Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for March 2025

Homily for the Annunciation: Twenty-five years of saying “Yes” to God

What makes Our Lady such a powerful intercessor when we are in need? All the saints agree that we can do no better than to turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In the beautiful prayer called the Memorare, we address her in this way: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”

Now, Mary does not grant our requests directly. Rather, she takes them to her Son, Jesus Christ. And He seems very willing to grant her requests, even when they happen to be, let’s say, “tangential” to God’s own plan.

What I mean by this is illustrated in the story of the wedding at Cana. Mary goes to Jesus to inform Him that the host has run out of wine. She clearly hopes that He will remedy the situation, even if He must perform a miracle to do so. In response, Jesus indicates that her request requires a bit of an adjustment to the schedule of His ministry. He says, “My time has not yet come.” Notice that He doesn’t yet say whether He is going to give a favorable response to Mary’s request.

But even before He agrees to do anything, she tells the servants to do whatever He tells them. She fully expects that her Son will grant her what she is asking. From where comes this confidence?

The answer is simple: Mary knows that she can ask her Son anything, because He knows that God can ask Mary anything.

When the angel Gabriel announces that Mary will bear God’s Son, she surely has some foreboding of what the cost of agreeing might be. But she says, “Let it be done to me.” In this way, she provides the perfect complement to Jesus, Who says, “not my will but thine be done.” Both are willing to do whatever the Father asks, practicing perfect, trusting obedience even unto death, as we will hear many times during Holy Week.

Today, we commemorate that mysterious day when God sought out the young Virgin and, with a ready heart, she said, “Yes,” to Him. She could not have known what this would eventually entail. She knew from the examples of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses, Jeremiah and Jonah that God’s call may well involve great sorrows along the way. But in faith, she also believed that one day God’s victory would bring great joy.

Now, just as Mary was invited to become the Mother of God and carried the life of God’s Son within her, so each of us, in our baptisms, was invited to say “yes” to God and bear the life of Christ within us. We now have the charge of nurturing this divine life and becoming part of the mystery of the Incarnation, as members of Christ’s Body. Our baptismal vocation requires us to listen each day for God’s invitation to enter more deeply into the mystery by our ready obedience to whatever He asks of us.

How ready am I to say “yes”? How much do I trust that God’s glorious plan will be worked out in me, especially when it involves walking through many trials on the way?

Now as it happens, today is a very significant day in the history of our community. On March 25th, 2000 our founders said their definitive “yes” to God’s invitation to follow Him in the Benedictine way of life.  And so today, we celebrate the 25th anniversary of our community’s entrance into the Benedictine Confederation.

Our founders did not know what the ensuing twenty-five years would look like.  I’ve been around for all of them, so I can say that this time has brought both joy and great hardship, including moments when it appeared that the community could not survive. But God has been faithful through it all, and He continues to invite us to follow His plan, no matter what.

We have also known, first-hand, the power of Our Lady’s intercession. This is why, at the top of the icons above the altar, we have placed Our Lady of the Protecting Veil. When I was a newly-arrived monk, we encountered one serious crisis that had us considering a move away from Chicago. We decided first to make a pilgrimage to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and ask for her help.

Shortly afterward, a man came to stay at our bed and breakfast. His professional expertise happened to be exactly what we needed to solve the problem that had been plaguing us.

This is only one of many such instances. After all, it was probably the Mother of God who brought us here in the first place to reopen this church dedicated to her Immaculate Conception. Today, as we renew the covenant in Christ’s Blood, let us renew our desire to say “yes” to whatever God asks of us, and to seek Our Lady’s help whenever we are in need, knowing that her generous “yes” was and is the beginning of our salvation.

Lent and Transfiguration

In the Church’s first three centuries, we have very little overt information about the liturgical calendar. Since the sacraments, the heart of the liturgy are ‘mysteries’, the early Christians were often circumspect in describing them in writing, where they might fall into the hands of the unbaptized. A certain amount of catechesis was required to prepare for initiation into baptism, confirmation (or ‘chrismation’) and the Holy Eucharist. Add to this the fact that the Church was largely underground, and it is understandable why the earliest layer of liturgical development is obscure.

Once we do have good documents, especially from the seventh century onward, we find more or less the fully-formed liturgical year, with a period of fasting preceding the great Paschal Mystery. Already, in this early period, we see the gospel of the temptation of Christ in the desert on the first Sunday, and the Transfiguration proclaimed on the second Sunday. Lent was still understood primarily as a preparation for baptism: the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, along with a new set of behaviors made the catechumen a fit receptacle for the divine life given at the Easter Vigil.

It was quite common in the early Church to refer to baptism as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘illumination’. With the gift of the Holy Spirit, the newly baptized began to see the world and his own life as if for the first time in the daylight. Obscure prophecies were explained as foreshadowing the Incarnation and Crucifixion; evil was revealed as a kind of parasite, destined for destruction at the end of time. In addition, the baptized were robed in white, a clear reference to the shining garments of Christ on Mount Tabor. The divine nature begins to shine through human nature after the pattern of the Son of God.

Changing behavior is laborious and demanding. Most of us are accustomed to regular setbacks in our Lenten discipline, and where we manage to hold the line, we are sorely tempted to ease up on the fast, to skimp on prayer. We tangle with the inner darkness that stubbornly resists cooperation with grace. By proclaiming to us the gospel of the Transfiguration on the second Sunday of this season, the Church reminds us that “the light shines in the darkness [John 1: 5],” and that in Christ, it is we whom the Father addresses as ‘well-pleasing’ and ‘chosen’.

In his apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata, Pope Saint John Paul II makes use of the Transfiguration to explain the particular contours of self-denial in the acceptance of the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience). This way of life in close discipleship with Christ is a way of transformation “from glory to glory.” “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness [cf. 2 Corinthians 3: 18].”

Interestingly, Saint Benedict, the great Lawgiver in the Western tradition of monasticism, and hence of much of subsequent religious life, tells us that the whole of a monk’s life should be like Lent. So the Holy Father’s connection of the Transfiguration with the renunciations of religious life is exactly parallel with the liturgy’s use of the Transfiguration to help us make sense of the self-denial asked of all the baptized during this holy season. The glorified body of Jesus Christ is a reminder of the goal of transformation that we are seeking via our Lenten discipline.

Let me add one more detail from the story of this mystery. Jesus chooses His three closest disciplines, Peter, James, and John, to witness the irruption of His divine glory. These same three will later be with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Once again, they will be sleepy! Indeed, they will flee when Christ refuses to manifest His divinity before the arresting soldiers.

After the resurrection, Christ appears to them once again under the appearance of His human nature, but His divinity is now known, and His glory recalled from this mysterious anticipatory moment in His ministry. Peter, James, and John chose to record this event for us who would come after the resurrection. We are urged to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and the imprisoned, under the appearance of His human nature. Let us not forget the hidden glory that lurks potentially in each of us, veiled by the perishing flesh. When service of our neighbor becomes a burden, let us seek, by meditation, to see Christ in glory whenever He presents Himself in ‘distressing disguise.’ And may this Lent see us grow in love for God and neighbor, ready to celebrate with renewed joy and peace the mysteries of our salvation.

St. Benedict’s Lenten fare

Here in the monastery, our Lenten observance is relatively austere. We abstain from meat and fish, dairy products, olive oil, eggs, and alcohol, with a few exceptions. We also undertake individual mortifications. In spite of this, I can say with some certainty that the brothers look forward to Lent. In some ways, it is when we are most ourselves as monks. Saint Benedict says that every day for a monk is meant to be Lent. Moreover, he mentions joy twice in his short chapter on Lent, which gives a good insight into the meaning of mortification. It is done in the expectation of the glory of Easter and a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ, Who leads us by way of the Cross.

Another aspect of Lent for Benedictine monks is special reading. In his Lenten schedule, Saint Benedict allots an extra hour each day for reading. He instructs the superior to assign to each monk a book which is to be read straight through. In his day, reading would have meant primarily Scripture and some Church Fathers. In our day, I assign books from more contemporary writers, but the intent is the same: that we apply ourselves to a six-week dialogue with a master who will challenge us with new insights into the gospel that we wouldn’t have arrived at ourselves.

Homily for Ash Wednesday

During Lent, the Church urges us to pay attention to what we eat. Let’s focus our attention today on a significant fact about food. Almost all of what we eat was either once alive or comes from an animal that is or was alive. We eat plant products, like fruits, vegetables and legumes. We eat animal products like eggs, milk and cheese. And then we also consume animals themselves: fish, cows, pigs, chickens, and so on. We sometimes speak of a food chain, the top of which is inhabited by predators, whether it be lions or humans.

What this reveals to us is that our life is borrowed, in some sense, from other living things. This is true of all animals; plants receive their life from sun and water, but then other animals make use of the life that is in these plants to obtain necessary nutrients and complex molecules necessary for more complex life. While we might see ourselves as the top of the food chain, this reflection also reveals our total dependency on other living things for our own life. We can’t survive without plants and animals reproducing, growing, and, most significantly, dying so that we may sustain our own life.

The Lenten fast should spur us to reflect on the primal need for eating, and the significance that our life is not self-generated. We are dependent on other living things, and ultimately, our life comes from God Himself. We do not generate our lives; we receive them from God, and God sustains our life through His gifts of sun, water, plants and animals. We, of course, are meant to participate in this sharing of life by cultivating the garden of this world. But the sustaining and handing on of life has become toilsome, painful, and in the case of childbirth, where a child’s life is fully sustained by the life of its mother, even dangerous. This toil and pain is a result of sin. Work has become labor, laborious, difficult, refractory.

In the gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly teaches us about food and about work. He does this, though, in order to bring new life and a new notion of work into the world. He has come into the world to share His own life with us. He becomes our food, laying down His life for us on the Cross as the Lamb of God, inviting to His Supper. Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you. In point of fact, Jesus’s own life is not even His own; he receives from the Father. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” This is quite an astonishing statement. As the Son of God receives life from the very Father, we are being invited at the Eucharistic to receive this same life from God through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “Do not work for perishable food, but for the food which endures for eternal life [John 6: 27].” And again, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish His work [John 4: 34].” This work is the harvest of souls, the return of humanity to its rightful Father and God. But idea that the food that sustains Jesus is the doing of the Father’s will is significant for us today on Ash Wednesday. Let me begin to tie up all of these ideas.

As we undertake the fast today, and as we practice various kinds of fasts and abstinence from meat during Lent, let us be conscious of the fact that we are dependent on God. As we experience hunger, let us recognize that this hunger is meant to be a hunger for the true Bread of Life, the Holy Eucharist, in which we receive true and abiding life. To receive this new life fully, we must consent to die to ourselves, to take up our Crosses daily in imitation of Jesus. This is to share in His work, and so, paradoxically, to be fed by the will of the Father. The ashes that we will receive in a moment are a sign of our consenting to die to sin and the old life. Let us remember especially the catechumens and candidates who will receive the Holy Eucharist for the first time at the Easter Vigil, and who are striving to do the will of God and change their lives throughout this holy time.

And then, as we see around us birds returning, plants gradually coming back to life, let us turn our thoughts to the glorious Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, in which we hope to share. And with these thoughts, let us lay aside every weight and sin that clings to us, and run with a lighter step the race that God has set before us, looking always to Jesus who has opened to us the way to eternal blessedness. May He be praised forever. Amen.

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