Homilies & Reflections

October  & November 2021

Homily of Thursday, December 3, 2021

In a place that is more or less Christian, particularly if it’s a very weak Christianity, it’s easy to lose sight of what it means to be a Christian. Which is why a feast like today’s, the great missionary Saint Francis Xavier, the 16th century Jesuit missionary in the Far East, is so important for us. When you are a missionary, you meet lots of people who have no idea of what Christianity is, so you must know what you are preaching. You also will meet, as Saint Francis Xavier did meet, particularly in India, bad Christians, lots of them, which are not a very edifying kind of reality. In fact, dis-edifying, which makes your work much more difficult. It makes your thought about what it means to be a Christian much sharper, much more insightful. And that fits very well with the season of Advent, particularly the beginning of this season of Advent, where we examine ourselves and whether we are in fact good Christians or bad ones, if we’ll Christ or not. It’s easy to be bad Christians: we’ll just be what we are, usually, more or less - not terrible, not great, just kind of in between. But great missionaries like Francis Xavier, his life, his example and his writings, and the season we are in, which talks about what it means to be truly faithful to God - the advent of Christ’s last coming, the coming that will judge the living and the dead, our final destiny - focus what we should be. And how also we can be happy if we follow Christ with faith like we see in today’s second reading, the reading from the gospel, as these people did. They had great faith, deep faith. If we follow him, then the great bounty and power and happiness that is made for us, in the second part of Advent you might say, the coming of Christ, the bounty that comes with the coming of the Lord, in the fulfillment of that reality in the second coming, will be ours. And that’s what it is all about, really. Francis Xavier was a missionary for a purpose, wanting to convert people, to get them to think as he did. But being a missionary made him realize far more profoundly what it means to be a Christian and to preach that more purely more intensely, and from that life of intensity  comes great joy

Homily of Wednesday, December 1, 2021 

Advent is about the church expressing her longing for the return of her Savior and the desire for Christ. Here are some texts from Saint Augustine for Advent. He says in one of his sermons: “My brothers and sisters, believe firmly what you believe, that Christ will return. What does it matter when? Prepare yourself for his coming. Live as though he were coming today, and you will not fear his coming.” This is a prayer of his, a commentary on Psalm 142: “Enter not into judgment of me. O Lord, my God. I may imagine myself to be ever so just, but when you bring forth your treasury and apply it to me, I am found to be evil. Enter not into judgment with your servant. I am in need of mercy, for I am a fugitive, returning and seeking peace, but I am not worthy to be called your son.” And then finally, this is from one of his sermons on the gospel of John: “Our every breath yearns for Christ. He alone is the desired one, the most beautiful of all. Christ loved us in our unloveliness in order to make us beautiful like himself.”

Homily of Tuesday, November 30, 2021 (Feast of Saint Andrew, apostle)

What would you do for someone you loved so profoundly and deeply? To what depths of humility and humiliation would you go and have gone? What would you give and give up out of love? Paul tells us that Christ took on the form of a slave, slave to sin, for us, out of love for us. Christ called Matthew from being a tax collector, where he was working. If you get into the history of Roman taxation, Matthew, between what he should be getting legitimately and what he was getting through bribes and outright extortion, it was a very lucrative position. But he immediately left. Peter and Andrew, if you go through the other Gospel accounts, there is their father and the hired men. This is quite a business enterprise. And how long do you think it took that family to build that business up? They leave, instantly. It is an almost sacred duty at that time for a Jewish son to bury his father. Remember the young man who came to Jesus and said, “I will follow you, just let me first bury my father.” In other words, what he was telling Jesus was wait until he dies and I have fulfilled my duties. And Jesus said, “No, follow me now.” They up and go. They left instantly their life on the water. 

Water, in the Jewish culture, is a symbol of power, the floods and the desert wadis come roaring down, wiping out tents and flocks. And then, these good desert people come to the Mediterranean and see the storms. Genesis - water, symbol of chaos, a reality of disorder and nothingness, raging. Water is a sign of God‘s blessing, of God’s presence and power. Water is also a symbol of death. You cannot stop the raging water. You cannot live in the raging water. It consumes, always. Always has room for more. You lose one boat going out. Don’t worry, the sea has plenty more room for all the other ones. Death is where we disappear. We drown in the raging, chaotic, nothing of death, because it is not part of our being, part of our nature. The fisherman, Andrew, with the power of Christ and his church, draws us out of the waters of death and casts us into the bark of Peter. Some of my students have replied: well, water is fine for fish what’s the problem? I point out to them: well, we are not fish. Death is a distancing from God. It is an effect of our distance from God. Salvation, as a very smart person once wrote, salvation is about the annihilation of distance between ourselves and God. So is prayer. Let us all annihilate the distance. Let us draw ourselves and others out of the waters of death into the bright light of love of God, infinite and eternal being, infinite and eternal love for us. Let us annihilate that distance and find ourselves all in the kingdom of God. Tell you what, I’ll do it my way, you do it your way. But always in our hearts let us keep the commandment that Christ gave the apostles at the last supper: love one another as I have loved you.

Homily for the First Sunday of Advent, November 28, 2021

Today, we move into the season of Advent, the first season of the liturgical year, and an unusual season with a varied history. Like Lent, it is a preparatory and penitential season, which is symbolized by the liturgical color of purple. I haven’t yet seen any explanation for how this use of purple developed aside from speculation that perhaps purple came about from using old black vestments that had lost their color over time. This may seem an unexpected connection to us because, unlike Lent, there is currently no additional fasting or abstinence in Advent on top of the Friday abstinence from meat present throughout the year, which can be replaced by some pious or charitable act.  

This current practice, however, was not always the case and is not the case everywhere. The symmetry between Lent and what would develop into Advent was more closely observed in the early medieval Church: Church councils from the 6th century specify a period known as “St. Martin’s Lent,” which started after the feast of St. Martin on November 11 and lasted until Christmas, during which strict fasts were observed on all Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. A forty-day Nativity fast, starting November 15, is still observed by many eastern Churches. For the Roman Church, however, the fasts gradually died out. 1917 marked the end of obligatory Friday fasts in several American dioceses. The "Ember days" were days of fasting observed during each of the four seasons. While the winter Ember days in the middle of December had taken on an Advent character, the entire practice was made optional in 1969, and mostly disappeared. Instead, the focus on Christmas and the coming of Christ came to dominate. In the Liturgy, we are presented with three different ways Christ comes to us: in history at the Nativity, into our hearts at our baptism and through the Church, and into glory at the end of time, when the living and dead will be judged. 

These three comings can each be seen in today’s readings. Jeremiah, writing as the Babylonian exile is starting, with Jerusalem destroyed, and the house of David seemingly brought to an end, looks forward to the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel, when a just shoot will be raised for David, which will restore safety and security to Jerusalem. This would happen when Christ came in time, although not necessarily as most expected. In justice, Jesus does establish safety for Judah and security for Jerusalem. However, this is not the physical city of Jerusalem or the physical state of Judah, which would both be destroyed by the Romans not long after Jesus’ crucifixion. Instead, the New Israel, the Church, is established by Christ, built on secure rock. 

The reading from St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is put into the context of Christ coming at the end of time. Paul tells the Thessalonians they should abound in love for one another, “so as … to be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.”  Exactly what this second coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones looks like is the central idea of today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke. Jesus makes a, perhaps for us, unexpected move. He starts by describing, in stark terms, what will happen when he comes again: signs will be seen throughout the day and night: in the sun, the moon, the stars and the earth; nations will be in chaos; people will die of fright. At that moment, the Son of Man will appear, coming in a cloud down from heaven, with power and glory. This is the day of wrath described in one of the most influential works in music history, the Dies Irae. Our response to this is not, however, fear and dread, but raising our heads because those will be the signs of our final redemption, when Earth will pass away, and be replaced by a new Earth, which has God visibly at its heart, as described in the final chapter of the book of Revelation. 

There is, however, a caveat. These two arrivals of Christ in history and at the end of time are not just facts of faith that we passively assent to. Instead, they require that we also receive Christ into our hearts: they require us to be conformed to the image of Christ so that we can receive His glory with Him at the end of time. After telling his disciples, and therefore us, to raise our heads high when he comes again, Jesus warns us. Our hearts should not “become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life.” In order to raise our heads high at his coming, and not shrink in fear of judgement, we must “be vigilant at all times and pray that (we) have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent and to stand before the Son of Man.”  A similar idea is present in the second reading. The coming at the end of time is not really the essential point St. Paul is making. He is instead using our need to appear holy and blameless before Christ when he comes again as the context for his exhortation that the Thessalonians should abound in love for one another and should keep ever more strongly to the conduct the Apostles, including St. Paul, had taught them. 

This leaves a need for us to prepare for Christ’s coming at the end of time, to prepare for Him a place in our hearts, and to prepare for the Incarnation, as Jeremiah and the prophets of the Old Testament did. This leaves a space for Advent as a penitential season, which is why I am currently wearing purple vestments, and why we did not sing the Gloria at the beginning of Mass. Penitence requires that we express sorrow for our sins, offering them up to Christ, in particular through the sacrament of Confession, and fortifying ourselves against sin. Alongside prayer and almsgiving, one important way this fortification against sin can be done is through bodily mortification: in particular fasting. Then, when the day of judgment comes, and it will always be unexpected, we will be able to raise our heads high and not be found wanting. 

Homily from Saturday, November 27, 2021

This is from Saint Ambrose, Doctor of the Church and great bishop of Milan. He says, speaking of Our Lady: “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit after conceiving a son; Mary was filled before. ‘You are blessed,’ said Elizabeth, ‘because you have believed.’ You too are blessed, because you have heard and believed. The soul of every believer conceives and brings forth the Word of God and recognizes His works. May Mary’s soul be in each of you to glorify the Lord. Let her spirt be in each of you to rejoice in the Lord. Christ has only one mother in the flesh, but we all bring forth Christ by faith. Every soul, free from contamination of sin and inviolate in its purity can receive the Word of God.” May the Holy Virgin Mary pray for us, to hear the Word, understand it, and conceive in ourselves the Holy Word of God.

Homily on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2021

Ten lepers… only one gives thanks, the unlikely one, the Samaritan. Just like the Good Samaritan was the unlikely source of charity to the robber’s victim. God is full of surprises, and so are human beings. Some from who we expect the least give the most.  

I have been teaching for 24 years. Back when I began, now and then a student would say thank you. One student said Thank you to every teacher as he left the class room every day. That was pointed out by the school in our letter of recommendation to the colleges he applied to. His gratitude was unusual and made him stand out. That was then; this is now. Today, everyday almost every student says thank you as they leave class. Although it takes time, perhaps gratitude is contagious. God gives us time. God is good…all the time. 

I’ve heard preachers imagine what happened with the other nine lepers. They imagined that as they got closer to the priests to whom they were to show themselves, the sores and rot of leprosy began to reappear on their bodies. They were unhealed because of their lack of gratitude. But I think that is all wrong. If God were like that we’d all be in big trouble. We do take things for granted. That is unfortunately human.   

When was the last time I thanked God for fresh air? …Or for that matter, the ability to breath it after 25 years of smoking? When was the last time I thanked God for being born in the USA and not in Afghanistan or Haiti? Our tendency is to think we are entitled to all kinds of good things we never think about. Are we grateful for bad things, from which God’s grace can draw good? How about for enemies, that make us work harder and better? How about for insults, that hopefully keep us humble? Or sick friends and relatives who demand our attention and care, which keep us from focusing on ourselves? We know that all things work for good for those who love God. What if those other nine lepers, having suffered from being outcasts and pariahs, were moved to give food and other help to lepers still suffering from the disease?  

Gratitude is an attitude, not an event. It is lived, not done. Today is a day to thank God for our many blessings, those we realize and those we don’t. But most of all we thank God for being God and for trusting us with the gift of life. Eucharist means thanksgiving. So we thank God in this Mass for becoming one with us in Jesus Christ, …for giving us eternal life earned through the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. May we be grateful not just in our prayerful words, but in our actions especially on behalf of those who do not share in our many blessings.  

And lest I forget, from all of us in the Monastery, thank God for you, and your being here to celebrate this Thanksgiving Eucharist with us. 

Homily of Wednesday, November 24, 2021

In the readings at the end of the church year, this church year, always, we emphasize judgment and condemnation and the suffering brought on by infidelity to the Gospel. And that’s important. We have never lived in a culture that has so celebrated itself, that was so self-indulgent, complacent, full of itself. And we have absorbed that culture; the church has absorbed that culture. So, it’s celebrated itself; it is full of self-indulgence and every sort of stupidity and frivolity, claiming it’s the Gospel. The Gospel is the Gospel. It is a hard and demanding thing, but it calls us to true happiness, true joy, true transformation. The world loves to talk about all these things, of joy and happiness, etc., but it can’t really offer them. So, it offers a fake joy, a fake happiness. It celebrates nothingness and mediocrity and sham and sin and evil, and we do too. Because we are absorbed by the culture we are in, to a great extent. So, we are called at the end of this church year, we are called at the beginning of Advent which begins soon, to look at ourselves, to examine ourselves. Are we really faithful members of the church, followers of Jesus Christ, followers of the Gospel? Or are we faux members, false members? The joy and happiness we seek cannot be found if it’s false, it’s phony, it’s artificial, it’s self-sufficient in the worst sense of that word. And therefore it cannot give true life, true happiness. Because only in the gospel can we find this true happiness, this true life, which is opposed to the world, to the joys and self-satisfaction’s the world offers in so many cases. However good the world may be, untouched by sin, untouched by human selfishness and greed, stupidity and self-indulgence. The person, the many people, who knew that are the people we celebrate today, the Vietnamese martyrs. Saint Andrew and the many thousands of others died for the faith, the Christian faith, the Catholic faith. They estimate, between about 1620 and the 20th century, 130,000 Vietnamese died for the faith, martyrs for the faith. Saint Andrew who we celebrate in particular, along with all of the other martyrs, died by beheading. He did not do that for no reason. He realized, all these other tens of thousands of people realized, that the only true happiness, the only true life, is to be found in Jesus Christ and his Gospel. Any other false happiness, false joy, was just that. We are called to a great life, but not by self-indulgence. We are called to a great life and happiness and joy, but not by stupidity and delusion and sham and phoniness. We are called to be followers of Jesus Christ and then once we possess him, and the fullness of that reality, true joy, true happiness, we can give it to others. But not until then. 

Homily of Tuesday, November 23, 2021

The reason we commemorate Pope Clement I today - he lived around the year 90-100 - is we have the first, what we think, the first solid historical evidence of the exercise of papal authority, in a letter to the church in Corinth. They were having their problems, and it was a very kind, very gentle, father-like letter, directing them to do thus and so. And for that the emperor had him executed; for just being a Christian. A main charge against Christians was that they were atheists. They did not believe in the gods. And the great Stone came, and smashed all the great monuments of the empires: China, India, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia, Egypt; Alexander, Ceasar. Lovely ruins, one on top of the other. We have the ruins of the Soviet empire. We are reading about it now in our supper readings. It’s called The Abandoned Remains of the Gulag. You still can go and see the camps. We now at the moment have a resurgence of China under there Red Dynasty. Yeah, how long this one is going to last I don’t know. But what Pope Clement was talking about was not how we rearrange the stones and the bricks. What he was talking about was eternity, the eternity of God, that like a mountain will crash all our human efforts and will last forever. There is the true source of being. It is not waving your fist around, and guns, and if we move around the stones and the machinery this will create a better place for us, in time and space, and thus change our hearts. No, it’s the other way around. Our hearts and change are with God for eternity. The great revolution, as a number of Catholic historians have been trying to tell us, example Christopher Dawson, a great revolution of history is not people with fists and guns running around, and what not. It is the Christian faith, faith in Jesus Christ. So when there’s a upheaval and helter-skelter and people screaming and running around and invading and what not, and earthquakes and plagues: yeah, that’s pretty much run of the mill, is what Jesus was trying to tell them. It is the rock of Christ, the love of Christ, being of Christ. Keep your eyes on that. For we do not exist simply in time in space, and with machinery and with computers and how we relate to each other. It is eternity and our relationship of love with an infinite and eternal being who loves us infinitely and eternally.

Homily of Monday, November 22, 2021

Saint Cecilia this is what the Roman breviary says about her: “The veneration of Saint Cecilia, in whose honor a basilica was erected at Rome in the 5th-century, has extended far and wide because of the Passion of Saint Cecilia (which is the account of her death) which presented her as a perfect example of Christian womanhood who preserved her virginity and suffered martyrdom for the love of Christ.” However, if you look her up in Donald Attwater, whom you can trust, he is very doubtful that she existed at all because there is no reference to her before the 4th or 5th century. in any case, the story is that she was betrothed to Valarian and they were married. The night of their marriage, she told Valerien that she had consecrated herself as a virgin to Christ and Valarian honored that and himself became a Christian, along with his brother Pontian and a friend Maximian.  Thise three were arrested and put to death. Donald Attwater says that’s historical, at any rate, that those figures were historical. Then, according to the Passion, they tried to smother St. Cecilia to death, and that failed. And so, she was finally executed by a “wound” to the throat, and survived three days and she died, as we honor her, as a martyr. That is about what Attwater at any rate would allow. However, he doesn’t mention this: in 1599, her tomb was opened in the Basilica of Saint Cecilia, and an incorrupt body of a young woman was found. And I think there was a wound in her throat. A drawing was made of that incorrupt body 9the body was reburied), and from it was made a marble sculpture of what had been found, and that is what you see under the altar in the Basilica of St. Cecilia today. And for me, that’s quite enough. I think that, yes, there she is. And she is the patroness of musicians because in her passion there is mention of organs, the musical instruments, and that she sings to God in the course of the account of her Passion, So, may she pray for us and keep us faithful, to be faithful to Christ as she was. 

Homily for the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe 
(Daniel 7:13 –14;  Revelation 1: 5–8 ;  John 18: 33b–37)

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King. In today’s Gospel, the Jews shrewdly managed to turn a religious charge into a political question.  They denounced Jesus, not as a spiritual leader, but as a revolutionary plotting against Caesar by declaring himself the King of the Jews.  In this way they contrived to see Jesus condemned to death by Roman authority and crucified, unwittingly fulfilling the prophecies and making Christ known as King precisely in his Passion. Jesus always refused to be proclaimed king because people thought only in terms of an earthly kingdom.    However, when he entered Jerusalem in triumph, he accepted the acclimation as King-Messiah.  

Now, in today’s Gospel, he acknowledges before Pilate that he is truly a king, but making it clear that his reign is not an earthly one. The time has come for him to reveal himself for who he is: the Alpha and the Omega; the origin and goal of the entire universe, as the Book of Revelation names him. He tells Pilate “I came to testify to the truth”.  The truth he speaks is the Father’s love for the world, which the Son represents in his life, death, and Resurrection.  His Cross will be proof that the Father loves his creation so much that he permits even this to happen. The inscription Pilate places on the cross in the three world languages of that time unwittingly proclaims at least a part of the truth to everyone: “Jesus Christ – King of the Jews”.  

The Jews, indeed, were awaiting a king, a Messiah who they foresaw as Yahweh moving among his people.  Basing their expectations particularly on the prophets and the Psalms, they looked to this long-awaited deliverer to accomplish four great actions. He would gather the scattered tribes; he would purify the Temple in Jerusalem; he would decisively deal with the enemies of Israel, and, finally he would reign as Lord of heaven and earth. After Pentecost, the first followers of Jesus were startled to find that he had in fact accomplished these four tasks, but in infinitely more comprehensive and completely unexpected ways.  

First, when Jesus emerged, preaching in the villages surrounding the Sea of Galilee, he had a simple message: “The kingdom of God is at hand.” (Mk 1:15)  Jesus’ first audience would have understood the term “kingdom of God” as meaning something very specific.  They would have understood that “the tribes are being gathered”. Israel, believing itself chosen by God to be a magnet of right worship for the rest of humanity, considered itself Yahweh’s gathering point for “all tribes of the earth”. But Israel, repeatedly unfaithful to its call, had become a scattered nation.  Jesus was telling them that the time had finally arrived for the in-gathering of the tribes into a family once again.  

But for them there was a problem.  Jesus seemed to be upsetting every social convention.  He ate with sinners.  He spoke publicly to women.  He even touched the diseased and the dead. In fact, this man who described himself as the “Good Shepherd” was deliberately breaking up even the most revered social and religious traditions if they threatened to take precedence over this flock he was gathering: the new Israel whose members (including us) would be called to live a very different kind of life and to be a lighthouse for the world, living epistles for all mankind to read. And he shocked them even more deeply at the climax of his ministry when he came to Jerusalem for the last time.  He immediately entered the Temple precincts and, with a “whip of cords” he drove the money changers out and overturned their tables. To do and say such things in the Temple of Jerusalem was incredibly shocking to Jews of that time, for whom the Temple was everything.  It was the center of political, cultural and religious life.  Even more, it was the dwelling place of God on earth; the one and only place where “right praise” was deemed possible.  The people of Israel felt themselves shaped according to the law of right worship, and derivatively by the laws of right behavior.  

When asked for a sign to justify this outrageous act he answered, speaking of himself:  “Destroy this temple and in three days I’ll raise it up” (Jn 2: 19). It was Israel’s tradition was that one would have come to the Temple for instruction, healing and forgiveness through sacrifice.  With Jesus the sacred shifts from a thing to a person.  He presents himself as the true temple, the definitive source of teaching, healing and forgiveness.  In all this Jesus was not so much eliminating the Temple as redefining it, indeed relocating it to his own person. He himself has become the sacred place where faithful Israel and faithful Yahweh come together: a temple of prayer “for all, nations” (Is 56:7).  Our incorporation in Christ at our Baptism, as members of his Mystical Body, makes each of us a new creature, with a new destiny, and a new nature, becoming what Israel only dreamed of: models of holiness to the whole world.  

So Jesus, as Yahweh moving among his people, gathered the tribes and cleansed the Temple.  How did he finally settle accounts with their enemies? In the course of its history Israel had been enslaved by the Egyptians, harassed by the Philistines, hounded by the Amalekites, overrun by the Assyrians, exiled by the Babylonians, humiliated by the Greeks and dominated by the Romans.  For the Jews, this was not just a political problem.  It was a profoundly theological one.  Had God abandoned his people?  Where was the great Davidic Warrior promised by the prophets?  When would the longed-for day come when God, who had fought mightily for his people against the Egyptians, return again to bare his mighty arm? We can hardly imagine a less likely way for this Davidic Warrior to have arrived:  a helpless infant born in a cave, too weak to hold up his own head, in stark contrast to the mighty powers of evil he came to confront, but a king just the same, one whose crown would be a crown of thorns.  Many rejected Jesus as the Messiah because they looked for someone who would deliver them from their worldly masters, the Romans.  What blinded them was that they disregarded the fact that that their worst enemies, the ones he came to save them from, were their own sins.  So they could hardly conceive of anything but a political and military kingdom and certainly not anything like a kingdom “not of this world” (Jn 18:36). 

An infant asleep in a manger, a container used to feed farm animals; those with eyes to see, encounter the true infant-king - one who will not be concerned with being fed but rather one who will offer his life as food for others. Here we come to understand that true kingship is not about worldly domination but about radical self-sacrifice. At the climax of his life, this child, come of age, will say to his followers, “This is my body, which will be given for you (Lk 22:19). And almost immediately the decisive battle will begin, culminating when this Davidic Warrior will decisively confront the true enemies of Israel.  The final battle would be joined not in an open field, but on a cross, where Jesus assumed all the sins of the world in the infinite ocean of his divine mercy. In dying he destroyed our death and in rising he restored our life.  That’s how this nonviolent warrior fought and conquered. And finally, as we’ve seen, Israelite tradition anticipated that Yahweh would reign as Lord and King of all nations.  In the light of the Resurrection the first Christians understood that this great work had indeed been accomplished and that he reigns precisely in the Person of Jesus. 

In the letters St. Paul wrote to the tiny Christian communities that he had founded he spoke often of Iesous Kyrios (Jesus the Lord).  This can sound blandly “spiritual” to us, but in Paul’s time and place this was a very dangerous thing to say, because a common watchword of the era was Kaiser Kyrios (Caesar the Lord).  It was the way one signaled one’s uncompromising loyalty to the Roman emperor, the only one to whom final allegiance was due.  Paul’s message was that Jesus, the crucified Messiah, was Lord and King, not Caesar.  It’s easy to see why he spent so much time in jail.  

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. He is king.  We’re his kingdom.  This king is a Father who created us, a Son who re-created us, and a Spirit who lives within us. When we pray the Our Father, we say, “Thy kingdom come” and in the same breath, “Thy will be done”.  That’s our sanctity in a nut shell: our willing God’s will. And that means that his kingdom is first in our hearts and then in our lives and works.  That order is crucial.  Virtuous acts, works performed out of love for God, construct his kingdom in our hearts first; and only then in the world outside. This was not so with the Pharisees.  Confronted time and again by Jesus, they were really the lax, less stringent ones.  They demanded nothing but outwardly exact deeds. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who gathered the tribes, cleansed the Temple, destroyed the power of our enemies and now reigns as King of the Universe, asks of us far more:  our Christian holiness. 

Homily of Saturday, November 20, 2021

God is an infinite and eternal being, God is love, and can and does love each of us, most intimately, greatly, directly. Which is the point Christ is trying to make. God is not some great theological premise, intellectual argument. God is not “a tale told by a fool full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” God is love, and our faith is a response to that grace, to that love of God, that intimacy between God and our souls. That is the point here of the gospel today. …King Edmund: if you have ever heard of the town of Bury Saint Edmunds in England, that is his tomb. It was the time of the Vikings. You all know, from the movies, about the raids. They show up in a ship, they go around. But this was the time called The Great Army: the Vikings came in a swarm and for several years went up and down England, slaughtering, burning, enslaving - mostly slaughtering. This went on for several years and they wouldn’t leave! This is why Saint Edmund is the patron saint of pandemics - sound familiar? He was defeated in battle. They tied him to a tree and told him give up Christ, worship Oden, worship the great gods, worship Thor. He said no. For him, God was not a theological exercise or an intellectual book , but that warm intimacy of love, of two beloveds. The Vikings, of course, were a tad upset by his intransigence and they shot him full of arrows and then chopped off his head. So, yes there can be a price to pay. Like the man said, “Love hurts.” As we go out there today, let us try to respond to that love of God as best we can.

Homily of Thursday, November 18, 2021

In today’s world, I think the greatest amount of evil is done by people, and the least amount of good is done by people, because they want to be like everyone else. It’s a very strong human desire, conformity. And it is certainly true of the crowd and the herd, that one is a lot safer. It is certainly true that in the crowd one will not be punished as being a strange or an odd person, a marginal fellow, etc. There are plenty of rewards for being in the “In-crowd” or in the crowd in general. And nothing to be gained by being on the outside, being the odd person out. And that’s very understandable. But it is also deadly. We see today in the Book of Maccabees, where the Maccabees realize that conformity leads to apostasy, which leads to spiritual death, eternal death. And they decide it is better to live according to the Law than to die according to the law, than to conform to what is given to them. And their reward will follow. In today’s gospel, we see also something else. The great danger of conformity is complacency. The more we conform, the more complacent we become, the more self-satisfied, the more we don’t realize certain things, because we have become children of this age, in this place. And, our Lord weeps for the great city of Jerusalem because they don’t see what will happen to them, because of their complacency. They will be laid under siege by the Romans in the year 70, and they will be destroyed and killed. And those who aren’t destroyed and killed will be sold into slavery. They did not know the day of their visitation, the very time of their visitation. They are so complacent they couldn’t see that they will be judged and judged severely for their hypocrisy, for their sin, for their self-indulgence, etc. And all this is very appropriate to today’s feast, the feast of Saint Rose Philippine Duchesne, one of the early members of the Society of the Sacred Heart, an order of nuns. She was a French woman who was born before the revolution; she died in 1852. And she was inspired to come to America, which was really difficult. She was working, as they say, “out of her comfort zone” in coming to America, to the Midwest of those days, in 1818 and following. It was very primitive, very austere, very demanding. And she was French; she didn’t even know English that well, so it was really difficult. I’m sure there were many temptations to conform in all sorts of ways, in France and also in America. But she was faithful to the ideals of her order, of the nuns, of the gospel itself. And so, she became a great saint. That should be for all of us the example that we should take from today’s reading, and from her life: there is nothing to be gained by conformity of that sort, and everything to lose. We lose not only eternal life: we lose even in this life.

Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (November 14, 2021)

A time unsurpassed in distress! You might think the first reading has a very prophetic message. Michael takes charge and that begins a time filled with disasters. Hopefully that doesn’t have anything to do with me. Technically, the message is not prophetic but apocalyptic, which is what the scriptural genre of prophecy grew into. Nine years ago, the day after Hurricane Sandy hit, the "New York Daily News" had a front-page spread picturing the hundred homes at Breezy Point in Queens destroyed by fire during the storm. The headline read, "Apocalypse New York." The Apocalypse descended on Paradise, CA in 2018, when it was destroyed by a catastrophic wildfire. There is a saying that all politics is local; well, all Apocalypses are local too. These pandemic days, accompanied by global warming and violent weather incidents have had a lot of people talking about the end times – dates, times and portents.

"Apocalypse" is derived from the Greek, "to lift a veil." When we do "lift a veil" we are liable to discover hidden things and that’s what some believe about apocalyptical writings. This kind of literature is filled with mysterious signs, extravagant language, visions, cosmic events and descriptions of destruction. People have interpreted readings like these in many different ways. There was Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster, author and evangelist who said the world would end on October 21, 2011. It didn’t. That was harmless enough. But there was one strange sect whose members chose to work at the nuclear labs in Los Alamos. They figured they would work to hasten the end by helping develop the nuclear weapons to do the job! Others, of a similar fundamentalist mentality, are working in Israel to promote the building of a 3rd Temple, which would start a cataclysmic Armageddon-like war. Some others have ridiculed attempts to protect the environment since they doubt there would be future generations to enjoy it – because "Jesus is coming and soon!" ----

These are just some of the extreme responses to what some believe is the message of apocalyptical passages like the ones we heard today. A big downside of a fundamentalist interpretation is a distrust of any human efforts to bring about peace and unity among people. Those who buy into it have a hands-off attitude, convinced that God will soon bring about an end to all human efforts and accomplishments. They think Jesus will miraculously intervene to rescue the "saved" and destroy everybody else. We in the Church, on the other hand, express faith and hope as we pray and work to bring about good in the world. We know God works with and through our efforts to live our lives according to the reign of God, the way that Jesus proclaimed.

We look forward to a new world with God as its center. So with that vision we are committed to cooperate with God’s loving plan for humanity revealed to us by Jesus. Apocalyptical literature is not about predicting future events, nor does it contain secrets that only certain insiders can interpret. God isn’t playing games with us, hiding vital information for just a few chosen ones. Rather, this type of Biblical literature gives us insights into the times it was written & a vision for our present days. The book of Revelation and other apocalyptical literature do reveal times of great distress & persecution for believers. And we know such times do happen. The Christian martyrs and victims of the Holocaust show us that. But after all that, the bottom line is a message of real hope. God is not oblivious or indifferent to people in their troubles. God’s goodness will triumph, despite any present appearances.

Whatever happens in the future, God is trustworthy and all who believe can draw strength, courage and patience from the message we hear in His word. This Gospel we just heard is from a section of Marks Gospel called the “little apocalypse” to distinguish it from the final book of the New Testament. In this passage Jesus is coming close to the end of his public ministry. He can sense the forces gathering against him and his fragile band of followers. He has been predicting his passion and death. But like us, Jesus is human. When someone prepares for impending death they pay attention & attend to those they love. If we sense the end is near, we try to say our farewells; things we may have wanted to say, but never got around to. And, of course, one day we each will face our own apocalypse, our own death and judgement. Even without an impending crisis, you know your parents are aware of their responsibility to advise and guide you for your future. They try to prepare you for the possible difficulties life will throw at you. Surely you have experienced that, even if you roll your eyes sometimes at your parents. So St. Mark wrote his gospel for the people of his time who had experienced an apocalypse of their own. Their beloved Jerusalem & its sacred Temple had been destroyed. Fanatics in his own community were talking about the imminent end of the world. Their world was shifting and Mark needed to convey to the church

Jesus’ predictions, warnings and, most of all, his reassurance to help them persevere in their faith and sustain them in hope. In our own times we face our own trials and tests as we live out our lives as Christians or any believer. Our commitment to Christ or belief in God can cause us discomfort and even suffering. Some people will mock us, call us ignorant or superstitious. This gospel encourages us to remain strong and faithful during such times and assures us that Jesus will be revealed as the real King and Lord of all creation. Those who keep faith will come to a final vindication of all we trusted in – but did not yet see in our lifetimes. The kinds of disaster pictured by apocalyptic writing should arouse in us the awareness that we are part of a larger Body, and there are others in that Body who are suffering in ways we can only imagine. 

In our world, in our nation there are people in great distress right now, today. The question then becomes: "Am I doing anything to add to the suffering of others, or not doing what I can to alleviate suffering?" Finally, Church calendar places these readings just before the last day of the Church year and just before Advent and Christmas. It's a time of endings, and new beginnings. Jesus said: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." Those words, or teachings, give us a way of living that embraces actions of peace and community. As we look to Jesus as savior, we should remember the Incarnation…that it is not a one-time event of long ago. It is not limited but embraces all creation and all time. Jesus is here in this Church today, in the Eucharist and in us.

Today the Holy Spirit gives life to the Body of Christ, to us. We are the "Divine Intervention" to relieve and heal the pain of others in the world today. We look to Jesus, who will "come again". Jesus who continues to suffer & die in his people, His Mystical Body, will raise us up. There is hope. There is resurrection. There is new life. As Jesus says in another part of the Gospel, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear.” Let those people be us. Let those people include you. 

Homily of Saturday, November 13, 2021 (All Saints, O.S.B.)

A Saint, an inhabitant of heaven, someone who very much had God in their lives: their beloved, they wanted to spend time in the presence of their beloved. To be with, to take on the characteristics of their beloved. God is one; cannot be divided. There God is – the relationship. In this gospel, Jesus is pointing out to us that relationship of love between the two beloveds, God and us. If you want to know what the difference is between, say, a Saint with a big S and the rest of us, I think it is that they do not pray, “Lord, be with me!” Rather, they pray, “Lord, let me be with You!” Let’s all try to have that relationship of prayer where we want to be with our beloved directly, in that Presence.

Homily of Thursday, November 11, 2021

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me and has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the broken hearted.” It is with these words of Isaiah in the first reading that Our Lord speaks, towards the beginning of his public ministry, in the Gospel of Luke. This is how he announces that he is the Messiah, and is the one who manifests the power of the life, and also judgment, of God. This power, this life, this ability he gives to his disciples through the grace of baptism, particularly today’s great saint, Saint Martin of Tours, fourth-century Latin, Roman. He was a convert from paganism who became an early monk and later bishop, who manifested repeatedly the power of God, in signs and wonders, the miracles, and many other abilities of Jesus in his time in France (present day France, in Tours was his monastery). That power he gave to a disciple of the fourth-century He gives to all of his disciples. This capacity, ability to achieve, the power: by a life of true virtue, holiness, prayer – like Saint Martin we celebrate today. Saint Martin is also very famous for his great works of mercy. So it is very appropriate that the gospel of Matthew is the great vision of judgment, in which you have the sheep and the goats. And what you are judged by is not by your belief, but what you have done. What good works you have done, what works of mercy you have done: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc. So we are called to an extraordinary life of responsibility; it is a possibility, but also a call to a great life of transformation, a manifestation of the power of God’s own life, as we see in the life of Saint Martin. Let us ask Saint Martin for this grace and power to imitate him who imitated the Lord. Let us do all things in our power to imitate the Lord, including the works of mercy.

Homily of Monday, November 8, 2021

“If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” (Lk 17:6). Some people feel rather badly about themselves at this point saying, “Well, I’ve never uprooted a mulberry tree.” Elsewhere in the gospels, it says that with faith the size of a grain of mustard you will tell a mountain to go cast itself into the sea and it will. The greatest of saints– ever hear of any of them uprooting trees or mountains? No. The point of faith is that we are sent the love of God in our life. The relationship of love between ourselves; and grace, the presence of God in our lives. God is one. God cannot be divided. God is an infinite and eternal being. That says even the smallest bit of love we have for God in that relationship, there is God. In his entirety, in all of his love, and with this power we can throw into the sea the mountains, the burdens, the problems of our lives, with the assistance and love of God. And you may ask, then, “Well how do I do this in my life?” I quote to you from Saint Therese of Lisieux, who said: “Do the smallest of things with the greatest of love.” And Saint John said in his letter: “God is love.“ And since in this homily I have been so busy quoting other people, I’ll finish it by quoting Dostoyevsky: “With God, all things are possible. Without God, all things are permitted.”

Homily of the Thiry-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (Movember 7, 2021)

Recently, through the kindness and generosity of one of my brothers, I was able to see a show I would not normally be able to see, a show you may have heard of. It’s called “The Squid Game.” I gather it is very popular. It is, I gather, an international sensation, a global phenomenon. Not just abroad, but here in the United States. I read an article about a month ago saying that, even then, one out of every four Americans had seen this show, which is quite amazing. In fact, if you look at the ratings of the show compared to other successful shows, it is seven times more successful than the hottest episode of “Game of Thrones.” That’s a lot of people, a lot of people in this country, a lot of people abroad. This is a show people know about. When I asked my students in class if they had seen the show, I was quite stunned, quite surprised, to see a vast majority had. That surprised me a little. I didn’t think it could be that popular, but I guess it is. Why is the question. Is that the kind of show I would normally watch? I love Korean shows. I see Korean movies all the time, Korean dramas, etc. But this is rather bleak. Dystopic. I am not terribly interested in shows where a lot of very, very, very desperate people pursue scads of money, tons of money. It doesn’t interest me. I’m not very interested in a show where out of hundreds of people, there can only be one true winner, one successful person. Everyone else is eliminated. Doesn’t interest me. I would not normally be interested in a show where to be eliminated means to be eliminated - quite literally - like with a bullet in the brain, dead, gone, nada, nothing. 

This is a very bleak show, I gathered, but since everyone was watching it I thought I should too, to see what it’s about. And I have to say that though I’m used to really good production values in Korean productions, used to really excellent acting, really good writing, this blew me away. And while it’s true that no show is equal to the hype about it, this was pretty close. This was an impressive show. It’s not just about selfishness and greed, though there’s plenty of that. It’s not just full of violence and death, though there is, God knows, plenty of that. Plenty of death, plenty of violence, plenty of selfishness and greed. It’s actually much more. It’s extremely philosophical, which may help to explain why it’s so terribly successful worldwide and even in this country, and why even I liked it and got hooked on it. Even though it’s not my kind of show, it’s very philosophical. In the last episode, it makes everything very clear, very explicit: why, or what is the truth that it’s trying to talk about. The main character answers a question: why, after all you have experienced (and he’s experienced a lot - a lot of death, a lot of violence, a lot of everything - why after all you have experienced do you still believe in the goodness of man, in the goodness of human nature? And God knows, plenty of stuff in the show makes one doubt that. 

It’s a very philosophical question, very important question, very germane to each of us. I think all throughout history the problem of evil has been THE problem. The Manichaeans in the ancient world answered it by saying well the world is evil since an evil God runs it. That’s why there’s so much evil, pain, suffering, death, gore: you name it; been there, done that. Everybody experiences it; it’s bad. In the middle ages, even with the Christian victory, Christian triumph, you would think, one of the most successful books of the entire middle ages, from the late 12th century, was a book by Lothar de Segni, who becomes, later, Innocent III, Pope Innocent III, and the book is called “On the Misery of the Human Condition.” There are over 700 manuscripts of this text, which is incredible, one of the biggest best sellers of the century, in the medieval world, in the Middle Ages. Now, it is true, he did plan to write a book called “On the Dignity of Man,” but in fact never got around to doing so – I think it that is important, very important. One could think that this world is ruled by an evil genius or by a malevolent demon or by some evil God, certainly that was brought up by Descartes as a possibility in the 17th century. The problem of evil. The problem of evil. 

Now what does that have to do with today’s readings? Everything. Everything. The reason why Elijah could do the incredible things he could do, multiply food for that widow and for her child (I guess you would say); why that widow, that poor widow, gave her all her two cents, everything she had. Why she could give it is because there is a good God. The world fundamentally is a good place, despite its evils, its difficulties, its trials, its horrors, its death. There is meaning out there. There is significance. There is goodness in the cosmic order itself, is fundamentally, despite all of its limitations, difficulties and challenges and evils. And that is important to know. It’s a great show - I would watch it. It’s really very profound, really intense acting, really wonderful scripts, beautiful execution, wonderful production values: it is worth watching. But that is the great question: why evil is there; how is it there? Who can barely believe in humanity’s goodness, in the goodness of the world, the goodness therefore ultimately really of God himself. And you can go through history and try to find examples of this. There are plenty of miracles. There are apparitions. There are supernatural occurrences that point to a good God. There’s some other stuff one can look at and talk about and describe. but on a whole one has to say, if you know human history even a little bit, it is rather bleak. It is extremely bleak. And the more you know, the bleaker it becomes. Do you have the chance of God‘s goodness, of God’s blessedness, of the supernatural, something more, something better? To give meaning and purpose to all we do and make suffering understandable and doable? 

Of course, the best way, despite these other things, these other indicators, is to know God personally. And that’s up to each of us. It’s nice to know about Fatima and the apparitions there, the dancing sun. It’s nice to know about these other things that point to God’s goodness. But so much of history is the opposite: pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance, the triumph of evil, death. The best way is to know God personally, about a life of true virtue, about a life of prayer. One can know, each of us can know God personally. We can say: I know there is a good God; I know the world makes sense. It’s not a cosmic disorder; it is not, as an atheist says, just random stuff and then there’s nothing else. It can make sense. It can be meaningful. It can be purposeful. It is good, but it’s up to us as individuals to pursue that reality, to live a life of virtue, to live a life of intense prayer, to know God powerfully, personally, objectively. So, not a “warm fuzzy,” not an “inkling,” but a real presence. Each of us can do that. God made this possible by the Incarnation of his Son, by the redemption won by Jesus on his cross. And we can know the Father. We can know him powerfully, intimately; the Holy Trinity, powerfully, intimately. But we have to do what we need to do. Nothing happens, usually nothing happens, cheap. If you want to know the good stuff, if you want to experience the good stuff, and find depth and meaning and purpose to your life, follow God, pursue God etc. 

It’s interesting that the people we find in “The Squid Game” as kind of death dealing reality - I mean hundreds die every game; there’s 456 people in the episodes that I saw: only one can survive. That’s a lot of dead people. This reality of God whose goodness can be known, but we have to pursue it the world, might be just random stuff chance… but some people write about “fortuna” (fortune) – some are lucky, some are unlucky - of course all of us are unlucky, because all of us die, all of us suffer, all of us in the end go into darkness (last I heard, unless you know something different). But you can have everything, even in this life to a great extent. We must pursue it. So it’s up to you, it’s up to you. Reality can be pretty grim, but reality can be far more profound, far more transforming or more incredible. It’s up to us. We can know the true God or not. We can go to the darkness full of joy and hope and expectation, full of trust, and make our life a better place because we do believe in all of this, we do trust. We do believe in humanity and the goodness of humanity, at least intrinsically. Or, like the people who created the game, this is a way to make life a little bit more interesting before we disappear, to bring fun, if you can believe it or not, fun, to our empty meaningless lives, since it has no purpose. To me, our life is more than just getting a little bit of fun and then disappearing into nothingness. Life has significance. Each of us, every one of us, has significance. If we pursue God, all of us can know God, or all of us can know the nothingness without God.

Homily of Saturday, November 6, 2021

 This is a few words of a prayer by the spiritual writer, now deceased, Anthony Bloom, Russian Orthodox Archbishop who worked most of his life in England: “We must not come to God in order to go through a range of emotions, nor to have any mystical experience. We must just come to God in order to be in his presence. If he chooses to make us aware of it, blessed be God. But if he chooses to make us experience his real absence, blessed by God again. Because, as we have seen, he is free to come near or not.

Homily of Wednesday, November 3, 2021

“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Such we hear in today’s gospel. There is no such thing as half-hearted saints. There is no such thing as moderate, at least as we understand the word, moderate saints. Moderate Saints, half-hearted Saints, don’t exist, not in the realm of God at least, in the realm of Jesus Christ. To follow Christ, we give everything we have to give, everything. And that’s important for us to know. What is it that we hold back? What is it that we don’t use? What is it that we reserve to our self, for our own use, our own pleasure, our own recreation, etc.? So, he demands everything. He also asks us to use our intelligence to have the resources to be the kind of saints we need to be: to spend sufficient time in prayer, preparing ourselves, focusing ourselves, having spiritual energy, supernatural grace to do the things we need to do. To be as radical as we would like to be. We have an excellent example in Martin de Porres, this early 17th-century Spanish American, Peruvian Saint; mulatto, half Spanish, part black, part Indian: a person inspired by the gospel to fulfill the gospel, who would spend many hours in intense prayer, especially in front of the Blessed Eucharist, the Holy Eucharist, to be the kind of saint that he could be. So he could help all these people in a life of charity, intense charity, aiding those who are suffering physical ills of every sort, but also spiritual ills. So we should be radical in our Christianity, as Martin de Porres was. We also should understand we need to have the proper resources to understand what we need to do, as we see in today’s gospel, to be the kind of saints we are called to be, to give ourselves to the spiritual life and the energy it makes possible, that radicalness that we see in the lives of the Saints. And Martin de Porres is a good example of both: he was totally radical in what he did, in helping and assisting others to become happier people, to deal with their sufferings and evils and boundaries and difficulties in this life. There are plenty of boundaries and difficulties in this life. And he spent the time in prayer and in spiritual devotion to be the saint he needed to be; used his intelligence in the service of Christ, and also his acts of charity and kindness and love and concern. Let us imitate this great saint. Let us ask this great saint for the prayers, the guidance, the graces etc., to be as radical as he was, and as thoughtful and preparatory as he was, and we will be another Saint Martin de Porres.

Homily of November 1, 2020 - Solemnity of All Saints  and Solemn Profession of Brother Benedict Maria  

Today we are celebrating. Every Eucharist is a celebration but today is special. We welcome among us fellow Benedictines, especially Abbot Gregory of Saint Louis Abbey. We welcome our brother priests and religious, our members of the board of regents, our oblates and friends, and especially the many friends of Brother Benedict, all of whom have come to celebrate with us. 

Today we celebrate All Saints. Saints are all those people who have attained the destiny for which God created all human beings. It is a destiny only we ourselves can prevent us from attaining. But the reason all these guests have joined us is today we are also celebrating one person’s taking a giant step forward in attaining that destiny, as Brother Benedict vows himself to a lifetime of prayer and work in pursuit of holiness. Our human experience of wholesome holiness is only possible through the mercy of God, mediated to us through Jesus Christ. So today we not only honor the Saints, but also our triune God who makes it possible for us, Brother Benedict and all the saints to actually become saints. The power and mercy of God are so inscrutable but they never cease.  

How incredible it is that a young man from the opposite side of the world, the Andaman Islands in India, should then find his way from Philadelphia to this…one of the smallest monasteries in the US. How wonderful it is that this talented young man with a bright future in information technology, who could earn a high salary and amass all the stuff our society offer; how wonderful that he decided no, that is not for me. Most people today have an undue attraction to material reality and an aversion to spiritual reality. What but the call of the Holy Spirit would move Br. Benedict to vow to spend the rest of his life here with us.  
  
A saint is someone who, like Jesus carrying his cross, when they fall, gets up and keeps trying. One of the desert fathers was asked, “What do monks do all day?” He answered, “We fall and get up. We fall and get up.” But Brother Benedict, you have amazed and impressed us all because you don’t ever seem to fall. You get along with everyone, everyone who meets you likes you. You always smile; we’ve never seen you angry or upset or sad. You never oversleep. You never miss prayers.  You get A’s in all your courses. You never complain or grumble. You are so unlike me! All of that is a great gift and a sign of holiness. But please remember you are not invulnerable or perfect yet. You will be further challenged and you will inevitably fall.  And when you do, just get up and smile and keep moving forward. All the Saints had their weaknesses and struggles. It is an inevitable truth that holiness and goodness will be actively opposed by evil. So all of us, who were created good by God, do struggle through this life. 

One way or the other, more or less, a human life is a time of distress, as the first reading this morning indicated. But today the Gospel tells us how we should all be in this life, how to become blessed and happy which means “saintly.”  Jesus tells us we can attain our destiny and this wholeness in our lifetime here. He tells us how to survive the time of great distress, by living the Beatitudes, a word which literally means ‘The Happinesses.”  They are not passive qualities. They are active in that they inform all our actions, and these actions make us the individuals we are. Poor in spirit means not chained to the money and stuff of this passing world. To mourn is to recognize the distress of this life, our fundamental separation from the true, the good and beautiful and the real pain it causes human beings. That is life as it is in our time. To be meek is to not be aggressive, self-assertive or self-righteous, but being unself-conscious and gentle with yourself and others. A hunger and thirst for righteousness is an interior passion to acquire all the moral virtues and to be passionate for justice for others. Mercy is the essential attribute of God, who throws our sins behind his back and ignores our brokenness when we turn to Him; so the merciful are Godlike and give and receive relief and forgiveness in abundance. Clean of heart: the clear of vision and heart are those who keep their hearts and eyes on the prize of God and eternity and are not corrupted by the glamour of evil. Peacemakers are restless and active, sowing all those things in St. Francis’ famous prayer, but above all sowing love and reconciliation. And those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness are those who willingly pay the price for doing the right things and living the truth in love. And in this world if you believe in God, no matter your religion, and if you truly love, you will be insulted and persecuted and you will suffer. And perhaps even more so if you give your life to Jesus Christ.  

All of these beatitudes, all these happinesses, are encompassed by the vows you will make today. So, ejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven for if you stay faithful to them you too will be a saint. You are vowing obedience. You know that obedience means to listen and then act, to listen with the ear of your heart to the voice of the Holy Spirit mediated through another who is bound by the same vow. Obedience is a great freedom that liberates you from the tyranny of the self. It is countercultural to say the least, and a great sign, a very needed sign to our world  which seems only to value and reward obedience to human voices and power, a world which seems to only value and reward love of, and commitment to, ones own self and interests. This vow is a very needed sign to our world which, because of such selfishness and short-sightedness, so often seems devoid of happiness and hope. You are vowing stability in unstable culture and world. To be stable is to be an immovable and unshakeable pillar of this community and monastery,   faithful for better, for worse,  in sickness and in health as long as you live. And you are vowing conversatio morum, which is to live the monastic way of life, which means not only to be poor and chaste and celibate, but it means you are vowing to continue every day working at and growing in holiness. And not because you are so very good, not because you are very important, or are very talented (although you are). 

It’s not because you are the best, but because God called you because He loves you that much, that He has mercy on you and so you will do his works and not yours. You are vowing to work at being a saint. What can we say other than you have made a great start. There are many people here to witness you make these vows. There are many people here to pray for you, that you succeed, that you enrich this monastery, this school, the whole church with your vocation. This is a tribute to you and a prayer of hope for the future. We are sorry your parents and family cannot be here to witness you making these vows, because your vocation, your faith and faithfulness began in your family.  

So we thank them for their gift of you to us. God is doing great things in you. May you cooperate with his gifts and his grace that you may lead others to God  and take you own place among  all the saints. Now you will make your vows. From the Fathers of the church on Holy Communion. The first, from St. Leo the Great, the pope in the fifth century, who said: “By Holy Communion we are changed into the flesh of Him who became our flesh.” And the second is from St. Ephraim the Syrian, a doctor of the church as is St. Leo, who said: “We feed on Thee, Lord, and drink Thee, not to consume Thee, but to live by Thee.”

Homily of the Thirty-Frst Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 31, 2021)

Today’s gospel is noteworthy because it is one of the very, very few places where Jesus compliments somebody, says “You got that right.” And he says to this scribe, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” He’s not there yet, but he’s not far from it. But the basic teaching of today’s gospel is for all of us, which is the teaching of the great commandments. Jesus sums up all the commandments that God has given us in two. One: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. That is the first commandment, the most important. The second important commandment is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There are those who have criticized Jesus and this teaching by saying: “You can’t command somebody to love someone. It’s impossible. People may fall in love, or get to love, but you can’t command it.” Well, there is an answer to that – I will tell you in a minute. The thing for us to learn, to get into our heads, and which you, students, and all of us, should remember is the most important thing you can learn in school or anywhere, is that there are these two commandments: Love God; Love your neighbor. And everything depends on them. If you learn those while you are here in school, you’ve done what you should do. Yes, you have to do other things as well, and we hope you will all get very high grades and learn a lot. But the really important thing for you to learn is that God is to be loved and that your neighbor is to be loved. 

So, then how do we love God? How do we love our neighbor? These two commandments are a summary of the commandments given in the Old Testament, which are all summarized in what we call the Ten Commandments. These are the Ten Commandments, which the Jews are supposed to follow, and which you and I are supposed to follow. These are the Ten Commandments, in an abbreviated form, to be sure. And you may ask why am I reading them? Because, if I try to do it from memory, if I stand up here and try to recite the commandments from memory, I will either get confused or leave one or two of them out. So I am reading them to you now. And the first is – and this is God speaking, telling us: I am the Lord your God, you shall not have strange gods before me. Strange gods would mean idols: Jupiter, Jove, Athena, Baal in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, the strange god, the god which we are tempted to put before God Almighty, is money. That’s an important thing to grasp. The second commandment is that you shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain. That is, do not use the name Jesus, the name God, as a curse word. It means, really, respecting, giving God respect, not forgetting, and giving Him respect. The third is: remember to keep holy the sabbath day, the Lord’s day. And that’s what we are doing now. If you say: why do we have to go to church? Why do we have to go to Mass? Yet again go through this every, every Sunday? Because it is a commandment. We are ordered, as it were, by God to keep holy the sabbath, and that’s the way Catholic Christians keep the sabbath. 

Now, those are the three commandments that go to God. The rest have to do with your neighbor. The first is: Honor your father and your mother. Now if you parents were here or are here, they would nod in approval – yes, honor your father and your mother. And you may think: ugh! But the day will come when you will expect your kids to honor you. The next one is: You shall not kill. I think we all get that. The sixth commandment is: You shall not commit adultery. That refers to sexual sins. The seventh commandment is: You shall not steal. And for people in school that includes cheating. You shall not steal other people’s work. You should not cheat. The eighth commandment: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Obviously, that’s in court. You should not go to court and tell lies and get somebody else in trouble. But it also means not to tell lies about other people in general. Leave people’s reputations alone. The ninth is: You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. And that means: don’t mess with other people’s marriages; leave them alone. And the tenth is: You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods. That is, I take it to mean, you shall not mess around with other people’s lives. Don’t destroy what they have worked for; don’t destroy their lives.

The first three are God’s commandments, how we honor Him. The remaining seven are how we honor our neighbor.

Homily of Friday, October 29, 2021

From the Fathers of the church on Holy Communion. The first, from St. Leo the Great, the pope in the fifth century, who said: “By Holy Communion we are changed into the flesh of Him who became our flesh.” And the second is from St. Ephraim the Syrian, a doctor of the church as is St. Leo, who said: “We feed on Thee, Lord, and drink Thee, not to consume Thee, but to live by Thee.”

Homily of Thursday, October 28, 2021

Today we honor two great saints, who legend says were martyred. We see in today’s gospel they were chosen by Jesus himself to be apostles: Simon the Zealot and Jude the son of James. Two great apostles, two great models, two great saints. What does it mean to be an apostle? To be chosen, to be sent, to know the Lord powerfully, to imitate him, to manifest his power because we do know him and imitate him. The world is full of many good people who do good things, but that is not sufficient. The world needs so much that even the best of us cannot achieve, cannot assist him: that’s why we have the power of God. That’s why God became man, why we should be truly apostles. We have been by our baptism made apostles. We were chosen, we have been sent. It is up to us to know the Lord. It is up to us to imitate the Lord, more and more so. The more we imitate him, the more we know him, the more his power comes to us and we are made better, and the world is made better. And the transfiguration of the world begins.

Homily of Monday, October 25, 2021

Saint Paul reminds us this morning that we are children of God, children by adoption, and we should live and walk, he says, as children, sons and daughters of God. This is one of the great themes of the preaching and teaching of Blessed Abbot Columba Marmion. This is what he says on that teaching: “Baptism is the sacrament of divine adoption and of Christian initiation. Baptism is like a spiritual birth, by which the life of grace is conferred upon us. By baptism we truly become the children of God and are incorporated with Christ.” (We become members of the body of Christ). Another quotation from Abbot Marmion: “It is by faith that divine life begins. Those who believe in His name are born of God. Whatsoever is born of God overcomes the world. Who is he that overcomes the world but the one who believes the Jesus is the Son of God? This intimate conviction of the divinity of Jesus Christ makes us throw ourselves at His feet like the man born blind. The just man lives by faith. ‘He that believes in me,’ says the Lord, ‘although he be dead, shall live.’”

Homily of Thursday, October 21, 2021

Jesus says he has come to cast fire on the earth, and most obviously that took place, so to speak, at Pentecost, when he sent the Holy Spirit, the gift of the Father, upon the apostles and the church is born. And then the apostles went forth, as it were, setting the world on fire with the gospel. And Jesus says here too that he has a baptism with which to be baptized, and surely that must be his passion, death, and resurrection. And if you look at Saint Paul, it may be from this idea in Our Lord’s own teaching that Saint Paul derived his teaching that in baptism we die and rise again with Christ. Of course, the baptism Jesus received from John the Baptist, and in the early church, was generally a baptism of submersion, which for Saint Paul is a symbol of death and resurrection. That should be true for us: if we have died with Christ and have been raised with him in our baptism – and again Saint Paul says if you have died with Christ and are raised with him – then your minds should be set on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father.

Homily of Wednesday, October 20, 2021

“At an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” The great Blaise Pascal once wrote that there are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason and to admit nothing but reason. One could also say there are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude the natural and to admit nothing but the natural. If we live in the horizon of eternity, we are always vigilant, awaiting the return of the Son of Man, the return of the Lord, the Second Coming, then we will use all of our natural gifts to their full capacity, all that God has given us, which the gospel refers to. And also live the supernatural reality to the fullest of our capacity, all that He can give us, the supernatural gifts. And that is the Christian life: to live fully natural lives, fully supernatural lives, the supernatural completing the natural, bringing us already in this life to eternity. So we must always be aware that any time, at any time, the Son of Man can return, and live in the arriving of that reality, not in fear of judgment, as it I could be at the beginning of our life, but it in expectation of completion. So if we live our lives fully naturally all that God has given us, and fulfill ourselves supernaturally, all that God can give us, then we will find happiness in the fullness of life and the vision of God.

Homily of the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 17, 2021)

Just before the Apostles and Jesus enter Jerusalem, James and John approach Jesus and ask to sit at his right and left hand in his glory. This seems like a ridiculous request to us, since we know how the story ends: crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. We know his glory is not found in a palace in Jerusalem, from which Jesus Christ rules the nations. For James and John, however, this would seem to be a legitimate request. Throughout Jesus’ ministry, at several key moments, He retreats from almost all of the Apostles, and takes only a chosen few with Him. When He goes up the mountain for the transfiguration, where He appears in his glory, before turning towards Jerusalem, he takes only Peter, James and John with him. After the last supper, when he goes to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, he again takes only Peter, James and John with him. These are three of his earliest disciples, all chosen to serve among the 12, and given leading roles. So, it is natural for James and John to ask Jesus how they will be rewarded for their closeness to Him. They have been two of his closest friends, will He commit to remaining close to them in His messianic glory in Jerusalem? Has he recognized their greatness?  

As happens frequently when Jesus is asked a question, He doesn’t really answer it. Instead, he takes the conversation to a deeper level in order to explain his mission, and prepare the Apostles for what was to come in Jerusalem. First, Jesus gets a commitment from James and John to share in his mission: to drink from His cup and be baptized with His baptism. Then, when the rest of the Apostles hear about the question James and John had asked, and, naturally, get angry at them, Jesus explains to all the Apostles the nature of greatness among them. Instead of greatness being based on an exercise of authority over others, as with Alexander the Great, or the Emperor Augustine, who exercised direct authority over great empires and great conquests, greatness among the Apostles will be based on service. This ties in directly to Christ’s mission: “the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Instead of seats in a palace, he offers them the cross. 

This point is made clearly in the Letter to the Hebrews, today’s second reading, where Jesus is described as the great High Priest. This is in contrast to the High Priests in Jerusalem that lasted until the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. At Jesus’ time, the high priests served an important function within Judaism. In addition to the authority they exercised over the people, whoever was high priest was the only person allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of the Temple. There, he would offer sacrifices for atonement for the sins of the people every year on Yom Kippur. However, before he could offer sacrifices for the sins of the people, he would first offer a sacrifice for his own sins. The great High Priest, Jesus Christ, offers a greater sacrifice: the offering of Himself, like us in all things but sin. He doesn’t need to offer sacrifices for his own sins, but instead takes on the sins of all and offers Himself, fully God and fully man. He performs the greatest service possible: reconciling man with God, and, therefore demonstrates his greatness. He came to serve, and give His life as a ransom for many, and, by doing so, shows his greatness to surpass all. 

This great mission of Christ is also spoken about in the book of the Prophet Isaiah. Interweaved in the text are 4 prophecies related to a figure known as the “Suffering Servant,” a figure we identify with Christ. The fourth is the longest, and most involved, and is the text of the first reading at the liturgy on Good Friday, when we commemorate the Passion of the Lord, the crucifixion of Christ. Today’s first reading is an excerpt from this passage. From our point of view, it is clear who and what it refers to: “through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear.” Through Jesus’ suffering on the Cross, all mankind is justified, and all their sins are taken up. Jesus gives up his life: the Word made Flesh, fully God and fully man, gives up his life, He suffers so that God’s will can be done in Him. Through this gift, given through the sacraments, his followers are brought into communion with Him. They not only sit at his right, but become part of His body, the Church. Again, through his suffering, and his bearing up of the sins of others, Jesus demonstrates his greatness. A greatness he offers to us through grace, his freely given gift. 

However, it is not enough for us to be passive to Christ’s sacrifice. We are also called to share in Christ’s greatness, a greatness that, as the Gospel indicates, is only found by imitating Christ’s mission by serving each other. So, how do we follow Him in this? What can we do to be great? How do we make offerings of ourselves for each other to the point of sharing in Christ’s greatness, of being made worthy not just of being at his right or left hand, as James and John wanted, but of being part of His very being, a member of His body, the Church? 

It’s going to look slightly different for each particular person and situation. We can, however, draw some general outlines. For some, the offering of themselves is made through lives of service offered to the Church as religious. These are demanding lives that require self-sacrifice to be lived successfully. In a little more than two weeks, you will witness Br. Benedict, God willing, taking his solemn vows, affirming the sacrifice he has made by joining this monastery and committing to living the Benedictine life here at Portsmouth Abbey for the rest of his life. They feature the service of prayer for the Church, and active apostolic works. There are lives of service offered by Priests, men who are ordained to follow the Apostles in ministering to the Church under the Bishops, the successors of the Apostles, and who act in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, to make present Christ’s sacrifice of Himself during the Mass. Of course, not being a member of a religious order or a priest does not exempt you from a life of service. The married life, in which the spouses give themselves totally to each other and to their children is a life of great sacrifice and service. There are many great saints who have been religious, many great saints who have been priests, and many great saints who have been married, but all have achieved that greatness by offering themselves fully with Christ for God and for their neighbors. 

There is one important caveat that must be mentioned. These great services, in particular the lives of service lived by religious, priests, and married men and women, are impossible purely on our own. They are nurtured by the grace of the sacraments, and grow out of a gift from Christ. We enter Christ and receive grace through the sacraments and through prayer. We cooperate with this grace in order to live lives of service for each other and for the Church. Through lives of service we grow in Christ, and share in his cross. By sharing in his cross, we become more capable of receiving the grace of the sacraments and prayer, and making a greater gift of ourselves. Over time, we grow into great saints. This is the life of sanctity and greatness that Christ has called us to.  

Homily of Monday, October 11, 2021

Pope John was, at the end of his life, almost universally called “Good Pope John” by everybody, and we honor him today. This is from one of his allocutions. “Love is all. Love is at the foundation of civilization. Love is the basis of all that Christ came to declare to the world. It is the command to love which distinguishes the Christian revelation from the doctrine of all other religions. In it is found the solution of all social problems, of all political. It is the keystone of the arch. When you hear all sorts of things announced by this leader or that, but no mention of love, be on your guard, my children. Beware. Without love, you may obtain temporary successes or victories, won by force, but afterwards, very soon, it will fall to the ground. This is been proved by our experience in recent years. Let us love the Lord. Let us love one another. One must know how to suppress the self and how to emphasize the unity of the social nature of man. Saint Thomas Aquinas says that man is a social animal, and this is true. Our own welfare is our brother’s welfare. It is that of others, of all men and women.”

Homily of the Tweny-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (October 10, 2021; 930am Mass)

What is that you desire? Some of us are aware of this line from the TV series “Lucifer,” where Lucifer Morningstar, often known to us as the devil, uses supernatural power to ask this question to find the deepest mysteries of certain characters in the series. What is it you desire? It’s a good question. Sometimes the results are quite deep and profound. Sometimes they’re amazingly pedestrian. What is it you desire? In today’s gospel, we see a young man - just called a man, actually, in this section - a young man comes to Jesus and asks: How can I gain eternal life? How can I gain eternal life? Jesus goes to the Commandments: you shall not kill; you should not steal; and so on. And he replies: I’ve kept them all. Jesus is touched. Jesus is impressed. And looks at him steadily and with love, it says in the gospels, and says: One thing is lacking. You have to give to the poor and come and follow me. The man’s face falls and he leaves sad, for he has many possessions. That man, what was his desire? He desired approval, certainly, to be accepted. But he also did desire some degree of virtue, or goodness, but he desired these things not if they came from all effort, from all that he had what he could give, his total self. That was too much. 

He is like us, I think. On the whole, we want to be virtuous, we want to be good - most of us at least - but not if it means everything. Not if it means our all. We want to have, as the saying goes, our cake and eat it at the same time. We desire all the benefits and little or none of the negative consequences or negative effort or hard effort. I think part of this, it’s really not selfishness, though there are selfish people out there. We all have a bit of selfishness in us, yes. It’s the fear that beyond us, all is nothing. It’s not just that it’s hard to be that good, that giving, that faithful. It’s that maybe there is nothing beyond this, no reward, no consequence, no pay off for all of our efforts, our sacrifice, our self-giving. That’s a deep fear we have. What is our deepest desire? We desire happiness, I think, fundamentally we do desire happiness. To have a good that is everlasting, that is permanent, that is what eternal life means: good that is everlasting that is permanent. But we’re afraid. We’re afraid it may not be there. We’re afraid it’s too much work. We’re afraid when it’s all done there’s nothing and all that work was for nothing, all that sacrifice was for nothing. 

That’s what we desire, happiness, and that’s why our Lord came in the first place. He came to show us that it is worth the effort it is, it is worth the sacrifice, it is worth everything we have. To partially, in this life certainly, partially possess it. And more fully as we grow in holiness, completely in the world to come. It’s not for nothing. There is not nothingness out there. His miracles, his power, his manifestation of life, his own resurrection and all since then - that the world is full of the supernatural, the world is full of miracles. We look for them if we use the means given us: prayer, the sacraments, and so on. More and more so we are transformed, our fear of nothingness, our fear of no payoff is gone. Possessions can be very useful, possessions give us control, a lot of possessions, great possessions, as that person in the gospel had. But even small possessions, the smallest thing possible, can hinder us. If we cling to small possessions, as much as large, we are stopped from pursuing Christ, stopped from achieving the supernatural, finding our happiness, more and more so. But if we do follow Christ completely, completely, everything is given to us. But he does say there will be persecution. Nothing comes free; nothing comes cheap. But it’s well worth the effort, well worth the sacrifice, even in this life much less the life to come. Of our own we can’t achieve this, neither rich nor the poor. It’s not that the poor have gotten it and the rich haven’t. Everybody doesn’t have it, none of us have it. Though our hope is that those who have less will be less dominated by their possessions. But with God, all things are possible.

Homily of Saturday, October 9, 2021

This little vignette from the gospels, I think, is one of the most precious that we have. While Jesus is speaking to the crowds, completely overwhelmed by how much she was seeing and hearing in him, a lady yells out from the crowd at the top of your voice: “Blessed is the woman that carried you in her womb and the breasts at which you nursed.” It’s a very moving thing, the way this lady must have been so deeply moved that she did this. What we need to remember is she’s talking about Our Lady, she is talking about the mother of Jesus. This is a little vignette about Our Lady, including Jesus’s reply to her: “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” That’s Mary, Our Lady, hearing word and observing it. It’s really a precious little Marian vignette within the gospels. 

I think the saint of the day, John Henry Newman, who was a great, great preacher and a great writer, very touchingly develops this theme in one of his homilies. And I’d like to read you a little part of a homily that I find very moving and very touching along these lines: “God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about."

It’s easy to imagine Mary having thoughts like this after her moment of her fiat, and I think these thoughts are worth carrying with us through this day. 

Homily of Thursday, October 7, 2021

This is from a discourse by Pope John XXIIIrd “The rosary is the bible of the poor… How I wish this devotion were ever more widely diffused in your souls, in your families… in all the churches of the world! The rosary must be recited with profound spiritual understanding, not merely with lip service. Every decade presents a picture of happiness or sorrow or glory: it must be the subject of contemplation. This contemplation, with the gentle repetition of the ten Hail Marys, must lead to prayer, so that the devotion may be for our edification and encouragement. We are all brothers and sisters of Jesus. We are members of his mystical body: therefore we must try to grow like him. We are children of Mary: therefore we must always try to please her and do her honour, and by this means to attain first of all graces of the spiritual order and then also graces of the material order, always in perfect accordance with the Lord’s holy will. Let us raise our hearts, let us raise our arms, holding aloft the holy rosary. Mary, Help of Christians, give the Church victory and peace.”

Homily of Monday, October 4, 2021

“Praised be you, my Lord, through Sister Water. Praised be you, my Lord, through Brother Fire. Praised be you, my Lord, through our Sister Mother Earth. …Woe to those who die in mortal sin.” These words come from the famous “Canticle of the Sun” of Saint Francis of Assisi. It seems to me bizarre, very bizarre, that this great saint whom we honor today, Saint Francis of Assisi, should be for so many people a patron saint of pantheism. It is very bizarre, very strange. No person is so devoted to the person of Christ, in his innocence, in his childhood, in his horrible suffering in the passion, than Saint Francis. If you read his works, and I’ve read all of his works, or know his life, he is the least pantheistic person you’ve ever met. He is full of love for nature, which God has created. We can see the Word. We can see through the world, God works through the world: it is his word to us and other people. Also, the great charity, great love that we see in today’s gospel: to our neighbor, and our neighbor is everybody. Do good to all - is part of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. The person of Christ is even more significant. We see all things in Christ, through Christ, in his life. But most especially I think not just in his goodness to his neighbor, but most especially in his embracement of suffering, of the passion, and in the stigmata. The first saint in history, as far as we know, who bore the stigmata, the wounds of Christ. …You see a lot of that in his life. Also he did give an enormous amount of time to personal prayer – you see that in his life even more so. And later in his life, it is through the passion of the Lord that he finds transcendence. In the passion of the Lord he finds transformation. In the passion of the Lord, he finds God, the face of God revealed in Christ: our neighbor, our friend, our Savior. Let us imitate the great St. Francis, to help our neighbor. That’s everybody, and that’s not easy to be sure. To be good and do good to all people. Let us be like Saint Francis in the life of intense prayer: sometimes nights and days, weeks and months of prayer, intense prayer. Let us be like Saint Francis in the suffering he experienced. In this life, suffering will happen: “No cross, no crown.” If we wish to be like our Lord, if we wish to be transformed, wish to see our creation transfigured in the Lord, we must also embrace, as we certainly will, the suffering this world, that offers us every sort of physical suffering, moral sufferings. It will happen, if we try to follow Christ. So let’s imitate this great saint. Let us follow this great Saint. Let us read about this great saint. We will become more and more like this great Saint, Saint Francis of Assisi, and in doing so find the face of God.