Monastery of the Holy Cross

Archives for March 2026

A Joyful Mystery in Lent

Today’s feast of the Annunciation can seem, at first glance, to be incongruous, falling as it does in the last weeks of Lent. While we are meditating on Jesus’ Passion, does it make sense joyfully to celebrate the Incarnation?

In fact, there are good reasons why this celebration falls precisely around the time of Holy Week each year. First of all, we might notice that in the Creed, the words “[He] became man,” are followed immediately by these words: “For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried.” Nothing is said about his teaching or healing ministry. We go directly from His birth to His death.

Medieval Christians had a lively sense that the purpose of the Incarnation was precisely that it allowed Christ to suffer for the forgiveness of our sins. And indeed, historians of the liturgy believe that March 25 was chosen as the date of the Annunciation because it was also believed to be the date of Good Friday. This followed a belief in the early Church that Jesus’s conception and crucifixion happened on the same date, nicely demonstrating their interrelation.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 2

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here is Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh.)

There is a place for pleasure in the Christian life. Aristotle astutely noted that pleasure typically accompanies the completion of a good action, an action with a properly ordered goal. What the flesh would have us do is to seek this pleasure for its own sake. Here lies the beginning of addiction. When pleasure is unhitched from productive actions and achievement, it becomes its own goal. And when it becomes its own goal, our bodies demand that pleasure continually increase in intensity.

So, goals exercise a certain restraint on pleasure. If they are worthwhile, they always entail accepting a certain amount of discomfort, pain, and danger. To become a great academic requires reading and writing when it is not pleasurable to do so. It requires sacrificing other potential good actions which might bring a certain amount of comfort. It requires being tested and corrected by one’s teachers and peers, perhaps even being subject to ridicule and career sabotage. But the young scholar undertakes those risks, believing that becoming learned and being able to credibly teach others will lead to the pleasures proper to a cultivated mind.

As Saint Paul again points out, athletes deny themselves all kinds of things. We can take up his metaphor and note how strength conditioning requires that we continually force our muscles to move weights that cause pain and discomfort.

We have seen that goals naturally tend to reorient pleasure. But what about choosing proper goals? Saint Ignatius of Loyola has made one important contribution to this theme. If I need to choose between two courses of action, when will I know that I am ready to make the choice? The answer has to do with unearthing hidden fears, sensual inclinations and the like. In addition to gathering information germane to my choice, I also must frankly examine the likely fallout from each choice. Only when I am ready to accept whatever discomforts are associated with both choices, am I ready to choose fully rationally, without being swayed by an irrational aversion to difficulties.

If a lot of this sounds like Stoicism, that is because the Stoics’ take on these questions is remarkably similar to the Christian. One area where the Christian parts ways with the Stoic is in this notion of provoking the flesh by voluntarily taking on deprivations. If I could summarize this briefly, and inadequately, while the Stoics contributed much to our understanding of these battles, they shared with other schools of Greek philosophy a tendency to conflate sin and ignorance. They moved closer to the Christian position than did, say, Socrates, but there is still a sense that once the intellect is healed, the will inevitably follows. The Christian, by contrast, believes that the will must be regenerated by grace in order that the intellect may be healed.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

Human beings, like all animals, are creatures of desire. We desire food and drink, and we have this desire because we need nourishment to stay alive. And again, this makes us akin to other animals. While plants also need nourishment, they lack desire, properly understood, because they lack awareness of their need. Animals not only hunger but deliberately set off to find food.

In this area, what distinguishes us from other animals is that we can use our reason to determine how to satisfy our natural desires. We can even deliberately not eat, enduring hunger pains for some greater goal such as fasting or dieting. We can also use our intelligence to alter the food we get by cooking it, mixing ingredients, and so on, to produce something that tastes good.

We go even further, using meals to symbolize other desires. For example, we desire companionship and community. A decision to eat together is a decision to satisfy that higher desire. What the philosopher Aristotle discovered is that we have a tendency to rank our desires. He explained this at the beginning of his book on ethics.

When we see someone carrying out an action, and we ask him, “What are you doing?”, we expect that the reason he gives will point to a desire that he is attempting to satisfy.

“Why do you get up at 5:00 a.m.?”

“To get to work on time.”

Aristotle then points out that we can continue to ask, “Why?” to the answer.

“Why do you want to get to work on time?”

“Because I want to get paid and not laid off.”

“Why do you want money?”

And so on.

These chains of questions will always terminate at the one thing that Aristotle says we seek for its own sake, which is happiness. We don’t normally ask people, “Why do you desire happiness? What good is it?”

We all recognize this is a sufficient answer to any question about someone’s motive. If it makes you happy, go ahead!

Aristotle’s theory is pretty sound, but I also think that it requires some filling out. For example, he did not deal with an interesting phenomenon that we find in the Old Testament.

I’m thinking of the prophets. If we were to ask Jeremiah why he was continually criticizing the rulers of Jerusalem, it would be a stretch to show that he did this because he thought somehow it would make him happy. What he desired was something more like proper worship of God. If I could use the words of the Beatitude, he hungered and thirsted for justice.

Alright, with that as background, we look at today’s gospel. We see that, from one perspective, it is all about desire. Both the Samaritan woman and Jesus desire water. Both Jesus and the disciples desire food. And Saint John the Evangelist shows us how these desires point to a higher yearning in the human soul.

Jesus says to the woman, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and you living water.” In other words, if we knew the gift of God, we would desire it.

What is God’s gift?

It is the Holy Spirit. Before the Son of God came into the world, would we even have suspected that it was possible to receive God’s Holy Spirit? I think yes and no.

There are stories from many ancient cultures in which a divine spirit enters a human being, making him or her capable of particular impressive deeds, such as the writing of poetry or the invention of writing itself. We say of the Holy Spirit that He has spoken through the prophets, that in some way, they were conduits of the Holy Spirit.

But what Jesus is promising to the woman at the well is something more profound, a permanent union of ourselves with God. This promise reveals to us that our desires for truth, justice, and beauty are in fact different ways of longing for God. That only God can satisfy, and He intends to do this for us in a way surpassing anything we can imagine.

How are we to respond to this offer from God?

Let’s go back to the gospel reading. When the woman is persuaded that Jesus has something of value to offer, she asks for it outright. And so we, too, should ask. Here, though, we should bear in mind that the gift that Jesus is offering will only be available after His death.

What Jesus does next is surprising: He gently talks the Samaritan woman into an admission of her own serial relationship failures. Is Jesus saying that He will only give the Spirit once she’s fixed all her problems?

No, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that.

Also bear in mind that the woman still thinks that they are talking about water. Things change, however, when she realizes that Jesus is a prophet. This suddenly prompts her to speak about proper worship of God, a point of sharp dispute between Jews and Samaritans at the time.

Jesus says that God the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and truth. This is where God’s invitation points, that we learn to worship Him properly. What this means in the context of this homily is, once again, that God is the final terminus of desire, God is what we crave in our heart of hearts, whether we are aware of it or not.

And the expression of this desire is literally worship. The word worship is derived from the same root as the word “worth.” Worship is then that activity in which we acknowledge that which has highest value, God Himself.

This is what I said that the prophets like Jeremiah were desiring rather than earthly happiness. And it was, in some sense, the Holy Spirit that both satisfies that desire and inflames it. The reason that Jesus brings up the ex-husbands of the Samaritan woman is to help us see that we can’t obtain satisfaction of this desire for God without correcting our lower desires.

The longing for love that the Samaritan woman manifested in her many marriages was a sign that could have pointed to God but did not. At some level that is why the marriages didn’t work.

Jesus is healing her and recalibrating this desire, and it truly changes the woman. She goes from being someone avoiding the eyes of others to speaking directly and persuasively to them.

As we move toward the middle of Lent, what desires of ours point away from God, and how can we redirect them? Is there a hidden sin that I’m keeping from God and from my own scrutiny out of shame? And if so, how might Jesus’s gentle example move me to re-examine and heal my own past?

As we cooperate with God’s grace in this process of healing, the Holy Spirit will become more of a conscious companion. And what more could we ask for than that?

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 1

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World.)

In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul writes, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” This quote helps to situate what we mean when we say that one of the three enemies of the soul is the flesh. Perhaps when we hear “sins of the flesh” we are inclined to narrow down the temptations of the flesh to lust and gluttony, with a nod toward other excesses of alcohol or drug consumption. But the tradition sees the danger here at a deeper level because of the subtle corruptions of our intellect and will that come about from an undue search for pleasure, comfort, and safety.

In our posts last year, we looked at the three traditional enemies of the soul, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. We saw that they correspond to three parts of the human soul. The Flesh is a distortion of the concupiscible part of the soul, that which seeks health, self-preservation and procreation. The World distorts the irascible part of the soul, that which governs anger, sadness, and to a certain extent vainglory. The Devil operates primarily on our intellect, distorting our notion of ourself and of God.

Jesus’s temptations in the desert also typify these three battles. The temptation to turn stones into bread is clearly a temptation of the hungering and fatigued flesh. The temptation to exercise power over all the nations is a world-related one, and the temptation to tempt God, to force God’s hand, is specifically diabolical.

So let’s begin with Jesus’s fast of forty days. The first interesting aspect of this is that Our Lord’s fast was a provocation. He is forcing the battle against the flesh out into the open. Later on, I will be making a brief comparison between the Christian understanding of the flesh versus the Stoic version. One of the important contrasts is here, that Jesus deliberately chooses prolonged hunger in order to get the Tempter to manifest himself on the pretense of the flesh.

Jesus is teaching us that it is a good practice to choose, for a season, what is uncomfortable, whether it be the discomfort of hunger, of a hard chair without a cushion, which is a typical monastic discipline, or hard manual labor. The goal is to get the flesh to mumble and complain against us and then to respond with a simple “no.” This has the eventual effect of freeing us from unthinking sensuality, which often operates at a subconscious level.

When we attempt these things, we can now see that the Tempter will use our discomfort as a pretext. Jesus’s response is interesting: “Man does not live on bread alone.” This is to say that our survival does not depend on comfort and ease.

One of the tempting ideas that the modern world has put into our minds is that these ascetical practices of the great saints of old—wearing hair shirts, sleeping on the ground, eating once every other day—will make us unhealthy, cause us to wither into resentful Feraponts. But in fact the Christian tradition, and more specifically the monastic tradition has always made a distinction between causing pain or discomfort and causing injury and harm. Not all pain is associated with damage.

And indeed, relaxation has its place. A story is told of Saint Antony the Great one of the champions of extreme ascetical practices. A farmer, having heard about Antony incredible feats of self-denial, was scandalized when he saw the great man from a distance, talking and even joking with a group of younger monks. When he confronted the saint Anthony had him string his bow and shoots a series of arrows. After a few bowshots, the farmer objected: if he continued to stretch his bow in this way, it would break. So too, said Saint Anthony, with the monk. It is not healthy to practice asceticism without relaxation.

This is also true when our health is compromised. Sometimes survival and the restoration of health requires treating the body gently. The pain and discomfort of sickness or age, when borne well, are penance in and of themselves.

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