Homilies

Easter 2012

1^st rdg   Acts 10 34a;37-43  commissioned us to preach & testify

psalm   Ps 118 this is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice

2^nd rdg  Col 3:1-4  seek what is above/life hidden with Christ in God

Gospel  Jn 20:1-9  look  -  see  -  believe  -  understand  

May God’s measureless love envelope us today as we celebrate Our Lord’s resurrection!

Whereas the saying ‘seeing is believing’ may be an apt adage for other occasions, this morning ‘not seeing is believing’ might be the better phrase.  For it was in not seeing Jesus’ body in the tomb that the disciples’ belief grew, with the understanding that his body wasn’t there because He had risen.  I am often drawn to reflect that we go looking for Jesus in the wrong places.  He is not in the place of the dead – the cemetery – the grave – in lackluster faith or in the pretense of religious practice.  Jesus is known in the midst of believers!  Jesus’ ministry was marked by attending to folks who were not the stellar church goers, but they got down to believing on a very intimate level and their faith often had to do with the fact that they had wandered from the path of relationship with God or had grown indifferent to God and they were upended by the One who ultimately died a shameful death so that we all would wake up and smell the coffee.

Ash Wednesday 2012

1^st rdg  1 Jl 2:12-28           return, repent, rend your hearts 

psalm 51                              Be merciful, O Lord, for we have sinned

2^nd rdg 2 Cor 5:20-6:2     be reconciled/now is acceptable time

gospel Mt 6:16-18             do deeds in secret, pray in secret, fast in secret

Ash Wednesday brings us an external ritual that calls for some serious internal work.  We know that we do not wear ashes as a badge of honor but rather they are a public declaration; “I am a sinner, please pray for me.”  This ancient practice is a Christian’s deep embrace of the truth of one’s fragile condition.  We comprehend our need for God’s mercy and love.  The reception of ashes is accompanied by the exhortation of the readings to live the ongoing conversion of being reconciled to God.  Although our sins are the catalyst as it were – the emphasis is not on our sins, not even on us.  God is the center.  The return to God or the turning to God is what is important.  And the surrender of self – the dying to self with Christ in order to fully embrace coming to life with Christ in the wonder of his resurrection is where we are being led.

For so many reasons the monastic tradition “gets” Lent.  Isn’t our vow of conversatio morum loosely translated ‘ongoing conversion’?  While the exterior of Ash Wednesday commands our attention it is the interior spiritual journey that deserves our effort and that really matters.  The Lenten spring is about the transformative experience each believer allows God to draw us into through silence, reflection, practices of discipline, penance, curbing of appetites in order to make room for God, so as to emerge into the newness God alone brings.  One can travel the path of one’s own choosing and it may give you a few insights, but God’s desire is to have us participate in a much fuller reality that can only be ours through a deeper union with God.  Jesus is telling us in the gospel that the practices are only of value if they bring us to “…the Father…who will repay you.”

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.

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.