Ash Wednesday - Holy Mass

Joel 2:12-18
2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

Just this past Sunday was Valentine’s Day. The ubiquitous symbol of this day is the heart. We usually find it in red everywhere. The element of heart that was symbolized on this day was love, love in its relational and affective, feeling mode.

Today, the heart is back. For what we are all about in Lent is the heart. If we need a greeting card to open this season, the prophet Joel leads with the word heart. He is echoing God’s words: “Return to me with your whole heart…rend your hearts and not your garments and return to me, your Lord and God.” Now the heart translates as something more than amorous feelings, the glow of being in love, as we say. To come back to someone carrying your heart, to stand before God with a heart that is broken and torn speaks of wanting to renew a relationship that has moved away from self-giving, sacrifice and looking out for the other. The call the prophet speaks is a call to look closely at our motivations for acting and speaking. The call is about checking out our attitudes and assumptions. The heart for this season of Lent is the heart that lies behind everything we say our do. “Return to me with your whole heart.” For it is the heart that governs all our relationships and all our plans.

The implication in the prophetic call to return and in St. Paul’s strong command to be reconciled is that something is not well in this human heart of ours. Say what we like, all is not right in depths of the human spirit. If it were, then we would not have this season that commands us to return with the whole heart. It seems that we have been acting with less than the whole. We have perhaps been acting in a manner that is less than fully human. It would seem that we have become careless and hard, otherwise there would be no need to ask us to soften it. No doubt what is meant is that our heart has ceased being other centered, it is no longer focused toward and on someone. It has become turned in on itself. In biblical terms, it has become hard and stubborn. It is no longer committed to the original relationship that binds us to God and through God to each other. A human heart at its core is other centered. In this way, it reflects the heart of God that is always other centered. God’s heart, he says today, is gracious and merciful, slow to anger; its richness, its wholeness lies in kindness.

So this is the season for acknowledging our hearts. It is the season for a deep recognition of the state of our real selves. It is the time to recognize the primary relationships that are found and are interwoven in the heart: the relationship to God, to fellow human beings and finally to ourselves and the environment we live in, to creation. But the heart is not something we see. It is invisible. It is of the spirit. How do we know something is happening there? How do we know that changes are taking place there? We have no choice but to look at what is coming forth from the heart. We have no choice but to look on the outside.

Certain things we do and say are able to show what is happening in the heart. If we fast, we let go of control and keeping for ourselves what is necessary for life. If we pray, we acknowledge our humanity and our solidarity with others in the human family. If we give alms, we are sharing our material goods or wealth. These are external signs that speak about what is happening inside, in the heart. If we bow our heads to receive ashes, we are at least admitting that we have something to grieve for, that something within us needs healing. When we accept the ashes, we accept death.; we acknowledge that we are limited. We need these external signs. By doing them the heart should be activated.

In the end, the restoration of the relationships is not a matter of fixing up things on the outside. It is a matter of something deeply personal, deeply spiritual. It is something which affects our whole attitude in life. It is not a matter of impressing anybody. It is as Jesus says, a matter of being before your Father in secret. This is the gospel way of saying it is being with your heart before God. What matters is that you and I are walking in the way the Father asks us to. Really, Lenten activity is get us to admit that God alone gives us honor, dignity and recognition. The Lenten work, whether it is fasting, prayer or almsgiving, doesn’t make anything happen on God’s part. But it can very well make us more aware of where our heart should be and consequently where our interests should lie….There is real physical hunger on this earth. Some brothers and sisters don’t get their share of daily bread. Fasting makes us ponder the mystery of why? Some people have deep longings that they think can be satisfied with more of the goods of this world. Fasting reminds us that human hearts are only satisfied by God alone. Many people are overwhelmed by suffering but have forgotten how to cry. Praying reminds us that before God all words are possible and can be heard. Tears and groans don’t fall on deaf ears but are gathered up till they stir compassion in the heart of God. We look around us and we see the inequality of this world’s goods, between north and south, rich and poor. Divesting ourselves of something concrete and material is a way of reminding ourselves that to have and to possess means holding all things in trust and for sharing. The earth is not ours to own. It is ours to care for; it is a precious gift.

The symbol for Lent is the human heart. It once again becomes a heart in process, a heart in the making, a heart in transformation. It is a heart being softened, a heart being awakened, a heart being torn. It is a heart, which began as less than whole, but in these days is becoming whole once again. It is a heart that had broken its commitment but in these days is breaking faithlessness and moving again toward fidelity and new love. It is becoming a heart shaped by our master and Lord who showed us how to rend it so that love pours out.

In a few moments, we will willingly receive ashes. They look useless; they look as though they should be thrown out. But like the dust and earth they symbolize, out of them will come new life, out of them will come a new light and fire that will burn and glow and never go out or grow cold.

~Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB

A Lenten Reflection by Bro. Tobias, OSB

Lenten Reflection

The monks of Christ the King Priory – Benedictine Mission House and St. Benedict Center in Schuyler, extend prayerful good wishes as we start our Lenten journey today.

Over the years, you certainly have heard many sermons on the values of prayer, fasting and alms giving that Jesus recommends to his disciples and followers. The words, of Jesus recorded in chapter 6 in the Gospel of Mathew, are familiar and yet a challenge for each Christian as we start the observance of Lent.

Benedictines have the custom of listening daily to a section of the Rule of St. Benedict. Chapter 49 is dedicated to the Observance of Lent. Even though I hear this chapter three times in the course of a year, and again on Ash Wednesday as part of a spiritual conference, one phrase strikes me in particular: …look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing.

I am standing here in front of the Passion Wall in our chapel, created by renowned artist Lore Friedrich-Gronau who for many years was artist in residence at our monastery in Germany.

The images of the Passion Wall reflect the last days of Jesus, especially this agony in the garden, the trial before Pilate, the way to Golgotha, the Crucifixion and finally the empty tomb with the angel declaring that He is risen.

I invite you to take time for reflection on the saving mysteries recorded in the Gospel accounts. During this time of pandemic not everyone can go to a church and walk the Stations of the Cross. The website pages of the monastery and retreat house have versions of our outdoor stations and reflections that may be helpful for your Lenten journey.

Most of all: whatever you do, do it in the spirit of charity and pray with us for peace in our world, and let us look forward with joy to holy Easter.

Blessings!

~Br. Tobias, OSB


6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Leviticus 13:1–2, 44–46
1 Corinthians 10:31–11:1
Mark 1:40–45

Last Sunday when we met we found that the whole town was gathered at the door. The community had brought all who were sick or were possessed. Jesus was busy healing and exorcising. This Sunday we find out there was one category of sick that was not in that group. The reading from Leviticus makes it clear that anyone with leprosy would not be in a crowd. In fact such a person had to live apart from anyone and live outside the town. We would say they have to be in forced isolation.

The word leprosy as we find it in the first reading and the gospel has a wider meaning than what we now call Hansen’s disease. That disease was most likely not known at the time of Jesus. Our texts refer to any kind of skin disease, with its broken skin and oozing pus, contagious or not. A person with a skin disease was not just sick, they were ritually unclean. They could not touch anyone, and anyone who touched them would automatically become unclean and have to also isolate for a time. While we might not be talking Hansen’s disease, the effects were the same: social isolation that meant religious isolation. Just think of the stories of lepers being isolated well into the 20th century.…We only need to recall the stories of St. Damian de Veuster and St. Marianne Cope on an Hawaiian island, banished and isolated. And closer to home in Nebraska, we only have to recall Fr. Flanagan reaching out to the street boys of Omaha, rejected by many as beyond the pale, and he being faulted for finding good in them.…The stigma of leprosy was public; you went around crying “unclean, unclean.” In effect you had to tell people to stay away. You can imagine the shame in that.

Now this week someone with a skin disease breaks rank so to speak and approaches Jesus. He should not be approaching anyone. He does not say please cure me, heal me, restore my sight. No, he asks Jesus to make him clean. It is not just a physical cure he is asking for. In response, Jesus does not tell him to stay away. In fact, now Jesus breaks rank. Jesus breaks the law, Jesus breaks the tradition. He does not drive him away. In fact he does the opposite; he stretches out his hand towards him and touches him. And with the power of his word the man is made clean. Jesus breaks boundaries: physical, religious and social. He does so consciously and deliberately.

The leper approaches Jesus as a man of power. You are able, you have the power, to make me clean. The leper knows what Jesus can do. He appeals to what Jesus wants to do. Jesus sees the leprosy; Jesus hears the question directed not to his power but to his desire, his will. What do you want to do with your power begs the leper. What does your heart want? The answer comes quickly. We hear that Jesus is moved with pity. The hand is stretched out and it touches the unclean skin of the leper. And the words express what Jesus wants; he wants to make him clean, he wants to restore him to his community. When he makes this leper clean then he is also making the community whole again. Someone isolated is brought back into the living pulse of the community.

Jesus holds divine power. The demons already know that he is the Son of God. Jesus tells them to keep quiet. The leper knows that it is not just a physical cure he needs; he can only be cleansed by God. Only God can make him clean and restore relationships within the community. The leper appeals to what God desires. Isolated he may be but the leper begs for God to be true to himself, to be true to what his power is really for. He appeals to the God of mercy and compassion, the one slow to anger and abiding in kindness. Jesus hears that appeal. The story says he is moved with pity. It may not be the best word to describe Jesus reaction. He is not feeling sorry for the leper. The word means something like moved in his gut. It expresses a movement in the deepest part of Jesus. And we see that movement when the hand is stretched out and the leper touched. That is the compassion of God. To touch the untouchable, to say yes to the shame of another’s isolation and marginalization.

This Gospel story is divided almost evenly between the leper and Jesus. And it ends not with the leper but with Jesus. There is irony here. If Jesus touches the leper, then according to the Law, the religious system, he becomes unclean. Jesus takes on himself the shame, the isolation, the stigma of the leper. Jesus sends the leper to the priests for affirmation of his healing. But now Jesus cannot go into the towns. He has to remain outside, like the leper, in deserted places. Jesus has broken the acceptable boundaries. So he will be on the edge. He may be popular and draw a crowd but he has sent a message as to who he is and to what his Father wants.

The leper becomes an evangelist, proclaiming that God is with his people. But Jesus is not finished yet. Jesus has a journey to make and a baptism to undergo. Jesus’ identification with the outcast, with broken and sinful humanity is still in progress. It will only be completed outside the city of Jerusalem. There he will die, alone and abandoned by his followers, his close community. There he will carry our pain and suffer our infirmities to the end. There he will reach out and touch our death spreading his arms on the cross. What he began in Galilee by stretching out his hand to touch the untouchable will finally be completed. For us humans death is the untouchable, that from which we draw back. Jesus will not draw back.

We who are in Christ, what about us? We were washed clean in baptism. We share in Christ’s power to do good. The question is can we join Christ in wanting to do that. It will mean crossing boundaries. It might mean using power to benefit not a few of our choosing but the many that God is seeking to make clean and restore to communion in his family. Who are those today that others or even we treat as outcasts as unworthy, as those who do not fit it or we say should not fit in? For them Jesus is seen as moved with compassion.

At the Eucharist we recall the death of Christ, a death moved by love. He stretches out his hand to feed us with the power of that love. Dare we take it in hand so that we can stretch out our hand for the acceptance, understanding and healing of others? The power of love that moves us when Jesus touches our hand will find its expression in whom we touch.

~ Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB

Baptism of our Lord

Isaiah 55:1–11
1 John 5:1–9
Mark 1:7-11

Perhaps you do not remember. Six weeks ago, we began the Advent-Christmas cycle with a reading from Isaiah. His lament became our longing, “Oh, that today you would rend the heavens and come down” (Is 64:19). Here we are at the end of the Christmas season. We are at the end of a season of epiphanies. Today, Mark tells us God is doing just that, answering our cry and coming to our aid: the heavens are being torn open. And from that torn opening comes down the Spirit. The same Spirit that was present at the creation of the world has once again come down upon someone dripping with the water, the same water that was there at the beginning. It is the same Spirit that came down on the prophet and anointed him to be a bearer of Good News, to bring release to those in bondage, to comfort those in mourning and bring gladness and a time of grace and favor. That tear in the heavens was not silent, for from that opening a voice was heard. It is a voice that affirms identity and at the same time gives a mission. “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”
What Mary and Joseph and even the shepherds at Bethlehem heard about Mary’s child before Christmas and on Christmas, Jesus now hears for himself. He is Son of the Father, he is Messiah, he is a chosen servant, and he is David’s heir. All the words that the voice from the heavens speak have accumulated meaning over Israel’s history. Now all that meaning and purpose are laid on Jesus. The Spirit enters him who was conceived by the same Spirit. In Mark’s gospel, this scene is presented as a very personal one. Only Jesus sees and hears all this about himself. Mark does this because he does not have his story begin earlier on like Matthew, Luke or John where all this is revealed to the characters and us the listener.

I dare say that none of us heard any voices at our baptism, probably because most of us were infants. But I heard no stories about it from my parents or godparents. Even adults do not hear the voice of the Father at their baptism. And yet, hidden in that baptism with its water, its anointing, its clothing and its passing on of the Paschal light something profound does happen to us also. For baptism expands our human genealogy and literally plunges us into the genealogy of God as it were. When, like Jesus, we come up out of the water we come up with our full identity. Be have been born anew by the Spirit of God. We have been adopted by the Father and are now his children. Our primary relationship is not limited to the fleshly but also to the Spirit and the Father.
We heard John say I baptize with water; but the coming one, Jesus, will baptize with the Holy Spirit. His baptism will restore your true identity. You will find yourself in a relationship with Father, Son and Spirit, a Trinity.

Today’s feast is in reality the climax of the Advent-Christmas season. This season is about the appearance of God. It is about God entering into our human history; it is a response to our longing for nearness to God and our need to be shown how to live humanly. So in the Christmas season we have been celebrating appearances. Not just of a baby or a star, but of God in our flesh. Today when Jesus does that humble act of letting John baptize him in water, all heaven literally breaks loose. In a simple washing, heaven and earth come together and earth sees and hears Father, Son and Spirit. Christmastide does not go out in a whimper with tossed tinsel, not with us who belong to Christ. It goes out with the full manifestation of the God we dare to call a Trinity. Today is really Trinity Sunday. This is heart of our feast.

But the feast does not leave us out. That humble act of going into the water places us in the family of the Trinity as it were. In our baptism, we are adopted by God, not as second class citizens, but as truly “begotten” as St. John puts it in his letter today. Entering into the life of Jesus Christ is to be begotten by God he says. As we hear of Jesus being named the Father’s Son, so each of us who experienced the water, is affirmed again as belonging to God in a most intimate and even inexpressible way. John makes it clear: we are not bystanders to Jesus baptism; we are sharers in his begetting. God continues the process of begetting in the human family. Our begetting, like that of Jesus, is one born out of love: my beloved, the one in whom I am well pleased.

This is a cosmic feast. Cosmic in the sense that the heavens are affected and the waters are affected. God touches them both and they become revealers of relationships. The waters of our baptism carry the power of bringing to birth ourselves. It is the place of begetting. We open this Christmas season with the birth of God’s child; we close it with the revelation that we too can be begotten as children of God. God sent his Son out of love; now the Father shares that love with us and calls us to step forward to walk with his Son on the journey of new life.

Our Triune God is not an abstract statement of belief. No, you and I can see it and be in it each time we are nurturing a relationship to one another, to a brother or sister who like ourselves is a child of God, precious enough to die for (this is what John means when he says Jesus came in blood). Our Triune God has a face and flesh in each one of us. Let us walk gently and peacefully with one another—let us walk in the Spirit who today filled Jesus and, on our baptismal day, filled us too.

~Prior, Fr. Joel Macul

New Year's Eve - Thanksgiving for the Year

Due to technical issues we were not able to Live Stream the special prayers and Compline on New Year’s Eve. Below is the text of the message from Fr. Joel Macul, our Prior.

New Year’s Eve 2020
Genesis 1:14–18

Thanksgiving for the Year

 We sometimes forget that the first thing created was time. Time was created on day one of our Judeo-Christian creation tradition by creating light. Then this light in the midst of darkness was used to demarcate day one, day two and so forth. After day one, it is day four that makes it clear that the creation of light marks out time into days and seasons. It colorfully does this by specifying the light of day and the lights of night. No matter how we divide up the passage from night to day we have to say that it is all good: days are good, seasons and times are good. So when we come to this particular unit of time called 2020 we have to hear the poetic phrase: “And God saw that it was good.”

Some may find it a bit difficult to verbalize that after the year 2020. Many will be heard to say, “Thank God its over,” or “There’ll be nothing like it” and think “Good riddance” because it is hard to see any good in it. But when we come together for a few moments at the end of this year 2020 and pause to give praise to God and give thanks, we are resisting the temptation to push this unit of time away. If our tradition says that time comes from God, and we say that it came into being through Christ like all created reality, then we cannot simple shake the dust of the past months off our feet and go on. We must also stand firm in another part of our tradition that says, give thanks always for God’s great love is without end. And so we come together at the end of this year to count blessings and to give thanks. This too is part of our resistance to simply wipe off the year. We must stand with it and in it and give thanks.

Each of us will have our own litany of thanks this year. It will have the lens of the pandemic about it but then we Christians are not strangers to suffering. We are not strangers in finding that love works at the heart of pain and suffering. Our God does marvelous things with what we might call lost and over the edge. There will be the tendency for some of us to read the time passed through the pandemic and its consequences alone. But we must see the time of this year with all the vision that the Gospel give us, with the light of Christ whom we are celebrating these days as come into the world.

Surely the pandemic is asking humanity to look again at itself. It stripped away, for some, what we thought was so essential. Maybe so we could find again what is it that is essential for being human. The year has been an invitation for us to confess a solidarity beyond ourselves and accept the link we have with others. As we pause to look back over our lives, we will need to give thanks for what we think we lost but also for what we found. Perhaps it will come in terms of thinking of others first, of listening to the stories of those who have less of this worlds goods and privileges than we do; perhaps in simply slowing down and seeing and hearing better for it. Perhaps in finding new ways to stay in touch. It is important to give thanks and praise not just for what we experienced despite the hard times but because of the sudden shift of what is/was normal. What was revealed this year may have been forgotten or even unknown but now has enriched our lives.

Pope Francis has taken up the 150th anniversary of naming St. Joseph, Mary’s husband, as patron of the Church and declared a Year of St. Joseph. This may help us as we transition from one cycle of time into another. One can say two things that are characteristic about Joseph as presented in the Gospels:

The first is that he is a person who cares. He cares for his wife and the Child Jesus. Time and again he has to move. So he picks up the child and takes Mary to the next stage. A person who cares. And in this caring he is looking after the vulnerable, a young wife and her son. He is entering into crises that disrupt his small family’s life at its very beginning. Caring. That is what we are also to be about as we move on. Caring, caring for one another, putting the interests of others first as St. Benedict reminds us, looking after the vulnerable; caring that translates into sharing. There is also caring for where we live, for the environment of the earth; and caring for the cultures of the peoples on the earth. Caring, that is how “and God saw that it was good” is played out today.

The second theme connected with Joseph: He never speaks. He is, as is classically put, the silent one. This is not negative. Rather it means that he listens and then acts. It is a reminder to us that we might just need less comment and commentary, less judgmental statements, and less talking to myself. For the silence of Joseph is a silence born out of love. His is a word that speaks volumes because there is no wasted word. To walk alongside others in a silence that understands and cares….maybe that is what the coming year needs from you and me.

Now let us take a few moments of silence so that Thanksgiving for the Grace that has appeared this past year may be named in the quiet of our hearts.

~ Prior, Fr. Joel Macul

Christmas Vigil

Isaiah 9:1–6
Titus 2:11–14
Luke 2:1–14

It all begins with light. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in a land of gloom a light has shone.” Welcoming that light, believing in that light, is where Christmas begins. It is a feast primarily of light. Yes, more candles in the chapel, special candles on the table and of course lights on the trees and for some on every corner of the roof! Christmas begins with light because that is where God begins his creative work. The light that opens Christmas is the light that opened the story of our world and thus the story of humanity on that first day. Light brings us back to the creative word and hand of God, the first day. But we are at that first day for as Isaiah says, a child is born. Birth is the beginning of a new life.

The people of Isaiah’s day experienced darkness. It was a heavy yoke of a foreign power; it was the rod that beat them into submission. It was the darkness of injustice, the gloom of corrupt leadership in the community. Today it might be the darkness of a pandemic that spreads gloom and uncertainty. But there is the darkness of our own choices, the choices of whom to let in and whom to keep out, the choices of who benefits from economic success. Or perhaps the gloom that comes simply by our choice of words. It is in the midst of this darkness that we are asked tonight to see not a simple light but a great light, a light that we cannot control, a light that is shining even when our eyes and feet are grooping to find a place to put our steps.

Today light simply shines as pure gift. And it is as the prophet says a relief, a release from heaviness. It comes as a victory over anything that breathes of darkness and night. Yes, we gather in the night because there is news of a light shining in the midst of the darkness. And the news is the darkness cannot overcome this light. This light will win in the end.

After Isaiah’s description of new light as a conquering light, as victory over the power of darkness comes the shocking revelation that the hero of this new world is a child. Into the midst of human frailty, of our wounds that seem incurable, of so many roadblocks to goodness and mutuality, there is the most vulnerable representative of humanity, a child. But our God is a God who finds power and strength and yes light in what perhaps we would normally scoff at or call foolishness.

When an angel comes in the night, as the gospel tells it, he comes to the only ones awake, shepherds, a lowly group, living out in the countryside, overlooked like that shepherd from Bethlehem long ago. The angel comes to those who in the midst of darkness are looking after others, to those who are defying night by caring, nurturing, by protecting the vulnerable, those susceptible to wandering off. In the midst of the night, God’s glory shines around them. Light surrounds the shepherds, embraces them as it were and from that light comes the news of joy: there is a child born. Yes, something new is about to begin in the world. Something that God will have a direct hand in. That good news shines around the shepherds and their night watch suddenly holds news of joy and a creative moment. The child in David’s city sets off a new beginning for the relationship between God in heaven and human beings on earth: Glory to God in the highest and on earth (where you and I are) peace to those who are open to this gift of new birth. Peace–a new possibility of living together, a healing and binding up of wounds, a way toward forgiveness that lets go of old wrongs. Peace means reconciliation, a coming together in a new way. This says the angel is what this infant is all about.

For a moment, the shepherds find themselves surrounded by a glory and light that holds the meeting between heaven and earth, between God and humanity. But Christmas is the feast of God marrying, as it were, himself to our human flesh. It is the beginning of the final bonding of our God with his image in human beings. It may be easy to believe in God and to accept humanity—but hold them apart. Yet the light that shines today is a light that shines on the two coming together here on earth, here in a Middle Eastern animal stall and feeding trough. Yes, heaven and earth meet in a newborn child wrapped up like all babies in their first human clothes.

The center of our celebration this night is the Child. Isaiah famously proclaims a child is born; the angel tells the watchful shepherds there is a child newly wrapped, lying in manger-it is the sign you have been waiting for. Go and see! How often we pray in the Psalms “It is your face, O Lord, I seek; hide not your face.”  How long do we say God is absent but I am looking for him. Where is he? Where is he when things are dark and go wrong? I want to see his face? Tonight God answers our longing to see his face. We will find it in his child. This may seem so innocent at first, but is it? What is in the face of the Child, what presence? The American novelist Marilynne Robinson in her novel Gilead, has the old Congregationalist pastor John Ames say: “Any human face has a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant.” Today God gives us his face in the face of his infant son. Isaiah gives something of the grand singularity of this face: Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace! And the angel outside Bethlehem adds on: Savior, Christ and Lord.

Every human face has a claim on you. Today God’s human face is seen for the first time. Filled with uniqueness, we are invited to look upon it. Once we do, we submit ourselves to what it asks of us. It will hold us—just think of how we look at an infant and talk about his or her face! But to celebrate the birth of God’s only child and to say yes to that is also to be captured by it. We cannot then look at any other human face or even other faces and not be changed. The face of God has appeared, his gift to us, and looking upon his face in Christ our lives begin their process of transformation. A transformation that leads to lives of justice, awareness of others and God; lives that see in the face of others a marvelous wonder; lives that are eager to do good. Lives that are willing, like the shepherds, to be embraced and held by the glory of love that shown this night in the fields of Bethlehem. A love that comes from God on high: Glory to him and on earth peace.

~Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB

3rd Sunday of Advent - Gaudete Sunday

Third Sunday of Advent
Gaudete Sunday

Isaiah 61:1–2a, 10–11
1 Thessalonians 5:16–24
John 1:6–8, 19–28

The well-known English author G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy, “Joy is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” It is indeed the distinguishing atmosphere of Christian life. It is the very heart of our vocation as a child of God. The root of joy is in our relationship with God. Joy is the expression of one who is loved by God and lives in God. It is not accidental to the relationship with God; it is fundamental. Joy flows out of one who knows they are loved by God. In a deeply real and personal way they have known that God delights in them. And that delight of God in them spills over, as it were, into joy.

Joy is a gift. It is a gift that is ours because we believe that God has reconciled everything and everyone to himself in and through Christ. God creating and reconciling means that God has restored everything and then lays it at our feet because he delights in sharing this gift he has wrought with us. Who is it that cannot rejoice when they become aware of this gift of wholeness and shalom that has been poured into their lap–given out of love?

Paul commands us today to rejoice, not once, not for a while but always. We as Christians, as those who have been incorporated into Christ are to live in joy and to communicate joy. Paul shares his joy with his community and wants them to live in it and to communicate it. We are to communicate the joy of being one in the Body of Christ, joy in believing, joy in the midst of suffering, joy in spite of suffering. Joy always. Joy is to illuminate the circumstances of life. For the Christian the shear happiness of being in relationship with God forever makes it possible to stand in every situation that would seem to separate us from the love of God. But as Paul says nothing can separate us from God’s love. Believing in that finds its expression in joy.

The contemporary spiritual writer Henri Nouwen described joy as “the experience of knowing that you are unconditionally loved and that nothing–sickness, failure, emotional distress, oppression, war and even death–can take that love away.” This joy is the fruit of the Spirit. It frees us from anything related to fear. It holds before us our identity as people who are created good, redeemed from ourselves, called by name and then made holy.

This Sunday has traditionally been called Gaudete Sunday. The word Gaudete means ‘rejoice’. It is the first word in Latin for the antiphon sung at the entrance of the liturgy for this second Sunday before Christmas. Its grammatical form is imperative!It is not a polite request; it is a command, just as Paul puts it to the Thessalonians and later to the Philippians. And it is one that we must also take to heart.

How can we have joy, you might ask, when we are surrounded and threatened by a pandemic, with economic hardships, fires, hurricanes and a very divisive and polarized political system. How can I have joy when sickness and death threaten or take the environmental crisis seriously or find the world I grew used to falling apart and slipping away? Fair enough questions. And those circumstances and questions will remain. The Christian has never said that life is without pain or the cross. But the Christian has always had God and Christ before him or her. God and Christ have always been within, poured there by love in the Spirit. The Christian knows the “always” of these relationships. The promise of Jesus echoes in our ears: When you walk through the pain, the joy you will have no one can take from you. Jesus did not mount the cross out of fear, he climbed the tree of the cross for the joy that lay before him. For the Christian affliction and joy seem to together. If we don’t hold them together, then we have lost the secret.

Here we are these days, perhaps, in the midst of what sometimes looks like loss after loss, death after death, change after change in a directionless movement. And yet the command this Sunday is “rejoice, always.” We do that precisely because Christ is coming; Israel did it because God was up front moving toward the community. We rejoice this Sunday because what we hope for is near. We do not look behind to see what is lost or how much ground we have covered, but look ahead to what is coming.

Two people in Scripture share and speak to us today about their experience of God and what calls them to rejoice and be joyful. The Spirit-filled prophet rejoices heartily in my God. Why? Because he sees that God is about embracing the poor and marginalized; he is about healing the broken hearted; he is about release from the past and from every injustice. Release, healing, seeing grace in the days ahead, trust and simplicity. The prophet sees all that coming and in it sees God’s faithful love.

Mary sings to us today her Magnificat: “My soul rejoices in my God.” For Mary and the prophet their joy is rooted in their relationship with God, “my God” they say. Mary experiences in God’s choice of her his favor, his personal love, which she will personalize by carrying the child in her womb. And she sees that love as transforming society: filling the hungry, emptying the pockets of the rich, helping his beloved community and above all showering mercy or put simply, loving. The prophet and Mary are joyful because they see God and Christ coming and continuing his creating and redeeming work. Not as something apart from them but as an expression of his love in which they are gifted to share. They are joyful because, as Paul says, the one who called them is faithful. When you know someone is there, simply there for you and with you, you, too, can be joyful.

“Rejoice always,” Paul says. But he goes on: “pray without ceasing” and “give thanks in all circumstances.” This is the triad of activity. This is the Advent ethic, what must be done. It is all command because it is all God’s will. It is want he wants. This behavior is what he loves and if you stand in it, you will be delighting in his love and the Father will be delighting in you as one of his own. Rejoice, pray and give thanks, not once or sometimes or when it is opportune, but “always, without ceasing and in all circumstances.” Doing this would be a real profession of faith that Jesus has come and that he is coming; that God has done great things and he is doing great things even now. Rejoice, pray and give thanks—do this and each of us will be a John the Baptist giving witness that light has come into the world and that humanity and God are at home with one another. And that is Christianity’s “gigantic secret.”

~Prior, Fr. Joel Macul, OSB


Second Sunday of Advent

Mk 1:1-8
Is 40:1-5,9-11
2 Pet 3:8-14

Focus: God cares for us.
Function: We are called upon to acknowledge our sinfulness and our failing, to recognize God’s ways and to make room for God in our lives.

Dear sisters and brothers in the Lord, My youngest cousin, Christine, and her husband Joseph raise 4 boys, currently ages 10 – 6 months. The second one in particular, Maximilian, when he was about 2 – 3 years old, used to have temper tantrums every now and then: crying, kicking and screaming, stomping his feet. Usually such a temper tantrum happens when children don’t get their own way.

Adults though can display less pleasant behavior, too, when they don’t get their own way. They might not lie on the floor and kick and scream, but they may well pout, get angry, or walk out after slamming a door. Getting our own way seems to be something we struggle with all our lives. It easily obstructs “conducting [our]selves in holiness and devotion,” as St. Peter in our second reading puts it. Our own way must make room for God’s ways.

Today’s Scripture texts speak to us about the ways of God. Our first reading is taken from the book of Isaiah, the second part, which was written at a time when the people of Israel had been deported to Babylon, into exile, and lived far away from home. The prophet has good news for them. He is telling them, in the name of God: You’ve experienced enough sorrow, and lived in a foreign land for too long. God will lead you into freedom and back home.

This message is given in the form of a dialogue between God and heavenly beings, one of whom summons the others to prepare the way and so to make it possible for the people of Israel to return, led by God, to the promised land and to the home of their ancestors. God cares for his people, Isaiah says, God guides them as a shepherd guides his flock. He gathers the lambs in his arms. God will make sure that his people are well.

“In the desert prepare a way for the Lord!” This call was originally meant quite physically and politically: The Persian King Cyrus, inspired by God, had given permission; now the people can go back home and will do so, in a new Exodus, from captivity into freedom, like at the time of Moses.

Over five hundred years later, John the Baptist considers it his task to prepare the way. Preaching in the desert, he calls his contemporaries to an inner journey of repentance and conversion, to a journey of aligning their own wills and ways with the will and the ways of God, to a journey of becoming ready for the mightier one than himself, the Messiah, who will come after him.

In today’s second reading, St. Peter calls upon his early Christian community in Rome to come to repentance, in order for them to be ready for the day of the Lord, the second coming of Jesus,
the new heaven and the new earth, in which righteousness dwells.

All three readings point us to what the season of Advent is about. Our word advent is derived from the Latin adventus, which means arrival. We await and prepare for God’s arrival in Jesus as the infant of Bethlehem, for his arrival in glory at the end of time, but also for God’s arrival today in our own hearts.

Dear sisters and brothers in the Lord, God cares for us. We are called upon to acknowledge our sinfulness and our failing to recognize God’s ways and to make room for God in our lives.

Isaiah’s, John the Baptist’s and Peter’s words are directed also to us today. The God who cares for us is at the side of those who feel imprisoned in difficult life situations, in a depression may be, perhaps in part caused by this time of pandemic which never seems to want to end, or in an addiction perhaps. God guides and leads out those who want to be set free!

A good illustration of this for the world in which we live today is the GPS. The GPS tells us where to go and when to turn. If we haven’t followed its direction, it will tell us: Take the next right turn or: turn around! That’s what the advent prophets do for us, too: they show the way,
they tell us to turn around where and when it is necessary.

Yes, God calls upon us to turn around, to convert, to change our minds—that’s what the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, literally means. If we do so in prayer and in the sacrament of reconciliation during Advent and strive to correct our weaknesses, God’s ways will become our ways more and more and we will become ready for God’s arrival in our hearts and in our lives. AMEN.

~Fr. Thomas Leitner, OSB


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