I've posted a homily for Monday of the seventh ordinary week of the Church year.

OPEN HOUSE TOURS OF MY MONASTERY

The parts the public is normally not allowed to see!

Saturday, June 14
Sunday, June 15

12 Noon to 2 PM

Why? We're celebrating the fiftieth year of the monastery.

US: one humanity in many persons. THEM: one God in three persons.

[Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The superior preaches today. Here's something I wrote before about the Trinity.]


A “father” is someone who gives his very self as a fountain of life.

In the LIFE of God— in God’s own LIFE— there is a person who is the FATHER, someone who GIVES, someone whose GIVING is so total, so absolute that it is alive: the SON.

The Gospels show that, when it comes to the heavenly Father, the personality of Jesus is total gratitude, absolute gratitude to the Father.

To speak of “God the Son” is to say that GRATITUDE for the Father’s self giving— GRATITUDE in God— is also an absolute, a living person: THE SON— Gratitude in Person.

The Father and the Son— the GIVER and the THANKSGIVER— the Father and the Son live for each other.

However, their embrace, their love for each other is not closed in on itself.

Their shared giving is absolutely open-ended.

Both of them give.

None of them needs or takes anything back.

Their communion of surrender for each other is a living absolute: THE SPIRIT.

If there is not a Trinity— if there is not God the Father and Son and Holy Spirit— then there can be no one and nothing worth recognizing as God, for such a one could not be absolute in anything.

Not absolute in SELF-GIVING.

Not absolute in THANKSGIVING.

Not absolute in the COMMUNION of giving and gratitude.

The truth is that God is Father and Son and Spirit.

The Father: absolute self-giving.

The Son: absolute thanksgiving.

The Spirit: absolute communion of self-giving and thanksgiving.

This is the truth of the living God, absolute love BEFORE and WITHOUT the created universe.

God is Love— before and without the created universe... before and without us.

Nonetheless, what does the Trinity of God have to do with us?

We are baptized into the Trinity, baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

The saving Trinity is what the Son of God was born on earth to reveal and make present in the Flesh and Blood of our humanity.

The Trinity is the saving truth that Christ lived.

It is the saving truth in which he suffered and died.

The saving truth in which he rose from the dead!

The Father and Son and Spirit are revealed, present and at work in the Flesh and Blood of our humanity, for us men and for our salvation— and for the glory of God.

The man born in a stable and risen from the dead in a garden is the Way of God, the Truth of God and the Life of God in human Flesh and Blood.

He is the Flesh and Blood of the heavenly Father’s self-giving love for his children.
Christ is gratitude to the Father, gratitude in Flesh and Blood.

Christ is Flesh and Blood communion with the Father in one Spirit.

We call this Flesh and Blood “Eucharist”, a Greek word meaning “thankfulness, gratefulness, gratitude.”

The Son of God is “Eucharist”— “gratefulness” in person, eternal gratefulness to the Father.

We also call this Flesh and Blood “Holy COMMUNION,” because the Father and the Son are TOGETHER, bringing us into their COMMUNION of one Spirit of Life and Thanksgiving.

Work on the first handwritten Bible that any Benedictine monastery has commissioned in 500 years is nearing completion

In the United Kingdom a team of calligraphers and artists has been copying the Bible by hand and illustrating it.
They expect to complete their work by the end of 2009.
In 1998 the Benedictine monks of St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, U.S.A., commissioned the project.

The project has a website.

Papal visit triggers “tsunami” of New York seminary applications

I thought I posted this last month, but it turns out I did not. Here it is now.

(From CatholicNewsAgency.com, April 26, 2008)


St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers, New York, has received dozens of applications following Pope Benedict’s visit, the New York Daily News reports.

"It's been like a tsunami, a good tsunami of interest," said Father Luke Sweeney, the Archdiocese of New York's vocations director. “I've been meeting people all week and have a lot of e-mails I haven't had the chance yet to respond to. It has been incredible.”

For the first time in 108 years, the seminary had been preparing for a year with no students. Only 23 seminarians are expected to be ordained for New York City over the next four years. A study carried out by Catholic World Report claims the archdiocese’s ratio of priests to congregation members is among the worst in the country.

Currently there are only 648 diocesan priests for the Archdiocese of New York, which has 2.5 million Catholics.

“We are facing a severe shortage,” Father Sweeney said. The vocations director recently launched a recruitment campaign that uses the slogans “The World Needs Heroes” and “You Have To Be a Real Man If You Want to Become a Priest.”

“We were hoping the Pope would convince many who were considering the priesthood to make the next step. It looks like he did,” he said.

The Pope spoke to a rally of 25,000 young people on the seminary’s grounds last Saturday, April 19.

Father Sweeney described how the Pope’s words affected one new applicant.

“One said he came, saw the crowd, heard what the Pope said and then called us," the priest said. "He said his questions and concerns were answered when he heard him speak.”

The Bible is NOT “The Pillar and Bulwark of the Truth”

1 Timothy 3:14-16

I am writing these instructions to you
so that … you may know how one ought to behave in
THE HOUSEHOLD OF GOD,
which is
THE LIVING GOD'S CHURCH,
THE PILLAR AND BULWARK OF THE TRUTH.
Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of
OUR RELIGION:
He was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated in the Spirit,
seen by angels,
preached among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.

"Thank God it's still Easter!"

The last day of the Easter Season is Pentecost Sunday.

Why do you not speak in tongues?

More than one thousand, four hundred years ago, St. Fulgentius of Ruspe, said:

The Church, united by the Holy Spirit, speaks in the language of every people.
Therefore if somebody should say to one of us.
“You have received the Holy Spirit,
why do you not speak in tongues?”
his reply should be,
“I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men,
because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church,
and she speaks all languages.
What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost,
except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people.” [Cf. “Sermo 8 in Pentecoste” 1-3: PL 65, 743-744]

Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter

I have posted the homily I preached at Mass today.

“Is This What You Mean”


Father Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, recently posted on YouTube two videos describing the two most common abortion procedures, using the actual instruments of abortion and the words found in medical textbooks and court testimony.

You can view these videos:
one here
and
the other here.

These videos are part of a new project called, "Is This What You Mean?" It aims to educate the public about the nature of abortion and to challenge public officials and candidates who support the legality of abortion to admit what it is. Click HERE to read about the project.

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

My monastery celebrated the Ascension of the Lord last Thursday, forty days after the Resurrection, in harmony with Scripture. So today we observed the Seventh Sunday of Easter.

I've posted the homily I preached at Mass here in the monastery today.

pánta hósa échei ho patèr emá estin

A powerful masculine identity statement!
The Greek of John 16:15a— “ALL THAT THE FATHER HAS IS MINE.” [That’s one line from the Gospel reading for the Mass of Wednesday of the sixth week of Easter.]
When a child is born, whether male or female, the child is literally dependent on the body of a female, the mother, for life, for nourishment. Even if nourished with a manufactured feeding formula, the formula is a substitute for natural milk from the body of the mother.
However, if the infant is to grow into a healthy human person, he has to acquire a sense of personhood or personal identity that is independent of and distinct from the mother; and this is necessary for both male and female infants.
However, there is a difference.
A female infant can continue to hold onto identification with the mother and the mother’s body in terms of female gender.
While a female infant absolutely must acquire a sense of identity as person separate from the person of her mother, the female infant does not have to “break” with the gender identity of her mother— and it is best that she not do so.
A male infant must acquire BOTH a sense of personhood that is separated (“broken away”) from the personhood of his mother AND a sense of gender identity different from his mother’s; for this last separation, a male infant needs to “latch” onto, or identify with, gender-wise, a male, a father.
In terms of the body, in terms of roles to be played as a human being, in terms of emotionality, a male infant, a male child, needs to recognize, “All that my father has is mine.”
Jesus, in John 16:15a, “All that the Father has is mine,” is not expressing his sense of physical gender identity, so to speak.
Nonetheless, we cannot conclude from his words and his meaning that his identification with God his Father has NO relevance to his sense of human masculinity, maleness.
Jesus overtly uses specifically male titles for himself: Bridegroom; Son.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus is a male who is powerfully, absolutely sure of himself, his identity, his origin, his goals, his intentions, his wants, his expectations, his mission.
In John 16:12-15, Jesus powerfully affirms not only his sense of identity as Son of the Father, but also the way in which we can and must identify with Jesus, and thereby identify with the Father.
Unless we identify, as sons, with the Father, we cannot grow as men in Christ. [Women, too, need to identify and grow as daughters of the Father.]
However, while we can naturally identify with human persons, it is quite another thing to identify with God the Son and God the Father.
We cannot bear to do so, and Jesus alludes to that in this passage, revealing, nonetheless a supernatural power— the Spirit of truth— that enables us to be identified with Jesus and the Father.

I have yet many things to say to you,
BUT YOU CANNOT BEAR THEM NOW.
When the Spirit of truth comes,
he will guide you into all the truth;
for he will not speak on his own authority,
but whatever he hears he will speak,
and he will declare to you the things that are to come.
He will glorify me,
for he [THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH] WILL TAKE WHAT IS MINE
AND DECLARE IT TO YOU.
ALL THAT THE FATHER HAS IS MINE;
therefore I said that he [the Spirit of truth] will take what is mine
and declare it to you.

Because of the Spirit we can bear to receive all that Jesus has as Son of the Father.
Jesus has all that the Father has.
It is the Spirit, then, that empowers us to be sons and daughters of the Father, even as Jesus is Son of God.
In Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, all that the Father has is mine, and I can bear it.
My (sinful) difficulty is that I am not daring enough, and so I settle for far less.