8th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow Jesus tells his disciples (Matt. 6:24-34): they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? How comforting these words are! Do not be anxious. God will take care of us.

Here's a lovely mediatation on this Gospel by St. John Chrysostom:

If spiritual things hold first place in our lives, material needs will cause us no concern, for God in his goodness will give them to us in abundance. On the other hand, if we devote ourselves entirely to earthly pursuits and neglect our spiritual life, if we are always concerned with what this life has to offer without any care for our souls, then we shall forfeit not only spiritual graces but worldly profit as well.

God wishes us, then, to be free from every anxiety regarding temporal affairs, and to have all possible leisure for the things of the Spirit. He says: “Your part is to seek spiritual blessings, and I myself will provide amply for your material needs. Look at the birds in the sky. They neither sow nor reap nor gather crops into barns, and yet your Father feeds them.” In other words, “If I take such care of irrational birds as to supply them with all they need without ploughing or sowing, I will take much greater care of you who are endowed with reason, if only you make up your minds to put spiritual things before temporal ones. If I made these creatures for your sake, as well as the whole of creation, and if I take such care of them, of what great care will I not deem you worthy – you for whom I created all of this?”

Summer Monastic Experience Weekend 2016

Last weekend we had a fantastic Monastic Experience Weekend - nine wonderful young women came! The participants share in our life, singing the Divine Office with us in choir, eating with us in the refectory, working alongside us, and having talks on monastic life and prayer. It's a joy and privilege to have these "Come and See" weekends and know that there is such vibrant life in the Church! Please keep these young women in your prayers as they continue their discernment journey.

Friday night Vespers in choir

Listening to reading in the refectory

Saturday pizza night

The participants

12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. These words of Jesus to his disciples in today's gospel (Luke 9: 18-24) are not always easy to hear. And yet, this is what he asks of us. During the Way of the Cross at Brazil's 2013 World Youth Day, Pope Francis told his young audience:

Christ carrying the cross, Titian ca 1565.

“We have come here today to accompany Jesus on his journey of sorrow and love, the Way of the Cross, which is one of the most intense moments of World Youth Day. At the end of the Holy Year of Redemption, Blessed John Paul II chose to entrust the Cross to you, young people, asking you “to carry it throughout the world as a symbol of Christ’s love for humanity, and announce to everyone that only in the death and resurrection of Christ can we find salvation and redemption.”

...[T]he Cross of Christ invites us also to allow ourselves to be smitten by his love, teaching us always to look upon others with mercy and tenderness, especially those who suffer, who are in need of help, who need a word or a concrete action; the Cross invites us to step outside ourselves to meet them and to extend a hand to them. Dear friends, let us bring to Christ’s Cross our joys, our sufferings and our failures. There we will find a Heart that is open to us and understands us, forgives us, loves us and calls us to bear this love in our lives, to love each person, each brother and sister, with the same love.

11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

In today's gospel, taken from Luke 7:36-8:3, a woman who was a sinner comes to Jesus as he is eating in the house of Simon the Pharisee. She stood behind him at his feet weeping and began to bathe his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them with the ointment. Jesus, knowing Simon's judgmental thoughts, says to him I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven because she has shown great love. A sinful woman, an anonymous Syrian writer says,

Christ in the House of Simon by Dieric Bouts (ca. 1420-1475)

has proclaimed to us that God’s love has gone forth in search of sinners. For when he called her, Christ was inviting our whole race to love; and in her person he was drawing all sinners to his forgiveness. He spoke to her alone, but he was drawing all creation to his grace. No one else persuaded him to help her come to forgiveness; only his love for the one he himself had formed persuaded him to do this, and his own grace besought him on behalf of the work of his hands.

....In order that you may have the same experience, reflect within yourself that your sin is great, but that it is blasphemy against God and damage to yourself to despair of his forgiveness because your sin seems to you to be too great. He has promised to forgive your sins, however many they are; would you tell him you cannot believe this and dispute with him, saying that your sin is too great; he cannot heal your sickness? Stop at this point, and cry out with the prophet, Lord, I have sinned against you. At once he will reply, “As for me, I overlooked your fault: you shall not die.” Glory to him from all of us, for all the ages. Amen.

10th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

Today's Gospel account is of the resurrection of the widow of Nain's only son. Luke tells us that Jesus had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. The crowd is seized by fear and they glorify God.

In a sermon on this gospel, St. Augustine told his congregation:

All believers are moved when they hear the accounts of the miracles wrought by Jesus, our Lord and Savior, though they are affected by them in different ways. Some are astounded by his wonderful physical cures, but have not yet learnt to discern the greater miracles that lie beyond the world of sense. Others marvel that the miracles that they hear of our Lord working on people’s bodies are now being accomplished more wonderfully in their souls.

No Christian should doubt that even today the dead are being raised to life. Yet, while everyone has eyes capable of seeing the dead rise in the way the widow’s son rose, as we have just heard in the gospel, the ability to see the spiritually dead arise is possessed only by those who have themselves experienced a spiritual resurrection.

It is a greater thing to raise what will live for ever than to raise what must die again. When the young man in the gospel was raised, his widowed mother rejoiced; when souls are daily raised from spiritual death, mother Church rejoices. The young man was dead in body, these latter are dead in spirit. Those who witnessed the lad’s visible death mourned openly and visibly, but the invisible death of the dead in spirit was neither seen nor thought about.

Jesus raises the widow of Nain's son, Codex Aureus of Echternach, ca 1030-1050

3rd Sunday of Lent, Year II

In today's Gospel, taken from Luke 13:1-9, Jesus tells the parable of the unfruitful fig tree. The owner wants to cut it down, but the vinekeeper asks for more time: “‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’” His plea for mercy resonates with the theme of mercy emphasized over and over by Pope Francis.

St. Bernard, commenting on the Beatitudes, talks about mercy:

Blessed are the Merciful, Marble relief
Church of St. Charles Borromeo, Antwerp, Belgium

The sequence of beatitudes given in the Sermon on the Mount places the merciful before the pure in heart. The merciful are those who are quick to see truth in their neighbour; they reach out to others in compassion and identify with them in love, responding to the joys and sorrows in the lives of others as if they were their own. They make themselves weak with the weak, and burn with indignation when others are led astray. They are always ready to share the joys of those who rejoice and the sorrows of those who mourn....

Just as pure truth can only be seen by the pure in heart, so the sufferings of our fellow men and women are more truly felt by hearts that know suffering themselves. However, we cannot sympathize with the wretchedness of others until we first recognize our own. Then we shall understand the feelings of others by what we personally feel, and know how to come to their help. Such was the example shown by our Savior, who desired to suffer himself in order that he might learn to feel compassion, and to be afflicted in order that he might learn how to show mercy. Scripture says of him that he learned the meaning of obedience through what he suffered. In the same way he learned the meaning of mercy. Not that the Lord whose mercy is from age to age was ignorant of mercy’s meaning until then; he knew its nature from all eternity, but he learned it by personal experience during his days on earth.

20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A

From a homily by St. John Chrysostom:

The Canaanite woman whose daughter was tormented by a devil came to Christ begging his help. Most urgently she cried out: Lord, have pity on me. My daughter is grievously tormented by a devil. Notice that the woman was a foreigner, a gentile, a person from outside the Jewish community. What was she then but a dog, unworthy to obtain her request? It is not fair, said the Lord, to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs. Nevertheless, by perseverance she became worthy; for Christ not only admitted her to the same noble rank as the children, dog though she was, but he also sent her away with high praise, saying: Woman, you have great faith. Let it be as you desire. Now when Christ says: You have great faith, you need seek no further proof of the woman’s greatness of soul. You see that an unworthy woman became worthy by perseverance.

Jesus exorcising the Canaanite Woman's daughter,
from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 15th c.

Now would you like proof that we shall gain more by praying ourselves than by asking others to pray for us? The woman cried out and the disciples went to Christ and said: Give her what she wants – she is shouting after us. And he said to them: I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But when the woman herself, still crying out, came to him and said: That is true, sir, and yet the dogs eat what falls from their master’s table, then he granted her request, saying: Let it be as you desire.

Have you understood? When the disciples entreated him the Lord put them off, but when the woman herself cried out begging for this favour he granted it. And at the beginning when she first made her request, he did not answer, but after she had come to him once, twice, and a third time, he gave her what she desired. By this he was teaching us that he had withheld the gift not to drive her away, but to make that woman’s patience an example for all of us.

Now that we have learned these lessons, let us not despair even if we are guilty of sin and unworthy of any favour. We know that we can make ourselves worthy by perseverance.