Holy Week 2022

Homilies and Reflections

Brother Sixtus Roslevich, O.S.B. 

Good Friday, April 15, 2022 

(Given to the students of Portsmouth Abbey School)

Last week when Abbot Michael asked if I would share a meditation with you on Good Friday, some random immediate thoughts came to mind. First, in the three years since I moved to Portsmouth, I’ve gotten to know some of you fairly well, a lot of you moderately well, and then again, some of you, I don’t know you...at all. Second, what I do know, is that all of you are surrounded here by some of the smartest, wisest, funniest, most caring and, above all, the holiest people you could ever want to find at a school like ours. From the administration, the Board of Regents, your faculty and coaches and house parents, to the kitchen staff who cook and feed you 3 meals a day, the housekeeping and maintenance crews who clean up after you, the IT staff you keep us both connected and safe, they are all here because of you. And I should mention the monks, too, who live and work here ...24/7. Because of you. Now, I don’t fall under any of those categories. I don’t think I’m smart, wise, funny, or particularly holy, but I do believe, truly, that God has given each and every one of us some kind of a gift. As St. Paul writes in First Corinthians, Chapter 12, “There are many gifts, but it is always the same Spirit; there are many different ways of serving, but it is always the same Lord.”  The trick in life is discovering what your gift is, what you’re good at from a young age, maybe an innate God-given talent you were born with, and then learning and honing the skills you need in order to use that talent for the benefit of humanity. Well, those were my random immediate thoughts after hearing from Abbot Michael, but now I want to talk to you about the cross, specifically the Stations of the Cross. 

This afternoon at 1:30 you’ll have a chance to walk and pray the Stations, led by Br. Joseph, to the top of Cross Hill, just behind the monastery, and in the shadow of the wind turbine. My earliest memory of the Stations of the Cross date back to my simple parish church in Pennsylvania, the church of my childhood. Every Friday during Lent, and not just on Good Friday like today, my church held Stations at 4 p.m., after school, and at 7:30 p.m., after supper. The pictures in my little Stations of the Cross booklet pretty much matched the bigger pictures lining the walls. When I was old enough to become an altar boy, at age 7, my best friend, Billy, and I were assigned at first to carry the candles. As I grew older and taller, I was finally allowed to carry the processional cross almost every Friday.  After I became a monk many years later, I still considered it an honor and a privilege to carry the cross in processions, much like Simon the Cyrene who is mentioned in the 5th Station as being asked to help Jesus. Cyrene is in North Africa and Simon was probably just another Jewish tourist in Jerusalem for the Passover that year. Fast forward even many more years later to 2008 and 2016, two years during which I lived and worked in southern Africa, not the country of South Africa, but in Zimbabwe, their next-door-neighbor. The monks I lived with had nailed up simple pictures of the Stations to the trees near our vegetable and fruit gardens, at eye level, for everyone to see and meditate upon. 

My entire life, even to this point at Portsmouth, has been lived according to an academic schedule. After my student days, first as a little boy, then as a teenager, and then as a college student, I always had summer vacations and spring breaks. Later on, as a college professor at the university where I taught for over 30 years, it was more of the same type of familiar routine. This academic schedule allowed me the luxury to travel throughout the world mostly in the springtime, on spring break, often during Lent, Holy Week, the Sacred Triduum, and Easter Week itself. This gave me the opportunity to walk and pray the Stations of the Cross in places like France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic and Chile. I’ve also prayed the Holy Week and Easter liturgies in Hong Kong (in Tagalog), and in Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia. If you live in any of those European countries, or have visited them yourself, you might be familiar with the centuries-old Good Friday tradition carried on by the penitential societies in many towns. For example, in the city of Zamora, in northwest Spain, a life-sized statue of Christ falling under the weight of His cross is carried on the shoulders of men walking through the streets of that town every Good Friday following the Way of the Cross. Each station is represented by one of the town’s Catholic churches, and the barefoot men are greeted at the main door of each church by the pastor or the rector. The men belong to one of the penitential societies and are dressed in distinctive long tunics or robes with pointed hoods masking their faces. Prayers are said by the people who are gathered, and the somber procession moves slowly to the next church, often ending up at the town’s cathedral. 

My most memorable experience of carrying a cross occurred while I was living in Rome in 2008. I was in residence at the Monastery of Sant’ Anselmo on the top of the Aventine Hill. Every Ash Wednesday, the pope arrives in the late afternoon at Sant’ Anselmo. It is where he gets vested in the sacristy for the procession through the narrow streets to celebrate the Ash Wednesday Mass inside the Church of Santa Sabina, which is the stational church of Rome for that day.  I was humbled to be the crucifero, or the cross-bearer that year for Pope Benedict XVI and his entire entourage of Cardinals and clerics and monks. It is the crucifero who leads the procession through the streets. I was very much aware of the significance of carrying a cross through those narrow streets in much the same way that Simon of Cyrene did when he was asked to carry the heavy cross for Jesus. The Stations, also called the Way of the Cross (or via Crucis), are one of the popular devotions of our faith, a Lenten tradition shared by entire families, and observed, as I said, for centuries in many countries. It is not a liturgy, like the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, which comprise our Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which we all participated in last night commemorating the Last Supper. It is a devotional practice, like praying the rosary, both of which have a certain repetition to them. And you have a chance to experience that devotion yourself this afternoon on Cross Hill. 

Earlier I mentioned some smart, wise, funny, caring...and holy...people who look after your welfare here at school. I want to close by reminding you of some other special people in your life who might also be described by those adjectives. I’m talking about your grandparents. As I was trying to tie together these random immediate thoughts yesterday, on Holy Thursday morning, I glanced at the ever-more disturbing front-page headlines in the New York Times. My attention was drawn away from the latest news out of Ukraine to a photo, just below the fold, with the short headline that said, “Grandparents Step Into the Gap.”  The caption reads, “Nearly 200,000 children in the United States have lost parents to Covid, by one estimate, and grandparents are often helping to raise them – while both young and old deal with grief. Above, Willie Lanzisera hugging his grandson goodnight.”  It is the sweetest picture, and the look of total abandon and unconditional love on the little boy’s face is pure joy. 

Some of you have already lost a grandparent or two. I’ve spoken to several of you personally about that loss. If you are blessed to still have them in your life, cherish them. If they live with you and your parents in a multi-generational household, you are doubly blessed. Two married saints you may have heard of, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim, are not mentioned in the Bible nor in any of the Gospels. However, tradition tells us that they were the grandparents of Jesus, having been the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  My maternal grandfather, Stephen, lived with us for the last 13 years of his life, after my grandmother died. Stephen died at age 80, one month before my high school graduation. I remember him sitting in his rocker by the kitchen window on every Good Friday that he was with us. Between the hours of 12 noon and 3:00, the length of time that Jesus hung nailed to the cross, our entire house went totally silent, quiet as a monastery. He would take from his prayer book a little piece of paper in his own handwriting. I’d like to end by sharing with you the prayer that he read, and that I shall be reading, 33 times this afternoon, once for each year that Jesus Christ lived on earth, before he was crucified and died for us...on the Cross. 

“33 times prayer on Good Friday 12-3 o’clock: O my Lord Jesus, I humbly beg of thee in thy merits, of thy precious blood, by thy heart, and by thy intercession, and by thy Death, to assist me in my need. Amen.” 

Abbot Michael Brunner, O.S.B. 

Good Friday (April 15, 2022) 

  

The Passion of Jesus ended on the afternoon of Good Friday, but the divine Compassion continued, even up to now. They took the lifeless body of Jesus down from the cross. That happened in a big hurry. Jesus had to be entombed before sundown. We have no details. But the cross had to be lowered and the nails had to be pulled out. Jesus lifeless body had to be lifted up from the cross. Mary was certainly there, as she had been all along, and she had to experience the aftermath of death…  

For a good part of my life, I strictly avoided wakes and funerals. Although they undoubtedly reminded me of my own future death, there is something shocking about a dead body, so different from a living body. I vividly remember the shocked reactions of our senior students in St. Louis at the wake when they first saw the bodies of their two classmates who had been killed in an auto accident. It struck me never more strongly than with my mother. The night before her funeral, my father and siblings had all left the wake in the funeral home and were waiting in the car. I went with the undertaker to retrieve my mother’s wedding ring before he closed the casket. He took off her ring and gave it to me, and I bent over to kiss her forehead. I don’t know what I expected. Her forehead was stone cold, so unlike my warm and living mother. It was like a harsh slap in my face.  

Mary endured the shock of receiving her son’s dead body, also cold from exposure and loss of blood, so unlike the body filled with divine energy just 24 hours before, just as one day 33 years earlier she received his body through the Holy Spirit, according to God’s promise. Now she receives him when everything has been fulfilled... almost everything. What must she have been thinking…fearing? I wonder…Was she angry at God? We human beings do get angry at God, when tragedy strikes at our deepest loves. But God knows that about us. He knows how we are. Fortunately, he doesn’t get angry with our reactions to pain. He has better things in store for us, as he did for Mary.  

They placed Jesus in a tomb. We think of this scene tonight knowing what will happen at dawn Sunday morning. But they did not know…Mary, John, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, the other women. And the apostles hiding in the darkness, in fear, they certainly didn’t know. God became matter when Jesus became a human being. Jesus was placed in the earth, like other human material bodies are. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, not by death. Matter is sacred because it houses souls; Matter goes into the earth and becomes the earth. Our bodies are made of matter, matter that was once other bodies and housed other souls. Our planet is made of this matter, so it is sacred; as God created it, it is good… Tov, complete not broken. That is why Pope Francis has told us we must cherish and care for our earth, all its life forms and all its life-giving systems. This tomb of Jesus represents every grave I stand before… My family, my friends, my former students, my brother monks…  every grave I stand before with a primal fear, in seeming defeat, struggling to believe it could ever be empty.   

There is a beautiful Gospel song I love that this brings to my mind.  

 

Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,  
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.  
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;   
Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot heal.  

Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,  
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!  
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,  
“Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot cure.”  

Here see the bread of life, see waters flowing  
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.  
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing  
Earth has no sorrow but heav’n can remove.  

  

And so we wait, in faith and trust for Easter Sunday morning, which is our promise that our graves too will become empty and our lives will never be destroyed. 

Homily for the Easter Vigil (Saturday, April 16, 2022) 

  

Today we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and to mark this event the word “Alleluia” reappears in our liturgy. This word indicates to us today’s theme and the literally earthshaking event it celebrates: the theme is Joy.  

You wouldn’t pick that up from the readings or the Gospel, especially not from the Gospel. That records the immediate response of the disciples to the news of the empty tomb. The first witnesses to the empty tomb were the great women followers of Jesus: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. The women were astonished and carried the news of the Resurrection to the apostles, who were in hiding, in fear for their own lives. The Apostles did not believe the women; their story seemed like nonsense. So Peter and John raced to the tomb to see for themselves. John was probably just a teenager, so he ran a lot faster than the older Peter. Even though he got there first he waited for Peter, and out of respect let him be the first to enter the empty tomb. Peter, who even though he loved Jesus much, who was a hothead and who, out of fear, had denied he even knew Jesus…he was second to know, to see with his own eyes the empty tomb. And then John…the young man whose whole life was ahead of him, who didn’t know much, who hadn’t seen or experienced much, who only knew that he believed Jesus and loved him as his best friend. He was the third to know and to see. But all they could see was what was not, the body of Jesus was not there.  

We can learn a lot from these three very imperfect, flawed first witnesses to the Resurrection. They are a lot like us. First, we learn that for us to experience that same resurrection that Jesus did we don’t have to be perfect. We don’t have to have led a perfectly saintly life and we don’t have to be rich and powerful and influential. We just have to have love…love for God in Jesus Christ, love for our neighbor, because God is love. That quick teenager St John tells us that…God is love, and whoever lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him or her. Second, we learn that we don’t have to be fast. God is not in a hurry. It is you and I who make mistakes because we are in a hurry, like the prodigal son who wanted his inheritance now. God always waits for us, like the father in the story of the Prodigal son. He watches and waits for us, and will make everything right when we arrive, or when he intervenes in our lives. Third, we don’t have to understand everything right now. Peter, John and Mary Magdalene went home confused. They had seen the evidence of the Resurrection with their own eyes, but did not understand. Later that day the Risen Jesus came to them to explain to them. God is so much bigger than us, so much better, that it is impossible for us to understand all of how he works and why he does what he does. There’s an old Baptist hymn that tells us: We will understand it better by and by.  

For now, Joy is the message of Easter; Christians are meant to radiate joy, because Christians know what has ultimate meaning, because Christians know that death, that thing which is the ultimate downer to the orgy of self-satisfaction which so much of modern life has become, that death is NOT the end of it all. Jesus demonstrates to us on Easter that death is the beginning of a more perfect life of Justice, Tranquility, the Liberty of the Children of God, and above all of perfect love, unhindered by the material stuff to which our earthly lives are so attached. He is God’s promise to us that we will share in His Resurrection to that life, eternal life. If we are not about love and joy, then we are really missing something important. If we know the risen Jesus Christ, no one and no thing can take that joy from us; no one and no thing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, not even death.  

So, let this be a school and community of joy. May our joy be palpable in all our activities, studies, sports, clubs in all our worship, all our prayers. May our family, friends, co-workers notice and say: “What’s up with them? They are really happy.” Jesus Christ did not suffer and die for us, did not rise again for us so that we should be anxious, guilt ridden or downcast. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. It was all for love, to free us from fear and sadness so that we might love Christ in and through others. Today we celebrate the attainment of the pinnacle of that love.  

Easter always comes in the Spring. The whole earth is coming to life as flowers bloom and the leaves open up on the trees. Tonight, in just a few moments, three members of this community will come to new life as they are baptized, Confirmed and receive the Eucharist for the first time. Let us welcome them and rejoice with them. May we all be a source of joy to each other. May we channel our joy to our Church and the world. May our joy in the full meaning of the Resurrection be our participation in this life of the Kingdom of God, for Jesus tells us: Look and see, the kingdom of God is all around you. Happy Easter! 

 

Homily of Easter Sunday Morning (April 17, 2022)

  

Today is Easter… so we celebrate. The Church bells are ringing again. There are flowers around the altar. The word “Alleluia” appears in the liturgy again. And Mass is a little longer because we again sing the Gloria. You may greet these liturgical lengthenings with mixed emotions, but it is all meant to be a joyful experience because Jesus Christ is risen from the grave where his enemies wanted Him, dead and buried. We know we are supposed to celebrate, but it’s a different kind of celebration from Christmas. There are a lot of Christmas songs, but when if you go to look, you will discover just how few Easter songs there are. We do celebrate, but when we read the Gospels, as they tell of the events of that day, we don’t find any celebrating… There’s no joyful sense of triumph… Only confusion, and fear too, among Jesus disciples. They had run away from Jesus enemies lest they be killed too. The women saw Jesus die. They saw him placed lifeless in the tomb. They saw the huge stone rolled in front of the door way. And they saw the Roman guards posted. And now on Easter morning, they see the empty tomb, and the discarded burial cloths. And as the last line of the Gospel today says… they did not yet understand.  

Confusion, cognitive dissonance, reigned in their minds and hearts. It would be resolved in the days, weeks, months and years ahead, what it meant and still means that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, truly rose from the dead. But that day, and still in the days, weeks, months and years ahead, even once the fact was established, there was still confusion. That is because life,  the life Jesus led and the life Jesus rose to, the life the Apostles led, the life of the Church, the life we lead, life is confusing. Life in this world is caught in that existential tension that we learned about in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Everything God created is good,  but you can’t have everything. Of all the good things in the world…choose,  but know that when you choose one good, you forfeit some other good. But still we do want everything. Our attempts to have those good things that are not ours, a fact, an object, a body, a pleasure… that is sin. Jesus died for our sins, but still there is sin, we still sin. The Church is stained with sin. To all appearances the world Jesus saved is still mired in sin. But sin is not the last word. Jesus’ Resurrection is the sign that God has the last word. That is our faith, that God does have the last word and that in Him, only in Him, we will have it all. But not now, and we want it all now.  

I don’t know about you, what your experience has been or will be, but just like how somewhere in the teenage years a person’s consciousness changes from that of a child to an adult, when I turned 60 something happened. Actually a lot of things happened; the warranty on my body ran out and I began accumulating a lot of repair bills and pills. I was also struck by how fast this all happened: 60 years went pretty fast, and now I’m in my 70’s. Life goes fast, and that is confusing in itself. A person can respond in two ways: grab all you can while you still have time or use the time you have to do the best you can. Jesus’ Resurrection tells us that we have won the race if we choose to do the very best we can fearlessly, to honor the good choices we have made in life and in our relationships, especially our relationship with God, because that is what gives quality to our relationships with others, when we see the risen Jesus Christ in others, because He lives. Jesus resurrection tells us that, as He so often told us in the Gospels, we have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. As we will pray after the Lord’s prayer in this Mass, we should be free of anxiety, well most anxiety anyway.  

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great Colombian writer, wrote in his greatest novel, “human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” We are still in this world giving birth and there is still confusion, because like us, the world is being created a little bit more every day, God is revealing himself a little bit more every day, His Kingdom is being built a little more every day. This is unsettling to us; we like to achieve something, be done with it and put it behind us. We like to be in control. We like to know when we are on a journey what the route is; are there any detours or construction delays; where are the gas stations and rest stops; what the sights are along the way, how long it is expected to take, and certainly we want to know where we are going to end up. In life, we don’t know any of this except that last point. If we have faith and trust in God like a child does his parents we know where we will end up. That is what the Resurrection clearly shows us. We celebrate Jesus’ Resurrection because it is really about our Resurrection. Gabriel Garcia Marquez also said, “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.” Jesus lived and died for love of us. Our only regret at the end of our lives, when we get where we’re going, will be if we did not live for love, because God is love. Easter is all about the triumph of love; because love conquers all things, even death. And as St. Peter says in his First Letter: Love covers a multitude of sins.  

My youngest nephew moved to Germany some years ago. And since our family comes from Germany, he sent me something to read about how they really celebrate Easter in Germany. I was surprised by many of the things I read. One of the customs listed we used to celebrate after Christmas. Then there was something about the Easter Fox instead of the Easter Rabbit. There were no Easter Foxes where my family came from. But the most interesting custom was about Easter Monday, the day after. On Easter Monday, three days after Jesus death, one day after the Resurrection, it says Germans are supposed to laugh…a lot. Perhaps you non-Germans are surprised we can laugh. Not only that, it also says the priest at Mass that day should give a rousingly funny homily to make people laugh. Abbot Matthew will have to think about that for the 7:20 Mass tomorrow morning. That custom, I guess, is to put an exclamation point on the celebration of Easter, and to really celebrate the morning after that event, when there was less confusion, when the disciples learned what really happened. We live today in the morning after, in the years and age after the Resurrection; we know what happened and why. So in the face of the confusion of the world around us and in the face of the uncertainties of our life’s journey, we can laugh. We can love and not ever be afraid. May your Easter, your Resurrection Sunday today, and all your days after, be empty of anxiety, low in confusion, full of joy and happiness, and above all overflowing with love.