Homilies

The Feast of our Founders

1^st rdg:   Prv   get wisdom/keep hold of instruction … she is your life 

2^nd rdg:  Col   clothe yourselves with love/word dwell in you richly

Gospel rdg:   Mt     instruction/service/humility

My brothers in community as much as we celebrate the memorial of the Cistercian founders today, we are celebrating the means they provide us to celebrate what we are living, our vocation, the dynamism of the call God is giving us in the here and now.  There is no need to remember the spiritual journey of Robert, Alberic and Stephen – with all its ups and downs – if it does not draw us to reflect on our own spiritual journey.

So we gather up some key words from our scriptures today – wisdom – clothe yourselves in love – let the word of Christ dwell in you richly – instructor – servant – humble – and we consider what message God may be offering us today.

What formed Robert, Alberic and Stephen in the monastic endeavor forms us in the monastic endeavor.  Relationship with God, nurtured in solitude and quiet, in personal and communal prayer, in our manual labor, and grounded in our life as a community of faith, all this is at the heart of what we are celebrating.  The whole self is being engaged by God, intellect, will, emotions, our corporeality, all leading to the interior commitment from which springs a wholesome spirituality.  The author of Proverbs encourages us to “get insight” and this involves just as much the practical / the human as it does the academic.  While we do gather ‘Information’, it is only when we acquire meaning from this data that we can live our response to God.

Dom Ambrose Southey, when he was abbot general, commented on “prayer as a self-gift to God.”  The monastic life is a life of ceaseless prayer.  How does one cultivate one’s faculties so as to pray always?  One must train the mind, discipline the emotions, manage one’s will, and order one’s desires.  It is necessary to arrange one’s life, patterning one’s living on the way of Jesus.  This is not accomplished alone/ all by oneself.  The need for adequate mentoring, for words of encouragement and the day-to-day good example of one’s brothers, for inner tranquillity emerging from a love of silence (avoiding unnecessary speech and noise) that then allows a deep recognition of God with and within us, for healthy interdependence and for healthy spiritual friendships, for that which fosters good human and spiritual growth – all these become part of the equation.

Brother Gregory’s Funeral

Sirach 3:17-23 + 29-31; Philippians 1:21-27; John 1:1-18  

     “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  As Brother Gregory would say: Wow.  Wow, my brothers and sisters, today these Scriptures are fulfilled in our presence.  Wow, today Brother Gregory celebrates face to face the mystery of the flesh-taking; the mystery of God become one of us; the mystery of the one who is closest to the Father’s Heart making that Heart known to us as living Love.  Wow, this is the mystery in which John Joseph Krug spent his whole life immersed.  This is the mystery that would bring forth from Greg not just ‘Wow‘ but the phrase he would use when something really touched him: ‘O Wow’.

I was talking with Brother Gregory earlier this morning, asking him what I should speak about at this most sacred time in the Liturgy.  He answered simply: ‘Talk about Jesus, talk about humility, talk about compassionate service, talk about prayer.  That is what my life has been about.’

‘Talk about Jesus.‘  That is where the Wow Factor is most front and center.  Greg’s life revolved around Jesus.  Jesus present in the sacrament of the Eucharist and Jesus present in his Word.  No one, to my knowledge, has used the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the Senior Wing like Brother Gregory.  One of the greatest joys of his last days on earth was being wheeled to the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in our Church to pray before the exposed Eucharist.  And one look at his battered New Testament is all that is needed to convince us of his absolute love and devotion to the words of Jesus enshrined there.

Christmas Vigil – 2011

Blessed Christmas, my brothers and sisters, Blessed Christmas!  From our monastic community to each of you and your families we wish you the fulness of peace, the joy which never ends, and the love which surpasses all knowledge.  It is all here in this feast: peace, joy, love.  The angels proclaimed ‘Peace‘ to the shepherds and to all of good will.  A ‘Great Joy‘ was proclaimed to all who would hear it.  And ‘Love‘ is both the fruit of such peace and joy as well as the source from which they are formed and flow out to us.

But it is one thing to proclaim such gifts and a totally different one to have them become realities in the here and now.  How do we allow such peace and joy and love to become part of our lives?  How do we allow the message of Christmas to live in us in such a way that it becomes the most important thing in our lives?  How does the mystery of the flesh-taking of the Son of God take flesh in our own flesh and bone?

This Christmas I would ask us to look at what might be called the organizing principle of our lives.  What is it?  Does the mystery we celebrate this evening have anything to say about it?  Is tonight’s liturgy just an exercise in warm, fuzzy feelings that we bring out for this most sentimental of Christian feasts, but without any true and lasting effect in our lives?

Father Jonas’ entrance into the Novitiate

Fr. Jonas enters Noviate

Some 4000 years ago and 8000 miles from Mepkin, God appeared to a certain Abraham in the flourishing city of Ur of the Chaldeans.  God invited him to leave his country, his kindred and his father’s house and come to a land that God would show him.  Reflecting on this story some 2000 years later, St Paul remarked that through Abraham’s obedience God was able to make of him the Spiritual Father of us all.  Moving ahead another 400 years, we find John Cassian in the Egyptian desert sitting at the feet of Abba Paphnutius.  The old man is telling the young monk that this call of Abraham is still very much alive and is at the heart of the monastic vocation.  We, too, are called to leave our country, our kindred and our father’s house and to follow Christ even to death on the cross.

Fast forward another 1700 years to Lipa City, Philippines, near the bustling city of Manila – about 10,000 miles from Mepkin.  You, Father Jonas, a somewhat sickly son of a Philippine Air Force officer and a school teacher heard this same call.  Through the Spirit-filled discernment of your then archbishop, later Cardinal, Rosales, you were able to follow Christ in his priesthood and to serve God’s people for many years.  But the call to leave country and kindred and father’s house became even more insistent.  You went to your new archbishop, and through his Spirit-filled discernment, he allowed you to pursue this call within a call.  Consulting your old friend, Cardinal Rosales, you were led to Mepkin.  And here on the night of May 16, 2010, you were able to imagine in a dream what your call truly was about.  It meant leaving your beloved country, your family, and all else that was familiar to you.  You didn’t know why, but you knew it as clearly as you knew your own name.

First Sunday of Advent (B)

1^st rdg  Is 63:16b-17;64:1, 3-8  our father/hidden your face/clay – potter

Psalm  79  Lord makes us turn to you – see your face – we shall be saved

2^nd rdg 1 Cor 1:3-9  wait for revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ

Gospel Mk 13:33-37  Be alert/stay awake ~ watch

 given by Fr. Kevin Walsh 

Jesus captures our attention in this morning’s reading from Mark’s gospel as he tells us to “Watch – stay awake – be alert” as we journey through Advent.  We cannot be people who live a passive faith if we are to engage with our God who has promised to be with us – not simply at Bethlehem or walking the land of Judea – and not simply in the fulfillment of the second coming – but here and now, in this time and in this place.

Advent calls us to mature faith.  Yes, truly with the wide-eyed wonder of children we prepare ourselves to recall the event of Jesus’ birth in a tiny village to parents fulfilling the demand for a census. However it is with adult faith that we appreciate with Saint Bernard that: “We have come to know a threefold coming of the Lord”. He came at Bethlehem, he will come at the end of the ages, he comes in our time, in our hearts. The Advent liturgy, like every sacramental reality, simultaneously evokes the past of salvation history, while promising its eschatological fulfillment and rendering both past and future present in the ‘today’ of salvation. To enter fully into Advent is to live personally the profound need of a Savior experienced by all from Adam on down through the centuries, to joyfully prepare for the mystical-sacramental re-presentation of the Incarnation, and to look in permanent expectation to the Parousia or second coming. The Lord’s coming (this is the present progressive of the verb) is met on our part with an ever deepening sense of hopeful expectation and readiness.

Christ the King

Ezekiel 34: 11-12, 15-17 ;   1 Cor. 15: 20 – 26, 28;  Matt. 25: 31 – 46

 given by Fr. Joe Tedesco

Every liturgy affirms our World view, today’s feast is central in our liturgical year because it celebrates the truth of Christ’s dominion over us.  Today sets up our mandate to follow the teachings of our Shepherd King and the truth that Christ is in the world.

Matthew’s gospel describes the world that  Christ constructs for us and that we live in.  A world that reaches out to every person in need and that recognizes that each person belongs to Christ and indeed is Christ for us.

We’ll hear in the preface of this mass what the Kingdom of God looks like that Christ well present to the Father at the end of time when everything is destroyed which is not of God’s  life and love.

It says that it is a kingdom of truth and life. It is a kingdom of holiness and grace .  It is a kingdom of justice, love and peace.  A kingdom where Christ is Lord and all life is sacred. A kingdom where all live in God’s presence and in the power of his spirit, a kingdom where there is right relationships with all, where charity is boundless, a kingdom where there is a clarity about everyone’s place before God and in God.

Our life as believers is a call, a duty to do our part in bringing about this kingdom.  To create  a world that is of Christ and in Christ.  We do so, of course, by living in this reality ourselves, by living with Christ as our truth and living with all that is life giving and of the Spirit of God.

This feast then suggests for us a reflection on our stewardship of our all to action this past year in bringing about this kingdom in our lives, in our community and in our world.