his listener’s expectations. Because if we had to choose between inform and transform it would be inform nine times out of ten. Transform implies change and change never comes easy.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about: There was a young priest ordained for a rural diocese in Kentucky. For his first assignment the bishop sent him to a parish where he was the assistant of an old and venerable Monsignor. The first Sunday the new priest preached on the evils of drinking. The old monsignor said to him “take care Father, a third of the parish works for a bourbon distillery”. The next Sunday the newly ordained preached on the evils of gambling. Again came the warning: “take care Father, one third of the parishioners raise race horses”. The third Sunday he preached on the evils of smoking and again came the advice “take care, one third the parish raises tobacco.” On the fourth Sunday, the young priest preached on the evils of fishing within the territorial waters of a foreign nation.

Those charged with responsibility for preaching the word and those burdened with having to listen to it on any given Sunday morning might recognize the sharp truth hidden behind the humor: it is easier, and so more tempting, to entertain and inform on a Sunday morning because we all resist transformation.

In the years before I entered the monastery I worked in Minnesota among God’s frozen chosen as they liked to call themselves. I had to preach at mass four or five times every weekend. I faithfully followed Fr. What’s-his-name’s rules for effective preaching and inevitably heard people say to me: “thanks for the message. It was short and sweet and to the point”. This was music to my ears for the first few years of priesthood, but then I began yearn for the day when someone said: your homily really brought me up short. Now I’ll have to go home and re-evaluate all my priorities and start living like a follower of Christ.

In these late winter Sunday’s before the arrival of Lent, the Lectionary moves, episode by episode, through the Gospel of Luke. These stories can seem odd to us. They are often difficult to understand because they come out of a culture and a time alien to our own. But they are passionate and powerful attempts to describe the length to which our God will go to befriend the human race.

In the time provided all that a homilist can hope to do is to trigger the religious imagination that lies dormant in most of us. It lies dormant not merely because we are preoccupied by the tasks of daily life but because we have unconditionally surrendered our imaginations under the assault of popular culture. So now the media does our thinking for us, provides us with the images that define who we are or stokes our desires for things we want but don’t actually need, and force feeds us predigested sound bites from the “talking heads” that become our opinions and ideas. In the end this robs us of the ability to think outside the cultural comfort zone.

This has its spiritual and theological consequences when it comes to living our Catholic faith. Someone writes a book claiming that the Vatican has engaged in two thousand year old conspiracy to hid the truth that the real Jesus was just an ordinary man. The book becomes a phenomenal best seller and people, like my 16 year nephew who read it, begin to imagine that the Church is nothing more than a web of lies and distortions. They forget that the book is a novel which, if my research is correct, is still shelved under fiction in better bookstores everywhere.

This also has its spiritual and theological consequences when it comes to celebrating liturgy on Sunday morning: we may be full of information about God but often are powerless to imagine the kind of life he has called us to live or that this life is in any sense different from the popular culture around us.

This is perhaps what the Lord Jesus is attempting to do when he preaches to the people of his own hometown. Like 21st Century America, 1st Century Palestine had its own cultural stresses. No Jew could have been unaware that Israel was an occupied land paying taxes to Imperial Rome. Herod, in a spirit of realpolitik, fixed the Roman eagle above the main gate of the temple as a reminder to one and all that the pagans were really running the show. The rabbinic students who tore that eagle down in their zeal for the Torah were hunted down by Herod’s police, dragged in chains to Jericho where Herod was wintering and burned alive in his presence.

The prior mentioned last Sunday that Nazareth was just five miles across the valley from the Greek speaking city of Sepporis the site of the revolt led by Judas the Galilean who proclaimed himself messiah in 6 ad. When the Romans took the city they crucified 6,000 men along the road that lead to the town.

Across the valley the people of a little village named Nazareth doubtless stood and watched the spectacle playing out before them. Among the eyes witnessing the power of Imperial Rome must have been those of a young Jewish boy named Jeshua ben Josef. He would have been about 12 years old.

This is why it is an electric moment when Jesus takes the scroll and reads from the Isaiah a passage in which the prophet foresees the day when Israel will no longer be oppressed by pagan nations and God himself will come to Zion. It is clear that no one sitting in that room could have possibly imagined that the prophetic text had been fulfilled in the person of Jesus, the son of a carpenter. Which illustrates an important principle they don’t teach in homiletics classes: that it’s hard to preach to people who knew you when you were in diapers.

What the citizens of Nazareth did understand however was that Jesus was using the coded language of a text sacred to Judaism to proclaim himself the messiah. Visions of Sephoris with its six thousand crucified must have danced through they’re heads. Was this another Judas the Galillean? The incident shows the poverty of their religious imagination just as it shows the power of their communal memory for state terror in the form of mass executions.
All the gospels speak about this incident but they locate it later in the ministry of Jesus. Luke moved it to the beginning of the public ministry because it foreshadows what is to come. His rejection by the people of his own hometown, the people he grew up with who knew him is a portrait in miniature of the rejection that he will meet at his crucifixion.

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet wrote about this passage from Luke in one of his poems:
A preacher’s temptation
Is the voice persuading
He is his own message.
So the emphasis on the other
Proved to them he blasphemed.
This stripling, this Nazarene
Nobody the mirror
Of God! They hurled their scorn’s
Stones and the cracks accentuated
The sky’s edge. There was scant time.
He withdrew into the wilderness of the
Spirit. The true fast
Was abstention from language.
Thomas was an Anglican priest and speaks out of his experience when he says that a preacher’s temptation is the voice persuading he is his own message. He titled the poem “Incarnations”. The only person of whom it can be said that he was his own message was Jesus Christ. When God the Logos became incarnate as a Nazarene nobody the medium, the human flesh of Jesus Christ, became the message: Jesus is the mirror of God for anyone who has the religious imagination to see it. He is also the mirror image of who we are, though that may take more imagination for us to comprehend.

Scripture scholars sometimes express frustration that in the environs of Nazareth there is no great hill from which Jesus might have been thrown off by his inhospitable listeners. But it you will find that hill much later in Luke’s story, on a Friday in April, just outside Jerusalem.

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

2007-01-22T07:49:00.000-06:00

In the dining room of the home where I spent most of my childhood, there was a framed needlepoint decoration. On it was stitched the verse: “Cleaning and scrubbing can wait ‘til tomorrow, for babies grow up we learn to our sorrow.” We are a short three weeks from celebrating Jesus’ birth, and here he is today, all grown up, a local boy made good.

Jesus’ homecoming reminds me a bit of the first few times a young man or woman returns from college or from the service. There is great anticipation: the young person is missed in the town, among friends and family. There is also some trepidation: will he have changed? Well, of course he will. Jesus has been off with John the Baptist, perhaps imbibing new and radical teachings. We don’t know much about the inhabitants of Nazareth. The town stood only five miles distant from the major Galilean center of Sepphoris, a place where Greek was no doubt spoken and much trade went on. So citizens of Nazareth could hardly be complete rustics. Nevertheless, for a local carpenter suddenly to give up his trade and take up with the distant John the Baptist (he was over fifty miles south), would surely raise some eyebrows. So one can imagine the interest in what Jesus would say when it was now his turn to give a teaching on the haftorah, the reading from the prophet Isaiah. I felt a bit of this when I went home the week after my ordination: all of a sudden the kid that everyone remembers playing Little League is back from the monastery and preaching. What will he say?

What Jesus says continues the Epiphany or manifestation theme of the past few weeks. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” refers us back most immediately to Jesus’ baptism, a unique event in the ministry of John the Baptist. Jesus returns not a disciple of John, but as the one ‘mightier’ who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire. If anyone picks up here that Jesus is suggesting that he is the Messiah, there might well be some misgivings: the city of Sepphoris which I just mentioned had sided with Judas the Galilean ‘at the time of the census’, that revolt mentioned by Gamaliel the Elder in the Acts of the Apostles. The result of this messianic uprising was the total destruction of Sepphoris. The city as it stood during Jesus’ adulthood was one rebuilt by Herod the Great.

So we can understand something of the apprehension that Jesus’ words might have caused. However, that is to foreshadow next week’s gospel, and Br. Brendan has been accusing me of stealing his homilies of late, so I will focus on the words of Christ today.

Let me ask you: how do feel when you hear Jesus saying in your hearing this morning, “He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind?” If we have something in common with the people of Nazareth, we probably are of two minds. Maybe today it sounds like good news and tomorrow sounds impossible. Our response depends in large part upon whether we see ourselves truly as poor, captives and blind.

I recall an excellent homily I heard about ten years ago on the passage where St. Paul exhorts Timothy to be ‘strong, loving and wise’. The homilist spoke for most of us when he said that there is a great (and dangerous) desire to see oneself and to be seen by others as ‘strong, loving and wise’. But here is our problem. Jesus does not come to announce glad tidings to the strong, liberty to the loving and sight to the wise. So take your pick: appear strong, loving and wise and be self-sufficient, not needing a Savior, maybe welcoming Jesus as a fellow friend and wise man; or learn to see yourself as loved by God, saved by the Incarnation of the Son of God who loves you, but understand that you are poor, captive and blind.

In the monastic refectory, we are almost halfway through a book called Befriending the Stranger by Jean Vanier. Vanier is famous for his work with the mentally and physically handicapped. His deep insight from his long experience is that we cannot love the weak, the hurt and the incapable unless we are able to expose for ourselves our own inner weakness, woundedness and incapacity. I would like to suggest that the great challenge for Christians today is to learn to serve the poor and the lonely in one another. There is something self-legitimating in caring for the physically poor, and in no way do I wish to suggest that it is easy or unnecessary.

The problem, as I see it, is that our individualistic mindset suggests that everyone, given the right opportunities and education, will and should make good. In the monastery, for example, we are all supposed to be good men. What do I do when my brother does something wrong again and again, even after I point it out to him and to the superior? Am I willing to love him with his flaws, or do I say, “Why doesn’t he fix that?” Or what do I make of the brother who is sullen and removed? Am I willing to love him, too? Or do I say, ‘well, what’s the bee in his bonnet?’ Even more difficult, am I willing to be loved by my brother if it means being, not strong, loving and wise in his eyes, but weak, poor and even blind?

This all sounds heavy and maybe a bit histrionic: St. Paul gives us a more positive perspective on all of this when he writes to the Corinthians, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you’.” Rather, the eye should rejoice in its inability to do what the hand can do, for it is through this inability that the eye comes to need the hand and the body comes to take shape. Love, then, is learning to say, “I need you” to our fellow human beings. Not in co-dependency, mind you, but in the Body of Christ. All the parts of the body must be linked to the head: a hand and an eye can’t become all-dependent on one another: that would make for a gruesome body. Rather we rejoice in being united one to another in Christ.

Again, Christ throws out the challenge: will you welcome the Good News if it means having to say, “I need you,” even to our enemies? Vanier is helpful again here: what if the enemy, what if what we hate in the world is what is weak, captive and blind in ourselves? Can we turn to that place of emptiness and poverty inside and say, “I need you?”

We are in the midst of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II noted that Jesus chose the Apostles not because they were strong but because they were weak, especially Peter, whom our Lord treated especially hard. Catholics face a temptation to feel self-sufficient: we have the fullness of the Faith we are told, and in a very narrow Magisterial sense, this is what we must somehow affirm. However, today’s liturgy suggests that we should approach ecumenism from a position not of strength, but of weakness, poverty, even blindness. Can we say to the Orthodox or to Protestants, “I have no need of you?” “By no means!” Can we instead learn to listen and to trust in such a way that we can discover our need for full communion in the Body of Christ and through this discovery acknowledge our weakness and incapacity to bring this communion about?

If we can, if the Holy Spirit grant us the courage to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, if we can love the poor and the captive within ourselves, then perhaps we will be among those who welcome the proclamation of Jesus Christ, “a year acceptable to the Lord.” To our One Lord Jesus Christ be glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.

Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

2006-11-19T12:29:00.000-06:00

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

2006-11-15T23:35:00.000-06:00

[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

2006-11-13T09:05:00.000-06:00

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.

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

2006-08-21T06:31:00.000-05:00

At the end of the eleventh chapter of the book of Leviticus, God says to the people of Israel through Moses: “You…shall be holy, for I am holy.” The Hebrew word qadosh, “holy” connotes being ‘cut off’, different from the profane. God in effect, in making His covenant with Israel says, “if you desire life with Me, and this is true life, you must become worthy of Me: you must become different than the world, because I am other than the world.”

Significantly, this exhortation takes place in the midst of the kashrut or Kosher laws. There are many ways in which Israel is to be different from the surrounding Canaanites and other peoples, but the most obvious way is by refraining from eating certain foods. The foods that God permits the Israelites to eat also must be prepared in a certain way. In chapter seventeen, God says to Moses, “You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood.”

One can imagine, then, the scandal occasioned by Jesus when He says “to the crowds,” “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” This teaching gives some currency to C.S. Lewis’ argument that Jesus is either God or insane. We have the advantage of knowing Jesus Christ risen from the dead; we know that all authority has been given Him and so this testimony is perhaps easier for us to absorb. Or is it?

From time to time one reads about polls that claim alarming numbers of Catholics denying the Real Presence or at least not understanding it. One must always exercise caution in interpreting polls; I’m half Polish, so I should know. However, some struggle to grasp the presence of Christ in the Eucharist should not surprise us. The teaching has been a source of difficulty for believers from the very beginning. How can we deepen our faith in this mystery and enliven others’?

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” Here we have life with God in a deeper and more intimate way than ever envisioned even in the marriage covenant given at Mount Sinai. “The life of every creature is its blood.” In this teaching of the Lord on Sinai, we see that all life belongs to God, but we also see the problem of sin in the world of creatures. The food that sustains our bodies is good. Eating is good, especially eating together. It is a visible and visceral reminder of our connectedness to the earth, to other creatures, and to each other. The downside of this is that creatures are perishable. The life of creatures has a limit. If we limit our horizons to the enjoyment of bread, we are apt to lose sight of the fact that we do not live on bread alone.

On the other hand, as the Council of Nicea taught, the Son of God is not a creature. The drink that He gives is not perishable but imparts eternal life. This is why, overruling the prohibitions of the old Law, Jesus can offer us His blood to drink. His life is also in the blood, but it is not the life of a creature, but the life of Blessed Trinity Himself.

With this as background, we return to the question: how to enliven our faith in the Eucharist, to desire communion with God and to receive it in this humble sacrament of bread and wine? We might ask an ancillary question: Why did God choose food as the privileged means of Christ’s continuing presence and of the gift of life? Surely this suggest that our attitude toward food and toward creation to which we are linked by our bodies must somehow be connected to the choice of bread and wine for the material of the source and summit of our faith.

This in turn suggests that if our faith in the Blessed Sacrament is somehow waning, we should examine our attitude toward creation. There are two temptations: to overvalue creation or to undervalue it. To overvalue it, to serve the creature rather than the Creator (Blessed be He), is tempting because the world is full of good things delightful to the eye. But this is to choose mortality rather than immortality. Not much of a bargain if you ask me, unless by some confused reasoning we think that the God who created the earth ki tov, very good, will somehow make heaven less good. There is also the temptation to equate God with creation, the mistake of pantheists or nature-worshippers. This makes God less than All-powerful and probably less than good as well.

However, we must also not become Manicheans and undervalue or denigrate this creation. Do we really do this today? I think that we do, when we eat meals on the run, treat bodies like machines or sculptures, abuse the earth for short-term conveniences and the like. We can also do this for alleged religious reasons, such is the temptation of Puritanism. This seems to me less of a temptation today, but it is worth noting, if only to make the Church’s stance clearer. Perhaps the clearest problem we have in this area is accepting the Incarnation, the idea that God would create the universe and the human person not merely as an amusement to be discarded when no longer interesting, but as a place within which He could dwell intimately with His creatures.

How do we balance a true appreciation for creation with a longing for everlasting life in union with the Blessed Trinity? Saint Paul gives us the answer in the Epistle to the Ephesians. “[Give] thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.” Do you have no choice but to eat quickly at McDonald’s? Give thanks. Do you have to cancel a trip this year because gas is scarce? Give thanks. Give thanks for those whom you love, and give thanks for those who show you your inability to love. Give thanks for good food and for lousy food. Give thanks for the sun and for the rain. Give thanks for this world and for the promise of a better world. This, after all, is the true meaning of the Eucharist: thanksgiving to God in Jesus Christ, to whom be power and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Assumption - Dom Brendan

2006-08-16T11:16:00.000-05:00

When I was a child and we had a Holy Day of Obligation like today our parish priest would inevitably begin his sermon by saying: Today is the Feast of the Assumption and how happy we are to be here. My father would groan quietly and slide down in the pew for what he knew would be a 40 minute sermon on the joys of coming to Church in the middle of the week. Obviously he was not happy to be there, half baked Catholic that he was. But his sentiments did not seem to be shared by the other in my parish: the Church on a day like today would have standing room only at all three masses.

In 1958 a parish priest could assume that most people would be happy to treat a weekday as a Sunday and interrupt their day to come to church to celebrate the Liturgy in honor of the Mother of God. I doubt if any priest today would make that assumption, if you’ll forgive the pun.

So why are we doing it? Certainly, we are honoring the memory of the Mother of the Lord. But we cannot forget that we’re doing so out of a set of specific historical circumstances that most of us have first hand knowledge of.

Historically speaking there has been a Feast of the Assumption since the 7th or 8th Century, but it was Pius XII who proclaimed the Assumption a dogma of the faith in 1950. However this was viewed at the time, his decision has been criticized in the last 25 years by voices inside and outside the Church.

But the fact that the Pope proclaimed the Assumption a dogma and the timing of it, November 1, 1950 cannot have been insignificant given the extraordinary assault on the human body witnessed in what another Pope has called "The Century of Tears".

Ten million killed in World War I, 600,000 alone in one battle, the Battle of the Somme (there were 58,000 causalities in the first hour of that battle). And that figure is dwarfed by the 60 million dead in the battles and death factories of WWII.

We have no time to talk about the 40 million dead in the Stalinist purges of the 30’s and 40’s, the 100 million dead in the Maoist purges of the 50’s and 60’s, the millions killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the slaughter of over 1.3 million Tutsi’s in Ruanda. And I have only skimmed the surface: we should not forget the 28 million abortions in this country alone since Roe v. Wade. A century of unimaginable atrocities, and a century that gave us new verb to describe what human beings are capable of: genocide.

In the face of this assault on the human body, Pius XII understood that in defining the dogma of the Assumption the Church was at the same time making an assertion about the nobility, dignity and worth of the bodies and souls of every human being.

It is not the teaching of the Church that the Mother of God escaped the common fate reserved to all human beings. It is the Church's teaching that at the end of her life she was taken into heaven body and soul in anticipation of the general resurrection on the last day. She is, as it were, the first fruits of Christ's Resurrection from the Dead just as she was his first disciple.

That is a bold and extraordinary claim for the Church to make about a fellow human being who was and is a woman and a mother. An extradordinary claim to make about the human body in an age that both exalts and denegrates bodilness in every advertisement, tv show, movie and magazine.

But it is also an extraordinarily hopeful and optimistic assertion about the lives and deaths of every human being in an age rank with pessimisim nihilism, and dispair. To say that Mary lives, body and soul in heaven means that Christianity does not promise a salvation of the soul alone in which all that has been precious and valuable to us in this world will vanish like a pageant that has been staged for a single occasion and then has no further meaning.

It means that God knows and loves the entire person that we are now, body and soul, flesh and spirit. Immortality or eternal life is not a "state" we will enjoy in heaven or fail to enjoy in hell after our death, it is something that is present, in this body of ours thoughout the journey we call life. Present in and through what we experience, feel, suffer, think, know, love and fail to love.

Our eternity is based on God's love for us. And anyone whom God loves never ceases to be. It is not just a shadow of ourselves that continues in being, rather in God and because of God we ourselves, with all that we are and all that is most ourselves, are preserved forever in an act of creative love.

So it is for the Mother of God. So it is for the great throng of the dead throughout human history and so it will be for us. And so it will be for you and me.

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

2006-08-16T11:14:00.000-05:00

My grandmother had an all purpose aphorism which she used liberally when I was growing up: “sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child”. I did not discover until years later that she was quoting a passage from that most complex of all Shakespeare’s play’s King Lear: a play about parents, children and gratitude among other things,.

It’s unlikely my grandmother knew she was quoting Shakespeare. She was not a highly educated woman: she had to leave grade school to help raise her 11 brothers and sisters when her father died. Nor was she a great lover of books: her reading material was generally limited to the “Readers Digest”, “St. Anthony Messenger” and the occasional Ellery Queen mystery story.

She grew up in great poverty and knew the hardship of the depression and the war years. And perhaps, because of this, knew a thing or two about being grateful.

And while she was not educated, one of the things she did know was that children are not naturally grateful. They have to be taught. Of course children are quick learners because they are such good observers though they are not necessarily good interpreters of what they see. They imitate the behaviors they observe around them often without knowing what they mean.

For example: One of the stories trotted out on those occasions when my family gets together has to do with the fact that as a little child I swore like a sailor. Apparently at a certain point it became so bad that my mother finally went to the parish priest, Msgr. Scheringer, to get some help on how to break me of the habit. As the story goes Msgr. Scheringer patiently listened to my mother describe the problem and then asked her one simple question: “Where did he learn it?”

A child learns to be grateful by observing the adults around them performing the important little rites of daily life that often begin with “thank you” or “I’m sorry”. These are simple phrases that are the basis of any real communal life because they are acts of recognition that we are not self-sufficient, self-reliant and self-contained. Someone whose focus is exclusively on him or her self are all to willing to abandon others.

Already at the beginning Genesis we hear the divine judgment on this kind of self-idolatry: “It is not good for man to be alone”. In this context, sin is a form of impersonalism: the failure to be attentive, responsible, compassionate, faithful and grateful.

The opposite of gratitude is resentfulness. Resentfulness, as St. Benedict recognized, is a powerful agent in destroying community because it too needs to be shared. And if the vehicle for sharing gratitude is saying “thank you” the vehicle for sharing resentment is murmuring.

Resentment and murmuring provide the background for this Sunday’s reading from the Gospel of John. Actually, we should be hearing Mark today because Year B in the Lectionary cycle is the Year of Mark. But because his Gospel is so short the Church inserts portions of chapter 6 of John, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, over a span of 5 weeks in late summer.

Today’s passage gives a good example of John’s theology at work.
The Jewish people, having come into the desert, are hungry and thirsty. They cry out for food and are given “bread from heaven” but no sooner do they eat their fill than, in a complete lack of gratitude for what they have received, begin to murmur against God.

I’m speaking about the Gospel of course but I could also be describing the events of Exodus 16 the famous story of the manna from heaven. John’s Gospel follows Exodus closely here because the evangelist is deliberately and insistently inviting the Christian community to think of their journey in faith in a way similar way to the one described in Exodus: the life of a Christian is a Passover from slavery into freedom, from Egypt to the Promised Land and from death into life. If Moses was the means through which Israel of old is saved, then Jesus is the means through which the new Israel finds salvation: and more, he himself is the true heavenly bread, the true paschal lamb, the true and long awaited messiah.

This is fully revealed in the multiplication of the loaves. But like the Israelites of old this sign, however wondrous, is not enough. And the people begin to murmur against Jesus just as they did against Moses. The words of Psalm 78 which we sing at Vigils on Wednesday simultaneously describes both events:
They tested God in their hearts
By demanding the food they craved
They spoke against God saying,
Can he provide a table in the wilderness?
Can he give us bread or provide meat for his people?
Behind these texts lies that most toxic of human inclinations, ingratitude. The lack of which is but a symptom of those quintessential American qualities of self-fulfillment and self-reliance that tempt us to do everything out of our own resources. Why? because neither God nor others can be trusted to provide for us.

But in the end Self-reliance and Self-fulfillment, like all forms of idolatry, are merely an illusion: no human can do what God does just as no human and fulfill what God alone fulfills. And this is precisely what Jesus is pointing out to his listeners in John 6. We cannot engineer our own salvation: only He can give life because he himself is the author of life. Human life is, from start to finish, a gift and we are responsible to the Giver of the gift for what we make of it. But we will make nothing of this Gift if we do not recognize the fundamental truth that “sharper than a serpents tooth is an ungrateful child”.

When all is said and done the Gospel is posing a simple question: who is God? I, myself or someone to whom I must surrender myself without conditions, qualifications or reservations at every level of my being?

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

2006-07-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

You are hot and I am minus one working arm. So, to preserve the bond of peace, today’s homily will be brief.

In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with the mystery of God’s overflowing generosity as well as His attention to detail. Put another way we have God’s grandeur and His economy. Both of these aspects of God’s omnipotence and omnipresence escape our attention much of the time, perhaps because they challenge the habitual human scale in which we live our daily lives. God’s generosity is a challenge for two reasons: first, it suggests that we, too, need to be generous, even when what we have clearly seems insufficient to the task at hand. We’d prefer to conserve and not take our chances that God will catch us if we extend ourselves. The second challenge of God’s generosity suggests that we stop being anxious about tomorrow and trust God. If we have eyes to see it, God lavishes everything we need for fullness of life on the world at every moment. In a strikingly beautiful image, Pope Benedict once summed up God’s generosity being shown to us in His willingness to scatter thousands of acorns in the confidence that one of them will become an oak.

Yet this brings us to another challenge from the opposite side. Is God wasteful? According to Jesus’ instructions, not at all. “Let nothing go to waste.” God’s greatness is such that He cares for all things, especially the smallest. This is a challenge to us who can only observe a few things at a time. For many of us crowds are scary things, and the sheer amount of people in the world today is frightening. Can God provide food for so many? I say yes, if humans weren’t so cruel to one another, but that is for another day. The point here is that because we can only come to know so many persons in our human capacity, we have a tendency to discount the importance of all kinds of persons whom we don’t know.

The scandal can be summed up another way. At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus calls the first disciples to follow Him. We find in today’s Gospel a whole throng following Him. Surely this can’t be the same kind of following, can it? Why not? Are these people hungering for the Kingdom of God any less than the fishermen were? So, too, we might be tempted either to discount to discipleship of the weak and weary, or to excuse ourselves from discipleship because God hasn’t called us to be a religious, or a priest, or a superior, or even just a devout person. Yet however it is that we have come to be followers of Christ, Jesus loves us and cares for us, each individually. His concern and compassion go out to us and all in need. All praise to Him with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

2006-07-28T22:03:00.000-05:00

July 23, 2006
We are listening to that part of Mark’s Gospel in which Jesus’ ministry has begun to feel like a three ring circus: a boat trip across the sea of Galilee to the pagan territory of the Gerasines where Jesus exorcises a demoniac at the expense of a herd of pigs, then back to Galilee where he is mobbed by a huge throng of people as he inadvertently heals a woman of an incurable flow of blood and raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead, a quick visit to Nazareth where he teaches in the synagogue and is rejected by his kinsfolk, followed by the sending out of the Twelve on mission, meanwhile Herod’s dinner party goes terribly wrong when Herodias’ daughter demands John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and finally, the Twelve return from preaching the Kingdom to Israel.

All this activity takes place within two tightly written chapters. And you think you’ve had a busy week! By this point it comes as a relief for the listener, as it undoubtedly was for the disciples, to hear Jesus say: “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while”

This text first opened itself up for me 30 years ago this Sunday. I was studying theology in Washington D.C. and asked for permission to spend six weeks of the summer in a small Benedictine monastery in northern New York because I too wanted to get away by myself to a deserted place and rest a while. After much hemming and hawing, hand wringing and foot dragging and the Seminary formation team reluctantly granted my request.

The monastery was an 8 hour bus ride north of New York City in a quiet corner of the Adirondack mountains. The life was similar to the schedule we have here: up at 4:15 am, vigils at 5, followed by lectio, lauds, and manual labor, midday prayer, mass, vespers, dinner and ending with Compline at 8 pm after which I walked the 1 and a half miles down an isolated dirt road to the guesthouse where I was staying.

It was a formative experience and it confirmed for me monastic vocation I had felt myself resisting. Thirty years later here I am a Benedictine monk what I did then. Except of course I am not doing it the quiet countryside but in a hot, noisy, restless city: this is proof for me that God does has a sense of humor.

I sometimes encounter people who are shocked to hear that we are a contemplative monastery in the city. One young man who came to visit us as a candidate told me that we had a charism within a charism because, as he put it “you can’t pray in a city”. You can’t, I asked? then what was Jesus doing the last week of his life in Jerusalem?

There have always been monks and monasteries in the city of course. But in modern times we have forgotten this. At the height of the Middle Ages there were more than 10,000 Abbey’s, monasteries and priories scattered across the face of Europe. Many of them were in cities, including that most austere of orders, the Carthusians who founded Charterhouses in London, Paris, and Toulouse. The monastery in Paris occupied the present site of the Luxembourg Gardens. What the Reformation and the Wars of Religion did not destroy was virtually whipped out by Napoleon. By 1815 there were only a half a dozen monasteries left untouched in all of Europe.

The refounding of monasticism from the ruins in the 1830’s and 40’s in France, Germany and the Low Countries took place at the height of the Romantic movement. Influenced by Romanticism monastic pioneers like Gueranger at Solemns and the Wolter Brothers in Germany imagined that monasteries needed to be located in dreamy landscapes where monks could wander through the mists with their hoods up and their hands hidden behind their scapulars looking spooky and otherworldly.

But perhaps that young man I spoke to was right in implying that a life of prayer and faithfulness is especially difficult in an urban environment.

On a summer day Chicago practically throbs with noise and energy as millions of people going about their business . How do we respond to Christ’s invitation to come to a quiet place and rest a while?

There is a saying from the Desert Fathers which I have used in novitiate classes over the years. It directly addresses the plight of monks, oblates and others who have to live and prayer in the urban deserts we have created for ourselves.

The saying is about a monk who prayed to God to let him know if his life of solitude in the desert had been pleasing. An angel appeared to him and said “You have not yet become like the gardener that lives in such and such a city.” The old man said to himself “I will go to the city and see whatever it is that he does which surpasses my work and toil of all these years.” He found the man selling produce in the market and spent the day with him. At evening time the monk was invited to stay the night in the gardener’s room that was located near a tavern. The baudy songs of the drunks filtered into the room and the monk was disturbed and asked “Brother, wanting as you do to live according to God, how do you remain in this place and not be troubled when you hear them singing these songs.” The man answered him: I tell you Abba, I have never been troubled or scandalized because I tell my self “they are all going to the kingdom”. When he heard this, the monk know that he had not yet approached this standard.
The next time your neighbors have their pool party and they’re screaming past midnight, or the Ice Cream truck rides down the street playing that annoying music or the dog across the street won’t stop barking tell yourself: we are all going to the kingdom together.

Homily for the Wedding of Mary Bellmar and Peter Olson - Dom Peter

2006-07-17T08:33:00.000-05:00

There is a good deal of discussion today about the nature of marriage. There are many who are skeptical about entering into marriage because of the difficulties involved in staying faithful to promises in a postmodern world. Yet what we come together to witness to and to celebrate today is something greater than the promises that Peter and Mary are about to exchange. We will come to that in a moment; I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these promises are insignificant even from a natural human standpoint.

We live in an era whose default assumptions are materialistic, where we have tried to find a cause for every effect, and find these causes in nature, in the physical make-up of the universe and by extension in the human person. By such an analysis, the drive to wed is reduced to biological impulses and the decision to stay wed is often reduced to mere expediency: in a cost analysis, it is more effective for individuals to form communities to satisfy mutual needs.

What we experience in life, in making promises and struggling to keep them, is something with far more dignity than simple survival. By entering into covenants with one another, we take a disorganized universe and we give it predictability. No matter what happens to you from this day forward, Peter, Mary will be there to share it with you. And Mary, you will not have to look around for someone with whom you can share joy or sorrow: you have the certainty of knowing that God has given Peter to you for this.

And there I have slipped and brought God in already. Certainly this is the natural dignity of marriage: it is the privileged place where new life enters the world, where community is first formed by the irrevocable bond of matrimony.

And yet, what we claim takes place here today surpasses even this great dignity of marriage. For our Biblical tradition claims that married love is the privileged image of the love of God for the human race and more specifically the image of the love of Jesus Christ for His Church. In other words, you are each called upon to imitate the fidelity of God Himself, Peter by laying down his life for Mary and Mary by a sacrificial gift of self to Peter and both of you toward your children. By your fidelity, you will make the Good News of the gospel, a gospel of forgiveness, love, reconciliation and restoration more credible.

Such a goal would surely be impossible were it not for the fact that we believe that God is with us here and now, pledging to you His help in times of struggle. We should also note that St. Paul exhorts us to rejoice especially in hope. This echoes our Lord’s teaching that we should rejoice precisely when we suffer trials for our faith. These trials are the times when your love will be tested, purified and strengthened. To allow this work to go on, you will need faith, hope and love. Faith that God is with you, hope that God intends to see you through and love of God and each other.

From this it is clear that you must be a husband and wife of prayer, as we see modeled for us in the story of Tobias and Sarah. In order to give yourselves completely to one another, you have the responsibility to be wholly who you are, whom intends you to be. And we say with the Council of Vatican II, that Jesus Christ reveals you to yourselves. Stay with Him as you stay with each other and He will strengthen your love. While this is a time of general uncertainty with regard to marriage in our culture, but it is also a time of unprecedented resources and creative thought in the Church. Meditate frequently on the high calling you have received in this sacrament, and make friends of the Church’s great teachers in this regard, especially our late Holy Father Pope John Paul and our present Pope Benedict.

For those of us here witnessing, it is incumbent upon us to support Mary and Peter not only today by our presence, but by our continued encouragement and our own efforts to live lives of fidelity and holiness. This is a good time for each of us to renew our promises, whether they be in baptism, in marriage, in religious vows or in confirmation, either Christian or Jewish. In this spirit, we can be especially thankful for the examples of married fidelity we see in both sets of parents, and we remember especially the example of Charles Bellmar who, though not able to be with us in the body, surely is with us in spirit, both in his example as husband and father, as well as in the mystical communion we share with all the baptized whenever we gather to celebrate the sacraments of the Church.

I hope that you will all permit me, under the circumstances, to end with some musical remarks. I met Peter nearly seventeen years ago now, hard to imagine, but it was in the Motet Choir at the University of Chicago. Later, we would tour the country together in a barbershop quartet and found the first-ever avant garde barbershop ensemble along with Ben Sussman-Collins, today's Best Man. About that time, I met Mary at our parish, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park, also in choir.

Were I aiming to found a choir today, I would think of founding my bass section and my soprano section on the two of you. Not only are you excellent musicians, but you are team players. When we’ve sung together over the years, I know that you listen, that you are conscientious about the right notes and the right rhythms and about watching the conductor. Don’t ever let those skills flag! Be listeners first and foremost: to each other and to Christ. The beauty of a good marriage well-lived is not unlike the beauty of a motet well-performed; indeed, it is certainly greater. Both of them open up those around us to a greater love and zeal for life. Beautiful music stirs the heart and an open home full of life, love and hospitality is also a convincing sign that there is more to life than biological laws. May God abundantly bless you and may your lives be a song of praise in God’s service.

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

2006-07-09T20:10:00.000-05:00

Some years ago, I had a discussion with a young man who was looking into the possibility of a Benedictine vocation. He had one lingering reservation, though. As he put it, “If the Benedictines go insane, who will stop them?” I was surprised, though encouraged by this question, as he obviously did not think we had yet attained insanity, though why corporate insanity in a religious order shouldn’t affect the superior is not clear to me.

He asked this because Benedictines are technically not an order. Each house has considerable autonomy, and the highest ranking abbot of the Benedictines, the Abbot Primate, has absolutely no canonical authority over any monks whatsoever. I head Abbot Primate Notker Wolf speak last week, and his testimony to this was quite moving. “Being powerless,” he said, and I paraphrase from memory, “is a blessing. People are not afraid to talk to me. I can look at people face-to-face as a brother and equal and not look down at them as an authority.”

Of course, while on one hand we love a man such as Abbot Notker who proclaims his powerlessness, on the other, we grow impatient when the Benedictines go test the limits of sanity while he merely plays his flute.

More frustrating is when we ask God to do something about our distress and He seems not to. St. Paul asks this thorn in his flesh to be removed, and three times is denied. More distressing yet is the picture in today’s gospel, where Jesus Himself is literally powerless, ‘unable’ to do anything powerful. This points to a surprising fact about the human person. Jesus has shown absolute mastery over the demons thus far in Mark’s gospel. Jesus controls the sea, heals sickness and even has mastery over death, as we saw last Sunday. When it comes to having mastery over the human race, however, we see God’s limitations, as it were.

Can it be that we human beings, created in God’s image, are really more powerful in some way than the demons, who seem unable to resist God’s authority? Certainly as creators and artisans, the human race has shown itself to be quite masterful toward nature in recent centuries, and that mastery continues to increase at a frightening pace. As space shuttles explore far away regions, new advancements in biology make it possible to engineer human and animal life, almost to build new human beings out of the dust, the otherwise inert material of genetic molecules. We shape not only the bodies of human beings, but by the rapid flow of information, we can shape minds and hearts as well. We human beings are powerful indeed.

Yet for all our power, misery remains. Faced with the outrages of great masses of humanity starving, killing and maiming each other in wars, dying of preventable disease, or young people even in our own affluent society killing or injuring themselves in large numbers, we are right to feel a certain indignation with the promises of the powerful of the world. In fact, it is not uncommon for many in recent centuries to go right to the top. If there is a God, why can’t He fix these problems? Or if He can, why does He not? If He does not, perhaps He is not such a good God. Today’s gospel offers us a way of answering these puzzles.

We are not the first to ask these questions. Israel was a people formed by an astounding and unprecedented rescue by God of a small band of descendents of Abraham at the Red Sea. God routed the most powerful human force of the time, the army and chariots of Pharaoh in Egypt and utterly destroyed them. Despite this, within a few days, the people were complaining in the desert. Some gratitude! When new dangers would arise, coming first from the Philistines, then Assyria and Babylon, the people would cry out to God: give new signs and work new wonders! Show forth the strength of your right hand and arm! After some time, these appeals apparently stopped working. Last week, Jesus raised the dead. This week: ho-hum, here’s the carpenter: what have you done for us lately? Jesus is hardly able to work even simple cures. Such is the power of doubt, ridicule, thinking that we know all there is to know about someone already.

And herein lies our challenge. How often do we locate the agency of our sufferings in someone other person? “If only he or she would change (or better, if only God would do something about him or her), my life would be easier.” This line of thought blissfully obscures the fact that we think we know the solution. And by the power of our pre-emptive summary of the situation, we foreclose the possibility of change, healing and reconciliation. We foreclose on these possibilities because we are acting powerfully, as if defining the situation once and for all based on our own inclinations.

If we are able to grasp, at least intellectually, the necessity of loving and forgiving others, we might advance to a different but no less troubling conclusion: that no matter how hard we try, we cannot forgive, cannot bring ourselves to love. In such a case, we might lose hope. But what we are in effect saying is, “I am powerless to change myself, and what’s more, I do not really want to change because that would mean that I was wrong all along, nor do I think that God can change me.” In other words, we are unhappy about being powerless because it wounds our pride.

Why not accept powerlessness as a gift, as St. Paul and Abbot Notker suggest to us? Jesus was not able to work cures in His home town, but He retained the power to do something greater: to forgive sins and change lives. But He exercised this power by consenting to the cross, to powerlessness. And this He did not do grumbling about the state of affairs in the fallen world, angry that it had to happen to Him, but, as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, “for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, heedless of its shame.” Do we take enough time to reflect on the joy that God sets before us?

Human beings are powerful enough to resist God: what will happen when we relent and trust God? If our exercising of power by rejecting Christ has been turned by the cross into our salvation, what will our embracing of powerlessness be but eternal blessedness? All praise to Jesus Christ, seated at the right of the throne of God forever and ever. Amen.

Seventh Sunday of Easter - Dom Peter

2006-05-28T20:07:00.000-05:00

It sometimes surprises people to find out that in high school, my extracurricular specialty was not so much music as it was theater. In college I came to understand why in the ancient world theater had a bad reputation: pretending to be someone else is a risky task. I’ve had the idea of a short story about a man who plays Shakespeare’s Iago and ends up himself becoming duplicitous in real life. But my writing skills are even shakier that my skills at music and theater, so the story probably will never be written.

An influential, if somewhat brutal moment in my realization about the theater scene came in my second year in college. There was a certain woman who never acted in any shows, but always seemed to be on the stage crew or lighting crew, helping out with whatever needed doing. In my awkward way of trying to show appreciation one day, I asked her what moved her to volunteer for these jobs. She replied, “Oh, I guess it’s my way of having power.” The answer really shocked me. This was a time in my life when I was studying texts by the philosophers Marx and Nietzsche, men associated with the idea that any suggestions of charity or help are really about power, but this was the first time the idea really hit home.

God is love we hear this morning; this phrase is one often quoted, indeed is felicitously the name of the Holy Father’s first encyclical. Yet, as Pope Benedict points out, the phrase needs explaining, especially if we struggle to believe in agape, that self-giving love, rather than self-aggrandizement masquerading as love. How does the Church ask us to hear this phrase, as we contemplate Jesus ascended into heaven, and as we await the Holy Spirit?

As the Father sent Jesus, so now, after His Ascension into heaven, He sends us. At the same, time, He promises to be with us always. Indeed, we believe that we are baptized into His Body and this means that in some fashion we have been raised in the Ascension to God’s right hand. But how can we be at God’s right hand and still sent? The sending into the world part is easy enough for us to see, though we might wonder sometimes what our task is. What about our exaltation at God’s right hand? Can this really be true? If it is true, why don’t we experience this?

I would like to suggest that we will come to the realization of our deep union with Christ to the extent that we love truly, that God is truly the wellspring of all our actions.

Pope Benedict notes in his encyclical that in the earliest days of the Church, Christians were admired for their charity. In a world where the poor and slaves were regularly treated with contempt, the Christians offered a radically new message. Today, because Christianity has so deeply influenced our world, concern for the poor and the sick has come to be seen as normal. Therefore, this care has largely been secularized. Where friars and nuns once relieved the poor and cared for the sick, science and government programs have stepped in and not infrequently are more effective, particularly in medicine. Because many of the tasks of charity that were once done by religious have been taken over by non-religious, Christianity itself is caught in a quandary: what is it that we are about then? What, then are we sent to do?

We should recall that the mission of Jesus is connected to baptism and therefore to the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not begin His public ministry until He was anointed with the Holy Spirit. As He is leaving the world, He promises that we, too, will receive this anointing, and that the Holy Spirit will tell us all things.

And what will the Spirit empower us to do? To serve one another in love and to bring salvation to others. In another time, this often meant clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. We are not dispensed from that task today, but we should look seriously at the charge, noted by the Holy Father, that charity to the poor reinforces their helplessness and that charity is really a front to assuage our consciences.

Saint Augustine made the same observation:
“If you render service to a wretched person, perhaps you desire to extol yourself before him and wish him who is the source of your beneficence to be subject to you. He was in need; you shared. Because you rendered service, you seem greater, as it were, than he to whom the service was rendered. Wish him an equal so that you may both be under the One to whom no service can be rendered. [Tractate 8 on the First Epistle of John, 5]”

Pope Benedict’s observation, one that accords with monastic tradition, is that charity should develop in tandem with humility because it should be real service, rather than mere favors. We will achieve that true humility that pours itself out for others if we grow in union with Christ, who provided His greatest service from the Cross, the lowest place.

This is why Pope Benedict implies that prayer is the greatest form of charity by placing the monastic life first in a list of the Church’s works of charity. I don’t take him to be meaning that this is limited to the monastic state, but that real prayer is real charity because it is union with God who is charity. It is in prayer that we conform ourselves to Christ and so can imitate Him in valuing persons for their full dignity as humans in God’s image. In prayer, if we really bring ourselves to it as creature to Creator, we will discover ourselves needy and we will discover ourselves loved. Too often, we go to prayer as if it is a favor that we do for God, and then we ask Him for favors in return. Is this love or is it business? We shy away from deeper prayer because it exposes us as empty, needy and naked. But it is the crushed spirit that God will save, not the healthy and self-satisfied. Sometimes we act before God: we pretend to be righteous, we avoid looking at our neediness and we never get to prayer. Yet, if we really pray, really encounter the greatness of God, the sweetness of God, our reliance upon God, we will easily dispense with the illusion that our good deeds are our own doing, that we somehow are righteous because of them.

Here, then, is the gift we should seek from God: the gift of knowing ourselves truly: both the neediness of our present state and the blessedness of the glorified state promised but not yet realized. We seek this union with God every time we gather at the Eucharist. In the liturgy, we practice this: we act as if we are there. Unlike the unfortunate actor playing Iago, or the Pharisee acting righteous before God, this type of acting transforms us into the image of God.
This week, let us renew our devotion to prayer: real prayer! Not reading texts that affirm our opinions, not fearing to go past devotions that produce expected results, but real prayer that brings us face to face with the God who is our supreme good, who loves us and pours out His Spirit into our hearts. Then let us pray for the gift of this Spirit that as we are sent to bring Christ to others, we may truly have Christ to give them.

Solemnity of the Ascension - Dom Brendan

2006-05-26T08:10:00.000-05:00

Ascension Thursday
May 24, 2006

At the end of the children’s mass on Christmas Eve in my home parish in Michigan they bring in a big birthday cake with sparkelers on it and everyone sings happy birthday to Jesus. A similar custom has sprouted up on the Solemnity of the Ascension, at least in the parishes I worked in from Vermont to Texas, Michigan and Minnesota. The children write letters to Jesus and put them into balloons and inflate them. After mass everyone goes out in the parking lot and releases them into the air. The idea is that people who find these balloons and read the messages are supposed to write or call the school to say how far the balloons have floated. In one place where I was the Principal even provided music for the occasion: a recording of “UP, UP and Away” by the 5th Demension.

For some odd reason, Christimas and Ascension seem to appeal to this sort of liturgical kitch. But birthday cakes for Jesus and balloons floating through the sky are more than just a chapter from the “liturgy lite” theology manual. They are as theologically inadequate as they are liturgically inappropriate because they do not convey the true extent of the Mystery that we celebrate.

Rather, they flatten the Mystery out like a steam roller by implying that all reality is divided into two, with Jesus upstairs in heaven and a world of men and women downstairs. Two separate spheres of influence: Moreover, God is not in charge of the daily running of the material world and does not intervne in it. If he did then Tsunamis, wars, bird flu, and cancer would not happen. The nice thing about this arrangement is that it salvages God’s reputation when something bad, like a major earthquake, happens. The bad thing is that it makes it feel as though Jesus is an absentee Landlord waiting around for his Last Coming to collect the rent.

The danger here is that Christianity becomes a religion preoccupied with a future afterlife rather than a religion that asks our investment in the here and now as a precondition to blessedness in an otherworldly existence. It’s a short step from here to speculating about the nature of the “rapture” and who gets left behind.

Rather, the truth that we celebrate is at once simpler and more theologically satisfying: in his ascension, Christ does not disappear from the world; on the contrary, he begins to appear and to come. He who is the splendor of the Father and who once descended into the depths of our darkness is now exalted and fills all things with his light.

But because Christ’s presence is now hidden it can only be discerned by those who are sensitized to it by the workings of the Holy Spirit, that is those who have been initiated into the Mysteries through the sacraments and who form a body of believers in communion with one another and with Him. A community so intimately bound up with one another and with Christ in love that they become the visible extension of his body in time and space: this is Church.

The full movement of the ascension will only be complete when all the members of his body have been drawn to the Father and brought to life by his spirit. Isn’t that the meaning of the angels who say to the disciples: why do you stand here looking up into the sky? This Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way has you have seen him go into heaven.

Homily for the 6th Sunday of Easter - Dom Brendan

2006-05-23T18:36:00.000-05:00

6th Sunday of Easter
3 May 2005
Cycle B

The most solemn moment in the Liturgy of Good Friday occurs during the proclamation of the Passion according to John when Jesus cries out in a loud voice and delivers over his spirit. At that point, the rubrics instruct the priest and assembly to kneel in silent worship before the God who dies. If you were here last year on Good Friday you may remember that was the moment when someone’s cell phone went off.

I have been pestering the Prior for some time now to put up a sign in the entryway that reads:
OUR NEW CELLPHONE EJECTOR PEWS HAVE BEEN INSTALLED. PLEASE! FOR YOUR SAFETY AND THE SAFETY OF THOSE IN THE PEW WITH YOU, TURN OFF YOUR CELL PHONE BEFORE ENTERING THE CHURCH.

I was visiting my brother in California once before one of his tours of duty in the Middle East. I dragged him to the 10:00 Sunday mass with me at the local Catholic Church. Someone’s cell phone went off during the Eucharistic Prayer: the opening bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik floated through the Church which, on the positive side, was a step up from what we had been singing, a mixture of Kenny G and Up With People. The priest looked up from the altar and quipped “God Calling”. Everyone broke into a nervous laugh.

I fear that I am getting old. Under the burden of years my sense of humor is receding at twice the pace of my hairline. I fail to find this sort of thing funny. Not the least because its bad theology, the kind of bad theology that has become the default mode for talking about God.

You may be thinking to yourself at this moment, as you reach into your pocket or purse to turn your own cell phone off, that wringing a theological truism out one phone call is the homiletic equivalent of squeezing blood out of a turnip. And you may be right. You can do lot’s of things with turnips, I highly recommend them. But I am less concerned about cell phones than I am with the comment “God calling”. It betrays a theological mindset that has infected us all. A mindset that you can check by answering a simple question: where is Jesus Christ?

The standard answer that most people tend to give is that Christ is in heaven, a place which by everyone’s definition puts him beyond pain, fear or death. And this is not entirely wrong. The Creed affirms that:
He ascended into heaven from
And he will come to judge the living and the dead.
The problem is when believers, like their non believing neighbors, fail to finding him here on earth in meaningful and significant ways. So that we have to imagine that the only encounter we will ever have with him is at the moment of our death. This ensures that praying to Christ is a little like placing a long distance phone call. One of the few that the NSA can’t listen to, but what exactly is the area code for eternity?

The question that should we should be struggling to answer in the post-modern age is how do we move from abstract knowledge of God based solely on creedal statements about Him to a personal encounter with a living Christ: and more specifically to a living communion with the Risen Lord through the institution called the Church?

This is not a modern preoccupation. Judging by John’s Gospel it was also a problem for the young Christian communities for whom the Gospel was written in the late first century. And it revolves around two questions: How do we carry on in Jesus’ absence? How do we come to know him now that he is gone? John’s answer is given in the passage we hear today.
The key lies in the common human experience of knowing how to love.

This is my commandment; love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

In the weeks after Easter Sunday we hear longs portions of John’s Gospel in which the world “love” is a prominent verb. It’s important to remember where these chapters come from: they are not records of conversations Jesus has with his disciples after Easter Sunday, that is after he has come through the crucible of the Good Friday whole and triumphant.

No, they come from Holy Thursday, the evening before Christ’s personal journey into the heart of darkness that we call evil.

This is makes it a remarkable passage for two reasons: First, in his confrontation with evil Christ will be crushed by it, swallowed by it whole in death. And he will do this armed with nothing more than love.

Few of us will argue with the fact that the world is not a loving place. These are lessons that most of us learn very early: bad things happen to good people but evil things also happen to good people. And yet on the night before he dies Christ has the chutzpa to talk about love.
The second reason the passage is remarkable is for what it says about love, loving, and being loved for anyone who calls himself a friend of Christ: Christian love—Catholic love if you will—for the world and all who live in it looks exactly like the broken body of Jesus on the Cross. It is the giving away of self in order to discover self. This is love made visible in a way that many people in our nihilistic, suspicious and self-seeking culture are ill prepared to understand or accept. Even among some in the Church who want the agenda to be about ideology and power. Yet for some unfathomenable reason God has chosen the cross as the means by which His love and presence are made visible in the world. And we need to get used to the fact that we are not only its beneficiaries, but also its ambassadors and its witnesses.

This is why the stories and books that say that Christ did not die on the cross, that he lived to marry and have children and that he’s really buried in southern France or in Northern Israel or in an unmarked grave near Jerusalem, why this new “take” on an old story needs to be firmly opposed with the truth about the meaning of Christ’s death as God’s irrevocable offer of love and reconciliation which sets aright a world gone wrong.

This is the church’s job: not merely to preach the cross to but to live its meaning as those who have truly died and risen with Christ. A people whose agenda is not determined by power, influence, money, or distraction from the burden of consciousness but by another set of priorities centered on the fact that in the death and resurrection of Christ everything in the world has changed.

Fourth Sunday of Easter - Dom Peter

2006-05-10T19:52:00.000-05:00

Good Shepherd Sunday, Year B (2006)
From time to time you will hear the phrase, “Christian humanism.” Personally I don’t care for the term. As a Christian I find it tautological. As it is normally used, it verges on insult, since it is usually contrasted with an apparent Christian opposition to human development. This is inspite of the fact that ours is the only religion I know of that worships a human being and claims that humans can be divinized. What is there about Christianity that is not humanistic?

Unfortunately, the humanists who have been critical of the Church over the past five centuries or so have not been entirely without justification. There are some ways in which the Church might appear to keep the masses down and discourage human creativity and
flourishing. One such aspect of the Church that coincides historically with the humanist critique is the problem of clericalism. Officially, clericalism is the belief that the hierarchy should have power in the Church, this hierarchy being restricted, of course, to ordained men. Let us agree that this approach is sinful from the outset because it seems to suggest that the Church is primarily about power. This is an aberrant view that derives from an overemphasis on the model of the Church as the perfect society, the Kingdom of God on earth. This view flourishes when the Church is politically powerful and wealthy. It encourages the wrong sort of men to seek ordination to the priesthood and consecration as bishops. And it causes us to be suspicious, in some ways a healthy reaction, to today’s gospel. We don’t like thinking of ourselves as sheep because we don’t trust our shepherds. We don’t trust our shepherds because we suspect that they are in it for themselves and not for us: they are, in Jesus’ terms, actually hired men who will leave us in the lurch when the wolf comes.

This is an overly suspicious view, but one, as I said, that has its foundations in a certain reality of life in the Church in the modern world.

Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd. In English, this sounds like He is simply contrasted with the bad shepherds, those who abandon the sheep when the wolf comes. This is true enough. In the Greek, Jesus says ego eimi ho poimen ho kalos. I am the kalos Shepherd. This adjective kalos has many meanings, including ‘beautiful’ ‘fitting’ ‘excellent’ ‘suitable’. Thayer’s New Testament lexicon has a nice phrase, “excellent in its nature and characteristics and therefore well-adapted to its ends.” In other words, Jesus is not merely one shepherd among many who happens to be good where others are not so good, He is preeminently the Shepherd by His nature. What is that nature? He is not only human but divine. It is because of His divinity that He is the Good and True Shepherd.

More than that, Jesus can’t be accused of running a power play on us sheep, being in it for Himself. He proves this by laying down His life, by emptying Himself, by becoming lower than all, a worm and no man.

But it is because He is the divine logos, the Word of God and Second Person of the Holy Trinity that He can make the astonishing claim, “I have power to lay [my life] down, and power to take it up again.” More literally, He lays down His psyche, His soul. More on that in a moment. But here we come to the crux: there has been a great effort in recent decades to emphasize Jesus’ humanity. There are scholars, even of a traditional bent, who will assert that Jesus was unaware of His divinity. Such studies are very interesting indeed, and I do not wish to downplay the wonder of Jesus’ humanity, nor the importance it plays in our own spirituality. But we need to say here that there is more to Jesus than this humanity. He is truly of a different origin than we are, and this is why the Church is not a democracy. We hear the voice of the one who has the authority to speak.

I say that Jesus is of a different origin; this is too simple a formulation, of course, for two reasons. First of all, Jesus possesses the whole of human nature. While as God He comes down from heaven to rescue His sheep, as a man, he is born of Mary. He has a mother as do we all. He even has a human soul, as this passage suggests. Saint Augustine pointed out that Jesus lays down His soul; English unfortunately lacks some of the nuances of the Greek or Latin versions of this reading. We can say confidently that Jesus is the Way the Truth and the Life. Life itself lays down not life in the abstract but the particular life of His human soul. This is because He participates in the divine life even as he participates in human death.

Let me return here for a moment to the question of Jesus’ origin and ours. I said that He is the True and Fitting Shepherd because He is God and we are not. This is too simple not only because Jesus is also a man, but because in our baptisms, we now have a divine origin analogous to the divine origin of the Word of God. It is for this reason that we do not or should not fear death. When the wolf comes to snatch us away at our deaths, we will find that the same Divine Logos, the life of the world, is indwelling not only in Jesus’ human soul but also in ours. As Jesus laid down His life to take it up again, we will find our lives given to us at death. This is what Saint John means when he urges us to reflect on the love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God. Indeed, that it what we are! We shall be like Christ: freed from death, freed from sorrow, intimately united with our sole Good, Who is our God and Creator, the giver of every good gift to humanity. If this is Christian humanism, why settle for anything less?

Third Sunday of Easter - Dom Brendan

2006-05-10T19:50:00.000-05:00

3rd Sunday of Easter
April 30, 2006
Cycle B
I received a strange phone call two weeks ago. The person on the phone said that she had just seen an NBC program called Dateline about Michael Baignet the author of the book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”. Baignet claimed on the program to have seen a papyrus document that proves that Jesus did not die on the cross but was still alive in 45 ad. The document is purported to be a letter written by Jesus himself to the Sanhedrin stating that he was not divine and was unfairly treated by the Sanhedrin. Baignet says this papyrus was found under the foundation of a home in Jerusalem 20 or 30 years ago. It has since disappeared into the Vatican’s Secret Archives, or so he claims.

The woman on the other end of the phone wanted to know if I had ever seen this document or had any knowledge of it. I explained that I was merely a humble Benedictine monk and did not have access to the Vatican’s Secret Archives; moreover if every monk and clergyman had access to the Secret Archives they would no longer be a secret thus depriving people like Michael Baignet and Dan Brown from making millions of dollars on books fabricating conspiracy theories involving the Vatican and it’s Secret Archives. There was a moment of silence on the line. Then she asked if I had the Cardinal’s phone number handy.

As it happens I looked up the interview on the internet where NBC is kind enough to provide a complete transcript. At one poinet Baignet is asked by the NBC correspondent:
Correspondent: You believe that much of what we think we know about Jesus is a lie?
Michael Baigent: It’s a lie. It’s an obvious lie.

I find this story very interesting but not for the same reasons that my caller did. What’s interesting about this story is it’s timing. Next to Christmas, March and April are the most religious times of the year as Christians observe Lent and Holy Week and Jews observe the Passover. And every year around this time there are always news stories in the media concerning some new take on faith. Either John Dominic Crossan, the poster boy for the Jesus Seminar, telling us that Jesus body was left on the cross to be eaten by dogs, the Da Vinci Code, last year’s fascination with Mary Magdalene or this year’s favorite the “Judas Gospel”.
Some are inclined to dismiss the furor about these so-called revelations claiming that they are merely works of fiction. But its much more than fiction: it is a toxic blend of pseudo scholarship, half-truths, ideology and blasphemy packaged for maximum sales. And they sell because it feeds the public imagination for conspiracy rather than mystery: the X-files masquerading as theology produced by conspiracy theorists on ideological steroids who argue that Gnosticism is the real story behind the origin of Western civilization.

And here we get to the core of it all: these gnostic “discoveries” validate all of the inferences to be derived from the sexual revolution: we are free to make up our sexual identity, roles and relationships, as we go along; moral codes tracing back to biblical times are now obsolete; conventional notions of the Deity are simply a form of social control and ought to have no effect on human behavior.

Apologists for this form of theological pornography argue that the media barrage ultimately has no effect on believers who are already convinced of the truths of faith. I’m not so sure. Two years ago my 16 year old nephew did something completely uncharacteristic: he bought a book and read it. The book was the Da Vinci Code. And then he did another uncharacteristic thing. He announced to his parents that he would no longer be going to church with them because, to use his own words “I believe in God but I don’t believe in the Church”. All this took place within a month of his was Confirmation. In his case, as with so many others, the Sacrament of Confirmation was ritual graduation out of the Church.

At the heart of many of these programs, books and movies is a relentless hostility to the Church. In the end, the success of these “catechisms of suspicion” show the depth of the present cultural darkness and the willingness of the popular mindset to believe the worst of organized religion in general and Catholicism in particular.

The Passion, Death and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the one truly piece of Good News that the world needs to hear. This is why it lies at the core of the Church’s liturgical year, her preaching of the Gospel, and the celebration of the Sacramental life. Why would anyone want to let this good news be taken from us?

What should committed Catholics do?

One response is to cancel your subscription to the papers and news magazines, boycott the movies and cut the plug off the television set. What will you have missed: news about Madonna’s latest husband or the perils of being Jessica Simpson? Now days the fine line between news and entertainment is hardly distinguishable. You can barely tell the difference between the news and the commercials. Remember what Fred Allen said: “Television is called a medium because it’s seldom well done”.

Unfortunately most people cannot not be persuaded by this kind of approach. Cutting off the plug to pop culture can seem, for some, like cutting off their nose to spite their face.

The best place to start is by taking a cue from the Gospel itself. It seems to me that one of the greatest arguments for the truth of the Resurrection are the apostles themselves. Gathered in the upper room they are 11 frightened men who fear that the news of Jesus’ resurrection might prove true and that when he returns he will have his revenge for their betrayal.
Instead Christ reconciles them to himself; befriends them once again. The power of their encounter with the Risen One changes them in ways far more convincing than any writer of fiction could describe. They become men willing to endure hardship and death for the sake of the gospel.

The greatest testimony of the truths of our faith is the witness of a holy life. Orthodoxy leads to orthopraxis, true believing leads to right living. If the church is ridiculed and mocked because Catholics are little better than pagans and unbelievers than whose fault is that? If we are accused of being a false Church and our faith an obvious lie because Catholics are too busy manning the barricades of the intramural culture wars then whose fault is that? In that case, arguing about where the sanctuary furniture goes is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. In some cases we’ve brought discredit on ourselves.

But if we live lives of courage, faith, honesty, truth and love then all the blasphemies and lies spoken and written about the Church’s faith will have no power to convince or confuse even the most naïve.

This is a homily not a program of reform or a political platform for another faction within the Church. Clearly, there is a need for pastoral action in our hyper critical culture. But whatever you do, don’t call me on the phone and ask if I’ve visited the Vatican’s Secret Archives lately. I lost my membership card.

Easter Vigil 2006 - Dom Peter

2006-04-16T08:39:00.000-05:00

“Who will roll back the stone for us?”
We have spent the past forty days working at prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These practices are recommended by the Church to combat the usual blockages in our spiritual lives posed by the flesh, the world and the Devil. For many of us, this is a frustrating experience. Our plans for more prayer get blocked by emergencies or the intrusions of angry thoughts that return to us from other experiences during the day. Our efforts at fasting are undermined by forgetfulness, by excuses and by simple weakness of will. Our efforts at kindness to others are met by indifference from our families and friends and certainly by the world. Our efforts to forgive others are stifled when those persons commit the same old sins against us over and over.

In other words, were Lent meant to be a time of concentrated self-improvement, many of us would have to admit that we fell a bit short. If we feel that we have succeeded, perhaps by August we will be back to wherever we had been last August.

While the problems I mentioned above seem to stem from others’ intrusions on our spiritual lives, in fact the reality is different. The angry thoughts we have at prayer are not caused by our neighbors, however irritating or belligerent they might be. In reality, these persons demonstrate that we are not yet rid of our anger, or our self-concern or so on. This should hit us when at the end of Lent, Jesus Christ, a man unjustly persecuted if ever there were one, serenely takes up His cross and marches off to his death.

Here is a tremendous paradox: when we set out to choose life, we hope that it will bring us liberation and happiness. What we don’t always reckon on is that before we make this decision to choose life, we have been silently choosing death all along. When we make an effort to turn around and follow Christ more closely, our past choices spring to life and hold us back. The experience may feel like one of God’s abandonment, that we are alive but He is nowhere to be found. We desire to find Him, but we fear finding only a corpse and, what’s more, a huge stone stands before us. Who will roll it away? It does not occur to the women that Jesus Himself is alive and quite capable of a small task like moving a huge stone.

What the women, and we, also don’t count on is the fact that the things we tend to associate with life in our world today: excitement, interesting stories and disputes in politics and ideals, just wars, the latest plot of The Sopranos, the most interesting blogs and websites, even the good feelings of being with those whom we like, if I dare say so (and I might bring forth Abraham to testify to my interpretation); these things are part of a world that is passing away and clinging to them is more like choosing death than being alive. God created the world good, of course: we heard this in the first reading. The reading we don’t hear tonight is of the sin of Adam and Eve. We become what we love, and Adam and Eve, by turning from God, heard the just sentence: to dust you shall return. When we prefer the world, we may feel momentarily alive, but we are on the road to dust. When we come to our physical deaths, this may appear to us as a sudden event, but in fact, it is the consequence of the choices we make for spiritual death. This will be its reality, at least until we are reclaimed by the One who brought life by His own death.

The ancient pagans were puzzled to see the ancient Christians approach death in rather a different way. The Christians, according to St. Ambrose, carried their dead high and sang “Alleluia!” Why? Because as life and the good creation had been changed into death by the sin of Adam, death and suffering have been changed into life and victory by Jesus Christ. As the eternal logos, He consented with His Father’s plan to come down from heaven, but He never lost sight of heaven, was not allured by the pomps of the Devil, as we heard six weeks ago. We become what we love: if we are in Jesus Christ, then death does not mean a final reversion to dust, but a transfiguration into the Divine Life. If we love with Christ’s love, then we will become like God Himself.

Have I changed my tune here? Didn’t I begin by saying that our efforts to better ourselves, to follow Christ more faithfully turn out often to be failure? Indeed, and I stand by that assertion, and I stand by the fact that it is Good News. This is because only Christ can roll the stone away, and a recognition of that fact is the key to salvation. We can only be saved, we can only desire a Savior, where we find ourselves perishing, where we recognize the places where we have chosen death. In these places within ourselves, where we are dead spiritually, let us place the Body of Christ, that on this night, He may triumphantly rise and put life in those places. During Lent, we have been searching out not our virtues, not our strengths, but the sepulchers within us. When we find these, we should rejoice: Christ desires to go there before us, and to have us hear there the Good News: He is risen indeed! Like the ancient Christians carrying their dead and singing Alleluia, we should come upon the dead parts of ourselves and sing Alleluia, for these are places where we can have a new life, and one we probably didn’t expect.

Can it be this easy? Am I making this up? If this were not the case, why do we sing, O felix culpa, O happy fault? God’s power makes even our faults, especially our faults, into a reason for rejoicing. What other news can compare with this? Listen to the invitation our Lord makes: all who are thirsty, you who have no money, come to the water and receive without paying! It’s on me! Christ has paid the ransom!

If our efforts at Lent don’t actually improve us, is there not then a better way to arrive at Christ? No, our efforts bear much fruit if they bring us to a realization of our need for Christ, and if we surrender ourselves into His merciful and loving hands. If we consent to our death: this we will do in a few moments when we renew our baptismal vows. As Saint Paul has reminded us, we who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into His death. So our promises at baptism are a consent to die the death that Christ died: the death to self, the death to this world, the death to death, as it were.

We will, after all, promise once again to reject sin. In a sense, we will promise to renew the fight that we took up at the beginning of Lent, but we will do so now with the renewed faith that comes of the realization that where we find death, Christ bursts forth with life from the Father. Where we have gathered in the darkness this night, the light of Christ has burst forth with an unconquerable joy. What we will have learned is that this victory, impossible for us, is already won by the Strong Man, Jesus Christ. By our efforts to break free of sin, Christ will find a welcome home in us this night.

So let us review a bit where we have been this Lent: what were our greatest disappointments? What were the self-revelations that we most disturbing to our self-image? What are the stones that we need rolled away? Having seen these, let us raise our eyes again and see that One who has already broken out of the tomb. Let us sweetly forget ourselves and let our failings be blotted out by the All-powerful, by the One into whose hands the Father has given all things. Christ is Risen. He is truly risen, alleluia!

Good Friday 2006 - Dom Brendan

2006-04-16T08:34:00.000-05:00

The comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen once said that he didn’t mind dying, he just didn’t want to be there when it happened. Few of us do. Ultimately we will have no choice in the matter. Death is part of the sad and inexorable logic of human existence that demands that every child born of every human mother will, one day, die. The trajectory between our births and deaths is a straight line called time that pushes relentlessly into tomorrow. Each day of a life lived means one less day to live because there is a finite number of heart beats in every human life.

This is a fact that even the Lord Jesus Christ himself could not escape. The moment he was conceived in the womb of his mother he was bound by the universal law of death. This is the great scandal of the Incarnation that we seldom pay adequate attention to: the God who takes on human flesh in Jesus Christ becomes the God who dies. A scandal so great that debunking Calvary is a multi-million dollar industry: from the so called “Gospel of Judas” to the Passover Plot, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and a potboiler about Leonardo Da Vinci which you will find in the fiction section at Borders.

Of course Jesus Christ could have died quietly in his own bed of complications brought on by old age and infirmity. But he did not. He died at the prime of life, in one of the most brutal, degrading and painful forms of capital punishment. To crucify was not merely to execute, it was to psychology destroy the victim with torture, isolation, ridicule and humiliation through a protracted and agonizing death. The nails were driven through the hollows of the wrist striking the median nerve causing immediate, overwhelming and prolonged agony. Bypassing the major arteries, these wounds were not meant to be immediately fatal, but so that the maximum suffering could be sustained for the longest possible time. So that in the end the crucified was left begging for death as a relief.

Doesn’t it make you wonder why God chose the cross as the instrument of our salvation? Yet, it is here, before the scandal and failure of the cross that the Liturgy of Good Friday asks us to stand. The Gospel does not attempt to explain the divine logic of the cross, but only to proclaim it. God has become completely one with sin and death and has not stopped being God there. And this is not what we expected, that God would come and show his power and glory by a shameful death: that he would give blessing through one cursed, freedom through a slave, righteousness through one made sin, wealth through one made poor, wisdom through foolishness, strength through weakness, and life through one man’s death.

But then, that’s why they call it Good Friday isn’t it?

Holy Thursday - Dom Peter

2006-04-13T23:24:00.001-05:00

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ! We gather tonight to begin our annual observance of the Triduum: the three holy days. This period of three days has for us a mystical signification. I won’t quote you all the places in the bible where three days are mentioned, merely point out the obvious one.

Jesus has told the Pharisees and us that just as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. However, if we go strictly by the chronology of the gospels, Jesus dies on a Friday afternoon and rises during the night on Saturday, staying one full night in the grave.
I was delighted to discover that St. Gregory of Nyssa pondered this same problem. His solution is ingenious, in that quirky Patristic way that not everyone finds convincing. He makes two interesting leaps. The second is to say that, since God calls the darkness ‘night’, then the darkness that overshadows the earth as Jesus hangs on the cross introduces an extra night into the sequence of events.

Even if you take this as proven, you might be asking, ‘but wasn’t Jesus still alive at this time? And doesn’t that still make only two nights?' Your questions would be answered by Gregory’s first leap of logic: this darkness over the earth on Good Friday was only the second night during which the Son of Man was in the heart of the earth. That is because, even though Jesus’ physical death takes place on the cross, the spiritual significance of that death is illuminated, indeed, is enacted on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper. Let us understand that we are in the presence of mystery here, where time and space cease to work in their customary manner. As of Thursday night, when Jesus says, “This is my body which is for you,” He has already offered Himself and taken away our sins. The Crucifixion will demonstrate the radical price of this self-offering and of our salvation, but the Jesus’ death was inevitable, indeed was already initiated, this night.

Whether you buy Gregory’s reasoning, his underlying theological insight is of utmost significance. The meal in which we partake this night is the sacrificial banquet of the one true lamb whose blood removes our sins. We cannot share His Body and Blood if it is not broken and poured out upon the Cross. Conversely, Jesus’ death on the Cross is meaningless if it is not His self-offering in sacrifice for our sins. The Cross spreads a banqueting table for us, and the table is revealed as the altar of the Cross. Both of these realities, of course, depend further upon the Resurrection, but that is to anticipate.

Jesus sheds further meaning on His impending death and the offering He makes to the Father in the demeaning action of the washing of feet.

We often take Peter’s aversion to Christ’s offer to wash his feet as a protest on behalf of Christ’s dignity. This it may be, but I would like to close with a suggestion or two about how each of us is like Peter, that we don’t really want our feet washed, and that each of us would rather not follow Jesus’ example of service when it is presented this way. I say that we don’t really want these things, but this is an exaggeration: at the deepest level of our being, we do desire salvation and communion with God and one another, so I will tell you some of the ways we forget that this is the truth about ourselves.

Around the closing of the Second Vatican Council, Romano Guardini wrote the following about the liturgy, the high point of which we celebrate in these three days:
“[It] is a steady light, constantly burning; a gentle flame, continually warming; a force silently at work, moulding and purifying. As such it needs the peace and freedom to develop, unhampered by aims and motives.”

“Unhampered by aims and motives…” I can’t say that we approach liturgy that way so often today. Is this because we don’t approach much in life that way?

Peter and the others surely had their aims and motives, what we might today call an ‘agenda’. It included Jesus ushering in the Kingdom of God with spectacular signs and wonders, fire raining down upon the Gentiles and (not to be forgotten!) themselves sitting at His left and right. Peter is repeatedly scandalized by Jesus’ predictions of His passion, of which this sign is paramount. In a sense, Peter’s refusal is John’s version of Peter’s attempt to persuade Jesus that the Son of Man need not die.

However, Peter is who he is because he is able to sign on again when he needs to. Unlike Judas, he does not despair, but just as quickly asks for cleansing of the head as well.

But how often do we insist that God’s plans for us go according to our aims and motives, to our agenda? Do we really want to admit that we need Jesus to cleanse us and that to be cleansed we must witness His abasement? Surely there must be an easier, more antiseptic manner to the goal of redemption, and surely it need not suppress our own ideas, especially the ones that seem especially good to us. You will never wash my feet, Lord! Not if it means giving up…[fill in the blank here].

It gets worse when Jesus commands us to go and do the same, to wash one another’s feet. Simply serving others is a task many of us will sign on for. But Jesus is asking something more profound. If Gregory of Nyssa is right to say that this night represents Jesus’ passion and death, and that His version of ‘service’ means suffering for the forgiveness of others, we might balk. If so, this exposes in us an unwillingness to recognize Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, as well as an inability to recognize in ourselves a desire for control, which service can often mean. This is another reason that we refuse others’ service of us: we don’t want their help. I can do it just fine, thank you. And as far as serving others: I will accept as long as it doesn’t hurt too much, that I get good feelings out of helping someone. If it means suffering at their hands, well…

If you recognize a part of yourself in this, as I do in myself, we must ask, what can we do? Here is where the liturgy returns to help us out, as does Fr. Guardini’s analysis of the liturgy. Let me offer a similar quote from a wildly different context as a possibility. In a poem called “En sourdine” Paul Verlaine writes:
“de ton Coeur endormi
Chasse à jamais tout dessein,
Laissons-nous persuader

From your weary heart, drive away forever every plan. Let us rather surrender.

Prescinding from the irony in Verlaine’s poetry, let us recognize that this is a love poem. Love, at least ‘falling in love’ tends to distort time, to dismantle our reserve, to reorient our preferences and relativize our concerns. Can we separate ourselves from our mundane concerns, our individuating preferences, our defense mechanisms and our drive for accomplishment for three short days and allow ourselves to be courted by God? If we can, think of how our faith and our very lives will be different.

Let us then surrender to Christ in the liturgy once again this year, and allow ourselves to be swept up in the embrace of one who loved us enough to suffer ultimately to win our eternal friendship in heaven, let us mourn with tears the death of one so just and so good; let us rejoice with abandon at the astounding triumph of the Lamb of God and His unhoped for offer of a share in God’s own life. “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well!” May you be praised, Lord Jesus Christ our Savior!

Third Sunday of Lent: Dom Brendan

2006-03-19T20:47:00.000-06:00

“And making a whip of cords Jesus drove them all out of the temple.”
This vivid story has captured the imagination of artists throughout the centuries. Giotto painted it on the wall of the Scrovengi Chapel in Pauda, El Greco painted it, so did Gustave Dore, Giordano liked the theme so much he painted it twice from two different perspectives; Rembrandt painted it too. Each of these paintings gives different interpretations of the event but in all of them one thing remains the same: Christ is always pictured with a whip in his hand flailing away at a terrorized throng of vendors.

But it was Rembrandt who painted the most violent version. The Lord Jesus is pictured holds the whip in his right hand. The man next to him is clutching a money bag trying desperately to grab the loose change on the counter top. One man is turned away from Christ, caught in mid flight while another glances over his right shoulder with panic and fear written on his face.

But it is the face of Christ himself that the viewer ultimately comes to focus on: there is fierce anger in his eyes and his jaw is set with grim determination. I once saw a similar look in my father’s face when he came home from work one day and found that my younger brother had shellacked the windows of the house with varnish he found in the basement.
So we should probably begin by admitting that the Gospel does not show the Lord Jesus Christ in an especially flattering light. This is not the “Jesus meek and humble of heart make my heart like unto thine” that all of us fervently hope and believe he is. This is the God you were more likely to encounter at a Redemptorist Mission in the 50’s or the Puritan God of Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon “sinners in the hands of an angry God”.

It would be tempting to ignore the cleansing of the temple except for three facts: first, every one of the Gospels records it, second it is used against Jesus at his trial as evidence leading to his conviction and execution on Good Friday, and third, it occupies center place in the Church’s liturgy for the Third Sunday of Lent. And we should probably be asking ourselves why?

The answer begins with the reading from the Book of Exodus on the Ten Commandments. In effect, the first reading is a lens that helps us focus and understand the uncharacteristic behavior of Jesus in the temple.

The Ten Commandments: if you have not read the book you’re probably familiar with the movie. You may also know that the “the ten words” as the Jews call it, are at the center of the culture wars in this country being fought in the courthouses and schools. And that is because we are talking about 10 commandments and not 10 suggestions or 10 alternate behavior choices.

The joke goes that Moses comes down the mountain and says to the people “I have good news and bad news. The good news is I got him down to ten, the bad news is that the one about adultery stays.”

Humor aside, the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai is the high point of the Book of Exodus. It is the moment when the God of Israel reveals himself to Israel. There is that beautiful line from the Prophet Baruch that we hear in the readings from the Vigil of Easter: “Blessed are we O Israel, for we know what pleases our God.” But this knowledge, which is denied the pagans, is a two edged sword because if Israel knows what pleases God they also know what displeases him. So this knowledge is not about mastering facts and manipulating information it the knowledge to do what is right and just. This is what pleases our God.
But when Moses comes down from the mountain to deliver the tablets of the law to the people what does he find? the assembly of Israel worshiping a golden calf, breaking the very commandments Moses has just received. In a fit of blazing anger Moses smashes the tablets on the ground.

Here we arrive at the point on which the Gospel turns. Moses’ righteous anger is provoked by the sin of idolatry, the Lord Jesus’ righteous anger is provoked by something equally sinister. Or to put it in the terms supplied for us by the Evangelist himself: zeal for the Temple consumes Jesus just as zeal for the Torah consumes Moses.

The temple was the holiest site in Israel, the visible sign of God’s presence. But it would be a mistake to think of it as a quiet place of personal prayer and worship. Josephus, the Jewish historian, scathingly refers to the temple as the “bazaar of Annas”. Annas was the high priest whose son-in-law Caiaphas turned Jesus over to Pilot.

Josephus’ comments refer to the fact that the High Priest controlled the monopoly on the stalls for merchants selling animals for sacrifice that were set up in the Court of the Gentiles, the huge portico on the north side of the temple. He also received rent and a portion of the profits from the money changers booths located there as well because every Jew was expected to pay a yearly tax to the temple. The amount as laid down in the Book of Exodus amounted to a half a shekel in pure silver which, in 1st Century Palestine, was the equivalent of two days wages.

But Roman coins contained the image of the emperor; it was unthinkable to use them as the temple tax, neither could they be used to purchase animals for sacrifice so they had to be exchanged for kosher Jewish coins. According to Josephus the profits in these transactions were huge because the money changers shamelessly took advantage of the pilgrims who came from the countryside and foreign countries. Annas and his family were there of course to receive a portion of these funds as well.

This means that the holiest place in Israel was probably a chaotic scene with crowds jostling, merchants haggling with pilgrims, vendors selling animals to be sacrificed, and the animals themselves bellowing and fowling the pavement. The spiritual center of Israel ends up as the biggest racket in town. And it is into this scene of chaos that Jesus bursts with a whip in his hand.

At this point we come to a homelitic crossroads. We could pursue any number of themes suggested by the liturgy but I’m assuming that one of your Lenten penances is not spending all day in Church.

What can we take away from these readings to nourish our hearts over the coming week? Lent is the season when the Catechumens prepare more intensely for the Sacrament of Baptism and the baptized rediscover for themselves the true meaning of discipleship. The pace of modern life and with its endless demands and distractions means that we tend to forget that as baptized believers we ourselves are temples of the living God. The day that water was poured over our heads and the Trinity invoked in the ancient formula our bodies became the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit: our hearts became the holy of holies. The divine presence is a heart beat away and yet we are often unaware or numb to it. Or worse, we have pushed God aside and have enthroned ourselves at the center of our own existence. Moreover we defile this temple by the way we live, the things we allow ourselves see, the thoughts we will to think, the words we say or leave unsaid and the actions we do or leave undone.

We cannot go back and be re-baptized but we can allow Christ to cleanse us through the second baptism of repentance. The whole of our Lenten asceticism, prayer, fasting, and acts of mercy are meant to bring us to this realization. Christ comes, not with a whip in his hand but under the form of bread and wine into our hands. In his zeal for the Church he gives himself to us completely, body and blood, soul and divinity. Let us give ourselves to him.

First Sunday of Lent: Dom Peter

2006-03-05T13:27:00.000-06:00

First Sunday of Lent, 2006
Repent and believe the Good News: Lent is here!

A friend of mine once shared with me his experience of fasting. He took it on faith that the practice had value, but in practice he found that it made him angry and difficult to live with, so he gave it up, at least for now. I have had a similar response when I have tried to give up, or even just reduce caffeine for Lent. Actually, let me admit, that I have a similar feeling every morning when we sing the office of Vigils, and as cantor I begin Psalm 94 (95): “Come, ring our joy to the Lord!” Now, I’m a morning person, but even I come up short most days having to sing at 5:00 a.m., when I’d rather be sipping a cappuccino and reading Dante. Much more to my liking is Psalm 3, which precedes Psalm 94, “How, many are my foes, O Lord…break the teeth of the wicked!” And perhaps here we have a reason why Saint Benedict put them together.

Saint Benedict wanted his monks to chant Psalm 94 each day because his own spiritual theology is closely mirrored in it. Saint Benedict wants his monks to be aware of God’s presence at all times and listening for Him: “O that today you would listen to His voice!” Conversely, at six different places in the Rule, Saint Benedict bans murmuring or complaining. And so the Psalm continues, “Harden not your hearts as…on that day at Massah in the desert when your fathers put Me to the test.”

“When you gain a friend, gain him through testing, and do not trust him hastily,” says Ben Sirach (6:7). This morning, Jesus goes out to the desert in imitation of His fathers in the flesh. Just as God had ordered Pharaoh to let Israel go into the desert and in doing so called Israel, my Son, so too, after Jesus’ baptism, where the voice from heaven identifies Him as the Son of God, He also goes into the desert. There He is tested. We follow this same pattern: claimed by God as His sons and daughters by our baptism, our lives should be something like a continual Lent, at least as viewed by those outside the Church. But, as Saint Benedict says, since few have this strength, at least in the days leading up to the celebration of Christ’s triumph at Easter, we should be true sons and daughters of God. Jesus will refer to us as friends at the Last Supper: and here is our chance to be tested by our abstinence, generosity and assiduous prayer throughout these forty days.

Like our fathers in the desert however, when we come up against obstacles, our first impulse is usually to put God to the test rather than acknowledging that this is forbidden to us, as Jesus reminds Satan in Matthew and Luke’s version of the temptation. When we are hungry or have that caffeine headache or try to be silent and find our minds buzzing away with 24/7 commentary on our busy lives, our usual first response is to blame someone else for our weakness. This is what Freud identified as the defense mechanism of projection. So we get angry at the unfortunate brother who passes by, we shake the baby or kick the cat. In some cases, perhaps by those of us slightly more sensitive, we may instead turn in on ourselves and despair. But this is not allowed either: believe the Good News! Why the long face? Why so slow of heart to believe? But what are we to believe, and why should it make us eager to repent, eager even to be tested?

“Never again will I destroy all bodily creatures,” God promises Noah in the first reading today. God promises never to send such a flood again. But the flood serves as a warning and a teaching, or as a ‘type’ as Saint Peter tells us, in this case, a foreshadowing of baptism. But this baptism does not primarily affect the body: rather it affects the soul. It offers us the chance of a clear conscience. This gift will be prized by all who recognize their consciences as muddied in some way. And this includes us all, if we have the humility and fortitude to face up to it. “No one knows himself except by be tested, or receives a crown except after victory,” says Saint Augustine. Through our testing during Lent, we will come closer to knowing the truth about ourselves. And knowing the truth about ourselves will dispose us to greet with genuine joy the announcement of the Good News. There is no Good News without repentance, as there is no crown without a victory. And the Good News the victory is this: Jesus Christ has been tested and has triumphed over all of the forces that we find too strong for ourselves: our anger, our concupiscence, our sadness, whatever demons hold us bound, their days are numbered because Christ has battled Satan and defeated once and for all. It is for us to trust in this victory, to undergo the test with Christ so that we may triumph with Him. Let us hold firm to the knowledge of His victory, after which He assumes the crown: “The Kingdom of God is at hand, and I am King!” He proclaims.

We will be tempted this Lent to give up on our good resolutions, tempted to give in to anger or sadness or boredom. We are being tested so as to know the Truth that will set us free. Will we give up, or will we repent and believe the Good News?

Ash Wednesday: Dom Brendan

2006-03-03T14:02:00.000-06:00

Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2006
Last month on January 27th the world observed the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the soviet army. In the years since that event took place there have been countless books, newspaper articles and even some movies that attempted to describe or explain the meaning of the Holocaust.

One of those camps, Auschwitz was in fact two death camps. An earlier one where thousands of poles, jews and gypsies were put to death. Among them St. Maximillian Kolbe starved to death in the basement of the punishment block 11. To get there you have to walk down a long corridor lined with the prison photographs of polish intellectuals and students, some of them just boys. All of them perished in the camp. At this point the guides tell you that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz was 6 months.

Auschwitz II was the larger camp just 2 kilometers away. Nothing can really prepare you for the size of the place: the double row of electrified barbed wire fences, the watch towers, and the long rows of barracks.

In the center of the camp are two rail lines with a wide gravel walkway on either side for disembarkement. It was here that the train journeys for Jewish deportees and other minorities finally ended. In the summer of 1944 hundreds of trains arrived with their cargo of 250,000 Hungarian Jews who, within a few hours after their arrival, had been herded into the gas chambers and from there into the crematoria. Death organized on a factory scale.

All but one of the gas chambers and all the crematoria were blown up the Nazi’s in the days before the liberation. They lie at the back of the camp near a grove of poplars: huge piles of rubble left undisturbed as a silent witness. Just to the right of them is a pond filled with murky water. It was here that the ashes of the dead were dumped.

Looking into that pond you see not merely the ashes of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and others. You see also the ashes of what might have been, the shattered hopes and dreams of modern civilization.

The Nazi death camps of World War II, like the camps of the Soviet Gulags, and the re-indoctrination camps of Mao’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam are all a testimony to the fact that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. Something that is far more than mere badness, far more than mere selfishness, something that is in fact evil. Were it simply a matter of ignorance or human stupidity we could say that what the human race needed was higher education, a masters in compassion or a PhD in human kindness. But it fact no amount of education, no amount of reading and study can change the fact that you and I sin even willingly and eagerly.

The journey that led to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and a hundred other camps all began with a single human will to do wrong. And there is not a single person here tonight who does not know what that feels like if we allow ourselves to get beyond the usual excuses and the pop-psychology jargon we use to justify ourselves to ourselves.

I just said that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. But this is not how we started out. On Holy Saturday Night at the Great Vigil of Easter we will hear how God created us good in the beginning, and how he as worked all through human history to call us back to our original innocence. Ashes to ashes is what we will become but God has greater plans in store for you and I. What he asks is our cooperation. And the first step in that cooperation is the grace of repentance, the desire to turn from sin and to seek forgiveness and renewal.
The ashes of Auschwitz are a sober reminder of what happens to a world without God, a world without love and without repentance. The ashes that we bless and distribute here tonight are not a sign of hopelessness and despair but the joyful acceptance of God’s offer of salvation.

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Brendan

2006-03-03T14:01:00.000-06:00

8 Sunday Ordinary Time B
February 24, 2006

At the beginning of Lent each monk in the community is expected to give the Prior the name of the book he will read for Lent. This comes out of St. Benedict’s regulations for Lent in Chapter 48.

I’ve decided to read the Song of Songs. I chose it because of a discussion we had a month or so back in our Catholic Readers Society. Someone mentioned that this book would have been better left out of the bible because it is essentially a collection of poems, often frankly erotic, on the theme of human love: Hebrew opera from the 10th century b.c.

The criticism sounds a bit like my novice master of 30 years ago who gently suggested that novices might want to avoid reading the Song of Songs so as not to stir up youthful passions. Of course, as soon as we had a moment free we went right to our rooms and read it. It was everything he feared and all we hoped it would be.

As it happens, when the canon of the Hebrew bible was decided upon by the rabbi’s at Jamnia following the fall of Jerusalem, the opulent poetry of the Song of Songs caused much debate. Was it Sacred Scripture or not? It was Rabbi Akiva, a fierce conservative but for all of that no prude either, who argued forcefully for its inclusion. “God forbid,” he said, “that any Jew deny that the Song of Songs is a holy text; for all the ages are not worth a single day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. All scripture is holy but the Song of Songs is the holiest of all”.

He was not only defending the emotion of the Song of Songs, but also the extraordinary symbolic image of Israel as the bride of God. And his argument carried the day.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this and how long it’s going to take to get me there because obviously the Song of Songs does not figure anywhere in this Sunday’s readings. What does figure into the readings is the reality behind the Song of Songs i.e. the covenant relationship between Israel and God described as a marriage in which Israel demonstrates her faithfulness to her husband by forsaking idols and observing the torah.
I had an aunt who used to say that marriage was like a hot bath, once you got into it, it didn’t seem so hot any more. This may not be everyone’s experience of married life but it was hers. It also seems to have been the experience of the Prophet Hosea in the first reading. He is a husband who has been made a fool of time after time by an unfaithful wife, but who loves her so passionately that he works to win her back. He even plans a second honeymoon. The prophet’s unhappy experience in love and marriage is an image of Israel’s now hot, now cold relationship with her husband YHWH, but more importantly, it is the also the image of the passion with which God loves Israel.

“A bride”, as the saying goes, “is a woman with a fine prospect for happiness behind her”. Salvation history has a far more optimistic assessment for the bride Israel. The book of Hosea was written around the middle of the 8th century b.c. It would take another 750 years before the marriage relationship between God and Israel would take a dramatic and unexpected turn when God would renew the covenant in a way that no one could have guessed or imagined.
In the person of Christ God came to Israel in human flesh and renewed the covenant, no longer by the mark of circumcision in the flesh of each Jewish male: henceforth it is God Himself who bears the mark of the covenant cut into his flesh with nails and a lance. And out of his wounded side, as from the open side of Adam, is born the New Eve, the Church, the Bride of Christ.
It is out of this background that we should hear this Sunday’s passage from the Gospel of Mark. It is framed in the context of a theological dispute about the proper observance of the laws on fasting. But this story is not about the outward observance and legalism of the Pharisees verses the spiritual freedom of Jesus and his disciples. Fasting in Jesus’ day was not simply an act of piety or the mindless accommodation to someone else’s rules about food. Fasting had to do with Israel’s present situation over run and occupied as she was by pagans. More specifically it had to do with the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. The prophets promised that one day God would come to restore the fortunes of Israel and fasts would be turned into feasts.
So Jesus raises the theological ante by asking “How can the guests at a wedding fast when the bridegroom is still with them”. In other words the bridegroom is at hand. Fasting is a sign of sorrow and repentance. Weddings are occasions of joy where the order of the day is feasting not fasting. Jesus’ presence means that the party is in full swing, and no one wants a glum face at a wedding.

But there are also darker things hinted at in this passage: there will come a time when the bridegroom will be taken away and put to a violent death. Mark, who also knows the outcome, immediately presents two images that hint at what that outcome will be: new cloth and new wine which tear and burst the old that went before them: images of the resurrection: the tearing away of the hold of death and the bursting forth of Christ from death and the tomb.

With Ash Wednesday just a few days away the liturgy is carefully preparing us for the coming of Lent. Obviously we cannot derive the whole theology of Lent from a few verses of Mark’s gospel. But using this Sunday’s texts we can begin to see what the goal of our Lenten fasts and observances are and what they are not. Certainly, Lent is not about eating carrot sticks and cottage cheese in order to win God’s favor and approval. We already have it. It is rather a time for God to
“ lead us into the desert and speak to our hearts
so that we may respond there as in the days of our youth.”
A time to put our own relationship with God aright by remembering the passion with which our God loves his bride, his Church and the length to which he has gone to prove it.

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Peter

2006-03-03T13:57:00.000-06:00

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
If I were to write a book about Mark rather than preach a homily I would entitle it, “God in Human Flesh: the Good News of Jesus Christ.” This title is purposely provocative. Most commentators would disagree that Mark presents Jesus as God. Indeed, it is in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus responds most clearly to the rich young man, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Most commentators assume that Jesus is saying that He is not God. But He doesn’t say that at all. Rather, He is challenging the rich young man to put two and two together. As we know, the young man lacks the faith to go all the way, shown most plainly by his unwillingness to give up his wealth to the poor. This is because he is unable to recognize that God has come to earth, and as a result of this everything has changed. Mark throws each of us this same challenge: repent and believe in the Good News: God has come in human flesh. Will we recognize this and therefore change our lives? Or will we stick to safe formulas such as one I found yesterday in an otherwise excellent book on Mark: “Jesus is neither God nor a divine being, but a human.”[i] This of course is not the Church’s teaching, and so this kind of thinking perpetuates the suspicion that the Church and Scripture say different things.

I say that everything has changed, but this is not exactly true. Indeed, one of the reasons that we recognize that Jesus is God is that He acts like God has always acted. More on that in a moment; for now, let us dwell a bit more on the fact that people don’t recognize God when He comes. This happens because He also acts in ways that they don’t expect of God, in ways that seem to compromise God’s holiness and purity.

We live in an antiseptic culture. Touching one another has become risky. When the monks prepare breakfast for our guests each morning, we are required to wear latex gloves. So not only touching one another is risky, but touching what other people touch is risky. For this reason, many of us are reluctant to share the Cup at Mass. Throughout the Old Testament, there is a similar concern for God’s holiness. God teaches in the Torah that His Chosen People must distinguish between what is holy and profane, what is clean and unclean. Things that are unclean are not so, however, because they contain germs. Rather, because God has come to dwell on earth within the temple, things that are unworthy of His presence are endangered. Contact between God’s presence and uncleanness causes the improperly cleansed person to be consumed in God’s wrath. In fact, in two Old Testament stories, leprosy is precisely the result of presumption, once by Miriam claiming to be a prophetess on the same level as Moses, and once by King Uzziah presuming to take the priests’ role in burning incense.

When God’s wrath breaks out against impurity, the imagery used is often that of an angry horse. Animals have very sensitive noses, and if you hold something near them that stinks, they snort, shake their heads and stamp their feet. They may even charge at the offending object and destroy it. This is an image of God common in the Old Testament. The very word for anger in Hebrew is related to the word for ‘nose’. In a corresponding way, one may appease God’s anger by burning incense or holocausts. These raise a pleasing odor and cover over the stink of impurity.

This, of course, is hardly a complete or sufficient image. God also purifies His People, forgives sin, heals the sick and teaches wisdom.

Still, it is hard to prepare oneself for the shock of Jesus, even if He were a mere prophet and not God, reaching out and laying hands on a leper. The touch of a leper defiles and nullifies one’s privilege of appearing in God’s presence.

Leprosy is displeasing to God, however, not simply because it is unworthy of His holiness, but precisely because is an affront to human dignity. God loves His People and is grieved to be separated from any of us. This separation is the consequence of our sin, symbolized by the bodily impurity of leprosy. God is so eager to rescue us and restore friendship with us that He enters the world as a man. He demonstrates His love not writing a prescription for the leper, but by the loving gesture of a touch. How many years had it been since this man with leprosy was touched? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Can you imagine being without human touch for that long and what it would mean to have Jesus touch you? To have God touch you?

It is noteworthy that Jesus, by working this cure, can Himself no longer enter into the towns but must travel in desert places. By touching this leper, He has taken upon Himself the consequences of leprosy which we heard about in the first reading. He and the leper have changed places: the leper can now return to the city and Jesus cannot. Thus has He taken upon us our sins and alienation, to bring them to the cross where they will be destroyed.

Why then does Jesus suddenly speak sternly to the man? The language of the cure in today’s Gospel echoes in many ways the exorcisms that we have seen so far. Jesus does not merely heal the leprosy; He drives it out. In fact, the language goes a bit further. Jesus is not merely warning the man; the Greek term used here is embrimēsamenos, which normally means ‘to snort with rage’: that is, like a horse in the presence of a foul smell. John the Evangelist uses the same term when Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus to confront the evil stench of death. This depiction is part of Mark’s signal that this is no mere man. This is our God, locked in the primeval battle with the foulness of darkness and death. Our God is a jealous God and countenances no rivals. God is angry battling leprosy and evil. The miracle here is not simply the trick of wiping away leprosy, it is the freeing of man from sin, sickness and death, restoring him not simply to a fulfilling life, but to a loving friendship with God, for Whom we were made. God’s anger blazes against whatever would come between Him and His beloved creation.

I began by proposing that Mark writes so as to provoke the hearer to repentance. We are in no way different from those characters in the story we hear today. Indeed, Jesus Christ, our God, is coming into our midst. He will come forth from heaven and touch of lovingly as we stretch out our hands and tongues to receive him. If this is so, we must leave off and renounce whatever impurity that we cling to so that as Jesus consumes it, we are not lost along with it. We must separate ourselves from our sin and give it to Jesus to be destroyed, whatever that sin is: anger, gluttony, envy, gossip, flattery, self-will, vainglory.

But more than that: we must recognize that God is coming to touch not only me, but my brother and my sister here with me today. If this is so, we cannot imagine these persons unworthy of God’s love. If that is so, we must also leave off considering others outside the pale of God’s redemption. We must not be scandalized that Jesus touches a leper and we must not be scandalized that God loves the sinner, among whom I number myself. Let us rededicate ourselves to purifying our hearts to God and toward others and so make a fitting dwelling place for Him Who comes to take up His dwelling there, our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be power and glory forever. Amen.

[i] Rhoads, David, Joanna Dewey, Donald Michie. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the narrative of a Gospel, Second Edition, Fortress 1999, 104.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Brendan

2006-03-03T13:55:00.000-06:00

Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time
February 5, 2006
Cycle B

I want to begin this reflection with a brief calendar item. I think that February is the most dismal month of the year followed closely by January and March in that order. Some of you may share my feelings on this matter. But even if you do not, I take a certain amount of comfort in the knowledge that the ancient Romans, where were in large part responsible for our calendar, considered February to be an unlucky month which is why it is also the shortest month.

Originally, the Roman calendar had only 10 months beginning in March and ending in December. The period between December and March was simply disregarded as of little importance because nothing happened in those cold, dark, slumbering 60 days which we have come to call January and February. This is why January and February were the last months to be added to the calendar.

Given the reputation of this month it is somewhat appropriate that the Book of Job ushers in February with one of its rare appearances. It suggests to me that the members of the Pontifical Liturgical Commission (who chose the readings for the three year cycle) may actually have picked this reading out of something that approximates a sense of humor.
“Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?
Months of misery and troubled nights have been allotted to
me.”
So says Job. In speaking of months of misery does he have January and February in mind? Probably. Though he is also speaking out of a larger context in which the experience of this month only plays a small part: that is the mystery of human suffering, and to be more precise, the mystery of undeserved human suffering. Of this, of Job is surely the prime example.

Throughout the Old Testament there is a sense that if you serve God faithfully and keep all his commands things will go well with you: corn, wine and oil, long life and plenty will be yours: whereas disease, suffering, poverty and a violent death are the lot of the sinner.
By the time of Christ this idea of blessings for faithfulness and curses for sinfulness was firmly fixed in Jewish mind. You can see an example of it in John’s Gospel when the apostles, noticing a blind man sitting outside the temple, ask Jesus if it was his sin or his parents that caused him to be born blind. The blind, the lame, the leprous and diseased are all being deservedly punished for things done or left undone.

I said that this idea was a common one in the Old Testament. But the Book of Job proves to be the exception to the rule. Job is a righteous man: his sufferings are completely unmerited and undeserved. His misfortune is actually due to a wager between God and Satan to see if Job, who up until now has enjoyed God’s favor and protection will, when faced with the loss of everything he holds dear, curse God to his face.

The brief passage from today’s liturgy comes from the seventh chapter where Job is visited by his three troublesome friends who have ostensibly come to comfort him. Since suffering is a punishment for sin they feel certain that Job must have done something wrong to merit all this misfortune. Job can only protest his innocence and the apparent futility of the human condition in the face of suffering and death. But since God is just it must somehow add up to something.

Most people are quite happy to suffer in silence, if they’re sure everybody knows about. The Book of Job, capitalizing on this bit of truth, seems to be saying that there is at least someone who needs to know what suffering is all about and that someone is God. This is why you get the sense that Job, while patiently enduring all that is dished out to him, is really pointing a finger at God and saying: you don’t know what it means to suffer, to feel pain, and to die. What is more, Job is right. God by definition is beyond sickness, suffering and death.
One of my theology teachers liked to say that Job provokes God into coming up with an answer to the charge that he is a stranger to all that is human and weak. And the answer is the Incarnation of Christ. And this in fact how we are meant to understand the passage from today’s Gospel. Jesus is God’s personal response to the human condition and all that it entails.
Mark shows this in a dramatic way. He has Jesus work his miracles on a Sabbath which in effect says that this is the beginning of a new age, a new Creation. Jesus also rejects any taboo that might inhibit his ability to help those in need. He reaches out and touches Simon’s mother-in-law. A respected rabbi of Jesus day would not have taken a woman by the hand, and certainly not on a Sabbath day. Christ’s approach to this woman, and all who are sick or possessed, is Mark’s way of signaling God’s compassion.

This may not strike you as a big deal. After all, every religion has, in some way, an answer to the problem of suffering and evil. Some faiths, like Christian Science, deny the reality of the physical universe and pretend that disease and death are an illusion. Some faiths comfort the suffering by asserting that God is tormenting them for their own good, to make them better persons. And others maintain that God has nothing to do with suffering because he stands above it.

It is true that God does not want human misery. But that does not mean that he has nothing to do with it. In fact, if we take today’s Gospel as our guide, we see that God has in effect rolled up his sleeves and entered into it, is not afraid to get his hands dirty doing something about the human condition.

But as everyone knows its one thing to visit a hospital and another to be a patient: this explains why the Lord Jesus will go on to identify with suffering humanity in a far more dramatic and ultimately shocking way. On the Cross he will taste death itself and descend into the abyss of hell the ultimate place of human alienation and torment. There will be nothing held back from him in this, the ultimate lesson in what it means to be a human being.

Whenever we gather for Eucharist to eat and drink his flesh and blood we celebrate a wondrous exchange: we enter into the mystery of his passion and death and he enters into our own personal experience of suffering and death. But he brings with him more than empathy, he brings the power of his holy and life giving resurrection.

This is not the theological equivalent of an extra strength Tylenol. He does not take our suffering away, and we will all one day have to die. But his passion and death gives meaning to our own. And this is good news to keep in mind in these long, dark slumbering days of February.

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Peter

2006-03-03T13:48:00.000-06:00

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time B
The world in its present form is passing away. What is the present form of the world? And will there be a new one? How will it appear and what will it look like?

For much of modernity, talk of ‘the world’ was normally taken to refer to a physical place, earth or possibly the universe as a whole. Anthropology has a different sort of answer to the question, ‘What is the world?’ The world as most of us experience it is not so much a physical place as a series of interlocking relationships. These relationships, in turn, are governed by various rules. We speak, for example, of the world of politics, and we mean the sort of monkey-business of professional lobbyists, trading favors behind closed doors and so on. From time to time, we hear talk of a revolution in American politics, where the bums are thrown out and new, honest men and women replace them. But the new and honest usually turn out to be bums themselves: the political world, its rules and pressures are too strong for mere human beings to change them significantly.

Perhaps Wordsworth best captured the difference between the world as a place, which is good and beautiful, and the form of the world that we experience as a kind of trap, in which the rules of relationships and apparent necessity snare us and cause to do things we don’t mean to do.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This snare or net woven of the rules of this world is exactly what is passing away. This is why Paul counsels us to live as if those rules no longer held. It is why most of the Fathers of the Church, commenting on this morning’s Gospel, point to the fact that the first Apostles leave behind their buying and selling, their wives, indeed their very worlds in order to follow Jesus Christ as He passes by.

It is worth noting that Jesus is passing by the sea. Mark uses the same word paragon, as Paul does to describe what the form of the world is doing, passing by or passing on. Saint Matthew says rather that He was walking by and Saint Luke omits the episode altogether. I would suggest that this is because Jesus is on a rescue mission, not unlike Jonah. There are two forms of the world in conflict, and they are about to separate definitively from one another. Jesus is coming to rescue those caught in this world, those toiling away at their work and its demands, not sure what the point is. “Leave your nets!” Jesus says, “come after me, and as I have pulled you out of the water, you too will save others by pulling them out of the water.”

That there are two worlds passing by each other also suggests that Jesus is not rescuing us to set us free from commitment or relationships. Far from it. Rather, He is inviting us to be freed from the nets of this form of the world so that the world can be recreated with proper relationships. What will these look like? These will be relationships based first and foremost on discipleship to Jesus Christ Himself. In other words, the new world that is coming into being is the Church, a new set of relationships and rules for acting as human beings freed from the dead-end of sin and death.

This is why we gather every week around the altar and table of the Lord: we are rehearsing, as it were, a new way of being. Our participation in the Eucharist is a decision on our parts to leave behind the old form of the world and work with Christ to co-create the new world. Is this goal too lofty? Are we out of our depth here? After all, we often don’t act like the Church even when gathered here, to say nothing of what we are like once we return to the old world outside of those doors.

John the Baptist preached that there was one coming after him who was more powerful than he. This verb ‘to come after’ signifies someone who will come and take up John’s work when his time is through. And indeed, it is precisely when John was arrested, as we hear this morning, that Jesus begins to preach a message very similar to John’s: the time is fulfilled, repent and believe the good news!

When Jesus sees Simon and Andrew, what does He ask them? Most people would respond, I believe, that He said “Follow Me.” In fact, He says, come after Me. Take up My work! He invites to pick up where He left off to be fishers of men and women, to bring about the conversion of the world to Christ.

Do the Apostles do this? Do they come after Jesus? Eventually, yes, once the Holy Spirit has been given. But today, the best they can do is to follow Him. Not a bad start, mind you, and probably about where most of us are. We recognize the need to change, to repent, but we feel overwhelmed by the possibility and demands of real sanctity. It seems, well, dangerous. To claim that the world is passing is to invite opposition from those who are powerful in the world, after all.

Nevertheless, Jesus really does invite me and you to live as if this world were passing away, and by lives of holiness to proclaim clearly to others that there is a better way than the present form of the world offers. That way is love and self-sacrifice, of the renewal of our minds that they and the world may be transformed, that is, given a new form unlike the one passing away.

Today’s first reading illustrates the dynamics of our efforts on behalf of God’s kingdom and what we can expect when we come after Christ. Oddly enough, when Jonah preached to Nineveh, they were all too ready to listen. In a sense, the old Nineveh really did pass away: the Nineveh of idolatry and sin changes course and becomes a nation that fears God and lives virtuously. The one person who remains unchanged is Jonah himself. It is this sort of stubbornness that often confronts us as we make the effort to be transformed in Christ. We set out to change other people and wind up having our own worldliness shown to us in all its ugliness. This is a good place to be! Conversion and transformation in Christ is not magical. He asks our consent at every step of the way and even forgives when our conformity to the world causes us to hedge. It is only much later in the story that Peter will discover the price of coming after Jesus, as well as the glory of the new world of the Church under the headship of the resurrected Christ.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us begin again today to the Church. So many people want the Church to conform to the world and so only view the Church politically, economically, sociologically and so on. What if we as Church could really proclaim the transformation of the world? Let us begin again the adventure of coming after Christ, of discipleship, that we may begin this transformation by the renewal of our own hearts: seeking out the various nets we have laid for ourselves within, our stubbornness, our pride, our vanity, our fear and need of comfort, and let us leave them behind to pass away. Let us rather look to the Lord, present in our midst this morning and be recreated in the Eucharist to be persons of praise, thanksgiving, hope and love in Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

Mary, Mother of God, 2006

2006-03-03T13:40:00.000-06:00

Mary, Mother of God, 2006
Each year on this date, Saint Cyril of Alexandria must somewhere be smiling and cringing. Smiling because this celebration of Mary, the Mother of God is a vindication of his life-long struggle for orthodox Christology. Cringing because in the Post-Communion prayer, we slip in the title, “Mother of Christ,” which was precisely the formula he fought so long to get rid of! It is a bit like toasting the memory of Ronald Reagan by quoting Leonid Brezhnev.

Cyril spent the better portion of his adult life in a relentless battle against Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople. Nestorius’ claim to infamy is that when his flock was referring to Mary as the Mother of God, he felt that their Christology was too extreme and asked instead that they call her Mother of Christ. After all, how can God, without beginning or end, have a mother?

But Cyril insisted, and indeed carried the day. Yet in a fit of theological amnesia, our English translators decided that the Latin phrase Filii tui Genetricem et Ecclesiae Matrem, literally “Mother of Your Son and Mother of the Church” should be rendered “Mother of Christ and Mother of the Church!” And of course, this wasn’t merely a problem with our translators: it had to get by a bunch of bishops and was approved by the Vatican. This morning, for your edification and my sanctification, I will pray the prayer as written. And why not start the New Year making lemonade with this one?

“Isn’t this just the sort of arcane nonsense that only scholars can care about? How much difference can it make? Isn’t Jesus the Christ and Mary the Mother of Jesus?” Yes and yes.
The problem is not what Nestorius allowed, but the fact that he insisted on calling Mary the mother of Christ and forbad her to be called Mother of God. Just as fatherhood is revealed to us by Jesus’ relationship to god the Father, so too, motherhood is revealed to us by Jesus’ relationship to Mary His Mother. To understand fatherhood, we must understand God’s fatherhood; to understand motherhood, we must understand Mary’s motherhood. No small praise for the Virgin of Nazareth in Galilee.

God is eternal and without origin, but God’s body is not. It is Mary who gives God a body. But the question is this: is God therefore a body? Can we in some way say that in fact, Mary is somehow at God’s origin, at least as we know Him now? It sounds risky to say so, but our salvation and the redemption of God’s good creation is at stake, if we refuse to acknowledge this.
For Nestorius, the body of Jesus the Christ was simply a tool. His real nature, the divine nature inhabited this body for a time, but threw it off, once He accomplished what needed to be done. Therefore, since his divine nature didn’t need a mother, he merely went along with the Incarnation as a kind of charade, or to be more kind, as a condescension to our lowly human nature for the purpose of instructing us. He put on a body to allow us to see something of God, but not God. Following this reasoning, we too must someday throw off our bodily eyes and perhaps even our bodies in order to see God.

“Show us the Father!” the Apostle Philip pleads at the Last Supper. Jesus’ response to Philip is important. He chides him: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus does not say, “He who has seen me has some idea of what the Father is like.” Indeed, we can come to an idea of God’s character by inspecting many of the signs He has put in creatio. Jesus also does not say, “He who sees me with spiritual eyes sees the Father.” No, He simply says, “He who sees Me sees the Father.”

This is true because Jesus is God and Jesus, since He is also man is a body. Some of us don’t like to admit it, but our nature as human beings means that we are bodies. Not merely bodies, mind you, but bodies nonetheless. It is false to say that we are spirits inhabiting bodies, though many of us today would prefer to think that. Many are ashamed to be bodies. Often this is because we think that only perfect bodies are worthy of respect, to the great profit of the plastic surgeon. Or we are embarrassed by the weakness of the body, that it becomes ill or has desires that we have difficulty controlling. So we blame the body and long to be rid of it, perhaps not consciously, but I do believe this is true. And I do believe that this is why we have so little respect for mothers today, including the Mother of God. For it is to our mothers that we owe our bodies, and therefore it is to our mothers that we owe ourselves. For we are bodies.
So we return to the importance of today’s Solemnity. God takes for Himself a mother and so becomes a body. If Jesus is not a body then His Resurrection is not bodily, then His presence in the Eucharist is merely symbolic. Indeed, there is much at stake in calling Mary the Mother of God. If God is pleased to be a body, surely our bodies can’t be bad: indeed, they are gifts from God: they are ourselves! When we leave this earthly life, we won’t be ourselves again until the Resurrection when we will receive our bodies back (at age 33, according to Thomas Aquinas—but I digress). Remember that: we won’t be able to hug our departed loved ones again until the Resurrection, but that will happen; therefore we have this hope for the world, that everything about it that is good will be perfected by God in the end, our bodies included. For if God cherishes humanity enough to become human, surely He will not begrudge us humans becoming God with Him.

Ash Wednesday homily: Dom Brendan

2006-03-02T16:08:00.000-06:00

Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2006

Last month on January 27th the world observed the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the soviet army. In the years since that event took place there have been countless books, newspaper articles and even some movies that attempted to describe or explain the meaning of the Holocaust.

One of those camps, Auschwitz was in fact two death camps. An earlier one where thousands of poles, jews and gypsies were put to death. Among them St. Maximillian Kolbe starved to death in the basement of the punishment block 11. To get there you have to walk down a long corridor lined with the prison photographs of polish intellectuals and students, some of them just boys. All of them perished in the camp. At this point the guides tell you that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz was 6 months.

Auschwitz II was the larger camp just 2 kilometers away. Nothing can really prepare you for the size of the place: the double row of electrified barbed wire fences, the watch towers, and the long rows of barracks.

In the center of the camp are two rail lines with a wide gravel walkway on either side for disembarkement. It was here that the train journeys for Jewish deportees and other minorities finally ended. In the summer of 1944 hundreds of trains arrived with their cargo of 250,000 Hungarian Jews who, within a few hours after their arrival, had been herded into the gas chambers and from there into the crematoria. Death organized on a factory scale.

All but one of the gas chambers and all the crematoria were blown up the Nazi’s in the days before the liberation. They lie at the back of the camp near a grove of poplars: huge piles of rubble left undisturbed as a silent witness. Just to the right of them is a pond filled with murky water. It was here that the ashes of the dead were dumped. Looking into that pond you see not merely the ashes of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and others. You see also the ashes of what might have been, the shattered hopes and dreams of modern civilization.

The Nazi death camps of World War II, like the camps of the Soviet Gulags, and the re-indoctrination camps of Mao’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam are all a testimony to the fact that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. Something that is far more than mere badness, far more than mere selfishness, something that is in fact evil. Were it simply a matter of ignorance or human stupidity we could say that what the human race needed was higher education, a masters in compassion or a PhD in human kindness. But it fact no amount of education, no amount of reading and study can change the fact that you and I sin even willingly and eagerly.

The journey that led to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and a hundred other camps all began with a single human will to do wrong. And there is not a single person here tonight who does not know what that feels like if we allow ourselves to get beyond the usual excuses and the pop-psychology jargon we use to justify ourselves to ourselves.

I just said that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. But this is not how we started out. On Holy Saturday Night at the Great Vigil of Easter we will hear how God created us good in the beginning, and how he as worked all through human history to call us back to our original innocence. Ashes to ashes is what we will become but God has greater plans in store for you and me. What he asks is our cooperation. And the first step in that cooperation is the grace of repentance, the desire to turn from sin and to seek forgiveness and renewal. The ashes of Auschwitz are a sober reminder of what happens to a world without God, a world without love and without repentance. The ashes that we bless and distribute here tonight are not a sign of hopelessness and despair but the joyful acceptance of God’s offer of salvation.

New Homily Posting: 1st Sunday in Advent

2005-11-27T13:31:00.000-06:00

Peace to you in Christ!
You can read the homily for today here.
Don't forget to visit the Website of the Monastery of the Holy Cross.

"When Christ became incarnate and was made man, he recapitulated in himself the long history of mankind and procured for us a 'short cut' to salvation, so that what we had lost in Adam, that is, being in the image and likeness of God, we might recover in Christ Jesus. For this reason Christ experienced all the stages of life, thereby giving communion with God to all men."
--St. Irenaeus

First Sunday of Advent: Fr. Peter

2005-11-27T13:29:00.000-06:00

First Sunday of Advent (2005: Year B)

For as long as I can remember, people have been concerned that Christmas preparations are coming earlier and earlier every year. Given the indignation of those who complain about this, one might expect that Christmas decorations by now would be going up in August, so the fact that most people wait until at least October is evidence that the change has been gradual.
Christmas preparations begin so early because the end of Christmas also comes prematurely. One does not have to wander far on foot to see a good number of Christmas trees strewn about the allies on December 26. Christmas ends on December 25 because the purpose for many people for Christmas is the exchange of gifts and parties that go on during Advent. There is no afterglow to the celebration that for Christians is really about great beginnings. To use the phrase ‘the end of Christmas’ in a slightly different way, we can say that the end or goal of Christmas in the secular world is the good feelings that come from gifts and family. The cynic is me says that this odd phenomenon is driven by retailers who recognize that they can’t peddle Christmas items once the gift-giving is over and so need to move on to the next season as quickly as possible. And so earlier and earlier every year we are treated to preparations for Valentine’s Day! Another part of me wonders what all these people do to help out those who can’t give gifts or who have no family.
“God will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Saint Paul teaches us this morning. How we view the end of something determines how we prepare for it. I alluded a moment ago to the fact that the word ‘end’ has two different but complementary meanings. The end of a thing means that it either passes out of existence or is changed in some fundamental way, but it also means that the thing in question has reached its purpose or goal.
The Church has been asking us for the past month or so to meditate on the end times, the end of the world. For many people, and probably with some justification, the notion that the world will end is a frightening one. They take it to mean that the world will cease to exist and all of the things that are beautiful about the world will be no more. I find that very few people call to mind the fact that the many evil things about the world will be no more, but more on that in a moment. What if the end of the world at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ means not the destruction of things so much as their proper goal and fulfillment. After all, what is the end of the world if we take ‘end’ to mean ‘purpose’? Why is the world here anyway and since we didn’t put it here, why do we fret about how it will be used by God when its purpose has been fulfilled?
How we view the end of a thing determines how we wait for this end and how we treat the object. If we dread the end of the world, we will cling to this world and all that it includes, good and bad. In fact, we probably won’t watch and wait at all. Rather, we will try in various ways to stave off the end, either through distraction or through trying to bring about some other end.
Israel found out the hard way how difficult it is to wait for God’s end. In this morning’s first reading, Israel has been brought utterly low, a people without a king, still recovering in fits and starts from a long exile in Babylon. She had tried to solve her own problems previously, by making deals with the superpowers of Babylon and Egypt but it had cost her in the end, when out of fear of both, the king was caught double-dealing with Babylon. In those days, Isaiah and other prophets had counseled the people and the king simply to wait. Wait and watch for God’s deliverance. Do not try to bring it about on your own. Why not? Because the enemy is not really Egypt or Babylon or the Soviet Union or terrorism. The enemy finally is more subtle and is craftier than we are and that enemy, the enemy whom Christ comes to defeat, is sin. And that enemy is within me and it is within you. All of our busy-ness distracts us from this reality.
For those who have put up a fight against sin, however, these will know firsthand that we need deliverance and that we cannot accomplish it ourselves. Blessed are those who mourn and blessed are the poor. Those who are not in love with this world will come to see this reality, will come, like Israel, to put all of their hopes on God and not on any worldly power. These will seek God’s ways, so that on that day when He does come, those who seek Him will be found doing right and not sleeping the sleep of those who are at home here in this world, with all that is in it good and bad.
I asked earlier what we do for those who are poor and those who are lonely. One criticism that can be leveled against those who hope in god is that they might become lazy and indifferent, overconfident in our salvation and unconcerned with those who suffer. But let us ask ourselves how much power we have finally to end someone else’s suffering when most of us cannot do much about our own suffering. Do we strive to help the poor out of respect for Jesus Christ who appears in them and who favors them in a special way? Or do we try to help to assuage our own sense of guilt, and deaden our own suffering? What better can we do for the poor and suffering than to become poor with them, poor toward this world, completely reliant on the promises of God? For God will come and bring about the justice due, that justice that we are powerless to construct.
Let us this Advent then, take up the watch for God’s coming. Let us not be distracted by things of the world, but turn our thoughts daily, hourly, moment by moment to His promises for those who forsake their lives in this world. O God, that you would find us doing right when You come and not asleep! May we be found eager and not fearful at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ!

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

2005-09-06T20:52:00.000-05:00

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time
For some time, I was in charge of reading the prayer requests we receive over the Internet. Commonly, a person will ask the monks to ‘agree’ with him in prayer. The idea, of course, is that our prayers have a better chance of being answered if two persons agree on them.

At the same time, I think that we can all agree that this needs some interpretation. After all, I am sure that millions of people are in agreement that we would like God to intervene in the lives of those devastated by Hurricane Katrina. I’m sure that all of us have had the experience of praying hard with family and friends for the recovery of a loved one who went on to die.
A common refuge from this dilemma is simply to say that our agreement wasn’t strong enough, that we lacked faith even the size of a mustard seed. For even this mite of faith can move mountains, as Our Lord has taught.

This word translated as ‘agree’ is an interesting one in Greek: symphonēsosin. We must be in ‘symphony’ with one another, literally speaking with one voice. Plato and Aristotle used this word in their teachings on music. In Plato, all of creation performs a kind of symphony, with a glorious music being generated by the harmonious motions of the planets.

What is of interest to me in this model is that the planets and the stars, like the instruments in an orchestra, ‘symphonize’ not by having everyone play the same thing. In fact, a symphony is accomplished by many persons each playing his own part in service of the whole.
This is worth remembering when we interpret the first reading as well as the first part of the gospel. We have a duty to correct our fellow Christians when their actions are producing discord. I need not dwell on the fact; there is plenty of correction to go around these days. At times, I fear that the American Church is overrun by vigilantes. But the question that we should ask ourselves before we assume the duty to correct is this: is the discord produced by my brother’s action? Or is the discord in fact inside me because I want my brother to play exactly the same tune as I am?

Is the discord in my brother? Or is it in me? If we examine our feelings objectively, I suspect that often enough, the discord is simply my own anger or self-righteousness, not the supposed wrong of the other.

Now I know that as I speak, there are those of us here that are already saying, "He doesn’t mean me. After all my complaint is legitimate, as opposed to the people he’s talking about."
The problem with being too quick to correct, complain, or even at times exhort is that it can alienate a brother whose ways are different from mine. We can make the problem worse so that my brother now perceives that I have sinned and he needs to correct me. And so we get into a showdown: who will back down first?

Then, following the teaching of the Lord, as we believe that we are doing, we find various arguments that are on our side and start firing away. When our brother remains stubborn, we go to the priest or to the bishop. When the priest or bishop will not listen, we label him as a bad priest or bishop and say that we need not obey him any more: we will just obey Rome or just mourn the demise of the Church.

What the Lord leaves unsaid is the possibility that if we find truly impartial witnesses, they might not agree with our assessment of the situation.

All of us have gripes and see things that strike us as wrong. All of us, indeed, live amidst countless wrongs that happen every day. In what way is it our duty to be watchmen for the Church? All of us share in the prophetic office of Jesus Christ by virtue of our baptisms. But how many of us are ready to really take up the mantle? How many of us are ready first to let the Word of God pierce between our own bone and sinew, take us apart, discipline us and refashion us anew? If we are not willing to allow God to work us over a bit, we will be like a violin that has not been played in twenty years. God might play the tune on us, but it will not appeal to anyone.
Sometimes, it is not our point of view that causes discord, but the fact that we are unable to present it to others in a compelling way. Too often, our own lives conflict with the message God has given us. Too often, we are so certain of our cause that we do not take the time to phrase it in a way that is understandable to others. To extend the musical metaphor, we give the trombone a flute part to play and then get angry that it sounds too heavy. We might even fail to give others the benefit of the doubt for their point of view. And if that person is a baptized Christian, we ignore their opinion at our own peril, for they share with us the office of the prophet.

We can always trot out our supporters, but then again, surely thieves and murderers can find people who agree with them. Does this mean that God is obliged to listen? Or must our agreement before the God who searches the heart really reach a completely new level? Is that faith that moves mountains a feeling of comfort and trust that we generate in ourselves, or is it a profound respect for our common baptism and the sometimes scandalous choices of God? For my part, I am thankful to God that He is more merciful with me than I am with others.

So when is it my responsibility to correct fraternally? I think that we can ask a few questions: do I possess authority over the person? If yes, then can I do it with love and not out of anger or self-righteousness? If the person is not under my authority, then we really must restrain ourselves unless it is a question of a sin directly against our person. And again, I don’t mean that someone simply did something that I disagree with. Did the person lie to me, steal from me or otherwise injure me? And again, can I offer the correction in love and respect, not out of anger or resentment? Would I really be willing to turn the case over to an impartial judge? Am I willing to abide by an impartial judgement and not nurse a grudge if it doesn’t go my way? Do I possess that kind of faith in God’s supremacy over events?

If I can come to this point, of truly fulfilling the law in loving my neighbor as God and subjecting myself to the Church for the love of Jesus Christ, then I might begin to glimpse what it might mean to agree with my fellow Christians. I might be freed from my own narrow perceptions and open to the counter-melodies emanating from the lives of those around me. Perhaps I will even start to listen to the symphony of God’s truth in a way that allows me to fit my part in more harmoniously than before.

Every orchestral player knows that he will ruin the piece by only paying attention to his own part. But he also needs the conductor to help him hear the whole. Let us turn our lives over to the master artist Jesus Christ and together with our brothers and sisters in the Church be transformed into something humble and beautiful, an agreeable song of praise soaring up to the throne of God, to whom be power and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

2005-09-06T20:50:00.000-05:00

August 14, 2005
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? The language of acceptance and rejection is the language of human decision and organization. The two terms ‘accept’ and ‘reject’ derive from Latin words that suggest ‘taking’ and ‘throwing back’. Deciding what to keep and what to dispose of is also known as discernment. In monastic spirituality, we speak of the discernment of thoughts, which is to say, our aim is to learn to recognize the thoughts going through our minds and then to learn how to accept or reject them. By the choices that we make, we determine the type of character we shall have.
In the context of a nation or a people, the issue of discernment determines what sort of person should be in and what sort of person should be rejected. Western nations, in the wake of the London and Madrid bombings and wage depression caused by unauthorized immigration, are waking up to the fact that any society must provide rules by which everyone must live, if that society is to have any measure of security and coherence. A negative way to state the same dilemma is this: not everyone has your best interests at heart; choose your friends and your compatriots carefully. Test them. Conversely, if we want to be a part of a particular society, then we must be willing to be tested, to demonstrate our good will toward the others within it.
What sort of society should the Church be, based on today’s Liturgy of the Word?
In today’s gospel, Jesus puts the Canaanite woman to the trial, and it is a discomforting one for those who think of Jesus’ gospel as merely the preaching of love and acceptance. If this woman is going to win Jesus’ acceptance and avoid his rejection, she has to do some pretty quick thinking and acting. She didn’t have the luxury of a year-long catechumenate: her daughter was ill and needed help immediately. Why did Jesus resort to this odd standoffish behavior?
The Fathers of the Church pointed out that Jesus, knowing the hearts of those He met, knew that this woman had the requisite faith and good will and was genuinely seeking not merely the health of her daughter, but in return, the glory of Christ. Jesus knows that testing her faith would lead to edification for His disciples; indeed, I hope to demonstrate that He had even more in mind. We should bear this story and this trial in mind at prayer when we, like the Canaanite woman, do not receive an immediate answer. This is not necessarily a sign that we lack sufficient faith; indeed, it might be a sign that God knows our faith is strong as has special plans for this gift in us.
It is worth noting that in the silence that follows, she does not immediately speak. The disciples interrupt and make their own suggestion to Jesus, to send her away. I would again liken these to the demons whom we encounter in prayer when things don’t seem to be going well, those nagging thoughts that we have displeased God in some way, that He doesn’t want to listen, that our prayer is rejected and not accepted.
The disciples’ rejection is poignant when placed in the larger story of Matthew’s gospel. In the previous chapter, Jesus had fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread with 12 baskets of scraps left over. This was a clear sign of God’s appearance at the end of time to redeem Israel. Despite this sign, when Jesus returned to the towns, the Pharisees were waiting for him, ready to pick fights with him regarding purity laws. In their minds, if God was going to come to Israel, it would be because the people were steadfastly rejecting anyone who sullied the observance of the law. They were not willing to accept Jesus and His disciples because despite the signs that Jesus worked, He didn’t seem to have Israel’s interests at heart. He was not a strict observer of the Law. I make this observation, of course, withholding judgment on whether the Pharisees knew what was good for them.
After the disciples had suffered rejection by the Pharisees because they were not sufficiently acceptable to Israel, it is somewhat painful to hear them dismiss the Canaanite woman on essentially the same grounds. Jesus will touch upon this when he compares the pagans to dogs, who were impure creatures.
When He does make the comparison, the words He chooses are quite intriguing, and are somewhat weakened in translation. Let me paraphrase a bit to give you an idea of the impact of Jesus’ words: "It is not right to accept the bread of the children and throw it away to the dogs." As in many languages, the Greek word for food, artos, literally means ‘bread’, even ‘loaves’.
The woman’s reply to this reinforces the suggestion that Jesus had some particular goal in testing the Canaanite woman. Why did He mention bread, why taking and throwing away? I wonder if she had heard about the miraculous feeding and all of the extra bread. What happened to the twelve baskets full of bread, anyway? On a figurative level, I would like to suggest that the superabundance of bread was an invitation to the Gentiles to seek after the true bread from heaven, Jesus Christ. The faith of the Canaanite woman and her persistence in prayer to Jesus made manifest the new plan of God breaking into the world, a new plan for human society.
No longer would the defining characteristic of the People of God be the purity laws of the Torah, good as they were. The new characteristic is faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of God.
Twenty centuries later, we must press ourselves in asking: how do we make judgments about who is in and who is out? Do we adopt the rule of faith as did the Canaanite woman? Or am I on the lookout for the signs of non-conformity in others as an excuse not to include them? When I encounter someone new, or someone who irks me, seems importunate or uses words that seem problematic, do I try to send that person away, or do I remain open to embracing him, after carefully testing of the spirits?
Many people are asking today, "What kind of Church should we be?" Should we be about radical inclusion? The high adventure of orthodoxy? Retrenchment in preconciliar models of liturgy and authority in the wake of postconciliar abuses? Principled advocacy of the marginalized? The model we choose will be related to the persons whom we are willing to embrace, to test, to love. We should first of all readily admit that while the superabundance of grace offered to the world in Jesus Christ is extended to everyone, that everyone is invited, to enter requires that we be tested and demonstrate our faith. Likewise, we should be forewarned that neither the great religious men of the day, the Pharisees, nor the simple unlearned disciples got it right. We must always stand ready to have our own ideas of what the Church ought to look life challenged. This is because all of us alike are emerging not from some remote pristine location where we’ve been able to obey God with complete purity of heart, but we emerge into Kingdom from sinful lives and sinful choices. This is truly Good News. The extent to which we exempt ourselves from Paul’s dictum that all have been delivered to disobedience, the less likely we are to understand the radically inclusive offer of God’s love to all men and women.
Let us prepare ourselves now to be that People of God. Let us probe our own thoughts and actions and find those that are not in keeping with the requirements of citizenship, renounce them and come forward seeking reconciliation with Jesus Christ and therefore with each other in Holy Communion. May Christ be praised for ever and ever. Amen.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Fr. Peter

2005-08-01T08:44:00.000-05:00

We learn on the first day of Economics 101 that the market value of an item is determined by the interaction of supply and demand. Today, for example, computer memory has become so easy to produce that some companies like Google virtually give it away: it is not worth very much, despite a high demand for it. On the other hand, as some sorry parents have found out, the iPod music player is very expensive. It probably does not cost very much to produce, but every kid needs to have one. Therefore, it costs twice as much as many other players of its kind. The same goes for Nike shoes, Levi jeans, and Starbucks coffee—there is plenty to go around, but people are willing to pay extra for the cultural caché that these particular brands bring with them.
Many people forget that economics is not a mathematical science but a social science. The example I quoted above should baffle any reasonable theorist at a certain level. Why do we prefer Starbucks and not some other brand? The choice at one level is completely irrational. After all, coffee is not even necessary for our survival, contrary to the appeals our early-morning bodies make to us.
Then again, human beings are not merely biological creatures. The very fact that we can speak of the value of things betrays our freedom as spiritual beings. Value is a function of choice and preference, and these are activities of heart and mind. Animals do not need Alan Greenspan to help regulate their commerce in durable goods and commodities.
Our circumstances force us to make choices. For one thing, we are not going to live forever. So when someone urges us to believe that we can be whatever we want to be is misleading us. I lack the time to accomplish all of the things that seem worth doing. I can also mention the fact that I lack the talent for most of the things I would most like to do. These limitations press upon all of us, and at first glance it may seem to be unfair.
The recognition of our limitations is the first step toward living a meaningful life. The very fact that we are limited creatures makes our choices meaningful. We recognize what is important in our lives by what we are willing to forego in order to have it. This calculation does not come easy today. Rather, many people will claim a status for themselves that is based not on the sacrifices they have made, but on the feelings they happen to have. There are those who would like to call themselves monks without having given up personal property and the freedom from external authority. Nor is it fair to call someone a scholar just because he is intelligent, or someone a musician just because he can play an instrument. Without a corresponding sacrifice, these sorts of titles are like American currency: they have an arbitrary value by fiat, but not any real worth. This sort of linguistic slipperiness is characteristic of those who would avoid sobering up to the fact of our creatureliness.
As Christians, we know that life does not end with our deaths, but we also know that this life is our time of trial, in which we can either choose greater goods or be caught in a quagmire of lesser. We also know that there is one good that is infinitely greater than any created good, and that is God Himself. When we have a hard time making choices because too many of them seem available and desirable, we need recourse to the one Good that gives meaning and value to all the others, and that is the Creator of all goods, God. This fact is obvious to our minds, but our wills and our affections are slow to follow.
We often forget about the unsurpassable value of God because we become enamored at the greatness of the human person. I began saying that human choices determine the worth of various items, and the fact that economics is based on human behavior means that it is a behavioral and not a mathematical science. This is true insofar as this limited world goes. But when we come to include God in the equation, all predictions are off. God can make rich or poor in an instant as He chooses. We don’t like to admit it, but all of our values are relative compared to Him, all of our efforts are provisional and subject to reversal. The tendency of the past four or five centuries has been to hold this fact against God and so to attempt to go it on our own.
If we look at today’s first reading, we immediately see that humility follows a different path. Solomon recognizes his limitations. Incidentally, we are used to speaking of Solomon as one who asked God for wisdom. In fact, he asks God for a ‘hearing heart’ or even better, an ‘obedient heart’. Solomon wishes to be totally attuned to God, to pattern his life after the Word of God, just as he patterned the temple after the heavenly reality. It is because he wishes to bow before God’s judgments rather than pursue his own that God gives him the preciously rare gift of wisdom.
But does God ask us what it is that we want? Was not Solomon an exception? No, God asks us daily what we want. Our very restlessness, our passions and hopes are all indications that God is posing us this very question. "What is it that you want, and what would you give for it?" We answer God’s question by our choices. When I take the time to examine my choices, what do they tell me about what I value in life?
If I find that my choices are often weak, clouded by comfort or laziness, skewed by an incompleteness of knowledge, I should not despair. Why not? Because the very fact that you have taken this time means that you have an opportunity for conversion. Remember, the merchant did not just come upon the pearl of great price by accident. He had spent a good deal of time learning to judge the precious pearl from the imitation, and he had researched into where he might find the finest pearls. Am I making these preparations in my search for the Kingdom of God? If not, why not begin today? Would I recognize the Kingdom if I came upon it? If I fear not, perhaps I could see this limitation and ask God for an obedient heart. Would I be prepared to give everything for it? If not, perhaps I can begin by giving something a little above my accustomed tithe to God.
I suspect that we are leery of taking the time to make these sorts of examinations in our lives because we are afraid that they will show us up to be unworthy of the kingdom. So we return again to that word: worth. We prayed in the opening of this morning's liturgy that without God nothing has value, yet we act as if we can generate our own value by making ourselves more in demand or keeping the supply of ourselves low. That is, we either try to impress everyone or we try to disdain everyone in a vain attempt to inflate our self-worth. But our true worth is known best to God who made us. So we should pose the same question to God that we posed to ourselves when were investigating what was of most value to ourselves. What is God willing to give up for us?
The answer is plain: we, you and I, are worth the infinite price of the life of God’s Only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, to whom be all power and glory and worship in His Kingdom forever and ever. Amen.

16th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Fr. Brendan

2005-07-17T21:08:00.000-05:00

In the spring of 1988, on our way back to the US from our year with the Jerusalem Community in Paris, we had a few days stopover in London. We found a hotel near Earl’s Court and because it was a bank holiday (the Queen’s birthday) we had to go into Westminster to find a place to change travelers checks.

When we arrived back at our hotel between 8 and 9 pm we found all of our luggage sitting outside on the front step. The hotel manager took advantage of our absence to rent the room to four people rather than three: more money for him and no room for us.
We spent the next hour going from hotel to hotel trying to find a vacancy. Nothing. Finally, someone directed us to a family not far from Victoria Station who had a small apartment in the basement of their house. They were willing to take us in for a reasonable amount. The apartment was not exactly opulent but it was a lot better than sleeping in the street.

That family was from Pakistan, their presence in England, like many others from Pakistan and India are a consequence of the British Empire. They came from all over the Commonwealth to seek a better life than the one they knew. And the British, true to the tradition of hospitality and sanctuary, let them in by the thousands.

And this is why the recent terrorist attack on London is so sobering for the British: because the four men who bombed the bus and trains in London last week were not foreign nationals, not terrorists who infiltrated the country from abroad. They were the sons of Pakistani immigrants. They were British, born and raised on English soil from middle class homes in the city of Leeds. British subjects who were essentially no different from the 54 people they killed and the 700 left wounded.
Weeds among the wheat: the Gospel comes alive in the headlines. And as it happens with tragedies like this the first inclination is to pull up the weeds and destroy them. In effect, to redefine who and who is not British. Not every Briton of Pakistani origin is a terrorist. But how do you tell who’s who? The question is making governments on both sides of the Atlantic uneasy as they look at their own large immigrant communities.

It is with this feeling of unease that we can begin to unpack the parable of the weeds and the wheat (because it does not make as us as uneasy as it should or could).

The parables that Jesus tells in the Gospels like the sower and the seed, the wheat and the weeds, the lost coin and just about everyone’s favorite the Prodigal Son are not just folksy stories meant to teach moral lessons on how to be nice to other people. They are radically subversive stories in which He calls his listeners to take stock of how God is acting in history for Israel.
The parables are provocative and confrontative. Well, maybe not for us, but they were for the people of 1st century Palestine because they re-tell the story of Israel but with a devastating twist. And the proof is that Christ got himself killed for telling them.

So what is so radically subversive about a lesson in farming techniques. The answer is that the people who first listened to Jesus tell this story knew he was talking about them. They knew it because they were as familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures as we are not. They heard the subtle illusion to Isaiah 6, Ezra 9, Amos 2, Zechariah 10, all of which compare Israel to the good seed which God has sown in the field of the world. A seed intended to bear a great yield.
Jesus is suggesting however that something has gone terribly wrong with the divine agriculture project. Israel has not yielded a rich harvest of justice and truth for the nations because someone has sown weeds among the wheat. And who are the weeds? In the context of the Gospel these are the forces in 1st Century Israel whose religious and political agendas are not in keeping with the precepts of the Torah, forces which will ultimately precipitate a long and deadly war and bring about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple itself in 70 a.d.
The long and the short of it is that Jesus is asking, by way of the parable, what does it means to be a true Jew? Is it Judaism according to the Pharisees’ agenda? Or Judaism according to the Sadducees agenda? As the Essenes define it? Or the Zealots?

Each of these parties within 1st Century Israel had a clear and definite set of criteria for who a real Jew was and just as import who they were not. The parable confronts these agendas and says that they have it all wrong. The real Jew is Jesus Christ. He is the true image of what Israel is supposed to be, the icon of her vocation as a light among the nations.

But we are not living in 1st century Israel. We’re living in 21st Century America. And we are listening to this story in the light of one of the gravest crises the Church has ever faced in this country. I am referring to the scandals that have filled the pages of the papers over the past two years. There are weeds among the wheat. And this is to name only one problem that confronts us. There is no lack of agenda’s out there to solve them. Is it Catholicism as the Liberals define it? Or the Conservatives? The Church as the Traditionalists would like it to be? Or Call to Action?

Each of these ideologies not only have their own agenda’s for what it means to be a Catholic in 21st Century America they also would like us to know who is and is not a true Catholic.
If the various parties in 1st Century Israel got it all wrong how is it possible that the competing visions in 21st Century America have it all right? I doubt it. And I doubt it because there can be only one true agenda for the Church and that is Christ himself as we encounter him in the Sacraments, in the teaching authority of the Magisterium and in the faithful.

I said that parable should make us uneasy. It is a parable of judgment and divine vindication. It says that in the end God’s judgment will fall, not on those who do not believe but on those who have preferred to man the barricades erected by their ideologies. A message that is as true today as it was two thousand years ago.

Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

2005-06-27T07:30:00.000-05:00

My mother has a picture of my great-grandmother’s family, taken perhaps around 1915. When I was a child, I noticed that the head of one of the sisters was too large, and this oddity worried me. Perhaps there was a strange disease in those days that caused heads to swell up. Later, I realized that the reason for her abnormality was actually that she wasn’t in the picture at all, but had been pasted in at a later date.

The reason that the picture was taken hastily in her absence is explained by another detail in the photo. The youngest son and daughter are both in religious habits. It so happened that both were home at the same time, a very rare phenomenon, since Sr. Daniella and Br. Ignatius (as they were known) were each allowed to visit home once every three years. As was common in Catholic families at the time, the youngest son and daughter were consecrated to God in religious life. It is a salutary custom upon which to reflect, living as we do in an age when the decision to enter religious life is seen as deeply personal and existential. There was no discernment on the part of the children, only on the part of the parents, and their choice had to do mainly with when to stop having children.

This impulse, to give a child away to God, is an ancient one and a practice whose history is unsettling for most of us. In the late 1970’s archaeologists excavating the ancient North African city of Carthage unearthed a burial plot covering nearly an acre and a half and containing some 20,000 tiny urns dating from a period of some two hundred years. Inside each of these tiny urns were the remains of one or two young children, apparently offered to the equivalent of the god Molech (the Carthaginians were related to the Phoenicians, who give us the Biblical character of Jezebel).

A striking feature of these sacrifices is the fact that they are commonly seen as a gift. The child’s life is not destroyed by the sacrifice, but is given over to a god, whom they will now serve. To give another example: among the Inca, a family could gain in social status by offering a child. The family that was left behind gained a familial relationship with the god and now could intercede on behalf of the larger community because their son was a friend of the god. By the way, the Inca were relatively humane in their manner of sacrifice. From some surviving accounts, most delivered to us by Catholic priests trying to eradicate this practice, the child went with a pretty clear knowledge of what was to happen, was given pain killers and alcohol and then carried up to the top of a mountain where the combination of the cold and thin air would never allow the child to wake from sleep.

A typical Judeo-Christian reaction to these horrors is to insist that we have a rational religion that has done away with such barbarities. I do not dispute this entirely, but the more correct interpretation is that we have transformed the practice of child sacrifice in various ways. In the book of Exodus, for example, God says that every first-born son of the Israelites must be given to Him! In other places, we read that the son must only be redeemed. In other words, he truly belongs to God, but can be bought back for the price of an animal. This is what Mary and Joseph do when they bring the baby Jesus to the temple and offer in his place two turtle doves.

Well, that’s fine, you may think, for the Old Testament. What about today? Today, we baptize. Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism. Remember this when you attend your next baptism and the baby cries.

All of you who are baptized in Christ have been offered to God the Father as His servants and confidants. This is why we don’t allow the unbaptized to approach holy communion. If you have not been so consecrated to God’s service, one should be a bit fearful of taking food from those who have.

But the more radical implication of this is that our parents, by baptizing us, have given up their full claims to us, and we have been dedicated to God’s service. Hence it is clear that when Jesus says that anyone who prefers father or mother, son or daughter to Himself is not worthy of him. Furthermore, we have an obligation to help our fellow servants, the prophets, righteous persons and thirsty pilgrims for God’s sake. In our present climate, where there are a variety of squabbles amongst baptized Christians, we do well to remember this. Be careful whom you spurn or criticize: he or she might turn out to have God’s ear.

All of this might make God sound too old fashioned, scary and arbitrary, were it not for the fact that He does not ask anything of us that He does not Himself do. God, the Holy Trinity, is perfectly content in Himself and has no need of our companionship. And yet, He took the startling chance of creating us to be with Him. And even more, to prove His love for us, His complete fidelity to us and concern for us, God the Father sent His Son to go forth from His bosom into the dangerous world, where He knew very well that what awaited Him was what awaits all of His children, the rial of death. And yet He preferred our salvation to sparing His Son that trial.

Jesus too, preferring not the comfort of easy unity with His Father, accepted His mission to rescue us by showing us that the way back to God and back to our true brotherhood as human beings, is through our deaths in faith in baptism. How can we then prefer pleasing our fathers and mothers, sons and daughter when this conflicts with pleasing God? God Himself is ready to please us, if only we imitate Him in a death in union with Christ.

It perhaps goes without saying that all of this s worth the risk because Christ is risen and is with us always. This ultimate act of faith, His own baptism on the Cross, completely helpless and without and human support, is possible because our God raises from the dead.

Let us never forget this great sacrifice of our Lord on our behalf, re-enacted this morning upon the altar. And let us go forth and live our lives as if fully given over to our loving God in Jesus Christ, to whom be majesty, power and glory forever. Amen.

Fifth Sunday of Easter: 4/24/05

2005-04-24T13:19:00.000-05:00

Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 6: 1-7
1 Peter 2: 4-9
John 14: 1-12
"Have I been with you so long, Philip, and yet you do not know me?"
Being a monk, people expect that I will know some things about what’s going on in the Church, and rightly so. As such, various persons have tapped me for an opinion on our new pope. I try to mention how grateful I am for his choice of the name Benedict for starters. I’ve also caught myself a couple of times claiming to know the man, from the mere fact of having read several of his books. This is, of course, absurd: I’ve never met Cardinal Ratzinger, logged hours getting to know him. Pope John Paul II once complained that his many biographers didn’t understand him.
The absurdity of claiming that we know anyone is the fact that few of us really know ourselves all that well. We need the challenges of life to bring out of ourselves all kinds of latent talents and virtues, weaknesses and vices. It is a commonplace in monastic literature that one of the first things that happens when a novice begins his monastic life that he suddenly finds himself overwhelmingly tempted by sin. He is often tempted to blame the community, but what is happening in fact is that the community is bringing out of him a part that he had previously kept hidden, perhaps even from himself. It also happens, at least we hope and expect, that the monk discovers his uniqueness and lovable-ness from his regular encounter in prayer with Jesus Christ.
The best and perhaps only way to learn about ourselves is in dialogue with another. The more we learn about others, the more we learn about ourselves, and in this respect, the importance of prayer is underlined. In the words of our late Holy Father, Jesus Christ reveals man to himself. One startling fact that is revealed is that each of us has an infinite capacity for love and for growth. This follows from the fact that God is infinite and the time we hope to spend with God is eternal. Hence it is that Saint Gregory of Nyssa can define perfection as perpetually becoming more perfected.
This is an aspect of heaven that we often don’t think about: that it will be an active state, not mere repose. There are two other mistaken notions about heaven that today’s gospel illuminate. The first mistaken notion is that our dwelling place will somehow be a room of our own. We often see souls pictured as solitary angels, sitting on clouds with harps. When we hear that the Father’s house has many dwelling places, we are apt to hear that we will spend eternity each in our own cells.
If we cast our glance back to the second chapter of John’s gospel, we get a different impression. Jesus overturns the tables of the moneychangers who are turning His Father’s house into a market. When He is asked for a sign to establish His credentials as a prophet, He responds, "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." Saint John tells us in an aside that this temple is the temple of His body, not the earthly temple which He had just referred to as His Father’s House.
So after the Resurrection, the Father’s house is none other than Jesus Himself. When Jesus goes to prepare a place for us, what He is doing is sacrificing His body upon the cross so that the Holy Spirit may be poured out upon us. This pouring out of the Holy Spirit incorporates us into Jesus’ body. In a sense, the return about which Jesus speaks in today’s gospel is the Feast of Pentecost, that Feast on which Jesus returns in His Holy Spirit and by our baptism in the Spirit, takes us to himself. Can it be that Jesus’ Second Coming is simply the establishment of His Church? What about the stars falling from heaven, the great apostasy and the other phenomena that are predicted to precede Christ’s coming?
Herein lies another misconception about our goal of the heavenly homeland. When Jesus says, "I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be," He presents a conundrum to scholars of Saint John’s gospel. This is so because throughout most of the gospel of Saint John, Jesus speaks as if the Second Coming had already happened. He says forthrightly that whoever feeds on His flesh will never die. He says that the hour in which we shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth is now. Jesus says that the hour is now when the dead hear the voice of the Son of God and live.
What Catholic theologians would usually say about this tension is that our understanding of eschatology, that is the science of the Last Things, balances two interpenetrating realities: that Christ is here, present and also is not here. We used to hear of this from the perspective of the believer that we are in the world but not of it. Actually, this formulation doesn’t go far enough. We are in the world, when by all rights, we should be in heaven. The gift of Christ’s presence is ours but we, being yet in the world, tend to be weighed down by many considerations and so forget that where Christ is, there are we. And Christ is enthroned at the right hand of God in majesty.
One reason this is difficult for us to realize is that we forget that this place has a human form and not a disembodied spiritual form only. The dwelling places prepared for us are available for us now, but only inasmuch as we are prepared to give ourselves over to the Church as Christ’s Body. This is a scandal because the Church, as it presents itself to us in this world is very much affected by its human nature. Imperfect persons striving, we hope, for the perfection of Christian faith, hope and love, but regularly falling short.
The scandalous reality of Christ’s presence in the midst of our weak earthen vessels has perhaps no greater symbol than the pope of Rome. It is well known that the choice of Cardinal Ratzinger is not terribly popular in the United States. I understand. Those who love the church and fear that she will not survive without some changes should not be characterized automatically as unfaithful by those who disagree. Indeed, I have heard from several persons pleased by the news that they hope that this pope will exclude from the Church those who disagree with them. How can it be that supposedly faithful Catholics can speak as if it were God’s will that there be division and that the symbol of our unity in faith might seek this division? In either case, the danger is actually the same. The danger is that I assume that God must share my agenda, and that this must be carried out by the pope. This is not to say that we must not have our own opinions on how the Church should be governed, but we must not expect that our happiness in being in the Church depends on her worldly success. The Church, that is, the saints, the pope, the bishops, the laity, men, women, old and young, zealous and lukewarm believers: all of these are Christ’s, and all are presented to each believer as assistance in getting to know Christ. When we persuade ourselves into thinking someone or other, even myself outside the Church, we run the risk of hearing what was said to Philip: "Have I been with you so long a time, my dear friend, and you still do not know me?" There are many dwelling places in the Church, and how grand she is because of this. Let us in prayer grow deeper in love for Jesus Christ, so that where He is, we may be with our whole heart mind and strength.