Monastery of the Holy Cross

The garden of the heart

Spring in Chicago has been unusually chilly this year, and this means that we are only now planting our garden. Last year, we made an effort to include more brothers in the work of cultivating our very small, urban plot. I am of the opinion that this kind of work is very important for monks, especially young monks. We are expecting one postulant in July, and I would very much like for him to be able to spend several hours a week weeding and watering the garden. Not only is it good, honest labor that puts one in touch with the solid realities of material creation, it is work that helps the monk to understand his most important work, the purification of his heart.

For our hearts are very much like gardens: capable of producing many good fruits, but, alas, often overgrown with all kinds of weeds! And our many resolutions to pull up these infestations often make things appear tidy for a short time. Soon enough, however, the stubborn tares spring right back up and start crowding out the wheat. A garden needs tending everyday, and so do our hearts.
Jesus has sown His Word in the soil of our innermost being. Will we cooperate with him each day to keep the yield from being choked by thorns? That is the drama of our lives.

Conference: The Common Good

I will begin with three quotes.

In illo Uno unum (“in that One, one”, the motto of Pope Leo XIV)

Pope Leo XIV is widely understood to be a peacemaker and bridgebuilder, who aspires to build up the unity of the Church. He does this by pointing us to our final end and the true common good that we all seek to enjoy: Christ Himself. Because of the Incarnation, we experience this unity first of all in creatures. This is the common world that God gave us, and it is a check on singularity and idiosyncrasy.

A monk is one who is both separated from all and yet united with all. (Evagrius of Pontus)

Our withdrawal from the world does not mean that we monks do not continue to find Christ in our neighbor. It is a recognition that there are other forms of unity which are corrupted by sin. Today, the Church even speaks of “structures of sin”. These give us a false sense of unity. Our true unity in Christ is a transcendent goal that goes beyond what our senses can perceive. It requires a purification of sense and a purification of our relationships by a certain planned abstention from speech, fraternization, and the like.

The anchoritic life is somewhat rare, perhaps more so today than at other periods of the Church’s history. Saint Benedict offers us the pedagogy of the cenobium. I will focus on this reality in the second half of my conference.

Where brothers live in unity, they give glory to God, for there the Lord gives His blessing. (Magnificat antiphon, Memorial of Saint Pachomius)

Our prayer in the liturgy will be all the more efficacious and sanctifying to the extent that we come to Mass and the office reconciled to each other through our daily acts of self-denial and patient forgiveness of each of our brothers. We will experience God’s blessings to the extent that we seek this unity. It is not a result of our work, but a gift offered us to be sought out in its fullness. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,” says Our Lord. Saint Benedict would have us seek and strive after this very Pax as our way of seeking God and seeking what is above.

To be in Christ is to be united to all the baptized, and, in some sense, to all creatures infused by the Logos. But I wish to focus on a few specific aspects of the cenobitic life and the common good to be found there as foundational to our sanctification.

The common good is the good that each of us enjoys precisely with the other members of the community. It is our common flourishing. It is a good, which means that we can enjoy it like any other good—to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how much we desire it and seek it.

I once visited Gloucester cathedral in Great Britain with a monk of our province who is also an artist. Fr. Stephen could enjoy the stone in a way that I could not. It wasn’t that I couldn’t enjoy the beauty and holiness of the cathedral, nor that I lacked any ability at all to learn to see the specific beauty and goodness of the stone. But truly coming to enjoy the stone as he did would have required me to want this and then to take steps to educate myself in its appreciation.

Furthermore, as an artist, Fr. Stephen was able to reproduce the goodness of stone in watercolor. Although I couldn’t do this either, I could enjoy his work at its completion, and even enjoy his enjoyment of painting.

So, too, with the common good of the monastic community. Some of us will be better at seeing it, enjoying it, and contributing to it. This doesn’t mean that others do not enjoy the actual common good and do not contribute to it. But the more we seek it—again by self-denial and preferring what is good for my brother, rather than what is good for myself—the more we will enjoy it.

The common good requires that each of us be our true selves in Christ. This is to say that the common good is in no way detrimental to my personal good. In fact, human beings can’t fully flourish unless they belong to communities of some kind, and contribute to the common good of these communities. Nor can communities truly flourish except when the brothers within flourish as themselves. So there is no competition between my good and that of the community.

Similarly, our community will flourish to the extent that we become our corporate selves within the larger communities of our neighborhood, our Province and Congregation, and the Archdiocese.

Celebrating Saint Athanasius and Nicaea

Today is the feast of Saint Athanasius, the great champion of the teaching of the First Council of Nicea. He was made bishop of Alexandria shortly after his attendance at the Council, but he spent much of his episcopacy in exile for his opposition to Arius, whose theology enjoyed a favorable reception among the governors of the empire. He was a stalwart supporter of the early monastic movement in Egypt, writing the biography of Saint Anthony the Great. In turn, the monks could be counted upon to support Nicene orthodoxy.

Here is a selection from my homily last Sunday:

This year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicea, the first ecumenical council. This council was convoked by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, and brought together nearly all of the bishops of the Church in the year 325. The principal item on the agenda was the teaching of a priest from the diocese of Alexandria in Egypt, whose name was Arius. Arius taught that Jesus was a man who was adopted by God. This was not an easy argument to make, given that Jesus says things in John’s gospel like, “Glorify me, Father, in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.” John’s gospel also famously begins with the lines, “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”

So as I say, it seems like Arius’s teaching would be a non-starter. And yet, it was quite popular, and the problem raised by Arius continued to plague the Church in different forms for many centuries. In fact, Arianism, the doctrine that Jesus is a man, not consubstantial with the Father, but adopted in some way as God’s Son, is a perennial temptation. This is because our reason, our rationality tends to say that two different things can’t also be the same, right? If I have an apple, I don’t say that it is also an orange; the two concepts are distinct. And so to say that Jesus is man, and also God at the same time, seems to be irrational. And Arius and his followers were simply ironing out problems with revelation by subjecting it to human reason, as it was understood at the time. Jesus can’t be both the uncreated God and a human creature.

What the Council of Nicea challenges us to do is to force our reason beyond its normal limits and to accept that, in fact, Jesus is consubstantial with the Father. In a few moments, we will say this, that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father, in what is often known as the Nicene Creed, the statement of belief produced by the bishops at the First Council of Nicea. The Church honors the great achievement of the Council by reciting these words at the liturgy. But this word “consubstantial” itself was controversial. It’s not a word that appears in Scripture, though Saint Paul hints at the idea frequently in his letters. Jesus not only has a human nature, but He is also by nature God, of the same substance as the Father.

What happens when we allow our reason to be suspended, and to take on faith that Jesus is God and man, is that our understanding of God and creation changes. God actually become more transcendent—or perhaps we would more accurately say that, because of the Incarnation, we now understand what it means to say that God is utterly transcendent.

As a side note, this is why the English translation of the Creed changed fifteen years ago. We used to say that Jesus Christ is “one in being with the Father.” But this seems to imply that the idea of “Being” comes before the idea of God. In fact, God’s transcendence, as we understand it from the mystery of the Incarnation, means that we can’t really speak of the concept of Being outside of God. God Himself is the Existence, the eternal Being, in which we partake.

The fact that Jesus is described as both God and man in the Scriptures forces us to stretch our reasoning abilities to account for what appears at first as a paradox. We can believe this truth even if we don’t fully understand it, even if we still have certain doubts about its proper meaning.

Homily for Easter Sunday

Catholic filmmaker Mel Gibson recently announced that he would begin filming the sequel to his most famous movie, The Passion of the Christ. The new film is set to be released next year, and the current working title is The Resurrection of the Christ, and it apparently will chronicle what happens after Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the women and the apostles.

On the Joe Rogan podcast, Gibson explained, “It’s the story of the Resurrection; It’s a nonlinear story. It took my brother, Randall Wallace, and me about six or seven years to finish the script. We’ve worked with historians. All the apostles died, but nobody dies for a lie; they die for the truth. I wanted to show that. Who rose three days after being killed in public? Certainly not Buddha.”

It is interesting to me that Gibson implies that the Resurrection is unique. And he has historians who are corroborating this conviction that he has. If he were working alongside his fellow filmmakers instead, he might come to a different conclusion. In Hollywood, resurrection seems to happen all the time. In the past thirty years, we’ve been treated to—or subjected to, depending on your cinematic tastes—films entitled Alien Resurrection, Halloween: Resurrection, Mechanic Resurrection (I kid you not), The Mummy: Resurrection, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and perhaps most surprisingly, four separate releases of movies simply called Resurrection. I could go on and on. From this small sampling, it would seem that people are being resurrected all the time. A cynic might suspect that an effort being made to downplay the uniqueness of the specific Resurrection that we are celebrating today.

It should also be noted that several of these movies are in the horror genre, which is to say that the mechanics, aliens and mummies rising from the dead (and to be honest with you, I’m not sure what it means to have a mummy rise from the dead), that these characters returning to life is something that puts them back into this same world that we thought that they had left for good.

So it appears that the notion of resurrection is commonplace today, and is almost certainly not good news. I presume that these resurrected aliens and mechanics and mummies will head back to the grave at some point. What I’m getting is this: we are so accustomed to the idea of resurrection that we might be in danger of domesticating its revolutionary meaning. It might come as a surprise to discover that the people of Jesus’s own day were rather unfamiliar with the concept. In the year 52 A.D., Saint Paul preached one of his most famous sermons in the city of Athens. In it, he announced that God raised Jesus from the dead. How do the sophisticated, philosophical Greeks respond? They scoff at him. “Sure! Come back another day and tell us more about this crazy idea.” Resurrection certainly was unique at that time. Even unthinkable.

Now, from this perspective, I want to point out something very interesting about the gospel from last night’s vigil and this gospel reading this morning. Here it is: Jesus does not appear at all. It’s amazing that, of all the Sundays and feast days of the Church, the only time Jesus doesn’t appear in the gospel reading is a few times in Advent, when He is not yet born, and then on Easter Sunday. What could this apparent absence mean for us?

First of all, it means this: the Resurrection is emphatically not simply a return of Jesus to the old life He had in this world. It’s not a resuscitation. He has somehow passed into the higher realms, and yet maintains contact with us, as if he were, for example, God. He challenges us to seek Him out, to follow Him. This is, in essence what Saint Paul was saying in today’s second reading—”seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”

The absence of a visible Jesus in this morning’s gospel is also a sign of just how new and baffling the actual resurrection was and is. There’s another very telling detail in the stories of the resurrection. The Apostles never seem to have questioned that Jesus life is now an eternal life—they do eventually see Him again in the flesh. But he is strangely changed. He is often completely unrecognizable at first. He’s a stranger on the road, a gardener, a man taking a walk on the sea shore at dawn. He is present, but He is present in a new and transfigured form. This is the opposite of the mundane understanding of resurrection trafficked by our contemporary culture. This isn’t more of the same. It is an elevation of human nature into the realm of the divine.

And, my brothers and sisters, we have been made partakers of this resurrection, even though we are still alive in the flesh. In baptism, we were united mysteriously to Christ in His death and Resurrection. This baptism, the promises of which we are going to renew in just a moment, conforms us to Christ, and it is what makes it possible for us to follow Him toward the hidden heavenly realms. Let’s look at the second reading again. Saint Paul says “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is.” Paul is speaking of the Resurrection that we were given when we were baptized, the light of Christ that now dwells mysteriously in our hearts, if we care to search for it.

Paul continues, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” So not only is Christ invisible to us in the gospels this morning, but our own new life is a hidden one, one that we must seek out to experience it. How do we seek it out: through prayer, through attentive participation at the liturgy, through the efforts we make to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and imprisoned. What we discover then, is that all of Jesus Christ’s teachings were not about making this a better world, but a map, an instruction manual on how to find God, to seek what is above while still in the flesh below. At the center of this is His presence in the Holy Eucharist, where He is visible only to the eyes of faith.

In today’s first reading, Saint Peter says that Jesus was not visible to everyone after the Resurrection. He appeared only to those who ate and drank with Him. Saint Peter is referring to us. We are the ones who now eat and drink with the Lord, and this means that we seek the things that are above not merely for ourselves, but to be able to report back to a world that labors, in so many ways, under the shadow of death: “Christ is risen indeed! He shall wipe away every tear from your eyes, and death shall be no more!”

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 2)

My second paradox is closely related to the first.

When the Son of Man is lifted up, he draws all to Himself [John 12: 32]. In John’s Gospel especially, it is the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross, His “lifting up,” that is the moment of Jesus’s glorification. Herein lies the paradox: how can glory emanate from the face that is hardly recognizable as human because of His wounds, His exhaustion, and the utterly shameful nature of death by Crucifixion?

While this paradox has been commented upon by many theologians, I first remember encountering a form of it in an essay by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in a book entitled On the Way to Jesus Christ. He observes, in the Liturgy of the Hours, two antiphons attached to the same Psalm 45 (44 in the Latin numbering) at Evening Prayer on Monday of Week Two. The Church has always taken this Psalm to refer to the marriage of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride. During the Second Week of Lent, the Church attaches to this Psalm the antiphon, “You are the fairest of the children of men and graciousness is poured upon your lips.” Jesus’s beauty is therefore emphasized, but especially the “inner beauty of his words,” as Cardinal Ratzinger puts it. He is the perfect man.

But this changes during Holy Week, when the antiphon is now a text taken from the prophet Isaiah: “He had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes [Isaiah 53: 2].”

To make sense of this contrast, Ratzinger points out that it cannot be a contradiction, since both antiphons derive from the same Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets. Invoking the English poet John Keats, he points out that the aphorism, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty” forces us to a critical evaluation of what we consider beautiful. We must accept that true beauty must somehow involve “wounds, pain, and even the obscure mystery of death and that this can only be found in accepting pain, not in ignoring it.”

Thus in the suffering Christ we see the beauty of our God accepting our pain in love, transforming it into life. We see a man, driven by a fervent love, freely willing to endure all manner of human violence and hatred in loving obedience to the Father. He loves His own to the very end and goes to any length to rescue us and to show us how lovable we are, even in our frequent unloveliness. That this is a kind of beauty can be inferred by its effects on us: it causes a kind of “compunction,” a breaking open of our hearts, often connected with tears, partly of joy, partly of pain.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s essay is primarily a reflection on Christian aesthetics, a topic to which he often returned in his occasional essays. He recognizes certain premonitions in Plato’s aesthetics (especially in the Phaedrus and Symposium), in the pagan philosopher’s belief that beauty wounds the beholder (which is to say, it causes a kind of compunction) and thus awakens in us a thirst for a deeper truth, something beyond superficial notions of beauty.

I would add that a similar premonition in the Greek pagan world can be found in the poets. As the great Alasdair MacIntyre observed, Homer’s Iliad demonstrates, subtly, how one can win a war by losing it. By this he means that the reader, in the end, tends to sympathize more with the vanquished Hector, even when his “appearance was so marred beyond human semblance [Isaiah 52: 14],” by the disgraceful treatment of his body by Achilles. There seems to be greater glory in the moral goodness and inner nobility of Hector than in the acknowledged excellence of Achilles. Why is this? We could speculate at length, but we see Hector dying for love of his city, versus Achilles fighting as a kind of hireling, a soldier of fortune. In the end, what redeems the character of Achilles, as is the case in all Greek tragedy, is our knowledge of his doomed mortality, not his perfections as a manly warrior.

[I note in passing that in this analysis, I part ways with important aspects of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek culture.]

What the pagans were not fully able to grasp (and indeed was anyone able to do it, except in prophecy by the Holy Spirit?) was that this inverted glory would be fully vindicated by God in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of God’s Son. The final beauty, for which the Christian hopes in the Iliad, is the vision of Hector and Achilles, like Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, reconciled by the death of Christ, and now, as friends, adoring the one, true God of us all. Until this final vision, all earthly beauty is provisional, existing in a tension between the intimation of God’s glory and the realism of human cruelty and suffering.

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 1)

Owing to my interest in sacred music and liturgy in general, I’ve been asked to join a few groups on Facebook. Recently, in one of these, I was quite amused by a long debate that had broken out. On one side was a Catholic liturgist, a very learned man whose writings I greatly esteem. In the opposing corner was an Orthodox believer, about whom I know little. The dispute was about the relative amount of rejoicing and lamenting to be found in the Lenten liturgies of the East and West. The Orthodox writer insisted that Western liturgies focused more on sin and penance, whereas the Byzantine liturgies were brighter, focusing on the joy of God’s salvation, and so on.

There are indeed many joyful texts in the Byzantine liturgies for Lent. But there are also long passages in which the faithful accuse themselves of every imaginable sin, of being the worst of all sinners, hard of heart. There are claims for continually weeping over sin. In this, I tended to side with my acquaintance, the Latin liturgist, who made just this argument.

What amused me, though, was the very idea that penance and the joy of Lent could be separated at all. This apparent paradox is easily understood if we attend to the theology of the liturgy. “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. [Romans 5: 10]” We do not weep for our sins hoping that God will save us if we attain the minimum required amount of contrition. Rather, we are already saved, despite the fact that we couldn’t possibly merit salvation. And it is this realization of God’s patience, His loving pursuit of us in our unloveliness, that gives rise to true penthos, or compunction. It is the response of the faithful on Pentecost. When they realized that they had conspired to put to death God’s Son, “they were cut to the heart [Acts 2: 37].” But did they therefore despair? No! They repented and were baptized, becoming followers of the Apostles.

It is well attested of many saints that, as they grew in holiness and nearness to God, they felt less worthy of friendship with God. The brighter the light in which we find ourselves, the more we see our imperfections. Yet it is God’s very nearness and purity, an experience, at root, of awe and bliss, that gives rise to this insight about ourselves. The closer we come to God in the liturgy and in prayer and in asceticism, the more we see how our sins keep us from fully experiencing the joy of life in Christ. And so we weep for our sins precisely because we are drawing near to God’s selfless, regenerating love. It is what theologian Khaled Anatolios calls “doxological contrition,” and which he holds to be the central meaning of salvation.

As I never tire of mentioning, Saint Benedict, who was extremely realistic about human failings and vices, mentions joy twice in his short chapter on the observance of Lent.

What is being described is the theological virtue of hope. Hope is the great forgotten theological virtue, and so perhaps it is no surprise that this Facebook disagreement went unresolved. For hope to be hope, we must hold in tension the fact that we remain sinners in need of salvation, and that somehow salvation has already been accomplished. In fact, until the eschaton, we are necessarily saved, not with final assurance, but “in hope [Romans 8:24]”: in such a way that we must continually work out our salvation in “fear and trembling [Philippians 2: 12].”

Temptation, Transfiguration, and the goal of Lenten discipline

The first two Sundays of Lent each year give us two significant events in the life of Jesus. Why these two? Can we say something about the relationship between the temptation of Christ in the desert and the Transfiguration of Christ on the mountain? And what might these tell us about the holy season of Lent?

This year, we are reading Luke’s versions of these events, and it is noteworthy that for Luke, they both look forward. To what do they look forward? Let’s look at each one. On the First Sunday of Lent, the temptation of Christ ended with an ominous note: “When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him…for a time.” What is Luke getting at here? The temptations aren’t over, is what he is saying. When we aren’t experiencing temptations, that doesn’t mean that they are over and done. The Tempter has just departed for a time. Temptations will return, and our job is to be vigilant.

But I think that Luke also had something more specific in mind. How about this: the great war between Jesus and the Devil, between the Son of Man and the ruler of this world, isn’t over when Jesus wins this opening battle. The war won’t be decided until the Crucifixion. At that time, Jesus’s human nature will again be tempted to use His divine power in opposition to the will of His Father. The Father’s mysterious will is to send His Son into the world as a man, to save us by sharing in our mortality, our weakness and suffering. When we arrive at Holy Week, and we recall all of Jesus’s suffering—the betrayals, the mockery, the scourgings, and finally Crucifixion—this is the Devil throwing every he has at the Son of God, Who conquers Him by a quiet obedience and faith.

The Resurrection marks the definitive destruction of the power of hell. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. We need to see how the Transfiguration also looks forward to Holy Week and Easter. In this case, it is quite direct. When Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, what are they discussing with each other? Here is what Luke says: “Moses and Elijah…appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Jesus is going to accomplish an “exodus.” Isn’t this interesting? So much could be said about what this means, since the Exodus is, in some ways, the theme of the entire Torah. Let’s focus on one important aspect of the Exodus, to see a deeper connection with Moses and Elijah.

What do these two have in common? Both of them spoke to God on Mount Sinai. When God first spoke to Moses on Sinai, He commissioned him to go to Egypt to bring the Israelites out, right? But when Moses went to Pharaoh and demanded that he let the people go, it was not his immediate aim to lead them to the Promised Land. Rather, his goal was to worship God on Mount Sinai. It was to make a new covenant with God—in a certain sense, a renewal of the covenant between God and Abraham. On Mount Sinai, the terms of the covenant are sharpened: God will adopt Israel as His beloved people, and the people, for their part, will obey God’s law.

But why did Elijah go to Mount Sinai, or Horeb, as it was called in his time? As a matter of fact, God asks Elijah that very question, “Elijah, why are you here?” And what does he respond? “Because your people have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars…” and so on. Note that God does not renew the covenant at this time; He simply sends Elijah back with reassurance that a remnant of the people had remained faithful. From that point on the prophets will have the job of reminding the people of the covenant and calling them back to it.

Alright, back to the Transfiguration. Jesus, we said, was going to accomplish His Exodus. Where is He leaving and where is He going? He is leaving this world, the fallen world, and going to the new creation, what we might call heaven, the right hand of the Father. Along the way, just like Moses at Mount Sinai, He is going to ratify a new covenant, in His own Blood. He will give us the new law—this is why the Father says, “Listen to Him!”

Now I’ve downplayed something crucial here: for Jesus to leave this world and pass over into the new world, He must die. And with that observation, we are brought back, finally, to Lent. Lent is a time to battle temptations after the model of Jesus, and it is also a time to practice mortification. For us, this mortification of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, involves a frank acknowledgement of our sin. The goal isn’t to make us feel guilty and therefore punish ourselves the more, even if contrition and reparation are part of the process. What is the goal? In the gospel, the Apostles see it before their eyes: glory. The glory of God and, dare we say, the deification of humankind in Jesus Christ. Every time we accept mortification, we are stepping tentatively out of this world and into the next, with the hope of glory. When we see the brilliant light of the Transfiguration, shining through the body of Jesus, we are seeing a foreshadowing of our own transfiguration. Saint Paul says that Jesus “will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body.”

So the goal of our Lenten discipline and the goal of Christ’s Exodus is the regeneration of creation and the reinstitution of all of the children of Adam and Eve as His beloved sons and daughters. Lent is not, therefore, a time in which we try to “make ourselves” better by increments. It is a time to participate in the death of Jesus so that we may also share in His bodily Resurrection from the dead.

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.

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