Monastery of the Holy Cross

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Homily for Good Friday

We have no king but Caesar.

The Gospel of John is full of irony. Sometimes the irony is amusing; sometimes it’s profound; sometimes it’s depressing. One of the more depressing ironies is the cry of the chief priests when Pilate presents them with Jesus after finding Him not guilty. They say, “We have no king but Caesar.”

To grasp the depth of the irony, it is helpful to return to the Book of Judges and the First Book of Samuel, which form one narrative together, giving us the story of Israel a thousand years before Christ. The Book of Judges ends with this statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

This is not a celebration of political freedom.

The people of Israel had reeled from one crisis to another, with God regularly intervening to save her. At the opening of the First Book of Samuel, the dangerous Philistines are becoming powerful. The people of Israel are growing increasingly fearful of this new political threat, and they demand that God give them a king, a strongman to fight their wars for them. The prophet Samuel warns the people that they will lose their freedom were they to submit to a king. A king would levy burdensome taxes, conscript their sons, build up a huge government bureaucracy. Perennial human problems!

In spite of Samuel’s warnings, God Himself agrees to appoint a king, eventually settling on David. Samuel’s predictions, however, quickly come true. On the whole, the kings of Israel found it impossible to avoid compromising entanglements with the gods of other nations. Israel was never the most powerful nation, and the world powers of the time dominated them, even exiling them. After God brought them back from exile, they became client states of the Persians, Greeks, and then the Romans, which is the background situation for the life and death of Jesus, Son of David.

The kingship in Judea had been suppressed for five hundred years at this point. But there were prophecies about a return of the King, the anointed one, who would free God’s people from domination by the Gentiles. And just last Sunday, Jesus allowed Himself to be identified as this Messiah, by riding into Jerusalem, the capital city founded by David himself, on a donkey, according to a prophecy of Zechariah the prophet.

And in fact, this is the closing of the circle.

When God agreed to appoint a king, He told Samuel that the people “have rejected me from being king over them.” In Jesus, we not only have a legitimate descendant of David, and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne, but we have God Himself, ready to take up His rightful place as the King of the people whom He had, time and again, delivered from her enemies.

Will they reject Him as king again?

The emotional background to this drama is fear. The chief priests fear the Romans. They also fear the mob and the consequences of a riot. Pilate is afraid of divine nemesis of some kind, which accounts for his reaction on hearing that Jesus claims to be the Son of God. He also fears the Emperor if things get out of hand. The disciples fear getting captured and punished by one authority or another, and so they run away.

When we are afraid, we are easily manipulated. This, by the way, is one reason the news is always negative. It serves a political purpose to keep large portions of the population anxious.

The choice that we all face at some point is here before Pilate, the authorities, and the mob. When we find ourselves anxious, will we choose God? Or will we demand a powerful man or ideology or movement to attack whatever is making us anxious? And what does it look like, exactly, to choose God?

Let’s admit that this can be a challenge. Because what God looks like on Good Friday is a condemned criminal humiliated by the powers of the world. Serving this God might not be quote-unquote “safe” in the normal sense of that term. But this is to limit ourselves to too narrow a field of vision. Jesus suggests this to Pilate when He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Turning to God will not necessarily give us things that world deems desirable: fame, prosperity, power, comfort, safety. Still, trusting God will give us something much, much greater: victory over death itself. Fame, prosperity, and power will not deliver anyone from death, nor can any worldly power achieve it.

In conclusion, let’s close another circle.

For the chief priests to say, publicly, before Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar” is willingly to adopt the position of a slave—or at best a client serving the interests of a pagan power. My purpose here is not to assign blame, but to present frankly the temptation that we all face in this life.

I said that God will deliver us from death. What does this look like? Is this something that we wait around for, trying to build up credits with God in the time we have left? Where is this kingdom of God, and how do we get there to avoid slavery to the world?

Well, first of all, we have our Lord’s assurance that His kingdom is among us and within us. It is not far at all. On the Cross, He is showing us how to get there. He is opening the path through death to the Kingdom.

We follow, first of all, by being conformed to His death in baptism, by taking up our Crosses daily and following Him through death to life. This requires the eyes of faith, but it has palpable results. It gives us the freedom to live without fear, to accept whatever sufferings come our way, with peace and indeed joy, for they conform us to Christ and lead to His Kingdom.

As we celebrate the mysteries of Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, let us ask God to open the eyes of our spirits to see anew the great love Jesus showed in becoming man for us and suffering for us. May it free us to let go of fear and find true joy in the Lord.

A Joyful Mystery in Lent

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

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

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

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

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

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

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

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

“Why do you get up at 5:00 a.m.?”

“To get to work on time.”

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

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

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

“Why do you want money?”

And so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is God’s gift?

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

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

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

How are we to respond to this offer from God?

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

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

No, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dealing with the Lenten malaise

The opening days of Lent are often filled with enthusiasm, a sense of purpose and newness. But Lent is a long season. After a week or two, my own resolutions start to appear more difficult than I had anticipated. What I have found helpful in dealing with this typical Lenten malaise is to focus on simply carrying out the fast, or whatever other resolution I made, without much regard to any tangible “result.”

Aiming at a result is a temptation of Lent. The truth is that we are seeking to grow closer to God, a God who is infinitely greater than anything we can imagine. We can’t really know what a better relationship with God is like. Instead of tracking my weight when I fast, I simply abstain from a meal, or from meat, without asking what it’s for, other than that I pledged to do this for God. Similarly, we can’t know for certain how any alms that we give will be used. Most of all, we can’t know ahead of time what results will come from prayer.

Once we have made the simple resolution to carry out our Lenten penance, we can take a more objective view of how these practices, recommended by Jesus Himself, subtly change us. They challenge me to identify and renounce a tendency toward complaint or victimhood. They help me to discover faults that I hide by eating nice food, buying nice things, and enjoying entertainments instead of prayer. Here is where the real work of conversion takes place. Let’s not waver in our resolutions!

Now Is the Acceptable Time!

“Behold! Now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation! [2 Corinthians 6: 2]” We sing this text from Saint Paul every Sunday morning during Lent. Paul’s impassioned exhortation reminds me of the words of another Apostle. Saint Peter, in his first “homily” on Pentecost morning, says to the crowd, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified [Acts 2: 36].”

In both cases, the Apostles Peter and Paul speak with great urgency. An immeasurable change has just occurred. A man has been raised from the dead and taken up into heaven. Now is the time to act: for Saint Paul, “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God [2 Cor. 5: 20]”; for Peter, “Repent and be baptized [Acts 2: 38]!” This is our chance to make things right with God.

Can we find this urgency in Lent? Lest we think that the acceptable time has come and gone,we might first note that Paul is writing the Corinthians perhaps twenty-five years after the Resurrection. The acceptable time is always now. The Church dramatically and starkly moves us to action in the liturgy of Ash Wednesday. To dust we shall return, at a time that we cannot yet know. There is no time like the present to repent. In just over six weeks, we will re-energize our baptisms by renewing our promises to serve God and reject evil. What if, in the intervening time, we were able to welcome God’s grace so as to be more saint-like when we pass through the darkness of Good Friday to the light of Easter?

There is another reason for urgency. We are discovering more and more each day, perhaps to our dismay, just how badly in need our world is of moral and spiritual renewal. The extent of evil in the world can be demoralizing. This Lent is a good time to offer our own acts of self-denial for the reparation of the harms done. The power of two billion Christians doing acts of penance and praying fervently is a good place to start tipping the scales back. We are living anew the need to “repent and be baptized,” to be reconciled to God, not for our sake only, but for the sake of the whole world. May God grant us all a holy Lent!

The Epiphany: God shines forth

In the Catholic Church, the season of Christmas extends through the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, which we will celebrate this coming Sunday. The Baptism, in turn, is connected with the Epiphany, which most Catholics celebrated last Sunday.

We might mistakenly think that Epiphany just happens to be the time to commemorate the long trek of the Magi to Bethlehem: a touch of exoticism, perhaps even multiculturalism. Certainly we have multiple reminders in this week’s liturgy that the Epiphany marks the revelation of the mystery of the inclusion of the Gentiles.  But Church tradition sees in it something more profound, a truth indicated by the very name Epiphany, or “shining forth.”

Imagine that someone deposited a million dollars in your checking account. You would suddenly become a millionaire, but if this benefactor didn’t tell you he was doing this, you wouldn’t know. At some point or other, a lawyer or banker would share with you this good news. Suddenly, you would have the opportunity to live like a millionaire, which you couldn’t really do if you didn’t know you had the money.

At the Incarnation, the Divine Logos, by becoming man, by consenting to our mortal state, really and truly redeemed us. But we could not participate in this regeneration if Christ’s divine nature had not
been revealed to us. We could naturally believe that God is everywhere, we could trust God and hope in God, but in the Epiphany we have something greater than this: we see directly what God is doing, for He appears in our human form.

Much of what He does is what any person does: He’s born, learns to walk and talk under the guidance of His parents, learns a trade, makes friends, eats and sleeps, reads, works, recreates. But now we see God doing all these things, and in turn, all of these human activities become means of sanctification and union with God.

This shining forth extends into the liturgy. We can now observe all aspects of the liturgy and see God at work, using architecture, iconography, song, poetry, vesture, ritualized movements and gestures, bells, incense, wood, marble, silk, wax, oil, water, wine, and bread.

These have all been imbued with spiritual depth because of the Incarnation. But it is the mystery of the Epiphany that unlocks these depths, that invites us to use our senses to mount heavenward upon material scaffolding.

The third traditional mystery of the Epiphany is the changing of water in wine at Cana. Within the water all along was the potency to be wine, but until our Lord responded to Mary’s plea, we couldn’t see it. Now all of the formerly pallid and mundane circumstances of the world can suddenly leap to life, like an old black and white film colorized.

Anyone could have followed the star to Bethlehem. In other words, this appearance and shining forth was not yet like the Second Coming, like lightning flashing across the sky. It was possible to miss the signs.

The Magi, it is often said, were probably astronomers, those tasked with mapping the heavens and predicting the movements of the planets, sun, and moon, and of noting disturbances like comets. These signs were understood to be communications from the gods.

So the Magi were already watching, seeking a sign and communication. And when they received it, they responded by reverent worship and pilgrimage.

How much time do we spend watching for God and listening for His instructions? It is possible that my own distractions have caused me to miss the star, or perhaps my own attachments have kept me from setting off to see where it leads.

That you are reading this suggests you are trying to be attentive. May God send forth His light and truth into our hearts today, that our awareness of His love and salvation may change our lives.

Homily for Christmas Eve

The entrance of the Son of God into the world is the most consequential event in all of history. Whatever we previously thought it meant to be human is fundamentally changed—very much for the better—by the discovery that our nature is completely compatible with God’s nature. Whatever we thought it meant to be God is also changed—and again, this change is for the better—because we now know that God is love, that God is communion. And of course, these discoveries about the two natures of God and man are an improvement over whatever went before simply because they are also true.

We often say that Jesus became like us in every way except for sin. And this is undoubtedly true, well-attested in the Scriptures and in the Tradition. But this qualification about sin obscures something of earth-shattering importance: sin is not natural to human beings; sin is a corruption of human nature. I will return to this in a moment, but for now, let us note that human nature is compatible with the divine nature, so long as that human nature is freed from sin.

When I said a moment ago that the Incarnation changes our knowledge of God, we should note that it is a change foreshadowed by God’s history with the human race. There are two aspects of this history, at least as I would like to tell it to you this evening. The first is the gradual realization of human beings that God is utterly transcendent. This realization was quite an achievement; most cultures are content to have a provincial idea of God. Ancient peoples were fine with there being multiple gods, and were apt to switch allegiances when one god seemed more powerful than another. It is the genius of two different cultures, the Jewish and the Greek, that they gradually came to understand that for God to be truly godlike, there could only be one, and this God must be somehow greater than the universe. When I mention Greek culture, really mean a small, radical subculture of Greek philosophers who derived the notion of monotheism.

Such a God is terribly powerful, and yet both the Jews and Greeks intuited that God is also just and true and therefore is not given to arbitrary displays of power. Here, though, is where the two cultures diverge. For Greeks like Aristotle, God withdraws into an inaccessible solitary bliss. For the Jews, God is puzzlingly close to the downtrodden, exiles, widows and orphans. They knew this because they experienced it. The Jews were conquered in turn by the Babylonians, the Macedonians (after being liberated by the Persians), then by the Romans. We hear this evening that Joseph and Mary needed to travel to Bethlehem to satisfy the
taxing strategy of Caesar Augustus. They are an occupied people at the moment that God appears as a child of a Jewish woman.

Throughout all of these tragedies and disappointments, God did not abandon His people, and this suggested that God was somehow a God of love. This was abhorrent to the Greeks. Love makes us vulnerable, and gods by apparent definition, can never be weak or vulnerable, and certainly not the supreme God. Love seems to imply that we need someone else, and God cannot need anything.

And so when we peer into the manger tonight and see God, the Son of God, as a vulnerable infant, dependent utterly on His Mother for sustenance and nurturing, this is a radical discovery about God, that He really loves us so much that He is willing to offer Himself to us, to placed in our arms, on our tongues. This is, strangely, who God is, and yet when we think of it, it rings true. It somehow confirms what we had not dared to hope, that all of creation, good as it is, beautiful as it is, is yet gratuitous, a grace a gift from a God Who loves us, and made us for Himself. He is not a God Who dominates, Who pulls rank. He is not first of all a scold, a gaslighter Who claims to love us while pointing out our every flaw. He is love pure and simple, vulnerable and waiting for us to say, “Yes, I love you, too.”

All of these insights we could derive from the Christmas story. But what about our response? Is the Incarnation something we celebrate today because it happens to be the anniversary of Jesus’s birth? Is it something that God did once upon a time, and now He no longer Incarnates Himself? Clearly this isn’t the case, and here is where I return to a thread I left off a few minutes ago. I said that sin is a corruption of human nature, and we know this because the perfect union of the human and the divine is in a sinless man. Jesus is not an isolated example of sinlessness. He is the beginning of our sinlessness, our union with God. In the words of Saint Athanasius, “God became man so that man might become God.” We are invited to follow the example of the Virgin Mary, and by the invitation He gives to us in baptism, to welcome the life of Christ in our hearts, to be transformed by love, and, let’s be honest by vulnerability, that sin might be rooted out of us, that we might die to ourselves so as to live the divine life of Christ. This can be a scary proposition for sure, but this night we have this assurance from God: He loves humankind so much that entered completely into our human world, with all its typical concerns, struggles, joys, heartaches,
boredom, insight, whatever we experience as human beings, Christians experience with God as our eternal partner in love.

Homily for Gaudete Sunday

If you have a feeling of déjà vu at this morning’s liturgy, what might be the cause? Obviously, it’s not the rose vestments, which we haven’t worn since March.

Do you remember what the gospel was last week? It was John the Baptist, the voice crying out in the desert, and, Matthew says, “All Judea and the whole region around the Jordan were going to him.” Today, John is no longer in the desert, but is in prison. And it is in prison that he hears about the works of Christ, which he had predicted last week.

Except there is a difference.

Last week, when speaking of one mightier than he, John said of the Messiah, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand….the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” So, it’s interesting that this week, when he asks Jesus whether He is one, Jesus doesn’t quite answer directly.

And it’s not an invalid question. After all, we don’t see—or we seem not to see—Jesus with a winnowing fan in his hand, even metaphorically. Where is the wheat and the chaff?

Instead, Jesus responds with a strong paraphrase of Isaiah chapter 35, today’s first reading. And this is interesting. Who is effecting these cures in Isaiah? The first two verbs are in the passive voice: eyes will be opened, ears will be cleared. This is what is sometimes known as the divine passive. Isaiah does not specify who is opening the eyes of the blind. It magically happens.

But we know that this happens when God comes to save His people. “Here is your God…he comes to save you.” That’s when eyes get opened.

So that’s Jesus’s response: if eyes are opened and the lame are walking, then God must have come to save His people. So, was John wrong? Did he have the wrong Messiah?

Of course, this can’t be the case, because the gospels go out of their way to underline the Baptist’s importance as the one who prepares the people and gives witness to Jesus.

The Fathers of the Church struggled with this passage, where John doesn’t seem to know whether Jesus is the Messiah. Did he not hear the voice from heaven pronouncing Jesus the Son of God at His baptism? What they noticed about this episode is that John is not asking Jesus a question directly; he is sending his disciples with the question.

Is it possible that they were the ones who were taking offense? That the Messiah appears bearing mercy, healing, and forgiveness rather than condemnation? This is a good explanation, I think, but it just shifts the burden.

If Jesus is the one who is to come, when are we going to see the winnowing fan, the wheat gathered and the chaff burned?

This is the second surprise. If the first is that the Messiah is not only a human king, but is God Himself, the second is that baptism by the Holy Spirit makes us not only human, but sons and daughters of God by adoption.

The chaff that is to be threshed out and burned is our sins, our worldliness, all that would make us unfit to be God’s heirs.

What about the wheat? Would this not be everything good that God has given us, and every effort, however small, that we have made to say, “Yes,” to do God’s will?

Oftentimes it feels as if our good deeds go unnoticed. Or when they are noticed, others respond with mild cynicism or outright cynicism.

We do good, hoping to build up all that is good in the world, and it seems like evil goes on its way unconcerned. It is as if our good deeds limp, a good word meets a deaf ear. God’s beautiful creatures are obscured, eyes are blind to the stars hidden behind streetlights, living things perish and decay.

This is where Jesus comes to set things right. In His kingdom, which is not of this world, he will have gathered up all those efforts at fidelity. They will no longer Iimp, but will dance before us, and all good words that were uttered will become a song of joy and praise. The dead will be raised, and there will be no tears or pain in that new world, which God wishes to be ours, that world in which even the least is greater than John the Baptist.

Why would we take offense at this? Why would John’s disciples have taken offense?

I believe they were hoping to divide the world between the good people, namely the people of the covenant, and the bad people, like the Romans and their collaborators. Would we not at times also like to see our opponents get burned—at least a little bit—for causing suffering to others?

If we do not see ourselves as lame and blind, at least in some sense, are we not prone to rancor when the undeserving receive mercy and healing? We will answer this with the words of Saint James: “Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another, that you may not be judged.”

If we can welcome each other as Christ has welcomed the least deserving, we will have that much more wheat to bring to God and that much less chaff to be burned away.

Homily for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

The Book of Genesis starts off on a very high note. God creates all things and finds them good, even very good. Adam and Eve, our first parents, are given paradise for their home. It is a vision of a world in which evil does not exist: plants spring up from the well-watered ground, animals help the man and woman to keep the garden.

As we all know, this does not last very long.  I believe Dante suggests that it lasted about half an hour.

In today’s first reading, we hear the tail-end of the story of man’s transgression, the attempt to attain wisdom in a manner contrary to God’s intentions. This begins a dismal series of chapters in which humankind goes from bad to worse, to the point that God laments ever making man because the thoughts of man’s heart is only evil continually.

It feels like that line from Genesis describes much of our world today. God never gave up on us, and so he began His great plan of redemption by calling Abraham to leave the world of idolatry. There was a long road ahead for Abraham’s progeny. We see that every time God sends a blessing, there is a corresponding resistance, even rebellion.

Eventually, the people of Israel go into exile, and the temple is destroyed. This marks a new approach: more and more, the people of Judah look to respond to God by a humble submission to His law, not seeking the power of kings, but seeking renewal interiorly.

Instead of having thoughts entirely on evil, meditating on God’s law, day and night. This was a good strategy, since God had promised blessings to those who kept His law in their hearts.

What I am describing here is the gradual training of the people of Israel to cooperate with God’s grace. This was a challenge because the rest of the world didn’t know God and went about with its wars and industries, measuring success by worldly standards while Israel became more and more negligible.

But this was all a part of God’s plan. He was seeking one person who would truly say, “Yes,” with a pure heart. And so, to an aging couple, whom we call Joachim and Anne, God gave the gift of a daughter who would be that perfect response to God’s invitation to know Him and love Him.

The covenant with Abraham, that agreement between two parties, is brought to fruition through one who will say, “May it be done to me according to your word.” It is at this moment God finally enters His creation to save it from within.

Today’s solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is not just a celebration of this event, but a reminder that each of us through baptism is part of the same drama of salvation. Each of us, in saying “Yes” to God’s invitation and pledging ourselves to Him in baptism, has brought Christ into the world in our own hearts. We are now striving to bring Him to birth by becoming saints. As Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception was prepared for by generations of humble, anonymous men and women, we are beneficiaries of generations of Christians who have striven to be faithful to Christ.

Seeing God’s hand in this history and recognizing His many gifts to us, let us respond to His invitation and say, “Yes,” with our whole heart.

Homily for the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today we celebrate the Presentation of the Virgin Mary in the temple. Our knowledge of this event is taken not from the canonical Scriptures, but from an important text, called the “Protoevangelium of James,” written in about the year 150. The Protoevangelium also gives us the names of Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna. The book is an excellent witness to the importance of the Blessed Virgin in the earliest decades of the Church. We see the earliest Christians reflecting on her role in God’s plan, requiring her to be set apart. Like the prophet Samuel, she is dedicated by her parents to God, to live in the temple and serve the priests who ministered at God’s altar. One of young Mary’s tasks was to weave the temple veil, the veil that would be rent at Jesus’s death.

The Church has always seen in this dedication of the Virgin Mary a foreshadowing of consecrated life. Those called by God to leave the world are to live, like Mary or the apostles after Pentecost, in the temple, praising God at all times. There, we wait upon God’s will, and following the pattern of Mary’s motherhood, we dedicate ourselves to welcoming the life of Christ given at baptism. With the help of God’s grace, we aim to bring that divine life to term by a life of sanctity and purity of heart.

Today we also conclude the monastery’s annual retreat. As it happens, this year’s retreat is shorter than usual, as we are planning to move it back to February. But it has been unusual in many other ways, and perhaps not as quiet and reflective as most of us would have chosen. This might be a reminder from God that no life of sanctity comes without a struggle to accept what is. It might be a reminder that as monks, we can’t afford to use the retreat as a time to “refuel” before we get back to work. We have to be the ones in the Church who say “no” to whatever distracts us from our primary purpose of serving God alone. Is there a difference in kind between withdrawal from the world and retreat? I think that they are both the same thing, differing only in degree. If God has seen to it that we haven’t had as much time for spiritual exercises this week as we would have hoped, this is perhaps a reminder that, for us, spiritual exercises must come first at all times, and not just on retreat.

I don’t want to be too elliptical for our guests: Fr. Edward is doing fine after having surgery on Wednesday night, and while he has a lot of rehab ahead of him, we have reason to expect him back. Other distractions have been more elective, and, as I say, a spur to imitate more fully the example of Our Lady: to put our own plans to the side and say, “Let it be done to me according to your will,” so that we may be a true sign to the Church that God’s will is our peace and not any accomplishment of our own. For whoever does the will of Jesus’s heavenly Father is His brother, sister, and mother, kindred of all the saints in heaven and destined for eternal life.

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