The Abbey Church and the Narragansett Bay

In the first reading today the author of the book of Sirach says: “One's speech discloses the bent of one's mind. Praise no one before he speaks, for it is then that people are tested.” It used to be that people in the business and professional world were proud to say, “My word is my bond.” Once your word was given on a deal, it was considered binding. A transaction worth millions of dollars could be completed by a few words or the shake of a hand. You didn’t need a signature or a written contract. Today, unfortunately, someone’s word is not usually trusted as binding or even reliable.

There is a real shortage of personal integrity. Integrity is one of the characteristics we should always want to carry with us in this life; it’s certainly one of the criteria on which God will call us to account. Integrity means wholeness, being complete and not divided in any way – physically, spiritually, or esthetically. Integrity does literally mean Holiness: being complete as God made us and intended us to be, morally healthy and saved. Sirach says that people’s faults appear when they speak, especially when they speak and aren’t considering their words. We often hide behind masks – but our conversation reveals our inner thoughts no matter how careful we are to hide them. So, St Benedict in his Rule quotes the book of Proverbs: In a flood of words you will not avoid sin, and: The tongue holds the key to life and death. In fact he says that there are times when even good words are to be left unsaid. Speech is a means of discerning the inner character of a person, because what comes out in speech uncovers what’s in our heart. And the first reading today focuses on the last line, saying that what a person says paints a true picture of that person.

Jesus restates this wisdom in today’s Gospel, saying a person’s words and actions reveals their character. A person of good heart will do good; an evil person will do evil because, “from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” That is very relevant for human integrity in our world today which is all about public relations and image-making, using soundbites and slogans. Through speech God gave us human beings the ability to communicate in greater detail, complexity and beauty than any other animal, and yet some people are so gross and crude in its use! Speech is mightier than any weapon. It can be poetry; speech is civilization itself. Speech was made to open up person to person, but we have allowed our use of speech to degrade our integrity. It’s not that there is fake news: it is that there are so many lies, the biggest one being that the truth is a lie. Sometimes it is best to say nothing, as St. Benedict advises. Always it’s a good idea to think before you speak, because our opinions are not always true, and freedom of speech presumes responsible speech.

The maid in the courtyard the night Jesus was being condemned told St. Peter, who at the time was denying Jesus, that his speech gave him away (Mt 26:73) – and the same is true of us. How much do we appreciate our ability to speak and express our thoughts to others? What would life be like if we could not speak? We could think of a particular person, Helen Keller, born in 1880. At the tender age of 19 months, a mysterious illness left her blind, deaf and unable to speak. 

Her parents consulted the best specialists of the day, including Alexander Graham Bell. But there was no cure for her. As she grew , her body and subconscious mind retained some memory of sight and sound she had as an infant, but there was nothing in her conscious mind except the pain of deprivation and rage. Her only contact with other people and the world was through smell and touch. Imagine: your only knowledge, your only thoughts formed through those two animal senses. No words, no communicable concepts, only feelings and animal noises of rage rising from a suffocated capacity for more. When she was seven, a gifted teacher broke through all those barriers and communicated to her just one word and changed her life. This was regarded as a miracle at the time. This what she wrote describing that experience: “We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled out into the other hand the word “water,” first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.” In the next hour Helen learned thirty words, and in the next 81 years she never stopped learning. Beyond all the natural range of possibilities for someone like her, she became a writer, an educator, a lecturer and world traveler. Her greatest book, published in 1955, is titled Teacher, and is not about her, but about the young woman who opened up the world to her through that one word “water,” Anne Sullivan, the gifted teacher who understood Helen so well because she was blind herself.
Monastic community at prayerIn considering our relationship with God, we are all naturally blind and deaf, and rather dumb too. Our spiritual and bodily natures are handicapped. How can we see, hear and speak with our God who is pure spirit? Jesus Christ is our Teacher – that is the title the apostles used for him. He is our Miracle Worker, who makes it possible for us to understand God because He is so like us. Although God, he is also truly human. He is physical, and we come into physical contact with him in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The greatest saints and mystics of Christianity all attest to God’s healing presence and power in this sacrament. But how can you and I be healed? How can we get past our own handicaps, faults, our blindness and dumbness, and experience the reality of God ?

First, We must each bring to Jesus Christ what everyone Jesus healed brought to him: faith and trust. It is the same thing that Helen Keller brought to her teacher. Without that, nothing can happen. God does not force himself upon us. Second, we must recognize the mysterious work of God. Listening to the Gospel today, you could well imagine the blind man in another Gospel passage that tells about Jesus healing him saying, “Oh no, Jesus. You’re not putting any spittle on MY eyes.” You and I are like Helen Keller: the waters of baptism may have poured over us once, but the waters of life are pouring all over us day after day, and God patiently, but firmly and ever faster, spells it out to us in our hands over and over and over: “It’s me. I’m here. I’m not a billion light years away. I’m here, here for you.”

So we must ask ourselves: are we good listeners to what He is saying? Perhaps we could pay attention to what people around us tell us about the quality of our Christ-likeness, about our compassion, our patience and responsiveness to God’s word. Are we people of justice, sensitive and responsive to the least of our brothers and sisters? For instance, what do we think about those poor brutalized people from Central America – mothers , fathers and children fleeing violence, huddled at our southern border? People who are Catholic, our brothers and sisters in Christ? Are we for building a wall against them or a bridge for them to a more abundant life? Do we claim to believe, to accept Jesus’ teachings, but don’t reflect them by the way we live? We should remember that Jesus was most harshly critical of those very observant rule-following Pharisees who did not have compassion for the poor, insignificant ones with whom Jesus shared his table. Deep in each of our hearts too there is a vague consciousness as of something forgotten. And there should be a thrilling returning thought, of our eternal homeland, our source and destiny, the mystery of God, waiting to be awakened in the fullness of our lives. God wants to be close to us. That’s our homework for this coming Lent. To wake up, to listen and close the distance between us.

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Abbot Michael Brunner, OSB, offered this homily on the Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time (March 2, 2025), the Sunday before Ash Wednesday, to the School community soon to depart on Spring vacation.