ALLELUIA !!!

The Way of Gentleness

Calvary is Judo.
The enemy's power
is used to defeat him.

Peter Kreeft

God Stoops

I waited, I waited for the Lord
and he stooped down to me;
he heard my cry.
Psalm 40:2

Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14

1 Corinthinians 11:23-26
John 13:1-15

One of the Lenten practices adopted by our monastic community is group lectio divina. Once a week during Lent, all the monks gather in respective groups of about 10 apiece to prayerfully read, meditate on, and discuss the coming week’s Gospel passage. It is an edifying and spiritually fruitful experience to hear and share one another’s insights.

A couple of weeks ago, as my group was discussing John 8:1-11 (the woman caught in adultery), I was struck by a particularly keen observation by a young novice (as St. Benedict says, the “Lord often reveals what is better to the younger”).

Novice Timothy noted Jesus’ bodily postures in the passage, noting how "down to earth" Jesus is:


-- “He sat down and taught [the people].”

-- “Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground” when the scribes and Pharisees brought the woman to him and questioned him about her.

-- “Again he bent down and wrote on the ground” after having straightened up to tell the crowd “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

-- After the crowd had filed away, “Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? … Neither do I condemn you. Go and from now on do not sin anymore.”


Jesus, the Son of God, literally stooped down to flawed human beings and sinners to teach them and free them, not condemn. Can you imagine him squatting on the ground, allowing you to stand above him as he speaks, or simply listens to what you have to say? Is this the suspicious, ever-watchful, accusing, wrathful God so many of us mistakenly imagine and fear? In this passage, as throughout the Gospels, out of love God lowers himself in Jesus to restore the dignity that sin has stripped from us.

That’s all he wants for us, and cost is no object, as indicated by the Mass readings during this Holy Week. For the most part, they have focused on the ancient prophecies of Isaiah foretelling the coming of God’s suffering servant who will save the children of Israel.

“A bruised reed he shall not break,” Isaiah tells us. “I gave my back to those who beat me,” yet “it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings he endured, while we thought of him as stricken. But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.”

And tonight at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper for Holy Thursday, we recall again God’s self-sacrificing love for us as demonstrated through posture. After hearing in the first reading from Exodus how the children of Israel stood during the Passover meal to eat the slaughtered lamb in front of them, we listen to the account of the washing of the disciples’ feet from the Gospel of John. Jesus, the Son of God, does something that even the lowliest slaves of the time did not do. He ties a towel around his wait, stoops down in front of each of his disciples, and washes their feet.

By doing this, Jesus alludes to the crucifixion that awaits him, but which cleanses and frees us—just as the slaughtered lamb at Passover saved the children of Israel in Egypt. “Do you realize what I have done for you?” he asks. The question is just as pertinent—more so, even—to us today. “As I have done for you, you should also do,” he then tells us.

To press this image into our hearts, after the homily tonight during the Mandatum, our abbot—who holds the place of Christ in the monastery—will stoop down to wash the feet of several monks and guests, including those of Novice Timothy.

Then, monks and guests will proceed to the altar, where we will commemorate the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, recalling the words of St. Paul in the second reading: “Jesus took bread, and after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’

God stoops down to us, allows himself to be broken and shared among us, so that we who are so broken may together become the whole Christ, blessed and shared with all.

To stoop down means to bend down, to lower oneself, to condescend, to yield, to submit. It is to willingly become small in order to provide another dignity. Our Incarnate God debases himself, becoming an infant sleeping in a feeding trough, a man crucified as a common criminal, and seemingly ordinary bread to be broken and eaten. His is the “chastisement that makes us whole.”

And so, like the woman caught in adultery, we are raised up, we are restored to dignity by having our feet washed by the Master, who asks “Do you realize what I have done for you?”

The answer, once claimed, is the true source of Easter joy, and is what provides peace and everlasting life.

One can do no better than reflect on the words of Pope Benedict XVI:

“When the Lord of the world comes and undertakes the slave’s task of foot-washing—which is an illustration of the way he washes our feet all through our lives—we have a totally different picture. God doesn’t want to trample on us, but kneels down before us so as to exalt us. The mystery of the greatness of God is seen precisely in the fact that he can be small. Only when power is changed from the inside, and we accept Jesus and his way of life, whose whole self is there in the action of foot-washing, only then can the world be healed and the people be able to live at peace with one another.”

May our good and gracious God grant to all this peace.

A most Holy Triduum and Joyous Easter season to all.

Whatever We Do

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,
as in all wisdom you teach and admonish one another,
singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs
with gratitude in your hearts to God.
And whatever you do, in word or deed,
do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the father through him.”
Col. 3:16-17

St. Benedict does not refer explicitly to the above Scripture passage in his Rule for monks, but it succinctly expresses what the Rule embodies. The monastic day is designed to carry with it the word of Christ throughout its hours. In gratitude to God, we pray and we work. We do this as a community that strives to make Christ present to one another and the world in everything we do.

As human beings, we naturally tend to compartmentalize our lives. We have our work life, our family life, our social life, and (if we have it at all) our spiritual life. But how do these areas intersect and affect one another? The Christian life is one of unity. It is about making the whole of life holy. We worship a God who is incarnate—the Word made Flesh. All that we think, say, or do should radiate Christ.

Since monks are not immune to the temptation of living fragmented lives, the Benedictine motto ora et labora—pray and work—expresses the ideal of the Rule of St. Benedict. Faithfully lived within the context of community, it is a sacred rhythm that provides structure and direction for our daily lives and (hopefully) keeps us on the path of life everlasting.

Our common prayer, our personal prayer, our various works, and our day-to-day living with one another are not disparate elements, but strands woven together like those of a rope to give the whole of life strength and sacred purpose. All of this requires commitment, humility, and the love of God.

One concrete symbol of this ideal is the corridor (or slype) that connects the monastery and church. Each day, after praising God in church, the monastic community processes down the slype and directly into the monastery dining room (refectory) at the corridor’s other end for our meals together. It is a reminder that whatever we do, we do for the glory of God, so that God may be glorified in all things through Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 10:31; 1Pet. 4:11).

All this, of course, is with the recognition that the Kingdom of God is not yet fully realized. This path toward life everlasting is a journey we make each day.

Pray for Us

What is a Friend?

Dear Friends,

Preparing for a retreat later this year on the subject of spiritual friendship, I am interested in hearing how others define it. Perhaps you have some insight to share that will be helpful as I explore this issue with retreatants.

If you like, please post a comment on this blog to the question:

What is a friend?

My ability to respond to provided comments is limited, but please know of my gratitude in advance.

PAX
Br. Francis

P.S. If it is helpful, below is the description of the retreat I will be giving late next summer:

Friendship with God:
God is Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, but is He also a friend?
Does God call human beings to friendship with Him? If so, why and how? This retreat will briefly explore these challenging questions. We will look at the nature of true friendship, listen to what Scripture and the tradition of the Church say about how it applies to our relationship with God, and discuss common objections. Moreover, we will discover what friendship with God means for our life of prayer, and how it bears fruit. Our focus for meditation will be what Jesus tells His disciples and all Christians in John 15: “I have called you friends.”

Growing to Maturity

Below is the homily delivered by Archabbot Justin DuVall at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve here at Saint Meinrad Archabbey. I thought it was worth sharing so that others may read and reflect on it this Christmastide--and in seasons to come. -- Br. Francis

In Nativitate Domini
Ad Missam in nocte

Isaiah 9.1-6
Titus 2.11-14
Luke 2.1-14

The childhood charms that have come to paint this night bright with hope keep a good grip on the latent little child in all of us. Our memories of Christmases way, way past might not be entirely happy ones, but even those that suffer from disappointment hint at the awareness of what might have been.

Charles Dickens’ story of Scrooge’s transformation banishes sorrow in the gleeful cry of Tiny Tim, the voice of innocence that confirms the hidden goodness in the miserly old Scrooge. But the Christmas story—the one according to Luke, not Dickens—has little to say about the hidden goodness of our human nature. The Gospel story of Christmas proclaims the innate goodness of God, who became a child so that we might mature to the fullness of our human nature in Christ.

This is the grace that has appeared as the immeasurable gift of God, that real hope which does not banish our sorrows, but respectfully redeems them.

The Gospel story of Christmas begins with an awareness of our need for a savior. The birth of Christ was not God’s gift to us because we have been good; rather, it is God’s goodness to us because we need it. If we believe that our own goodness is more often than not merely hidden, and in our better moments becomes evident, then the announcement of the angels could hardly be good news.

Because we sometimes forget just how ordinary evil can be, we also forget that we need to be saved from what has come to be accepted as the way we are. It’s humiliating to need to be saved, as we heard recently in the refectory from Michael Casey. While we pray for salvation on a theoretical level, the day-to-day desires turn out quite different. We often have a hard enough time accepting help from another person with whom we live and suspiciously question his motives; why should we think it would be any different with God?

And yet even Scrooge was saved from his greed through an intervention. One of the biggest sorrows of life is to realize that we are dependent on others, a dependence that begins as infants, is modified to a greater or lesser degree through adulthood, and returns in force at the end of life. Perhaps we resist what is life-giving—whether from others or from God—because we realize that life comes to us from outside and that within us there is a push towards death. It’s the inescapable reminder that we cannot ultimately save ourselves. We need others. We need God.

If we want to enter into the joy of Christmas, we have to begin by taking to heart the proclamation of the angels: “A savior has been born for you who is Christ the Lord…”

In this savior God has given us the gift of his own divine life, which often we are not too sure just how to receive. Sometimes God gives us an inestimable gift that we can only treasure without knowing exactly why he’s given it. It feels strange to us. But our acceptance of a gift that we don’t quite understand allows us to welcome God’s nearness in strange as well as in familiar ways.

When the shepherds heard the announcement of the good news of a Savior, they might have expected a savvy revolutionary who would finally and forever get rid of all Israel’s enemies. They got a baby. We can only imagine the divine sense of humor behind this revelation. It went from the sublime to the ridiculous, or at least it must have seemed so to the shepherds. The immensity of God’s power was shrunken down to the familiar cries of a baby. It was a strange surprise for them that must have stretched their understanding of God’s power to save.

As children we could be taken up with the surprise of Christmas, brightly wrapped boxes that hid what we knew was a gift from a grown-up. In the mystery of the incarnation, God reverses that pattern. He surprised the grown-ups by the gift of a child. To think ourselves beyond being surprised is to be blind to part of God’s revelation. God is somehow like a child, defenseless before us, and has opened himself to being held in our arms.

Unless we prepare our hearts for this surprise, we can’t possibly hope to receive and keep the gift of God. In his immeasurable goodness God has visited us, and we carry within us that gift of God that we treasure even when we don’t fully understand it.

In the mystery of the incarnation, God shared with us his own divine nature so that we might grow to maturity in our human nature. Behind all the charm of Christmas we cannot afford to allow anything to blind us to the true meaning of what God has done. The child of Bethlehem becomes the man of Jerusalem. In him we see something greater and wiser and kinder than we are.

As we grow to maturity in Christ, we are the bearers of the mystery we welcome tonight in faith, and we are asked to carry for the world what it so badly needs, but also what it so often ignorantly rejects because it must bear the sorrows of life. There are very few people who have not at some time or another experienced deep anguish and in our lives we may be tested in ways we cannot even imagine. This burden is what God has redeemed in Christ. The sorrows of life pull us away from the full maturity of our human nature, but our faith in Christ, the savior born to us, allows us to live in such a way that true joy in life cannot be killed by sorrow.

Perhaps this sounds grandiose; but it is divinely simple. It means fighting the impulse to live for ourselves only; it means choosing generosity over selfishness; it means living humbly rather than loving gain. It is the “grace of God [which] has appeared, saving all and training us … to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age” (Titus 2.11-12).

Part of the mystery of Christmas is that we don't know in exact detail how God will fulfill our hope, but we believe that God has visited us, and we carry the presence of Christ within us. His life in our flesh was the down payment for our life in God’s future. By sharing with us his own divine nature in Christ, God brings to maturity in us his primal gift of our own human nature.

This is the mystery of Christmas in full bloom, a story whose end is yet to come.

There is a version of the Christmas story without charms. It is neither Dickens’ nor Luke’s. It comes in the Revelation of John, the book that deals with the end of all things. There a woman gives birth to a son but not in the serene company of shepherds and angels. As she cries out in childbirth, a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns opens its mouth to devour her child, but God frustrates his plan by snatching away the child and carrying the woman off to the desert. In his rage the dragon unleashes a battle of cosmic proportions.

This Christmas story is the life and death struggle for the whole of creation. It is a story for mature audiences only. In the fullness of the Incarnation God gives us the gift of salvation once and for all.

Here in the peace of this Christmas night let us open our hearts to his gift, and then we may come to discover ourselves held in the womb of the Mother of God.

Rt. Rev. Justin DuVall, O.S.B.
Saint Meinrad Archabbey Church
25 December 2009