The Feast of the Annunciation - Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

The Rev. Matthew Wright, CRC
The Feast of the Annunciation - Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Isaiah 7:10-14
Hebrews 10:4-10
Luke 1:26-38

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Fiat, lux—Let there be light’…”

The angel said to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, [will sweep over you,] and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy…” Then Mary said, “Fiat mihi—Let it be with me according to your word.”

*     *     *     *

Fiat.  “Let it be done.”  Let there be; let it be.  Luke’s account of the Annunciation intentionally echoes, or responds to, the story of Creation; it becomes our account of the New Creation, or, maybe better, the ongoing Creation—it tells us that Creation is not finished, is still unfolding.

The same core elements are in each account: the Spirit moves over the face of the deep; the Spirit moves over the depths of Mary; and in both, the Fiat is spoken—“Let it be.”  But in the first account, it is God’s fiat, drawing forth Creation; in the second account, it is Creation’s fiat, drawing forth God.  In the first, Creation takes form in the womb of God; in the second, God takes form in the womb of creation, in the womb of Mary.

Theologian Sarah Jane Boss, in her wonderful 2003 book titled simply Mary, puts forward what she calls a “green Mariology”; she writes:

Mary […] stands at the Annunciation in the same relation to God as do the waters of creation at the beginning of the world.  It is as though the world’s redemption in Christ is in fact its re-creation, and that God accomplishes this re-creation by breathing and speaking afresh upon the world’s foundations, in the person of Mary […].  Mary is the dark water, Christ the fiery light.  And this work of creation and renewal is neverending…

 And so here she explicitly links our two creation stories, our two fiats, our two annunciations, as one—each a face of the neverending, ongoing, unfolding that is creation, that is the life of God.  But then she continues, and even more boldly asserts:

…insofar as the Blessed Virgin shares an identity with the deep from before the dawn of time, she too is mysteriously present in all things […].  If we start by imagining the cosmos as fabric whose thread and weave are ever changing, then Mary is in some sense the same as the entire assembly of the most minute, invisible particles of the fibers of which the world is spun and woven.

And so for Boss, Mary becomes the deep identity of the whole created order, the thread and weave of life itself.  In the beginning God says “Let there be” and calls forth from her womb Mary; Mary says “Let it be,” and calls forth from her womb God.

 And in the meeting of these two fiats is Christ; is the full and perfect union of the created and the Uncreated; is the goal and longing and center and heart of all that is.  God’s call, God’s longing; and Creation’s response, Creation’s longing.  And the two become one—one single longing, one fiat, one dance, coursing through all things.  And this is the goal of all our living, of every breath—Can we bring ourselves into alignment with that primordial fiat that gave birth to the worlds, and with Mary again speak “Let it be”—or rather, let that original, that only, fiat be spoken through us—and thereby give birth to God?  Little by little, every breath can become “Let it be”; every breath God’s birthing of us and our birthing of God.

 When Gabriel announces to Mary of Nazareth, Mary in that moment becomes the human face of all creation, the human face of that primordial Mary; the human face of the God-bearing dimension of existence.  And through her, the human face of creation, is born the human face of God.

*     *     *     *

In the 14th century, Meister Eckhart wrote of the Annunciation, “Gabriel addressed not her alone, but a great multitude: every good soul that desires God.”  That desire, that longing for God, is at the heart of every soul, and of all creation.  But we often seem to think that our longing is a sign of God’s absence, of our lack of God.  This is perhaps our greatest error—this is perhaps Original Sin.  Because that desire in our hearts—that we so often try to fulfill in small and limited and unsatisfying ways—it’s not our desire for God.  It’s God’s desire in us.  Not a sign of absence or lack, but the surest sign of presence, Divine Presence. 

In that original fiat, God poured God’s own longing into Creation, into primordial Mary, into us.  Our longing has always been God’s presence in us.  And in our individual fiats, we give God’s longing expression.  Can each of us, human faces of creation, let our whole being become “Let it be” and give birth to the human face of God?  This is our high calling—the potential that we so often fall short of.

*     *     *     *

In Gabriel’s opening words to Mary he says, in our rather flat New Revised Standard Version, “Greetings, favored one!”  This is, of course, in Latin, Ave, Gratia Plena—“Hail, Full of Grace!”  And the Greek word here is Kecharitōmĕnē, which is in perfect passive participle form, and so implies “has been, is, and will be.”  So Gabriel greets her not with a name (“Mary”), but with a title—“Full-of-Grace.”  And if Mary is the human face of creation, then this is the name of all Creation, of the primordial Mary who is the thread and weave of all that is: Full-of-Grace, Kecharitōmĕnē.  Again, Eckhart says, “What good would it do me for Mary to be full of grace if I were not also full of grace?”

 And he writes with a boldness that could only come from Meister Eckhart: “We are all an only son whom the Father has been eternally begetting out of the hidden darkness of eternal concealment, indwelling in the first beginning of the primal purity which is the plenitude of all purity.”  The Kecharitōmĕnē.  The primordial Mary.  She is that primal purity out of which God is eternally begetting, or, in Sarah Jane Boss’ words, “of which the world is spun and woven.”

 And so it is no mistake that most of our traditional depictions of the Annunciation show Mary spinning wool—a detail which comes to us from the Protoevangelium of James, where we learn that at the moment of the Annunciation, Our Lady was spinning purple wool, at the request of the Temple priests, to make a new veil for the Holy of Holies.  The Kecharitōmĕnē, spinning from her limitless Ocean of Grace, all the veils of Creation—weaving every world that ever has been or ever shall be.

*     *     *     *

 The Fiat makes one final appearance in Church tradition, recorded by St. Maximus the Confessor in his 6th century Life of the Virgin.  He tells us that shortly before Mary’s death, the angel Gabriel appeared to her a final time.  “Hail, Full-of-Grace,” he says once more.  Then he tells her, “Your son and Lord bids you: ‘It is time for my mother to come to me.’”  Maximus writes, “she responded to the angel with her original reply: ‘Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me now again according to your word.’”  The perfect bookend.  And so her whole life, her whole being, has become “Let it be.”

 So may it be with each of us, in God’s ongoing work of creation.  As God speaks us into being moment-by-moment, may we speak God into being also.

And so to all of you, “Hail, Kecharitōmĕnē!”

And may we each respond “Fiat!—Let it be!”



Amen.

Third Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 24, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Third Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 24, 2019

Exodus 3:1-15
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Luke 13:1-9

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

We will all die one day. We were reminded of that at the beginning of this Lent, on Ash Wednesday: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.” Today’s gospel reminds us that we do not get to choose either the time or the manner of our death. Death comes to us on its own terms.

But whether we die as obdurate sinners who squander their divine inheritance, or as lovers of All who have persistently turned back to God is up to us to decide. We have free will and can go down either path.

In the end, as the Apostle Paul says “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We are all dependent on the mercy of God which, thankfully, is infinite and ever-flowing.

In the meantime, we are living and exercising our free will as best we can. As we go about the business of living, suffering is not optional. Suffering is structural to being alive.  All of us, at some point or another, in some shape or form, have, or will suffer. But we do not suffer because we are worse than others.

In today’s gospel, Jesus imparts that great suffering and catastrophic death are no indication of God’s judgment of our lives. Terrible things do happen to good people too.

We are to refrain from wondering if people’s suffering is deserved. In the gospel according to Luke, Jesus confronts those “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Judgment is not up to us. It is God’s prerogative.

And the God we heard of yesterday in the parable of the Prodigal Son is immensely merciful and loving. Yes, God is a keen judge of character and spirit.  As the letter to the Hebrews says: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).

But luckily, we are saved, not by our meritorious works, but by God’s grace enfleshed in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. As the Apostle Paul says: “They are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

*****

Now let’s look at how the parable of the barren fig tree fits with Jesus’ teaching in the first half of today’s lection.

I see the parable of the fig tree as illustrating the dance between God’s ability to judge and God’s ability to show mercy.

One way to look at this parable makes the owner God the Judge of All and makes the vinedresser God the Advocate.

The owner has a fig tree planted in his vineyard. In the next three years, he comes each year and checks on the tree seeking fruit, precociously as it turns out.

A fig tree would be somewhat out of place in a vineyard. It uses a lot of root space and casts a large shadow where the vines would be unable to bear fruit themselves.

Maybe the owner wanted a shady place for the vineyard workers to rest from time to time. That would be a lavish investment in workers comfort. But still, he would want the tree to pay for its place by bearing fruit as well as providing shade.

Also in Jewish tradition, a fig tree would not have been expected to bear edible fruit for about three years after its planting. Our vineyard owner is somewhat overeager for results.

The gardener (the vinedresser) can be seen as Jesus. The fig tree was a common symbol for Israel and may also have that meaning here. You can also choose to see the fig tree as a Gentile planted amidst the vines of Israel.
But I will choose to see the tree in the parable as a person (Jew or Gentile) who has heard and believed the gospel of Christ.

In any case, the parable reflects Jesus offering a chance for repentance and forgiveness of sin, showing his grace toward his believers. The gardener knows the fig tree, understands the fig tree and wants to give the fig tree its best chance to produce edible fruit.

Some see the three years of growth of the fig tree as referring to the period of Jesus' ministry. I see it as the period it took for a fig tree to bear fruit or, metaphorically, as the period of maturation for a new believer’s faith to bear fruit.

The fig tree was given the opportunity to be in the vineyard where it otherwise should not have been and was also given the needed time to bear fruit. The owner, somewhat impatiently, or is it eagerly, wants to see results.

The vinedresser, who is Jesus, does not see the current absence of fruit as a fatal flaw. Rather than giving in to the impatience of the owner, the gardener advocates for the fig tree. He offers to cultivate the fig tree further in the hope that it will produce fruit.

*****

As with the barren fig tree, so with us. We are given a space in God’s garden even though we take up a lot of space and cast a long shadow.

God is eager to see us bear fruit. God yearns for us to turn to God and bear fruit.

And God is also understanding of our needs for time and nurture to be in right relationship with God and All.

Jesus, in his humanity, empathizes with our frailty and advocates for judgment to be withheld, or to be given with great mercy. And the divine scale between judgment and mercy tilts towards mercy. Thanks be to God!

Still, out of awe and love for such a merciful God, we should all bear the burdens of life, help our fellow humans to bear theirs, and turn to God again, and again, and again. We don’t want to die separated from God by an ill-advised exercise of our God-given free will.

Suffering happens in this life. But God is with us through all of it. God nurtures us with love and mercy no matter what happens in our lives. Let us return that love as lavishly as God provides it.

Amen.

Second Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 17, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josép Reinaldo Martínez-Cubero, OHC
Second Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 17, 2019

Genesis 15:1-12,17-18
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In my preparation for this sermon, I had the happy experience of coming across a picture, and a poem. The picture, I had never seen. The poem, I knew but had not seen in a very long time. They became my inspiration and meditation on the gospel lesson, and I will attempt to connect all the dots.

There is a small chapel situated on the western slope of the Mount of Olives, just across the Kidron Valley from Jerusalem. The chapel is called Dominus Flevit, which means “The Lord Wept”. It was designed in the shape of a teardrop to symbolize Jesus’ tears. Dominus Flevit was constructed at the place that according to tradition, Jesus wept over the city that had refused his ministry. On the front of the altar, is a mosaic medallion of a white hen with a golden halo around her head. Her wings are spread wide to shelter the little pale yellow chicks that crowd around her feet. There are seven of them, and they look happy to be there, protected by the mother hen. The mosaic does not pretend that the scene ever happened. There is a rim all around the scene it depicts with Latin words in red letters that translated into English read: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" The last phrase is set outside the circle, in a pool of red underneath the chicks’ feet: you were not willing.

Luke’s first readers were urban, for the most part economically secure, well-educated Gentiles at the end of the first century. These circumstances put them at some distance from Jesus and the earliest Christian groups. They needed an imaginative leap in order to make the story of Jesus and his ministry their own. The main objective of the gospel’s author is to give and example to readers of how they ought to live their lives, and of what God called them to be and do. Luke’s Gospel begins and ends in the temple in Jerusalem. Zechariah learns in the temple that he and Elizabeth will have a child. Mary and Joseph bring their own child there when the time comes. Simeon and Anna deliver their prophecies there, and Jesus returns with his parents when he is twelve years old and ends up among the teachers of Israel.

Jerusalem is mentioned 139 times in the entire New Testament, and 90 of those times are in the Gospel of Luke. Clearly the city, so rich in history and symbol, was important to the author. Jerusalem is the dwelling place of God, the place where, according to the prophet Isaiah God’s glory would be revealed (Isa. 24:23). It is also the place where, according to the prophet Micah, God is betrayed by those who hate the good, and love what is evil (Mic. 3:2). Jesus is headed there, the historic seat of Jewish power where both kings and priests have their home. Prophetic ministry in the face of power is dangerous business for those who would speak the truth of God’s kingdom to the powers that be. Jesus characterizes the city as killing prophets and stoning those who are sent to it. His response is mercy. The words of the Trisagion, which we chanted at the beginning of the Eucharist today, are a plea for God’s mercy. “Holy God, Holy and mighty, Holy immortal one, Have mercy upon us.” Mercy is the theme of the collect for this second week in Lent. Mercy is God’s gift to us, but it is also a gift we are called to show others, even those we don’t like or we see as our enemies. We have a part in it for which we are meant to take responsibility, and that part is not just asking but giving forward.

Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem is the example of the mercy we are meant to show in the world. He envisions Jerusalem as a city filled with a brood of little pale yellow chicks and at least one fox. There is a white hen with a golden halo around her head across the valley. That white hen with a golden halo around her head is clucking away with the desire to protect her little pale yellow chicks. But they cannot hear her, and the ones that do have forgotten who and whose they are, so they pay no attention because they can no longer recognize her voice. All she can do is spread her wings. Jesus, who is always turning things upside down, so that widows, children, and peasants are at the top while kings and scholars are at the bottom, identifies himself with a hen, not the eagle of Exodus or the leopard in Hosea or the lion of Judah. Oh no, Jesus is the hen.

The beautiful poem by nineteenth century English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins goes like this:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

 The kingfisher is said to “catch fire” as the light brings its feathers to a bright radiance. Similarly, the wings of the dragonfly reflect small flashes of light with a flame-like beauty. The tinkling sound of pebbles tossed down wells, the plucking of strings on a musical instrument, and the ringing of bells, each of these objects represent what life as a gift is all about. Everything has a way about it, and gives itself fully in its true essence. In the same way, every “mortal thing” is meant to express the essence that dwells inside of it. It “selves.” “What I do is me: for that I came.” Christ inhabits those who express their true, innermost selves. And Christ, in turn, does this as an offering to the Mother.

Through our baptism we have been clothed with Christ, and are a new creation, called to be an offering- to give ourselves fully, in love, as Jesus did. We are to justice- to enter into injustice with our whole being, so we can transform it. That requires the vulnerability of that white hen with a golden halo- no fangs, no claws, no muscles, just the willingness to shield her babies with her own body. It seems to me that the example for us is quite clear: we can live by wielding power and licking our chops or we can live with wings spread wide open in mercy and love, and act in God’s eye what in God’s eye we are- Christ. Tall order! ¡Que así sea en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

First Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 10, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
First Sunday in Lent - Sunday, March 10, 2019

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the name of the one God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. Amen.

The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that, though Jesus was God’s son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.

What is obedience? And what should it have to do with suffering?

Our Founder’s rule puts it this way: “the vow of obedience is the doorway to the monastic life, at the heart of which is the entire self-offering of the person—body, soul, spirit, material possessions—to God.” What is true of the monastic in a particular way, is true of every Christian, who, through baptism, has vowed obedience to God.

Obedience is a willingness to be used, not as I desire, but as God desires, and as the Church and the world need me to be used.

Many of my brothers will be quick to point out that the word “obedience” has its root in the Latin word for “listen.” Obedience requires a deep listening to the voice of God as it presents itself in scripture, reason, tradition, conscience, prayer, and the cries of pain and joy in the world around us.  But obedience that stops at listening is not truly obedience.

Speaking of the obedient disciple, the Rule of Benedict tells us, “no sooner does he hear than he obeys.” Such people, Benedict goes on, “immediately put aside their own concerns, abandon their own will, and lay down whatever they have in hand, leaving it unfinished.”

Real obedience, then, is listening paired with action, fused you might say, so that hearing the voice of God and responding to it become one single action. Like the unified heart for which loving and being loved are indistinguishable.

And why would a person lay aside her own will, her own desires, her own wants and perhaps even her own needs, in order to follow the voice of God?

Well, for love, of course. “It is love,” Benedict tells us, “that impels [the obedient disciple] to pursue everlasting life; therefore they are eager to take the narrow road.” And again, from our Founder, “Obedience is not simply outward conformity to external conditions and human requirements, but a real and positive response of love to God’s voice.”

This movement of love, listening, and response in the face of suffering and death is the movement Jesus demonstrates for us in today’s Gospel reading. He has just been baptized in the Jordan, just heard God’s voice of love proclaiming him the Beloved Son, God’s very own heart, given to the world. And with that foundation of love firmly in place, it is the Spirit herself that drives Jesus into the wilderness.

He faces into the temptations of the world only after God has claimed him as God’s very own. With the understanding of who he is in God, which is to say whose he is, Jesus is able to face into the temptations Satan presents to him.

And do you notice the words Satan uses? He says, “If you are the Son of God…” If you are the Son of God. Needling and questioning, introducing doubt, suggesting that maybe Jesus has gotten it all wrong. Maybe he imagined that other voice, the one that called him Beloved and name him for God’s very own.

How real these needling words are! They’re the words, perhaps in a different form, that get all of us, too. The seeds of doubt that we ever really belonged to God at all. And that’s where we stumble. And that’s where we fall.

Difficulty with obedience, which is to say difficultly hearing and responding to the voice of God, is really difficulty in loving. Or, more accurately, difficulty in being loved, in trusting that we are loved, that we are enough, and that God will take care of us, even and especially when we don’t get what we want or what we thought would make us safe, secure, and powerful.

To the extent that we have trouble with obedience—and we all do—we are really having trouble trusting, trusting that God loves us enough to provide us with what we need; trusting that the suffering and pain will not last forever; trusting that though our own will is insufficient to save us, God’s will is not.

What person, after forty days fasting in the desert, wouldn’t be desperate for food, water, affection, and power? And so those are exactly what the devil offers Jesus. Just so for us. Our own temptations and struggles always arise from those areas in which we doubt God has the power to save us. Which is to say from those places within us that are so hurt and so tender that we dare not risk surrendering them to God.

Our stumbling blocks are always a kind of idol, a manifestation of our own stubborn desire to save ourselves in isolation from God, to do it ourselves, because deep down we’re afraid that God can’t, or won’t heal us, save us, make us whole again.

The medicine for this difficulty in trusting, loving, and surrendering our entire selves to God is the Cross, the Tree of Life and the medicine for the hurting world. The Cross on which Jesus suffered and learned obedience; the Cross on which Jesus still stretches out his loving arms to us in surrender and embrace, beckoning each of us home to God, calling each of us to lay our ear against his chest, to listen to the sweet music of his heartbeat.

And yes, this obedience and the surrender that enables it will feel like dying, but dying is the only way to the life that really is life. “We are to die to our isolation and separateness as individuals,” our Founder tells us, “so that we might live together in the strength and power of a spiritual community in which there is fullness and integrity of life, namely the life of Jesus Christ our Lord.” You see, in the end, obedience never leads to isolation. Rather, it leads to integration into the mystical body of Christ, where we know ourselves to be one with all that is.

Temptation need not frighten us. Nor ought it lead us to despair or shame, even when we fall prey to it, as we mostly do. Temptation is really an opportunity to trust God enough to let go of our own will and our desires, to practice obedience and surrender.

We mostly fall. We mostly give way to our own stubborn willfulness. We mostly choose the pain of separation and isolation. But perhaps when we have suffered enough through our falling, we, too, might learn obedience. We might learn to say no to the Tempter so that we might say yes to the one who holds open his loving arms, welcoming us home again.

Last Sunday after Epiphany - Sunday, March 3, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Last Sunday after Epiphany - Sunday, March 3, 2019

Exodus 34:29-35
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

The story of the Transfiguration of Jesus appears twice every year—on the last Sunday before Lent and on the Feast itself, August 6—more than almost any other single narrative in the current Gospel table of readings.

And the classic question always arises: did something 'real' happen to Jesus on that mountain? Was he transfigured, metamorphosed, changed in some substantial way?  Or  was it the eyes, the vision, the spiritual perception of those three disciples that changed, allowing them to see what was in fact hidden there and obscured all along:  Jesus in all his natural glory? 

There is no absolute answer to this except to say like a good Anglican that it's probably both, though I myself tend toward the second option: that the veil was pulled aside for just a brief moment and the awe-ful glory of Holiness Itself was glimpsed, just as Moses glimpsed it in the Burning Bush and on the mountain of that conversation that we call Sinai so many centuries earlier.  Moses glimpsed it...and his face glowed. 

I am fascinated by the conditions under which such 'glimpses' as these occur. 

They can happen, of course, at almost any ordinary time:  sitting on a riverbank, walking down a city street, folding the laundry. The can even happen in church. As a woman I was once met said:  “Suddenly the world was bathed in light.”  Or we are overcome with a deep, profound and unanticipated (even uninvited) but persistent awareness that it all makes sense or that, as yet another woman you may be acquainted with once said: “All shall be well.”

My experience is that many—not all but many—people have such experiences, such glimpses, and that they are rarely shared  beyond perhaps one or two confidants or close friends.  Part of the problem is, of course, that words fail us.  And part of the problem  is that we have been taught to be somewhat suspicious of such experiences.  Our faith in Christ does not, does not depend on them.  But if or when they come to us, what a wonderful gift! 

In addition to the ordinary events of life, there are certain times where such experiences seem to occur more regularly.  The first is when we are relaxed and satisfied and feeling safe—emotionally, physically, sensually, relationally.  Our guard is down, as it were, and God can sneak up on us without our usual defenses coming into play.  Consider the disciples in today's reading.  They went with Jesus to a mountain to pray—generally good company—and  they were weighed down with sleep.

 But such breakthroughs can happen too when we are stressed out and perhaps near or at the end of our strength or wit or emotional reserves. It is then that we may be particularly open to see things in a new and more realistic light.  The situation itself needn't be dramatic—though it can—but it is often life-changing. 

This past week the household here has been under some stress.  We were exiled from our church for almost two weeks and then faced with a sudden move back. And during this time we were struck with an epidemic of respiratory disease:  one brother down with pneumonia, maybe eight others sick with bronchitis or viral chest/sinus infections, almost all of us on antibiotics and everybody just plain exhausted. This seems to happen every few years in the monastic community...kind of like being in kindergarten.  I was/am one of the stricken.  But in the midst of this, admittedly modest crisis, lying in my bed, unable to do much of anything, I heard something in a new way and felt a small shift in my thinking. It was captured in a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer that we say from time to time at compline and that rose spontaneously to my consciousness:

O God, your unfailing providence sustains the world we live in and the life we live: Watch over those, both night and day, who work while others sleep, and grant that we may never forget that our common life depends upon each other's toil; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Grant that we may never forget that our common life—our lives together—depend upon each other's toil.   How true:  when I can't be there to do my assigned work, someone else rises to the task, just as I hope I might do when the tables are turned.  I got to thinking: what if this this mutual dependence is true not just for my monastery, or a family or a community, but for a nation, a people, for the whole world?  What if this is the great truth of gift-giving and reciprocity that we are now urged to expand beyond family or kin or neighborhood to all peoples, indeed to all the created order? 

I don't think I heard that prayer before in quite that way.  And I hope I shall not pray it in the future without hearing this again.

So it is, I think, with the experience of the Transfiguration of Jesus.  In it, the disciples caught a glimpse of  the deepest structure of the created order.  They saw, if only briefly, that the deep state, if you will, does not consist of those whom our culture reckons powerful, but in the profound and abiding presence of  Holy Love in eternal dialog with the Law and the Prophets, with Truth and Right.  And though the disciples told no one about it in those days, it was a vision which sustained them and guided them through dark days into a bright hope of which we today are the heirs. 

The church holds out to us this “luminous mystery” of the Transfiguration—this mystery of light as Pope John Paul II called it—as among the greatest of the epiphanies or manifestations of Christ.  It is thus a suitable conclusion of our Epiphany season.  And as we prepare to enter the Lenten fast once more, it offers us as it did to the disciples courage, confident that what is true of Christ is also true of each of us: we too will be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory. That's the promise and the goal Christian of life.  And it is the work of Lent.  May the journey be blessed.  May we together reach the joy of Holy Easter with eyes wide open and hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.