Monastery of the Holy Cross

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The Feast of the Presentation

“Is a lamp brought in to be put under a bushel, or under a bed, and not on a stand? For there is nothing hid, except to be made manifest; nor is anything secret, except to come to light.” [Mark 4: 21-22]

When the Son of God, the light of the world, was sent by God into this world, He arrived in a surprising, even hidden, way. Rather than manifesting power, He embraced smallness and dependency, becoming an infant, a child of the Virgin Mary. This unspectacular entrance upon the world scene meant that, without jubilant angels singing before shepherds and miraculous stars drawing astronomers from the East, the presence of the Redeemer among us would have gone almost entirely unnoticed. Today’s celebration is the capstone on what used to be called “Epiphanytide,” that period of time after January 6 in which the Church meditates on the various ways in which Jesus Christ’s divinity was revealed in the flesh.

This points to an important reality about the Gospel, and in fact, the entire created cosmos: it is a revelation of things previously hidden. The inner meaning of the human person is only fully understood in the discovery that we are meant to share life with God, just as food and drink, bread and wine, find their full meaning in the Holy Eucharist, God feeding us with His own life.

In theory, God could have saved us without our knowing. There is something potentially mischievous, even manipulative, in that idea. What we see, rather, is that God invites us to be His coworkers in bringing mercy and healing to the world. For this to happen, we need to recognize His presence, how to read “the signs of the times.” The “ true light which enlightens every man” has entered the world, and now illuminates all of God’s creatures from within. The Word of God, through Whom all things were made, is revealed to be the life within all things, making them holy and lovable.

When the aged and devout prophet Simeon takes the infant in his arms, he not only proclaims Him to be the long-awaited salvation of Israel, but “a light for revelation to the Gentiles [Luke 2: 32].” Salvation and reconciliation with the great Creator of the cosmos is being offered to all, though it is Israel’s special “glory” to be the nation that prepared the way and who calls Jesus a son of the tribe of Judah.

Let’s turn to another aspect of today’s mystery. When the Babylonians captured Jerusalem in 587 B.C., the ark of the covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was removed from the temple. What happened to it remains an unsolved riddle–Indiana Jones’s adventures notwithstanding. When the temple was rebuilt, the ark was no longer in the Holy of Holies (when the Roman general Pompey entered the Holy of Holies after taking Jerusalem in 63 B.C., he was puzzled to find it empty of any idols or statues). God was not entirely absent; nor yet had He fully returned after His dramatic departure narrated at the beginning of Ezekiel’s prophecy, dating from the Babylonian captivity. The prophet Malachi, writing perhaps in the fifth century B.C., indicated the God would suddenly appear in the temple. In the arrival of the Virgin Mary and the boy Jesus, the early Church saw the return of the true Ark of the Covenant (the Mother of God, whose womb was God’s resting place for nine months), and the long-awaited sudden arrival of God in His temple. The long exile of the chosen people was finally ended, that moment for which holy Simeon and Anna had kept vigil with such love for God.

In the second antiphon from First Vespers of today’s feast, this arrival is seen as the consummation of the marriage covenant into which God had entered with Israel: “Adorn your bridal chamber, O Zion, and receive Christ the king; him whom the Virgin conceived, the Virgin has brought forth; after giving birth, the Virgin adores him whom she bore.” Now, if we remember back to the Exodus, and God’s claim on all first-born sons, we see that this espousal is intimately connected with Christ’s self-offering on the Cross. He returns to claim His bride, at the cost of His own blood. There is indeed a certain sorrow to this, but it is that of those who sow in tears, only to reap in joy. In the Presentation is encapsulated the whole of the story of salvation. God the Father, in receiving back the Son of Mary, liberates not only Israel, but through her, all humanity—and not from political slavery in Egypt, but from spiritual slavery to sin. It is significant that, at today’s Mass, we bear candles in procession, just as we will at the Easter Vigil. It is one and the same Passover that we celebrate, from differing perspectives. As such, today’s feast marks the perfect nodal point between the Incarnation and Christmas, and the Paschal Triduum that looms in the future.

 

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany

Nearly four thousand years ago, there was a man living in the vicinity of the ancient city of Babylon. This man heard God speak to him, and it turned out to be a major turning point in history. That might not seem like an exaggeration. After all, don’t we believe that God speaks to us on a regular basis? The answer would be, “yes, of course.” But whatever confidence we might have that we can separate out God’s voice in our hearts from the other voices clamoring for our attention, we owe very much to this man who lived so many generations ago.

I am referring, of course, to Abraham. At the time of which I am speaking, he lived in what we would call a pagan land, where there were many gods. The stars themselves were held to be divine in some way, and the wise men of Babylon were expert at mapping the heavens, watching them for divine messages. Later Jewish and Christian tradition held that Abraham was grieved by this perplexing multitude of gods and the superstition and magic that went along with them. In other words, Abraham wanted the Truth, and despaired of finding it in the paganism around him.

In Abraham, God, the One, True God, found a heart ready to hear the Truth. What Abraham heard was that to follow this Truth required of him a great sacrifice. He would need to leave his homeland and his family and travel to a place that this God would show him. But Abraham followed, because the Truth is better than make-believe, and certainly better than lies. As I said earlier, we owe a great deal to these patriarchs and their wives who heard the voice of God and obeyed, often at high cost to themselves. Through them, God was establishing a foothold in this world that had rebelled against Him. Abraham’s children, the Israelites, became a light for the nations because they worshipped the One, True God.

This vocation, to hear God’s word and follow, was often very costly, because the old gods were not about to give up their power easily. Unsurprisingly, the most powerful and successful by worldly standards were often the most dedicated to the false gods. Someone like Socrates, who had a similar thirst for Truth as Abraham, ended up being executed by those who felt threatened by him. This was a world of conflict, scarcity, fear, and mistrust. Too often, it was held together simply by the threat of violence and the predations of the stronger against the weaker. This is why God’s call to Abraham required him to renounce that world.

Today, on the Epiphany, God speaks again to a group of three men from the East. What is more, God speaks to them through one of the stars which they watched so carefully. The stars had always belonged to God, and were intended to be His messengers, but fallen man had forgotten how to read them properly. With the arrival of God’s Son, fallen nature begins to regain its true purpose, to offer us signs of God’s presence and His love. These three men do exactly what Abraham did many years before. They set off for a place unknown, following this star.

They know that a king has been born, and he is somewhere in this small country of Judea. By their obedience, by their willingness to set out, they make known the identity of this child. I said that the willingness to follow God comes at a cost. The gospel tells us that King Herod and Jerusalem were in an uproar about this news that God was sharing with them. In his famous poem “Journey of the Magi”, T.S. Eliot captures this cost well. He has one of the Magi, many years after his encounter with the baby Jesus, say this: “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,/But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,/With an alien people clutching their gods.”

Today we celebrate the fact that God did not only call Abraham’s descendants, the Jews, to know the Truth. In the Magi, we see His rescue mission reaching the Gentiles as well. God reveals Himself to us and to all. In the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, we have a perpetual point of reference to discern God’s voice in today’s world. In the Church, which is the extension of the Incarnation in space and time, we continue to enjoy the assurance that we can hear God. He speaks through nature, through stars and trees and wind and rain.  With God’s Word alive in our hearts, we can learn to read these signs. But His invitation still calls us to leave all that is fallen within us and in the world. In other words, following it will require our ongoing conversion. Not everyone welcomes this. Herod heard what the Magi had to say, and he rejected it. He was unwilling to give up that old world in which he enjoyed power and status.

Where is God speaking to me today? How can the Church help me to clarify God’s voice and His invitation to conversion? Will we set off in faith toward what is still unknown in God’s plan? Will we put it off, or even reject what God is asking, fearing the cost? Guide our hearts Lord God, to hear and heed, and to follow where so many holy men and women have gone before, believing not only that the Truth is better than make-believe and lies, but that Your Truth is greater than all we can imagine.

The Holy Family

While doing a bit of searching in connection with yesterday’s Feast of the Holy Family, I discovered this striking–and humorous–image by the early 14th century Sienese iconographer Simoni Martini. It shows the finding of 12-year-old Jesus in the temple after Mary and Joseph had been searching for him for three days. Anyone who has parented an adolescent will, I hope, find this depiction amusing:

Let me take this opportunity to invite you to join us for Solemn Vespers tomorrow, Tuesday, December 31 at 5:15 p.m. In addition to exquisite music by Josquin and Willaert, our Schola will reprise a motet I composed for last year’s celebration: Virga Iesse floruit. At the bottom of this post is a sneak preview of the first of Josquin’s antiphon settings for this solemnity. The text, O admirabile commercium, with a translation, is also given below.

Merry Christmastide to all!

–Prior Peter, OSB

 

O admirabile commercium!
Creator generis humani,
animatum corpus sumens,
de Virgine nasci dignatus est:
et procedens homo sine semine,
largitus est nobis suam Deitatem.

O wondrous exchange:
the creator of human-kind,
taking on a living body
was worthy to be born of a virgin,
and, coming forth as a human without seed,
has given us his deity in abundance.

The Nativity of the Lord 2024

Dearly beloved, today our Savior is born; let us rejoice! Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness. (Pope St. Leo the Great)

“Et Incarnatus Est” is on hiatus during Twelve Days of Christmas but will return after Epiphany.  Merry Christmas to you and yours!

The Progress of Advent

In days long ago, before the invention of Twitter, when kings, governors, and others occupying the highest levels of authority wished to communicate with their subjects, they relied on the spoken word. Most often, messages from the palace or capital were delivered by heralds. Upon more solemn and serious occasions, however, the monarch would make his or her own “progress” through the cities, towns, and villages of the realm. These were graver occasions not merely because of the requirements of royal pomp. Certain pressing issues at a local level were reserved for the judgment of the sovereign himself. When the sovereign was just, this was good news for those who loved peace and justice. The arrival of the king, his “advent,” was an affair of great municipal fervor. Extending several miles from the destination town, the royal route would be richly decorated. At various stations along the way, singers and dancers awaited the royal progress and celebrated the king’s or queen’s approach. When the sovereign finally arrived, the celebrations began in earnest. Then, of course, the work began, courts were drawn up, cases were heard, and judgments were dispensed. The sovereign then began the journey to the next town.

Before the institution of a hereditary  monarchy in ancient Israel, the king was God Himself. God communicated through heralds, who occupied the social positions of prophet or judge (priests, too, occasionally divined God’s will by use of the mysterious urim and thummim). God’s most memorable advent was His descent into Egypt to take Israel out from slavery and to pass judgement on Pharaoh and his army. As time went on,  such miraculous manifestations of God’s judgment became harder to discern. The great crisis was the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 B.C. and the deportation of the most important Judahites to exile in Babylon.  In spite of the high-flown and inspired rhetoric of Second Isaiah (chapters 40-55 of the book of that bears his name), the restoration of Jerusalem under the benevolent sponsorship of the Persian empire never quite took hold of the people’s imagination as had the Exodus. No wonder: many Jews opted to remain in Babylon and in Egypt, where life was decidedly less rugged than in the hills of Judea.

Most of the literary prophets of the Hebrew Bible grapple with this problem. The general solution proposed is that God will, at some future time, once again make His royal progress from His heavenly throne, and through an appointed Messiah, execute judgment on the idolatrous nations that successively dominated God’s chosen people. This “day of the Lord” was often enough a frightful event, but the goal was always the eventual restoration of justice and shalom, the peace that is “ordered tranquility [Saint Augustine’s phrase],” the world as God had intended it to be.

In the Christian proclamation, when God did make His advent, it was in a most unexpected manner. His herald, the angel Gabriel, went not into the public square, not to the courts of Herod (much less those of the faraway emperor, now in Rome), but to the humble dwelling of the Virgin Mary. God was indeed to make His solemn entry into the world, but it would be in an obscure village as a vulnerable infant. He would go unrecognized by nearly everyone until, ironically enough, His return to the Father at the Ascension. In the Incarnation, the Son of God came not to issue final judgment, but to invite all to a new way of thinking about the world. No longer is it divided into antagonized interest groups and national factions (though Israel would always remain God’s first love). Salvation and shalom (“My peace I give you—not as the world gives…”) would be offered to all peoples by the humble carpenter of Nazareth to those who would take seriously His offer to repent and undergo a change of heart.

We now wait for the ultimate advent, what is often called the Parousia or Second Coming, but each year, we call to mind this first “royal progress” of the infant King, so as to be reminded of His offer of peace and joy. “No one ever spoke like this man [John 7: 46]!” May these Final Days assist us in our preparation to celebrate the approaching Kingdom of God!

 

Ritual: Social Control? Or Liberation for Love?

Catholic and Orthodox believers are sometimes criticized because of the weight of ritualized behavior at worship and elsewhere: rote prayers, signs of the Cross, and so on. Ritual appears to be a form of social control that interferes with personal authenticity. Of course, what ‘authenticity’ means or whether it is an unambiguous good is not often examined, in my experience.

The fact is that we depend on ritualized behavior every day. Many, if not most, social interactions depend on ritualized behavior. I arrive at the train station at 7:05 and meet the train there at that time. I use the same desk everyday at work, and I expect that when I go to my superior’s office, he will be there and not someone else. Conversations make use of stock phrases, particularly at the beginning and end, and not to make use of these can be a sign of hostility. I turn on the television at a certain time, and at the same time, the people in the news studio begin to talk into a camera. The range of options for my clothing is limited by ritualistic restraints.

By following ritualized behavior, I help to create and sustain a sense of the ‘normal’, and make social life possible by making my behavior predictable to others in crucial ways. By steady adherence to such behavior, I demonstrate my dependability and make possible deeper levels of interaction by showing my trustworthiness. Ritual, it turns out, is in some measure the condition of commitment to others, even to love. It is a sign of my willingness to put others’ needs and expectations before my own at certain crucial times.

Of course, opening ourselves to this sort of basic love, as is the case with any kind of love, is a risk. Social rituals can be manipulated and the good faith of persons can be preyed upon by those with some control over rituals who do not have the common good at heart.

Reflections on Genesis 2 for the Feast of SS Joachim and Anne

“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant (siah) of the field was yet in the earth and no herb (ēsev) of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”

Genesis 2: 4b-8

“Thou hast one daughter/Who redeems nature from the general curse.”

King Lear IV.vi.205

Here, we have, in the Hebrew mindset, the true ‘state of nature’, one rather different from the Hobbesian ‘red in tooth and claw’ version.  Scholars of the Pentateuch, who typically regard the book of Genesis as a compilation from different sources, point out that in the previous chapter, ‘vegetation (deshe’)’ and ‘plants (ēsev)’ were already created by God.  Since in chapter 2, there is said to be no plants or herbs in the fields, this is taken as evidence that the original story given in chapter 2 was written without any knowledge of chapter 1.

However, Rabbi Umberto Cassuto, in his work criticizing the ‘documentary hypothesis’, argued persuasively that the reference is to two different classes of plants.  In chapter 1, we have plants in the ‘state of nature’, which God pronounces ‘good’.  In chapter 2, the denial that there were plants and herbs ‘in the field’ does not deny the existence of all plants.  Rather, ‘the field’, which connotes the wildness that was introduced into nature as part of the curse of Genesis 3: 17-19, does not contain any of this wild growth, including the specific genera of plants referred to as siah in Hebrew.

This rare word appears here and in three other instances in the Old Testament.  In Genesis 21: 15, when Sarah convinces Abraham to drive out Hagar from the household, Hagar in desperation places her son Ishmael under ‘the bushes’.  This is again in the wild, in the inhospitable ‘field’ (which, incidentally, is also where Cain lures Abel to murder him).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the other two instances of siah occur in the book of Job.  These ‘bushes’ (or ‘shrubs’) appear in 30: 4 and then again in verse 7, and appear once more in ‘dry and desolate ground’, in a place where people are ‘driven out from among men’.

To return now to Genesis 2, we read that the Lord had not yet sent rain upon the earth.  Indeed, the first time that we can say without contradiction that it does rain, is in chapter 7:  ‘The windows of the heavens were opened.  And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.’  During this time, every creature of flesh not in Noah’s ark perished.  Thus it is implied that rain is part of the ‘fallen’ dispensation, producing these wild shrubs and other plants ‘of the field’.  Human beings were meant, in the original purity of creation, to dwell in a garden, in which water was supplied by this mysterious mist that went up from the earth.  Why would this detail be mentioned about the earth being watered (literally ‘given to drink’) if there were no plants?

It is also worth noting that there is no man to till the ground, and yet God makes it fruitful.  The Fathers of the Church, particularly in the Middle Ages, saw this detail as presaging the Incarnation of the divine Word of God.  The fruitfulness of the earth immediately after its creation, despite there being ‘no man to till’ it, finds its mystical fulfillment in the conception of Christ of the Virgin Mary, who knew no man.  For this fruitfulness, which depends entirely on God (and not on the ‘will of man’—John 1: 13), the ground must be pure, untouched in any way by the future ‘general curse’ that will mark the beginning of the rains, the thorns, thistles and shrubs of the field.

Today is the feast of SS Joachim and Anne, parents of Our Lady.  Their ‘one daughter’ was a ‘new creation’, a ground that needed no purification to become fecund at the overshadowing, the brooding of the Holy Spirit of God.  Akin to the temple, from which mystically flowed the waters which recall the mist and streams of Genesis 2, she is the true ‘ark of the covenant’, fit to be the dwelling place of the Dominus vivificans, the Lord, the Giver of Life, and to give God’s Son a body and a Mother.  She too, required no purification for this to take place, other than the anticipated grace of our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, ‘which [God] foresaw’, as the collect for Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception phrases it.  Which is to say that God, in preparation for His definitive act of salvation, quietly prepared His triumph in the humble marriage bed of SS Joachim and Anne.  Happy feast day to all!

Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Benedict

Put on the armor of God. 

This is the language of battle, even of war.  Saint Paul writes about spiritual armor and spiritual warfare in several of his letters.  But here, in today’s second reading from Ephesians, he is referring to the “panoply,” the full armor of a professional soldier.  He explains why this is necessary:  we must be ready to ward off attacks by principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, evil spirits in the heavens.

If you were to read the accounts of the early monks, you would see that this language was common among the fathers of Christian monasticism.  The biography of Saint Antony the Great, who, together with Saint Benedict, is depicted in the deesis above our altar, is filled with all kinds of spiritual battles between Antony and a host of demons.  Saint Benedict, writing almost two hundred years later, alludes to the great hermits like Antony in the first chapter of his Rule, where he says that hermits fight hand-to-hand with the Devil.  Saint Benedict’s own biography, written by Saint Gregory the Great, also has several stories of Benedict going toe-to-toe with the Devil and his underlings.  He shows that the power of Jesus Christ in his saints is far greater than the power of evil.

But the Lord still wants us to fight, to enter the lists of this spiritual warfare.  Over the course of the centuries, the common teaching drifted away from a realistic depiction of demons as having visible bodies and doing physical harm to monks.  Writers came to the realization—or perhaps just preferred to believe—that spiritual warfare happens primarily in the realm of the mind.  Demons test us by means of thoughts.  The principal thoughts include lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, sadness, vainglory and pride.

You might recognize this list as being very similar to the more contemporary list of the seven capital sins.  That represents the latest development in the tradition, bringing us up to the present day.  Perhaps on the feast of Saint Benedict we can take stock of what has been lost amidst these changes.  Perhaps we can ask whether monks and nuns might not have a significant contribution to make to today’s Church in recalling the dynamic of spiritual warfare.

When we talk about battling against vices, I suspect that we tend to think that we are battling ourselves.  But all human action begins with thought.  Often, we simply are not aware of the thought that precedes the action, because we aren’t attentive to our thoughts.  They can seem to have a persuasive force from habit, from social custom, and so on.

In fact, once we start paying attention to thoughts, we might start wondering where they come from.  Do they come from us or from somewhere else, or both?  So it is that monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative orders, have a special role to play in this spiritual battle.

In the best-case scenario, such monks and nuns are on the front lines.  We withdraw from the world and practice self-silencing to clarify what is going on in our minds:  to notice the fact that actions follow thoughts, and to catch thoughts before they become actions.  Then we can ask the question:  does this thought come from God? Or does it come from the Devil, from Principalities, from powers, or from other lower-ranking demons?

Saint Benedict is the patron of Western Europe, which is probably the last distinction he would have anticipated.  Like ourselves, he lived at a time of complete political upheaval.  Ten years before his birth, the last of the Western Roman Emperors abdicated.  This was followed by the terrible Gothic Wars, as the Eastern Byzantine Emperor Justinian tried to take back the Italian peninsula and reunite it with what was left of the old Roman world.  The end result was widespread destruction all around Benedict’s monastery of Monte Cassino and the beginning of a period of cultural hibernation.

Saint Benedict did not seek a political solution to the grave disorders of his day.  Rather he sought, in all simplicity, a life of solitude where he could focus on his own fidelity to the witness of Jesus Christ.  Where he could meditate day and night on God’s word and put it into practice in the most radical way possible.  Where he could watch his thoughts, purify his actions, and enter into real spiritual struggle by saying “no” to all kinds of temptation.

The first result was that others noticed his holiness and wanted to imitate him.  This led him to write his Rule for monks, but also to take up the work of caring for others, of bringing Christ to the world.  Eventually his way of life became so popular, and his Rule so widely recognized for its practical wisdom and fidelity to the gospel, that by the year 1100, all of Europe was dotted with Benedictine monasteries.

Under their influence, the European Middle Ages as we now know them came to be.  There arose new gospel institutions like the Truce of God, chivalry—which is the knightly warrior code civilized into service of the poor and weak—devotion to our Lady, and prayers for the dead.  All these practices, pervaded by the spirit and rhythms of the liturgy, flourished under the influence of Saint Benedict and his decision to arm himself and do battle for the one True King.

By withdrawing from the world, Saint Benedict and his disciples were able to replace the founding assumption of the previous world, the old Roman world founded in paganism and a drive for power, with a new vision of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

May God help us to be worthy disciples of this great man.  And may his example light a fire in the hearts of many young men and women, who might choose to fight the ills of this age not by becoming internet influencers or political operatives, but by humbly submitting all thoughts to Jesus Christ.

The Holy Triduum

We have arrived again at the holiest time of the Church’s Year, the annual celebration of the Paschal Mystery, our Lord’s Passover. It’s hard for me to believe that this will be my 27th Triduum at the monastery. The liturgy for this holy time can be bewildering when we first encounter it, but also exhilarating–and for the same reason. Everything is new, slightly disorienting. Time is suspended. Melodies and rituals suddenly appear that remind us of our first childhood memories of Easter.

Over time—and this is especially true for monks who must study the liturgy and practice it regularly—the ceremonies become more familiar, even if they remain special to this time of year. For some of us, there is a temptation to a bit of boredom—the old feelings no longer emerge with the same intensity. Every Triduum features a liturgical blunder or two–sometimes the same one many years running, and this can tempt us to cynicism. But these temptations should be dealt with in the same way that we deal with every temptation: with resistance. When we begin to understand the liturgy, not as a prompt for good and edifying feelings, appropriate as these might be, but as central to our permanent identity as children of God, we can transition into a deep sense of belonging to Jesus Christ and His Church. This identification and belonging will remain with us and inform the rest of our lives as Catholics throughout the year.

Once again, this applies especially to monks and nuns, who have espoused themselves to Christ. The transition of which I am speaking is analogous to one that we see in certain married couples. They begin their lives together with excitement, expectation, even a kind of infatuation with each other, and the joy of having been loved and accepted. There are new experiences of owning a home, of pregnancy, childbirth, school, in-laws, new family rituals at Christmas, and so on and so forth. This gives way eventually to routines, and as the new and exciting becomes the familiar and dull, there is a risk of each spouse focusing on the small annoyances of any relationship with inherently limited and even flawed persons. There are heartaches with children who suffer health problems, disappointments with careers and there are compromises. The temptation is to boredom and even a sense of resentment. But if this temptation is resisted, what emerges is the beauty of belonging to one’s spouse, of totally identifying with that person with whom I have made a lasting covenant, and struggled to live those vows in fidelity. These are the couples who can sit together for long periods of silence, simply content to be with their “better half,” appreciating the presence of the long-beloved.

The Holy Triduum is like the Church’s wedding anniversary, the annual reminder that we have been espoused by the great Bridegroom Who laid down His life for us, Who poured out His Blood to cleanse us and make the Church a worthy Bride for Himself, spotless and beautiful. When this reality is newly embraced, it can move us to great torrents of emotion. It can so move us even after many years. But it can also carry us away to a different kind of experience, that of profound and peaceful contemplation, the silent adoration of the Holy Trinity, to Whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

Our Lady of the Rosary

My mother taught me to pray the rosary. In her family, they had the old custom of praying a decade nightly on their knees, with my grandfather leading the prayer. While that lovely custom didn’t continue into my generation, the rosary continued to be the primary mode of prayer. It was definitely what we turned to when life became anxious for any reason.

The rosary developed over many centuries and through many twists and turns. The pious legend that Our Lady gave it directly to Saint Dominic has helped to cement the connection between the “Domini Canes” (the “hounds of the Lord” as the Dominicans have been playfully nicknamed) and Our Lady as the Vanquisher of All Heresies. The deep history is in the lay spirituality of the high medieval period, when lay brothers in monastic communities used beads to count 150 Paternosters in place of the 150 Psalms that were required weekly of the choir monks (who could read, and thus were expected to digest these extensive texts).

Eventually, these 150 beads came to represent 150 Ave Marias, and these were further divided into 15 decades, to which were assigned the familiar Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious Mysteries. Connecting the prayers to the Mysteries seems to have been another monastic innovation, this time from the Carthusian Dominic of Prussia. Confraternities of the rosary became popular in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.

But it was the clash of civilizations that culminated in the great Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571 that cemented today’s feast into the liturgy. As the Ottoman fleet prepared to square off against the Holy League of Catholic states, led by the soon-to-be famous Don John of Austria, Pope Saint Pius V urged all Catholics to pray the rosary in defense of Christendom, already tottering in the wake of the Reformation. The League’s decisive victory was attributed to Our Lady’s intercession, and effectively ended the Ottoman threat for another century and a half.

While the contemplative dimension has never been absent from the rosary, this more “militant” aspect also became more typical of the devotion. It is a part of spiritual warfare, as I discovered as a child, learning to ask Our Lady fervently for her protection under duress. The addition of the Fatima Prayer (…Lead all souls into heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy) strengthened the sense of prayer as battle. Pope Leo XIII, in his 1883 encyclical  Supremi Apostolatus Officio, urged Catholics again to take up the rosary in battle, this time a more clearly spiritual battle than at Lepanto, against the incursions of particular evils into modern society.

More recently, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote his own apostolic letter, Rosarium Virginis Mariae, in which he extolled the contemplative dimensions of this devotion, even adding five new Luminous Mysteries. While I have heard some criticism of these additions (they disrupt the parallel between the 150 Ave Marias and Psalms), they are very much in line with another important document from his papacy, issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. In this directory, pastors were urged to help the faithful to draw the connections between popular lay devotions and the liturgy. The 15 original Mysteries of the rosary corresponded to the most important mysteries of the Liturgical Year. John Paul’s introduction of the Luminous Mysteries fills out the traditional mysteries of Epiphany (adding the Baptism of Jesus and the Wedding at Cana), adds the central feast of the Transfiguration and the solemnity of Corpus Christi, and invites us to meditate on the feasts of the Apostles in the third of the Luminous Mysteries.

We happen to live in a most perplexing moment when, as in the times of Pius V and Leo XIII, the demonic spirit of deceit, division, and violence is visibly attacking the Church and humanity. In 2018, Pope Francis issued his own call to Catholics to engage anew the spiritual battle under the banner of the Virgin Mary, “asking the Holy Mother of God and Saint Michael  Archangel to protect the Church from the devil, who always seeks to separate us from God and from each other.” It is not a coincidence that the rosary has recently been in the news, albeit with a certain amount of misinterpretation, as a symbol of (spiritual) militancy.

May our celebration this evening be pleasing to Almighty God, and may the Virgin Mother of God once again crush the head of the Serpent, that we may spend our days in peace and conversion of life. And may Christ lead us all to everlasting life. Amen.

 

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