Posts
All Comments
All too often, we live each day, not as if it might be our last, but as if it is the first day of many. We slip into habits that don't seem that bad. We tell little white lies; we gossip and backbite; we can't quite find enough time for our children and spouse, let alone for prayer. But we think that we have all our bases covered, because we go to Mass every Sunday, and obey the other precepts of the Church.
The powerful story of this new Benedictine community must be read by my readers. You can find it in its entirety here. Here is a short excerpt:
The Monastery of Our Lady of the Cenacle is a community of men dedicated to the traditional monastic life according to the Rule of Saint Benedict, and to intercession for the sanctification of priests, in adoration and reparation before the Eucharistic Face of Christ.
We were established during the Year of the Priest (2009-2010) in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa, Oklahoma, by His Excellency, Most Reverend Edward J. Slattery.
Fr. Mark writes:By the grace of God, we have been invited by His Lordship, the Most Reverend Michael Smith, Bishop of Meath, to move our fledgling community to County Meath, Ireland. God willing, we will complete this move in February-March 2012.
Ours is a mission to Ireland, it is true, but a mission that seeks not to teach, but to learn by abiding before the Eucharistic Face of Jesus; not to preach much, but to listen intently to the secrets of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus; not to reform anything or anyone but to reform ourselves by the steady and quiet pursuit of the conversion of our own hearts.
Jesuit martyr, born in Lincolnshire, 1636; executed at Tyburn, 24 Jan. (not 3 Feb.), 1679; eldest son of William Ireland of Crofton Hall, Yorkshire, by Barbara, a daughter of Ralph Eure, of Washingborough, Lincolnshire (who is to be distinguished from the last Lord Eure) by his first wife.
He was educated at the English College, St. Omer; admitted to the Society of Jesus at Watten, 1655; professed, 1673; and was for several years confessor to the Poor Clares at Gravelines. In 1677 he was sent on the English Mission and appointed procurator of the province. (Read entire post.)
"Never has Saint Teresa been read with such topicality as today. Saint Teresa is God’s witness, a loud and clear prophet for modern times”, pointed out the Discalced Carmelite, Tomás Álvarez, in referring to present day reception of the work and message of Saint Teresa.
In an interview granted to the magazine “Teresa de Jesús”, of which he has been an assiduous collaborator, the Teresian specialist acknowledged that the coming centenary of the birth of saint Teresa would have greater pastoral impact than the one in 1982, since the preparation has been more intense. “Within the Carmelite family, there has been a much closer drawing together around the Saint since the beginning of the continuous reading of Teresa’s works, one after the other”, expressed the prestigious Teresian expert. (Read entire post.)
There are mortal sufferings from which human beings are not expected to recover. There are torturers of the soul who leave their victims for dead, certain that they will not recover their strength and revive. There are people who, having suffered the cruel assaults of evildoers, astonish those who know them, by going on to live and give witness to the love of Christ. (Read entire post.)
VATICAN CITY, 19 JAN 2012 (VIS) - Today in the Vatican Benedict XVI received a group of prelates from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (Regions 4 and 6), at the end of their "ad limina" visit. Extracts from his English-language remarks to them are given below.
"At the heart of every culture, whether perceived or not, is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing. In America, that consensus, as enshrined in your nation's founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature's God. Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.
"For her part, the Church in the United States is called, in season and out of season, to proclaim a Gospel which not only proposes unchanging moral truths but proposes them precisely as the key to human happiness and social prospering. ... With her long tradition of respect for the right relationship between faith and reason, the Church has a critical role to play in countering cultural currents which, on the basis of an extreme individualism, seek to promote notions of freedom detached from moral truth. ... The Church's defence of a moral reasoning based on the natural law is grounded on her conviction that this law is not a threat to our freedom, but rather a 'language' which enables us to understand ourselves and the truth of our being, and so to shape a more just and humane world".
"The Church's witness, then, is of its nature public: she seeks to convince by proposing rational arguments in the public square. The legitimate separation of Church and State cannot be taken to mean that the Church must be silent on certain issues, nor that the State may choose not to engage, or be engaged by, the voices of committed believers in determining the values which will shape the future of the nation. (Read entire article.)
One of the greatest means of union with God for the religious soul is the psalmody, which in religious orders is the daily accompaniment of the Mass. The Mass is the great prayer of Christ; it will continue until the end of the world, as long as He does not cease to offer Himself by the ministry of His priests; as long as from His sacerdotal and Eucharistic heart there rises always the theandric act of love and oblation, which has infinite value as adoration, reparation, petition, and thanksgiving. The psalmody of the Divine Office is the great prayer of the Church, the spouse of Christ; a day and night prayer, which ought never to cease on the surface of the earth, as the Mass does not....
Such prayer is no longer mechanical, but organic; the soul has returned to vivify the body; prayer is no longer a succession of words; we are able to seize the vital spirit running through them. Without effort, even in the most painful hours of life, we can taste the admirable poetry of the psalms and find in them light, rest, strength, renewal of all energies. Then truly this prayer is a lifting up of the soul toward God, a lifting up that is not uniformly retarded, but rather accelerated. The soul burns therein and is consumed in a holy manner like the candles on the altar. (Read entire post.)
First of all, allow me to say that prayer--all prayer--is a real combat against the proclivities of our fallen nature. God created us to pray naturally: to pray with every breath and with every heartbeat, or, if you will, God created us to adore Him perpetually, in spirit and in truth. The original sin of our first parents was a falling away from prayer, a falling away from perpetual adoration, a break in the ceaseless heart-to-heart and face-to-face in which, and for which, God created man in His own image and likeness.
With the entry of sin into the world, prayer became a struggle. The bitter irony is that, while adoration was, in the beginning, man's natural state, it became, as a result of sin, something hard to do. (Read entire post.)
Fr David Jones is a Welsh hermit who lives in Duleek, (or should that be a hermit from Wales?) which is not far from Drogheda. He was on Spirit Radio on Monday, and gave an interesting interview. If you missed it, you can listen to the interview on his website. Yes, the hermit has a website! He uploads various homilies etc. His sermon on the Feast of the Epiphany is really very good. He addresses the Irish habits of blasphemy, foul language and smoking! It is not your standard irish sermon. Watch it, and share it with your friends on Facebook, if you are brave enough! (Read entire post.)
Benedict XVI expressed the view that the roots of the current crisis lie in "individualism which clouds the interpersonal dimension of man and leads him to close himself into his own little world, concerned first and foremost with satisfying his own needs and desires with scant concern for others". The consequences of such a mentality are "speculation in housing, increasing difficulty for young people to enter the world of work, the solitude suffered by so many elderly, the anonymity which often characterises urban life, and the sometimes superficial attention paid to situations of marginalisation and poverty".
The first step towards creating a more human society is "to rediscover relationships as the constituent element of our lives". Man is called to live in relation with other people and with God, Who alone "is capable of welcoming man unconditionally and of giving him infinite love". (Read entire post.)
Silence not a virtue, noise not a sin. True. But the turmoil and confusion and constant noise of modern society are the expression of the ambiance of its greatest sins - it godlessness, its despair. A world of propaganda, of endless argument, vituperation, criticism, or simply of chatter, is a world without anything to live for.
My Little Jesus draws me to Himself at about the age of five years, or at about the age three or four. In the beginning, there was a little bit of imagination and a fair amount of emotion. It has been a long time now that the emotional has disappeared almost entirely; very often, it is desert, bleak and arid. What holds me in this way is the Word of God become a child, out of love for His Father and for us; or else it is the Saviour and Physician of souls; it is the God of my heart, the Friend, the Spouse and above all the adorable Little Brother. But it is always the Holy Humanity united to the Word, and so my worship goes to the Word become a child. When He presents to my spirit His infinite grandeurs and my nothingness, His holiness, my faults and my miseries, I adore Him in making myself very small. If He allows me to glimpse the charms of His childhood, His heart so humble and so meek, His infinitely touching holy littleness, the astonishing simplicity of a little brother (and so He does ordinarily), it is the heart that responds to Him, saying to Him the same protestations of love endlessly again and again, and from time to time, making itself very little before Him who is so great. This has lasted lo all these forty years and I never weary of always repeating to Him the same things. Since then, I have never aspired after another way; my Beloved Little Jesus is enough for me. And why would I have sought anything else, since, “all good things came to me along with Him” (Wis 7:11). I should never know how to retell Him my gratitude enough. (Read entire post.)
 |
| High altar. Notice the choir grate over on the left. |
 |
| High altar. |
 |
| Choir altar and creche. |
 |
| Choir creche |
 |
| Creche inside the monastic quarters |
 |
| Lovely Hummels, a gift to the monastery from a generous benefactor |
There is something manly about plunging into an icy pool in the middle of winter, I have been trying to think of Western parallels, apart from rigourous Lenten fasting or all night vigils, I can only think of St Patrick's Purgatory in Ireland or the blood and chains of certain unreformed remote Spanish or Italian Holy Week celebrations.
Coptic Orthodox men in Brighton seem to love to shame me by telling me of the vast numbers of fast days in their calendar and Muslims of their Ramadam austerities, there seems to be something about austerity, even physical pain that is attractive to men in the service of God. (Read entire post.)
My favourite representative of devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus is the delightfully eccentric and utterly incandescent Richard Rolle, a mystic of fourteenth century England. Richard Rolle associated the Name of Jesus with three things: calor, heat; dulcor, sweetness; and canor, song. Listen to his teaching:
If you will be well with God, and have grace to rule your life, and come to the joy of love: this name Jesus, fasten it so fast in your heart that it come never out of your thought. And when you speak to him, and through custom say, "Jesus," it shall be in your ear, joy; in your mouth; honey; and in your heart, melody: for men shall think joy to hear that name be named, sweetness to speak it, mirth, and song to think it.If you think the name "Jesus" continually, and hold it firmly, it purges your sin, and kindles your heart; it clarifies your soul, it removes anger and does away slowness. It wounds in love and fulfills charity.It chases the devil, and puts out dread. It opens heaven, and makes a contemplative man. Have Jesus in mind, for that puts all vices and phantoms out from the lover. (Read entire post.)
