Monastery of the Holy Cross

Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

Conference on Consumerism and Patience

There were many striking observations in William Cavanaugh’s book Being Consumed, which we recently finished reading at table. This evening, I would like to focus on one observation which helps us to see how consumerism, as understood by Cavanaugh, subtly undermines the monastic life.

The observation has two points. The first is that consumerism works by stoking desire but never satisfying it in any definitive way. This gives rise to a chronic dissatisfaction with life. Even when we get what we want, we are already desiring the next object or experience.

The corollary to this chronic dissatisfaction is that we prize the experience of desire more than the quenching of desire. Were we ever satisfied, we would cease, at least for a time, to desire more, and then the consumerist cycle would grind to a halt. There are various means of conditioning us to accept this reality. The most obvious is advertising, but the values revealed in newscasts, movies, and the like also reinforce the desirability of desire itself.

Our sense of incompleteness gives rise to feelings of personal inadequacy, even self-loathing. There’s something wrong with us because we are never satisfied, but we sense that just around the corner we will strike gold and figure it out. But seeking peace in the world never brings the true peace that only Christ can give.

Perhaps Saint Teresa of Avila intuited a certain change, a restlessness that accompanied the great expansion of territory and wealth in the Spanish empire of the sixteenth century, when
she composed her great poem:

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

Where God suffices, all dissatisfactions can be accepted and borne patiently. In other words, we don’t need to satisfy them necessarily. Think of Saint Benedict’s advice to bear patiently the weaknesses of body or character of every brother. Patience seems to me to be the monastic antidote to the experience of chronic dissatisfaction, whereas restlessness and self-criticism are the signs of chronic dissatisfaction going to seed.

So let’s begin with patience. Saint Benedict first uses the word to indicate that God Himself is patient, and this is good to bear in mind. God does not intervene immediately when we act contrary to His positive will. We imitate God when events go against our wills and we accept them patiently. My contention in this conference is that the dynamics of chronic dissatisfaction are such that not only is patience difficult, which it always has been, but that bearing difficulties patiently is seen as a moral failure. And more than that: we go out of our way to find things to be dissatisfied about, because we have been conditioned to feel uneasy about being satisfied and quietly tolerating things as they are.

By contrast, Saint Benedict places the patient monk at the highest level of praktike. The abbot sets himself against monks who are restless (there’s that word—the Latin is inquietos, the “unquiet”).  He is to argue with them very firmly and directly (durius is the Latin here). And he also opposes the negligent and disdainful, who are subject to rebuke. But the patient are grouped with the obedient and docile. The abbot is to urge them to greater virtue, which is to say that they are already in the position of mastering the active life.

Sick brothers must be borne patiently. This is an interesting idea from our perspective, I think. With modern medicine, we have come to expect that there is some treatment that will fix whatever ails us. We can become impatient with brothers who are dealing with health issues especially we feel that the brother has brought it upon himself. In this case, we grow impatient with his inability or unwillingness to take the steps that we think he should to obtain healing and better health. But often enough our very impatience can be an obstacle to a brother taking that step. I will return to this when I speak about self-criticism in a moment.

In the ladder of humility, the word patience appears twice, unsurprisingly both times in the fourth step, in which obedience takes place under difficult unfavorable, or even unjust, conditions. Not only are we being asked to bear the difficulty of going against our own will, but we have added reasons for dissatisfaction. Why me? Why not that brother? It’s not fair. If I obey, this will cost me in the long run. We have all kinds of reasons to be resistant. But Saint Benedict (and really the whole monastic tradition) insists that this is a means of spiritual growth: to forego the satisfaction of our own desires in order to carry out God’s wishes as communicated through the lawful superior.

This patience is obviously connected to the Dominical teaching that we should bear wrongs rather than react, even in righteous anger. When forced to go a mile, go two. We think of the Desert Father who returned to his cave to find robbers making off with his precious goods, and how he chased them down…to give them an item that they overlooked. One of the tools of good works is to bear wrongs patiently. Not just inconveniences, but actual wrongs. Then we really are Christlike, and His mysteries will begin to reveal themselves to us.

The Faces of the Transfiguration

In the beautiful mystery of the Transfiguration that we celebrate today, Saint Matthew tells us that Jesus’s face shone like the sun. It is a dazzling image. Do we have any analogous experiences of this?

I think that we do. Many years ago, I helped plan a surprise birthday party for a good friend. When he arrived at the restaurant where about thirty of us were hiding in a banquet room, he was expecting something like a quiet meal with his wife. When he entered the banquet room, he began to recognize all of us. As he looked around the room, his face very much “lit up!” It was a recognition of love, that all of these friends had made time to show him appreciation.

The second example I often reflect on is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Toward the end of her life, she was quite bent over, and her face was lined and tanned. Yet, whenever she saw someone, especially a young person, her face would simply beam.

What we see in the face of Christ is this light of intimate love. The Father says, “This is my Beloved Son!” The effect of this love is illumination: most especially of the face of Jesus, but also of all around it. I have already hinted that this potential is in every human face. Indeed, God wishes that all of us will one day shine with the same transfiguring light. Every person we meet today—whether it be a coworker, a beggar, an elevated train conductor, or a spouse—is loved by God in his or her innermost reality. That great light is waiting to shine forth when we have experienced the purifying fire of God’s love. May we live this reality today and every day!

Martha, Mary, and monasticism

This year, at Sunday Mass, we have been reading through Luke’s gospel. Two weeks ago, we heard the famous story of Jesus’s visit to Martha and Mary, where Jesus chided Martha, “You are anxious and worried about many things!” Is this not the case for so many of us today? We are indeed anxious about many things. Jesus goes on to offer Mary’s actions as a contrast. She has chosen the “better part,” listening at the feet of Jesus.

For many centuries Martha and Mary were seen as types of the active life and the contemplative life. This interpretation is controversial today. But we are surely right to see a connection between Mary’s choice and monasticism. By withdrawing from the anxieties of the world, contemplative monks and nuns should become icons of peace, focusing all attention on Jesus.

Yet the reality is more complex. Today’s monks bring with themselves into the cloister all those worries that afflict modern persons. In this way, monasteries become places where our faith is truly put to the proof. Can we truly let go of those worries and put all our trust in God? Here, anxiety tends to arise not from the dense web of responsibilities that modern life poses for the laity, but from the dread of feeling useless in the face of today’s cultural challenges. The only remedy is the belief that God suffices for all things.

May this reality be a source of “the peace which the world cannot give” for all our friends!

 

Monasticism and Magdalene

To the modern mind, Saint Mary Magdalene doesn’t seem like a promising role model for monks. The Church’s mind thinks differently, and it benefits us to pay attention.

Let’s begin with the Offertory chant assigned for today. It reads, “Deus, Deus meus, ad te de luce vigilo [Psalm 62: 2].” “O God, you are my God, for you I keep watch at first light.” If we don’t associate Mary Magdalene with keeping a nighttime vigil, it is perhaps because we don’t read the Scriptures as carefully and synthetically as did our forebears in the faith. An important detail behind today’s gospel meeting between Mary and Jesus is found at the end of John Chapter 19:

“Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried [John 19: 41].”

Jesus is buried in a garden and there appears risen from the dead. The image of a garden brings up all kinds of resonances, including with Eden. When Jesus first sees Mary, he refers to her as “Woman,”–Adam’s first name for Eve–as He did His Blessed Mother at Cana when he earlier spoke of His “Hour” [see John 2: 4]. Jesus is the New Adam, come to reverse the sin of the First Adam.

Another resonance is with the Song of Songs, which happens to provide the First Reading on this feast. In that masterpiece of eros-poetry, filled with garden imagery, the Bridegroom frequently goes missing, forcing the Bride to persevere in pursuing Him. The Bride says:

On my bed at night I sought him
whom my heart loves–
I sought him but I did not find him.
I will rise then and go about the city;
in the streets and crossings I will seek
Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him.

–Song of Songs 3: 1-2

Notice how this reading brings together the Psalm text with which we began, about keeping vigil at night. Mary Magdalene is not content to stay at home when her Lord is in the tomb. Her love impels her to go there in search of Him: “Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark [John 20: 1].” She finds an empty tomb, and not Jesus. Yet while Peter and John head home puzzled by the scene, she “remained outside the tomb [John 20: 11],” persevering, watching to see what happens, keeping vigil.

Saint Gregory the Great, the “Doctor of Desire,” saw himself as a watchman.

Saint Gregory the Great demonstrates his Benedictine sensibilities in a homily on this gospel, which is used for the Second Reading at this morning’s Office of Vigils.

“Though the disciples had left, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found…And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see Him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tells us: Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved [Matthew 24: 13].”

The monastic life is dedicated to the search for God, keeping watch in the night for Christ’s return, contemplating God’s creatures for traces of God’s Word, yearning to see His beauty in all things. Like the Bridegroom, God evades easy capture by the Bride. Those who desire to make God their sole Good will have to step out into the night of naked desire and persevere in seeking Him through the heart’s desire. Many distractions and many doubts flood the mind that would pursue God alone. This is why monks urge each other on with the exhortation, “Persevere!” And in doing so, we are urging one another to imitate Mary Magdalene, whose love ensured that she saw Him Whom her heart loved.

Conference on the Priority of Persons over Rules

Tonight, I would like to follow up on a topic that I spoke about during Chapter last week, and that is the priority of persons over rules. I asked Br. Anthony to look up some examples of this contrast in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Some of the examples I will use tonight are the ones he found.

It occurred to me that a major source of the appeal of the Desert Fathers as spiritual teachers is precisely that they refuse to formulate rules. In fact, they seem to be better known for finding all kinds of exceptions to rules. Here’s an example:

A directive was once issued at Scete: “Fast this week.” It came about that some brothers from Egypt visited Abba Moses and he cooked them a little gruel. Seeing the smoke, his neighbors told the clergy: “Here, Moses has broken the directive of the fathers and cooked himself some gruel.” “We ourselves will speak to him when he comes,” they said. When Saturday came round, the clergy, well aware of the great discipline of Abba Moses, said to him before the company: “Oh Abba Moses, you have broken men’s directive but fulfilled God’s.”

The priority of persons is often very explicitly taught by the Fathers. Here is a saying of Antony the Great:

Life and death depend on our neighbor: for if we win over our brother, we win over God, but if we offend our brother, we sin against Christ.

Here, I will note that we do not typically win someone over by quoting the rule book to him. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes an act of charity for someone to state the Church’s teaching clearly. Among the spiritual works of mercy are instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner. Saint Benedict clearly wants the abbot to intervene when a brother is acting disobediently or contrary to the community’s customs.

But notice that here, it depends in another way upon persons: the abbot is the one who determines when and how to intervene, and this can’t be predicted ahead of time by rules. Our current Abbot Visitor, Abbot Cuthbert, once quoted another abbot, I believe an abbot of Solesmes, saying that in a monastery there should be many strict rules, and many dispensations from those rules. But there are not rules for when to grant a dispensation. That depends on the abbot’s personal judgment.

The abbot according to Saint Benedict is a master of virtue. And we know that the virtuous action cannot be legislated ahead of time and out of context. I believe that Alasdair Maclntyre, in the book Dependent Rational Animals, has also demonstrated that we cannot learn virtue apart from the concrete situations that involve us in the lives of others, and involve them in our lives.

What this means in practice is that virtue can only be learned by faith. In other words, we learn the virtuous action by imitating the one who already possesses virtue, which means that we trust that person’s example, and we act without fully knowing what we are to learn by that action. And then, one hopes, through consenting to that action by an act of trust, observing the consequences of that action, and sympathetically observing how it affects others, we gain insight into what is truly virtuous.

So again, the Desert Fathers embody this principle very strictly. We have example after example of virtuous actions and the responses of the other monks, usually edified, but occasionally scandalized. Typically those who are scandalized are so either because they insist on a rule, or because they insist on the action fitting their understanding of the situation, rather than trusting in the example of a wiser monk.

Conference on Thoughts

It’s been awhile since I last addressed this subject. Evagrius, Cassian and Maximus offer a good deal of technical advice, and we should make a habit of regularly reviewing their teachings. What I offer tonight is a reflection on my own experience in the spiritual battle, including insights from spiritual direction with many monks, priests and others over the years.

Our thoughts are not ourselves. This can’t be overstated. Just because we have a thought or a feeling, no matter how intense it is, does not make it worth our time or worry. All thought should be subject to discernment.

I say this because I have watched well-intentioned people get very hard on themselves for having certain kinds of thoughts. Yes, sometimes we bring these on ourselves by our earlier choices. But this still doesn’t mean that we will make any progress by getting sad about having them, or getting angry or frustrated with ourselves or others.

Any thought can be let go of, or we can at least loosen its grip on ourselves. It is a good practice, maybe ten minutes a day, just to sit still and watch our thoughts. There are many images for how to do this, and how to learn to disengage from a thought. One is to imagine thoughts as so many boats floating down a stream. It’s alright to look at what is in the boat, but don’t get in the boat yourself; let it float away.

Another way to disengage is to use a word or short phrase. I often use, “Amen,” or “Jesus,” or “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” or “Holy angels of God.” In some ways, the content doesn’t matter. The words are there to place gently upon whatever thought we wish to let go of. Many thoughts recur frequently. The worst thing we can do is get angry because they won’t go away. Again, if I have an angry thought against a brother, I take the word “Amen,” and set it lightly upon that thought and let it go. If it returns, I’m not surprised, I’m not impatient; I simply make the same action of reciting my sacred word and moving on.

Making a habit of doing this intentionally each day is very useful because we learn—slowly, eventually—not to get taken in by thoughts when they surprise us.

Another important habit to cultivate is to question our thoughts, especially if we can notice that a thought has accompanied us into the monastic life from our families, workplaces, or local cultures (for example, urban life, country life, academia, the art world, the military). What was the right way to sweep a floor at home might not be the way the community wants me to do it. If I’m corrected, I am offered the opportunity to let go of another kind of thought.

A particularly pernicious thought is the idea that I have some responsibility to change someone else, to focus on his faults and figure them out. Let’s figure ourselves out first. But we can’t do this, frankly, if we’re always right. All that means is that we never get to the bottom of our prejudices and preferences. If we are always angling to get our way, even if we cloak it under the pretense of helping other to do things “the right way,” we will never question our thoughts. We will never broaden our horizon.

It’s good to ask questions, to be the dumbest person in the room. To be curious about what other people’s experiences are. To notice how others do things differently, especially when they seem to excel in something.

In the best case scenario, we would have holy mentors. But would we even know whether they were holy? That’s another thought, and I’m not sure we’re well-positioned to recognize real holiness or insight. But we can always gain valuable experience by trying out someone else’s method of action. And God will reward us for our self-denial.

Corpus Christi in Bridgeport

Last Sunday, we celebrated Corpus Christi with a Eucharistic procession. We processed around our neighborhood of Bridgeport, singing hymns. It’s always a bit amusing to see the reactions of unsuspecting denizens when they see us coming! We also had some students from the Chicago College of Performing Arts (at Roosevelt University) join us, singing Mozart’s Eucharistic motet Ave verum corpus (Hail, true Body!) and other music. It was an uplifting experience making a public confession of our faith in the loving Lord Jesus Christ, Who continues to nourish us spiritually and to guide us toward His kingdom.

I don’t believe that anyone in the neighborhood was doing Corpus Christi processions when we arrived. About twenty years ago, we approached Father Donald Craig, then the pastor of our nearest parish, Saint Mary of Perpetual Help, about collaborating on a procession. He was extremely enthusiastic, and for many years, we joined forces with the parishioners there. Now we each do our own separate processions (and cover more ground that way!). And it seems that these processions are really making a big comeback, here in Chicago and in other U.S. cities, which is very encouraging.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of John the Baptist

How did we first come to know Jesus?

Normally, our parents introduce us to Him by teaching us Who He is, stories about His life and death. We might have had teachers, priests, or a religious sister teach us Who Jesus is, by teaching us how to pray. Maybe we gained a deeper insight into Jesus from the example of a saint. These people, if they have been effective introducing us to Jesus, have all been bearing witness to Him, testifying about him.

And how exactly did they do this?

We might assume that a witness is someone who relates facts about a case, typically in court. If we witness a car accident or a theft, we may be called upon to give testimony. But once we start thinking about testimony, we see that there is a lot more going on. For example, we want to know how credible the witness is. There’s a legal principle in American law which states, “False in one thing, false in everything.” This means that if we catch a witness in a lie, we can legally disregard everything else that he or she says. So a good witness needs to have some integrity for us to believe his or her testimony.

But we also want to know how this person relates to the case at hand. Is the witness biased in some way? Is the witness likely to spin things in some way or other, maybe not being entirely dishonest, but perhaps also not invested in being objective?

This can work in the other direction, too. Returning to our parents or teachers, we are more likely to believe the person who has a certain type of relationship with Jesus and the Church than someone who recites the facts of Jesus’s birth and death as a series of facts from long ago. I recently read somewhere that testimony is not giving someone else the truth. It’s about giving someone else access to the truth, so that the other person can encounter the truth himself.

Alright, so all of this is a prelude to celebrating today’s great saint, John the Baptist. Jesus Himself says that no one greater was born of a woman than John the Baptist. Several times in the Scriptures we read that John bore witness to Jesus. So what can we learn from John’s example? Why is he so important?

Well, for starters, identifying Jesus was not as easy as we might suspect back in the time of His earthly life. While many people were happy that He brought healing and taught with authority, He was also very threatening to many powerful persons. Jesus often did things that were unsettling, like associating with lepers and prostitutes, tax collectors, and so on. So it’s understandable that many persons questioned whether Jesus could be the Messiah. In fact, at the time of the Crucifixion, the apostles themselves found it too dangerous to bear witness, and Peter lied about knowing Him.

But there was someone else that no one had any doubts about, and that was John. John’s integrity was unquestioned. His teaching was wholly consonant with that of the great prophets before him, especially Elijah and Jeremiah, and he backed up his teaching with a willingness to die rather than adulterate God’s law.

And what does this greatest of men do? He constantly points to Jesus, even from his mother’s womb. By his connection to the great prophets of old, he gives others access to the truth about Jesus, that He is the One who will fulfill all the great prophecies spoken in the Scriptures by the Holy Spirit.

John’s integrity and reputation were hard won. From his early adulthood, he separated himself from the crowd and lived in the desert, meditating on God’s law and the stories of the prophets. Through the assistance of the Holy Spirit, he came to know the mind of God Himself, and so was able to recognize Jesus when He appeared.

We, too, are called to be witnesses of Jesus Christ, and we can learn a lot from John.

How can we be more credible witnesses? Well, we must separate ourselves from the world and find time to devote to prayer and knowing God. We must be involved in God’s plan, in His story. But we also must be credible by our actions. They must reflect the reality of Jesus in our own lives. Like John, we have to learn not to point at ourselves, our own knowledge, our own experience, but to point away from ourselves toward the one Who is our Savior and Lord. See how in our deesis icon above the high altar John and Our Lady both face Jesus, pointing toward Him, offering their supplication and witness.

We who are striving to be His disciples must decrease so that he always increases in us and in others, for the Son of God is our true life and happiness.

Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” (John 6: 51)

Our Lord’s language in this excerpt from the “Bread of Life” discourse brims with connections to the mysterious Prologue of Saint John’s gospel. In particular, in John 1: 14, we read, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Saint John prefers this word, “flesh” to “body,” which is the preference of the synoptics. The one significant exception to this is quite telling: in Luke 24: 38-39, the risen Christ reassures His disciples, saying, “‘Why are you troubled, and why do questionings arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.’” God’s Son still manifests Himself in our human flesh.

Returning to the evangelist, Saint John, we see that his mystical gospels is, paradoxically, the earthiest, and this contrast was a challenge to His hearers in first-century Palestine, as it is for many today. In his first epistle, Saint John finds it necessary to stress the saving power of the Incarnation: “Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God [1 John 4: 2-3].”

Thus the flesh of Christ provides an occasion for a sorting out of spirits. This is exactly what we find when we look back at John Chapter 6. The crowd begins to grow restless. When Jesus says, “my flesh is good indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him [vv. 55-56],” the crowd (who had witnessed the multiplication of the loaves the day before!) objects. “This is a hard saying!” and “How can this man give us his flesh to eat [vv. 60 & 52]?” Saint John then remarks, “After this many of his disciples drew back, and no longer went about with him [v. 66].”

This sorting of the spirits perhaps offers partial explanation for the fact that early Christians exercised reticence about sharing the profound mysteries of the faith publicly, even with catechumens. This practice, known today as the disciplina arcani, or the ‘discipline of the secret’, began in the centuries of persecution, but persisted for about two hundred years after Constantine’s conversion began the process of making Europe Christian.

Once the Church became the dominant cultural engine in the West, disputes about the Incarnation reemerged. Whereas the Fathers of the Church, most notably Saint Irenaeus and Saint Athanasius, had successfully resisted the denial of the reality of Jesus’s body (known as the heresy of Docetism), the focus began to shift to the Holy Eucharist, the very flesh of Christ now truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. While the controversies surrounding the denial of the Real Presence did not carry many away from the faith, they were not put to rest until the reintroduction of Aristotle’s philosophy in the West. As a celebration of the triumph of the true doctrine of the Eucharist, the Church instituted today’s feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord. Pope Urban IV commissioned Saint Thomas Aquinas to compose the liturgy, and we are singing his antiphons and his hymn today. With the advent of Eucharistic Processions, the Real Presence of Christ became a public proclamation.

In the modern era, perhaps an underappreciated challenge to the Church’s teaching on the Incarnation is the place of the Church, which is Christ’s Body in the world today. As we adore Christ in the Holy Eucharist, let us ask the Holy Spirit to enliven our sense of the Mystical Body, formed and fed by Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. And may our sharing of the One Bread make us a clear sign of the one destiny of the human race, an instrument of the mercy of God in the world today! May Christ, the Bread of Life, sustain us, strengthen us, and transform us into His presence for a waiting world.

Homily for Ascensiontide

We are in the midst of Ascensiontide, a brief liturgical season that falls between the feast of the Ascension and that of Pentecost. For forty days after the Resurrection, Jesus continued to appear to the disciples, and He taught them. It’s intriguing to speculate on what He taught during this mysterious period of time, but we can’t know the specifics with any certainty.

What we do know from Scripture is that after the Ascension, the Apostles did not immediately go out and start preaching. Jesus told them to wait in the city until they were clothed with power from on high, the Holy Spirit. He also told them that the Holy Spirit would remind them of everything He had told them. And indeed, we will see next week that the gift of the Holy Spirit transforms the Apostles into men on a mission to spread the gospel.

But back to today: where exactly are we in this story? I’d like to make two points about the liturgy today, relevant to the Ascension.

First what are we doing at the liturgy? Are we simply commemorating something that happened 2000 years ago, and meditating together on Jesus’s triumphant entry into heaven? There’s nothing wrong with doing this, and, in some sense, we do this every time we pray the Second Glorious Mystery of the rosary. But in the liturgy, something else is happening. We are touching eternity, and there is a sense that we are being invited to enter personally, truly into the dynamism of the mystery that we celebrate, that it is we who are ascending into heaven, the Body of Christ ascending with Jesus Christ the head of the Mystical Body.

On Ascension Thursday, in the opening prayer, called the Collect, we prayed this: “Where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.” So we are following Christ toward heaven, and we do this by the theological virtue of hope. Maybe a good way to look at this is that objectively speaking, we are saved, we are ascending into heaven, it’s happening. But subjectively, we don’t fully feel or experience all the effects just yet.

What keeps us from experiencing the full effects? What is the purpose of waiting, of hope? Where are we going?

We are going toward God, Who is infinitely mysterious. We can never fully grasp Who God is or what it means to share life with Him. There is always some aspect of God towards which we are in the dark. This is why at the Monastery, we follow the ancient custom of the Church by not lighting the Easter Candle during Ascensiontide. We had seen Jesus resurrected in the flesh, but then he ascended, going before us toward the Father. We lost sight of Him, at least as we had known Him before. This absence is a reminder that, however well we know God at this point, there is still more to be revealed and discovered.

During Ascensiontide, we are in the position of waiting for Jesus to be revealed in a more profoundly spiritual manner. And this requires the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Now if you look in the leaflet that we put out for you that has the translations of the prayers, you will see how we are asking God today to help us experience Jesus’s abiding presence. We ask that we may, like Christ, pass over to the glory of heaven, and so on. Now, returning to this idea that our knowledge of Jesus and of God the Father will always be less than the reality, we can see a bit more what we are doing today and why we celebrate this each year.

We are always in the state of needing the Holy Spirit to enlighten our hearts, to give us a stronger faith. We are always, to some extent, in the dark about the reality of God. So we should pray every day to the Holy Spirit: come Holy Spirit, and fill the hearts of your faithful. Today’s liturgy puts us right in the middle of this dynamic of rising ever closer to the reality of heaven that we seek.

Alright, I promised two points about the liturgy. Here is number two. I asked earlier about what we are doing at the liturgy, and now we should ask what the liturgy is, exactly.

The Second Vatican Council taught that the liturgy is the action of Jesus Christ the high priest. So what we are doing every time we gather for the liturgy is making visible to ourselves and the world what Jesus in glory is doing for us and the world. We are not doing this ourselves, hoping to get God’s attention. God has fundamentally initiated this encounter, and we are merely responding, as best we can. And what Jesus Christ the high priest is doing is uniting us to God, giving us a glimpse into heaven itself, which He can do in his human nature, now that He has ascended.

This reveals that somehow human nature is not an abstract quality that we each participate in. Rather, in some mysterious way, our natures are made for union with each other at this spiritual level. This is why we can say that Christ, in His human nature, has raised all of us up to heaven. And while we are made for union, this unity is something that Christ invites us to achieve with His help by our willingness to make a sacrifice or gift of ourselves to God and to each other. This is why Jesus prays in today’s Gospel, “that they may all be one.”

And is this not the great gift that the Church can offer the world at the moment, a vision of human unity in God? Certainly Pope Leo believes this, which is why we chose as his motto, “In the One, we are one.”

We begin that work at the liturgy itself. This begins with our turning our hearts and minds toward Jesus seated at God’s right hand, as we sing each Sunday in the Gloria, and then asking Him to deepen our faith, to illuminate our minds at a more intensely by the gift of the Holy Spirit. He responds by sending the Holy Spirit to consecrate the bread and wine, to unite us by the sharing of the One Body. Then, like the Apostles, we are sent into the world to share what we have heard and seen.

Those waiting for us in the world are often experiencing profound uncertainty and unease. Let us be the presence of Christ for them.

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