Pentecost Sunday, Year 1

A glorious and grace-filled feast of Pentecost to you! Today ends the Paschal season, and we sing the Veni Creator Spiritus for the last time. This beautiful hymn is attributed to the Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus (776-856).

Pentecost, 14th c. Missal (Natl. Library of Wales

 It is a tradition to sing it as a novena in the evening at Vespers, begging for the gifts of the Holy Spirit to transform all of us and bring us to the fullness of the life that God so desires us to have. May there be an outpouring of his grace and peace on all the world!

Here's a recording of the Veni Creator Spiritus, sung by the Schola Gregoriana Mediolansis under the direction of Giovanni Vianini, and here's a translation of it (the choir sings it first with women's voices, and repeats it with men and women):

COME, Holy Spirit, Creator blest,
and in our souls take up Thy rest;
come with Thy grace and heavenly aid
to fill the hearts which Thou hast made.

O comforter, to Thee we cry,
O heavenly gift of God Most High,
O fount of life and fire of love,
and sweet anointing from above.

Thou in Thy sevenfold gifts are known;
Thou, finger of God's hand we own;
Thou, promise of the Father, Thou
Who dost the tongue with power imbue.

Kindle our sense from above,
and make our hearts o'erflow with love;
with patience firm and virtue high
the weakness of our flesh supply.

Far from us drive the foe we dread,
and grant us Thy peace instead;
so shall we not, with Thee for guide,
turn from the path of life aside.

Oh, may Thy grace on us bestow
the Father and the Son to know;
and Thee, through endless times confessed,
of both the eternal Spirit blest.

Now to the Father and the Son,
Who rose from death, be glory given,
with Thou, O Holy Comforter,
henceforth by all in earth and heaven. Amen.

7th Sunday of Eastertide, Year A

On the Seventh Sunday of Eastertide in 1999, St. Pope John Paul II spoke on the today's Gospel at the World meeting "Reconciliation in Charity." His words seem particular appropriate during this time of the pandemic:

Pentecost (detail), Book of Hours, British Library

Sustained by the Word of God, the Church constantly proclaims the goodness of the Lord. Where there is hatred, she proclaims love and forgiveness; where there is war, reconciliation and peace; where there is loneliness, acceptance and solidarity. In every corner of the earth, she prolongs Christ's prayer which re-echoes in today's Gospel: “That they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (Jn 17:3). Today, more than ever, man needs to know God in order to entrust to him, in an attitude of confident abandonment, the weakness of his wounded nature. He notices, often without realizing it, the need to experience the divine love by which he is reborn to new life.

Through the various apostolates that bring it into contact with old and new forms of poverty, both spiritual and material, every ecclesial community is called to foster this encounter with “the only true God” and with the One whom he has sent, Jesus Christ. Every community is moved and prompted by the awareness that helping others does not consist merely in offering them material aid and support, but above all in leading them, by the witness of their own availability, to experience the divine goodness, which is revealed with particular force in the human mediation of fraternal charity.

Feast of the Ascension, Year I

The Church allows the faithful to celebrate the Feast of the Ascension either on the traditional Thursday, or on the following Sunday in order that more of its members can participate. Here in the monastery we celebrate it today, so we’d like to share with you part of the reading we hear at Vigils. It's from a homily by St. Augustine:

Ascension, Giotto (c. 1305)

As he was about to ascend, he spoke the last words he was to utter on earth. At the moment of going up to heaven, the head commended to our care the members he was leaving on earth, and so departed. No longer will you find Christ speaking on earth; in the future he will speak from heaven. Why will he speak from heaven? Because his members are being trampled underfoot on earth. He spoke to Saul the persecutor from above, saying: ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? I have ascended to heaven, but I still remain on the earth. Here at the Father’s right hand I sit, but there I still hunger and thirst and am without shelter.’

...My friends, you have Christian hearts. Think, then; if the words of one who is on the way to the grave are so sweet, so precious, so important to his heirs, what must the last words of Christ mean to his heirs as he departs, not for the grave but for heaven! When a person has lived and died his soul is borne away to another place while his body is laid in the ground. Whether his last request is carried out or not, it matters little to him now. He has other things to do or suffer. His corpse lies in the grave, feeling nothing. And yet his dying wishes are carefully obeyed! If that is so, what will be the lot of those who fail to observe the parting words of the one who is seated in heaven and who looks down to see whether they are flouted or not – the words of him who said: Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? and who reserves for the Day of Judgement all that he sees his members suffer?

6th Sunday of Eastertide, Year I

At the Last Supper, Jesus prepared his disciples (and that includes us) not only for his Passion and Resurrection, but also for his Ascension to the Father (Jn. 14:15-21). Yet he promised he would not leave us orphans. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows him.

Pope Francis spoke about this gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday, 2013:

Holy Spirit, Bernini (St. Peter's Basilica)

The older theologians used to say that the soul is a kind of sailboat, the Holy Spirit is the wind which fills its sails and drives it forward, and the gusts of wind are the gifts of the Spirit. Lacking his impulse and his grace, we do not go forward. The Holy Spirit draws us into the mystery of the living God and saves us from the threat of a Church which is gnostic and self-referential, closed in on herself; he impels us to open the doors and go forth to proclaim and bear witness to the good news of the Gospel, to communicate the joy of faith, the encounter with Christ.

The Holy Spirit is the soul of mission. The events that took place in Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago are not something far removed from us; they are events which affect us and become a lived experience in each of us. The Pentecost of the Upper Room in Jerusalem is the beginning, a beginning which endures. The Holy Spirit is the supreme gift of the risen Christ to his apostles, yet he wants that gift to reach everyone. As we heard in the Gospel, Jesus says: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to remain with you forever” (Jn 14:16). It is the Paraclete Spirit, the “Comforter,” who grants us the courage to take to the streets of the world, bringing the Gospel!

The Holy Spirit makes us look to the horizon and drive us to the very outskirts of existence in order to proclaim life in Jesus Christ. Let us ask ourselves: do we tend to stay closed in on ourselves, on our group, or do we let the Holy Spirit open us to mission? Today let us remember these three words: newness, harmony and mission.

5th Sunday of Eastertide, Year A

On April 20, 2008, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium while visiting the United States. He commented on the Mass readings, drawing a parallel between the increase in numbers of the early Church recorded in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 6:1-7) to the growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. The full text is given on the Vatican website; here's a small selection of his words:

Christ Pantokrator (St. Catherine's, 6th c.)

Authority” … “obedience.” To be frank, these are not easy words to speak nowadays. Words like these represent a “stumbling stone” for many of our contemporaries, especially in a society which rightly places a high value on personal freedom. Yet, in the light of our faith in Jesus Christ – “the way and the truth and the life” – we come to see the fullest meaning, value, and indeed beauty, of those words.

The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love. Only by losing ourselves, the Lord tells us, do we truly find ourselves (cf. Lk 17:33). True freedom blossoms when we turn away from the burden of sin, which clouds our perceptions and weakens our resolve, and find the source of our ultimate happiness in him who is infinite love, infinite freedom, infinite life. “In his will is our peace.”

Real freedom, then, is God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free (cf. Jn 8:32). And this freedom in truth brings in its wake a new and liberating way of seeing reality. When we put on “the mind of Christ” (cf. Phil 2:5), new horizons open before us! In the light of faith, within the communion of the Church, we also find the inspiration and strength to become a leaven of the Gospel in the world. We become the light of the world, the salt of the earth (cf. Mt 5:13-14), entrusted with the “apostolate” of making our own lives, and the world in which we live, conform ever more fully to God’s saving plan.

4th Sunday of Eastertide, Year A

“I am the gate for the sheep,” Jesus tells his disciples (John 10:1-10). “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” This Gospel passage continues the Easter celebration of the central mystery of Christianity: Jesus saved us from our sins by giving his life for us on the Cross and rising from the dead. Here's part of a commentary from the early Church Father St. Clement, a convert from paganism and bishop of Alexandria, who lived  ca. 150-215. It's a comforting reminder of our need for the Divine Healer, especially these days:

In our sickness we need a savior, in our wanderings a guide, in our blindness someone to show us the light, in our thirst the fountain of living water which quenches for ever the thirst of those who drink from it. We dead people need life, we sheep need a shepherd, we children need a teacher, the whole world needs Jesus!

Pasture us children like sheep, Lord. Fill us with your own food, the food of righteousness. As our guide we pray you to lead us to your holy mountain, the Church on high, touching the heavens....

How bountiful the giver who for our sake gives his most precious possession, his own life! He is a real benefactor and friend, who desired to be our brother when he might have been our Lord, and who in his goodness even went so far as to die for us!