Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Contemplative Prayer

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.

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].”

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Ascension

As members of the Mystical Body of Christ, we are already seated with Christ at the Father’s right in the heavenly places.  Our human nature has been glorified in Christ by its translation to heaven, and the life we live now is a life of pilgrimage to our true homeland, which is in the New Creation.  Our conversatio should be spiritual and heavenly, the glory of the flesh purified and illuminated by the grace of baptism.

The Divine Liturgy greatly aids us in coming to recognize this truth.  In the liturgy, we turn our minds, hearts and bodies toward Christ seated with the Father, and ask to be transformed from glory to glory in His likeness.  This is the meaning of facing East:  by turning in a common direction toward the reality that transcends any human project, we consent to God’s entrance into our lives.  We learn to desire not only spiritual goods, but the Divine Life itself.

The Mystery of the Ascension teaches us that our true life is hidden with Christ in God.  This a reality which requires effort to make manifest, most especially the effort of liturgical worship.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Resurrection

We do not often enough consider that in baptism, we have already begun living our resurrected lives.  The Resurrection of Jesus is not merely the first of many, it is the cosmic regeneration itself.  Gradually, from this center and foundation, Christ’s new creation is already growing.  We have been incorporated into Christ and thereby have become co-workers in His new creation.

The first task is for us to live ‘in newness of life’.  We ought to take time each day to reflect on this gift, so as to live as one of the saints already.  We would be so much less likely to forget God, to be at peace with our imperfections and attachments to venial sin, if we truly grasped that we bear the new creation in ourselves.  Its growth into the lives of others and into the cosmos itself depends on our appropriating for ourselves ‘the immeasurable greatness of the power at work in us who believe.’ [Eph. 1:19]

Heaven is not something waiting at the end of our lives as a token reward for having been morally upright.  It is a state of being in the present:  in unity with Christ, together with the saints who already enjoy the vision of God in eternity as members of the one Church.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Crucifixion and Death of Jesus

Being human means dying every day.  We do not easily realize this when we are young.  As our twenties pass into our thirties and forties, however, we begin to discover that we must relinquish a great deal of what we had hoped for in life.  Our early successes fade into the past more and more quickly, and new successes are more difficult to achieve as the years follow relentlessly.

The life of Jesus Christ was, for many of His followers, an immense disappointment.  After the healings, the miracles, the inspiring teachings, how could this young man allow Himself to be brutally tortured and executed?  But the same question can be asked of every human life.  Each one is a kind of miracle; each one holds a particular kind of promise.  And each one is no less mercilessly snuffed out at the end—or so it would seem.

The mystery of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Death shows us the lengths to which God will go in order to give us life.  In solidarity with broken humanity, the immortal Son of God passes from the unrealized possibilities of this present life into the mysterious reality of another life which is accessible only to faith.  He is also the Son of Man, our Brother, and He invites us to make the same act of trust in the Father that He Himself did.

 

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Carrying of the Cross

It is incumbent upon the Christian to die to the flesh so as to live to the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, the practices of mortification represented by the scourging and the crown of thorns are universal obligations that we live out under various aspects, such as fasting, prayer and almsgiving.

But we are also individuals, unique creatures of a loving God Who endowed each of us with a particular dignity.  The negative side to this is that each of us has his or her own particular battle against sin and vice.  When our Lord invites those who follow Him to take up their crosses daily, He is inviting us to embrace our lives as they truly are, not as an abstract exercise in conformity.  This means embracing the particular sufferings that belong to my unique life, rather than blaming others or avoiding responsibility.  It does not mean planning and seeking out special sufferings, as if I knew best what is necessary for my growth in the mystical life.  Sometimes the absence of spectacular suffering is as much a mortification for those who desire holiness as is needed, and, in some cases, it may be more beneficial.  The key is to take up my cross and not someone else’s, to be open to the medicaments prescribed by the Heavenly Physician for my particular maladies, trusting in His love.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Crowning with Thorns

If the scourging signifies the mortification of the flesh, the crowning with thorns invites us to the mortification of the spirit.  The Word through Whom all things were created, the rightful King of Israel and, indeed, of all peoples, is mocked as if He were a common criminal.  Sometimes, we, too, feel that our rights have been violated; we feel that the very dignity of our existence has been denied by others.  On those occasions, let us call to mind the various temptations to which our spiritual natures are subject:  vainglory, which is the need for approval and praise (ie, worship!), and pride, which is the illusion of self-sufficiency.  Let us remember that our true dignity comes directly from the love of the Creator.  The ridicule of human beings, no matter how cruel, can never remove it.  But each of us can undermine our dignity by mistaken efforts to usurp our Creator’s role.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Scourging at the Pillar

As with His Agony in the Garden, there are two situations in which the scourging of Christ is lived out anew in our bodies.  First of all, there are the major illnesses and injuries that eventually find us.  Bodily pain is a genuine test.  At the end of his life when he was suffering greatly from pancreatic cancer, Cardinal Bernadin taught that we should pray well when we are healthy, because it is difficult to pray when we are sick.  So the Passion of Christ can give us strength when it is our turn to suffer bodily pain.

Hearing the late Cardinal’s advice, though, and recognizing that conformity to Christ must be a daily effort, we can say that the scourging at the pillar corresponds to the bodily ascesis that anyone serious about the life of sanctity will need to adopt.  Fasting, eating simple foods, chastising the stirrings of lust, and avoiding addiction to bodily comfort do not normally cost us in suffering what serious illness does.  All the more reason to bear these discomforts willingly, like the athletes who carefully watch what they eat and push their bodies further each day for the sake of an earthly trophy.  When we do this, Christ is present in us, working out our transformation from darkness to light.

Incarnational Meditations on the Rosary: The Agony in the Garden

The Sorrowful Mysteries are, in many ways, the easiest to pray ‘incarnationally’.  The humanity of Jesus is on full display, and our own experience of suffering typically provokes us to prayer more readily than does joy.  What we find in the pairing of the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries parallels the traditional stages of the interior life, the active or ascetical followed by the contemplative.  We put to death the desires of the flesh in order to rise in a spiritual manner and follow Christ to the Father.

How do we recapitulate the Agony in the Garden?  Clearly, we do this when we are faced with a situation that brings with it fear, an indication that we may anticipate pain of some kind in our future.  So when duty requires us to say difficult things to someone, or to begin a new job outside of our present competence, we are confronted with our human nature wishing that there were some way around these unpleasant experiences.

These situations can be somewhat abnormal, however.  Our Lord’s agony can also be a spur for the small, quotidian sacrifices that discipleship requires.  Not looking with lust or not harboring anger in my heart might not immediately cause me great suffering, in the sense that we think of suffering.  But it does require me to expend effort in a negative way that doesn’t seem to produce much fruit.  It is an inconvenience to be borne, and this bearing of irritations and uncongenial actions is at the heart of the quintessential monastic virtue of patience.  The Latin patior means both ‘to suffer’ and ‘to allow’.  When I take Christ’s instruction to heart literally, I must suffer or allow all kinds of minor discomforts.  Each morning, we should join Christ in the garden seeking that the Father’s will be done in us.  In our small, hidden sufferings, by which we uproot any affection for even venial sin, we will give glory to the Father, and Christ will be more clearly present in us.

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