The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost B - September 8, 2024

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18 B 
Isaiah 35:4-7a
James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17
Mark 7:24-37

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Proper 18, Year B

To be open:

adjective: allowing access, passage, or a view through an empty space; not closed or blocked up.

"the pass is kept open all year by snowplows”

Verb: to unfold or be unfolded; spread out.

"the eagle opened its wings and circled up into the air”

Noun:a championship or competition with no restrictions on who may compete. “Today is the men’s finals for the US Open”

Ephphatha, “Be opened.” This isn’t just a call for unstopped ears. Like so much in Sacred Scripture, words contain multitudes and so is the case here. It is a call to access, passage, and freedom. It is a call to fullness…to being unfolded and spread out. It is a call to soar unhindered…a call to transcendence. It is a call to full inclusion and a call to belonging.

In this particular context an unnamed man is deaf with a speech impediment who can’t even beg Jesus to heal him himself but depends on others to get Jesus’ attention. He is not free and has little self-autonomy…and is trapped in his own silent, speechless world. He can’t express himself and can’t hear others express themselves to him. He lives a stunted existence, blocked from the fullness of life God designed for him.

In juxtaposition, we have Jesus, “the Opened One,” who, ever since his baptism and confirmation in the Spirit’s gentle descent and the Father’s affirmation of love, is driven by the sole mission of making God’s loving presence known. He knows who he is, God’s Beloved, and this knowledge opens him to the world without partiality and with dogged determination. Scene after scene in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ open spirit allows him to move freely in the love of God and to freely make this love known. To those bound by demons, bound by paralysis, bound by deformities, bound by sickness and disease, bound by hunger, or bound by the debilitating prejudices of others. Jesus’ openness confronts a bounded world and those whose spirits are bound meet a power to release them and to become just as open as this “Opened One.”

But, the Gospel is clear, Jesus’ open spirit did not pave a way for him

without obstacles. The same open spirit that drove him to the oppressed also caused deep concern from the religious establishment (you can say, the other oppressed who didn’t realize they were oppressed or, the “closed” ones who had no room for the radical openness of Jesus). Such a confrontation occurs immediately before the passage we hear today. So, at this point in the Gospel, Jesus is becoming acutely aware that his open spirit and the transformation that it is causing in the community may very well become his downfall. I imagine Jesus spending much time in prayer, at this crucial point of his life, reflecting on how to proceed. We don’t get much of a glimpse into his inner deliberations, but what we do get is his inner resolve that is evidenced in his continual commitment to bringing God’s transforming presence to those who need it most. And we see his strategy: to minimize the attention that these transformative encounters are causing so that he can open as many people as possible before he is captured, if that was, indeed, to be his destiny. “Tell no one” he tells the man newly released from his deafening silence. Does the man listen? Would you if the same thing happened to you? Which is precisely the point! The kind of openness that Jesus brings cannot be contained or constricted. It’s that place where you just can’t help yourself!

I see at work in this passage, and the Gospel of Mark as a whole, a

dynamism of elements that come together to create this openness, this spiritual vitality that is free and fearless. They are: the priority of silence, contemplative observation, desperate faith, judicious speaking, and transformative power. Each of these elements play a vital role in the life of Christ and characterize his spirituality of openness and how he goes about making others open.

The priority of silence. It all begins with listening…with hearing the gentle Spirit of God pronounce the divine belovedness over us. And not just once…but in developing a life of listening and hearing until this God of love resounds from within and our lives begin to reverberate this divine sounding. Like the Open Christ who possessed such self-determination to so freely and fearlessly make God’s love known in the face of such existential threats, we too follow in his way by hearing God’s solemn mantra in the silence of our hearts: “You are my beloved, you are my beloved, you are my beloved.” And as for the deaf mute, it was because he was first silent that he was able to find such boundless, open joy in being able to hear and speak.

Contemplative observation. The Open Christ was on the search. His openness was characterized by a particular way of seeing, of gazing into the reality of things and recognizing hidden pain. He read souls and, moved by an alert compassion, called those hidden pains to the light. He saw what others couldn’t because of the silent centeredness of his life and his acute attunement to the Father. Like Yahweh, he looked upon the heart and allowed himself to be determined solely by the condition of those hearts he encountered. And with the deaf mute now before him, Jesus, with his fingers in the man’s ears and his saliva on the man’s tongue, locks eyes with him and communicates everything that needs to be known through his penetrating gaze.

Desperate faith. The condition of being oppressed usually solicits one of

two responses: desperate faith or desperate self-assurance. The religious establishment had fallen into the latter and mistook their religiosity for true spirituality. Those with desperate faith, though, like the deaf mute, take what little openness they have and cry out for more. And when desperate faith encounters the penetrating gaze of God, openness happens.

Judicious speaking. In the percolating convergence of silence, contemplative observation, and desperate faith sounds the word of life. The word cannot be heard without the previous silence, it doesn’t know what to say without the observation, and it meets no fertile ground without the desperate faith. But at just the right moment your “Ephphatha” comes. Whether it was a word of affirmation or consolation, a word of correction or rebuke, or a sound of command as we hear in this instance, Jesus spoke with judicious discernment and precision. Nothing was spared or superfluous. Cor ad cor loquitur, “heart speaks to heart,” was Jesus’ personal philosophy long before St. Augustine coined the memorable phrase.

Transformative power. This spoken word releases power. As the proverb states, “To make an apt answer is a joy to anyone, and a word in season, how good it is!” And how good it is when someone who sees our hearts and feels our pain speaks our “Ephphatha!”

These elements to a vital spirituality of openness are, you may have noticed, particularly monastic. Monks and other contemplatives should be among the most open of us all, and, maybe, we should consider such openness as being one of our most precious gifts to the world. It’s seen in our radical hospitality and open doors. It’s experienced in our priority for silence and our listening with open and hungry hearts. It’s internalized in our attunement to the divine heartbeat and our observant lectio or reading of all that is around us. It’s practiced in our judicious and timely speaking. And, hopefully, it bears fruit in the transformation of our lives through our common fidelity to this resolute and radically intentional way of life.

The Cistercian monk, Thomas Keating, in his classic work on centering prayer, Open Mind, Open Heart, teaches us how to grow deeper into this open and full way of being in the world. In his Introduction, Fr. Keating sites Matthew 6:6: “If you want to pray, enter your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” On this foundational verse for a deeper life of prayer, he comments: “Notice the cascading movement in this text into ever deeper states of silence: 1. Leaving behind external tumult, the environment we may be in, and the concerns of the moment by opening the door to our inner room, the spiritual level of our being, the level of intuition and the spiritual will. 2. Closing the door, that is, shutting out and turning off the interior conversation we normally have with ourselves all day long as we judge, evaluate, and react to people and events entering and leaving our lives. 3. Praying in secret to the Father, who speaks to us beyond the sound of words.” The truth of the matter is that there are worlds within each of us that now exist behind closed doors. But through the silence and attentive prodding of our wills in love, God’s Spirit gently, sometimes dramatically, opens doors and invites us in. And from these secret places we discover new depths of being and a quality of life begins to manifest itself that is open and free—like the Open Christ—to live by the law of liberty, the unrestrained, unstoppable law of love that just can’t help itself.

Proper 18 C, September 4, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Adam McCoy, OHC

Pentecost, Proper 18 C - September 4, 2022

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33

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The cost of discipleship: Today’s gospel reading opens a world of complexities, more and more the more one ponders it. This morning I want to focus on the images with which our gospel begins and with which it ends: family and possessions, and set that in the context of Paul’s delightful letter to Philemon.

   We all come from families, and every family has its own dramas. Our family dramas can run the gamut from interesting to idiosyncratic, from curious to strange to alarming, from truly weird to dangerously abusive, even to fatal. No matter our own family’s story, however, we are each and every one of us shaped by our interactions with those we grow up with. Once we are adults we are all of us well advised to reflect on our own personal dramas, to recover our memories, reconstruct them, analyze them, and come to terms with them. When we do so they can give us foundations for conscious adult self-understanding. They can give us opportunities for insight and growth. They can strengthen our bonds of love, and they can enlarge the possibilities for our future. Especially if we had a difficult childhood. In any case, one of the steps to fully aware adulthood is to know who we have been and what made us who we are. That can give us choices. Sometimes, however, we are tempted to cling to this self-understanding as though it were itself a possession which we can not give up. If we do cling to

it, our memories can take over our lives. To have a new life, we need to be willing to leave our old one. I am struck by the almost angry force of this morning’s sayings about family and possessions. They seem so all-encompassing, so lacking in nuance that I want tone them down, to “explain” them, to hedge them about with qualifications, and so I (and doubtless many others) ascribe them to Jesus’ use of a particular kind of rhetoric, his habitual use of what some call “semitic hyperbole” - outrageously off the chart exaggeration to make a point. But then I also realize the power that family and possessions can have to shape, dominate and control us if we don’t put them in a proper context. Jesus is calling us to a new, different, better life, and to begin to live that new life we will need to leave behind the negative controlling forces of our past. We need really to put them in the past. As Jesus says in another place, Let the dead bury their dead. If we don’t, we may well not escape, we may not grow, we may not be able to move forward. Unless we let them go, we may not be able to enter the Kingdom.

    And how wonderful that this gospel passage is paired in today’s readings with the Letter to Philemon, which so beautifully models a gracious, Spirit-filled approach to building a godly future out of a less than perfect past. And as it happens, that future seen in the Letter to Philemon grows out of these same two dangerous minefields: possessions and family.

    Onesimus is a slave of Philemon, who is a friend and co-worker of St. Paul. Onesimus is a possession. Philemon owns him. There can be no area of human relations less satisfactory than slavery, whose effects our own age is strenuously engaging to understand and to rectify. We may be shocked that St. Paul does not take the opportunity of this letter to urge Philemon to set Onesimus free. But such was the culture of that place and that time. Rather than pursue manumission, St. Paul does something entirely unexpected, something which foreshadows the coming Kingdom which he, Paul, is proclaiming: Out of slavery, which traps both the owner and the person owned, comes a set of entirely new and transforming relationships.

    Paul asks Philemon to take Onesimus back, after what seems to be a period of estrangement between the master and the slave. Onesimus has become a great help to Paul in Paul’s old age and in his imprisonment. Onesimus has progressed from a state of uselessness to one in which he is valued for his good work. This is the utilitarian basis of slavery: How much better to be a happy worker than a negligent one. A “good” slave.

    But there is more. Paul now considers Onesimus not just a slave, but a part of himself. Indeed, Paul identifies Onesimus as “his own heart”. In sending him back, he is sending Onesimus back to Philemon as the center of his, of Paul’s, own life. He identifies Onesimus as part of his own self. Onesimus has moved from being a “thing” to being a person, and more than a person - to being part of Paul’s self. Slaves and masters become one in each other because they become one in Christ. And even more: Paul identifies himself as Philemon’s father, and so he identifies Philemon as his son. And Paul urges Philemon, as a son, to regard Onesmus as his brother. Paul has become father in Christ to both Philemon and Onesimus, a father who now has two sons, each the brother to the other. And as if to underline the point, that master and slave are equal in Christ, Paul ends the letter by addressing Philemon the master in language that would be used to a slave: “Confident of your obedience, I am writing to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say.” Confident of your obedience. Do even more than I say. The world’s distinction between master and slave in Christ is transformed into a new family of brothers to each other. Possession becomes the starting point of a new relationship of the family of God.

    We may be sure that Paul is deliberate in saying this, that he is not simply using flowery language to dress up an everyday note of recommendation. We may be sure of it because slavery is a primary image in Paul’s understanding of the nature of Christ. In the second chapter of the Letter to the Philippians Paul famously writes: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” The saving life of Jesus comes from the deliberate decision to be a servant, a doulos, which in Greek means both servant and slave. Christ’s self-identification as the lowest among us means that the lowest among us can count Jesus as brother, as equal. His obedience to death is the key to life.

    And so for us. Our family, who we have been, does not have to define who we can be. Our possessions do not need to define us, whether they are things or ideas. Our possessions can become occasions for unexpectedly life-giving relationships if we allow them to transform us and themselves be transformed into God-filled vessels of love, leading to relationships we never might have thought possible.

    A memory which used to trap us can become a springboard to wider and deeper and more compassionate engagements with the world and with the people we meet in it. A possession which used to define us can lead to something that enters into the center of our life’s being, into our very heart. Which then can grow and be shared in relationships that build a new family, this one as brothers and sisters, parents and children in the love of God, which is ever reaching out to rebuild the broken world God so earnestly wills to be whole, to be vibrantly alive.

    This is the choice we make when we decide to become disciples of the one who chose to be the servant, the slave of us all. We choose to be like him: in service to each other, and with the Spirit who knits the world back together again. We have been what we were and we have had what we have had. New life comes, not from holding on, but from taking our past, whatever it may have been, and offering it to the One who can make it whole, offering it to the One who can take what we were and what we had and make of its unlikeliness a Kingdom, God’s Kingdom: the blessing of the everlasting Shalom. In the words of God which Moses speaks to Israel and which we have heard this morning: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.”

Proper 18 B - September 5, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC

Proper 18 B - Sunday, September 5, 2021

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23

James 2:1-10, [11-13], 14-17

Mark 7:24-37

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After what felt like a brief reprieve,  once again, we find ourselves in a liminal space as Covid continues to affect our lives, reminding us that we live in a finite world. At such times we long for a strong and powerful God—a God removed from suffering. But in Jesus, God shows us how God participates in the finiteness of this world. The enfleshment of Jesus reveals that God is not apart from the trials of humanity. God is not aloof or a spectator. God is not merely tolerating human suffering or instantly healing it. God is participating in it with us.

Pain and beauty guide us to see the face of God. On the one hand we’re attracted to the unbelievable beauty of the divine reflected in the beauty of human beings and the natural world. On the other hand, brokenness and weakness also mysteriously pull us out of ourselves. Vulnerability forces us beyond ourselves. Whenever we see pain, most of us are drawn out of our own preoccupations. It saves us from our smaller self. That’s why so many saints wanted to get near suffering—because as they said again and again, they meet Christ there.

Grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities. It lets us know how capable we are of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt. All of us have setbacks, broken dreams, broken relationships, or unrealized possibilities. All of us have bodies that just don’t do what they used to do. Because we’re human, we understand that loss is a universal language.

Today we hear two Gospel stories that highlight both the universality of God’s relationship with humanity and the tenacious faith of two vulnerable Gentiles that allows them to witness to and participate in Jesus’ power. It strikes me that the placement of these two healing stories in Mark, following directly after Jesus’ warnings about hypocrisy, highlights not the shortcoming of his followers but of those of Jesus himself. The uncharacteristic rude response of Jesus to the woman seems out of place if Mark is only using the story to emphasize God’s universality. The encounter with this woman is a conversion moment for Jesus in which he realizes, in a very human moment of physical and mental exhaustion, his own vulnerability and how he has lost sight of the point of his mission. She straightens him out, she opens him up. It is the courage of the woman to confront Jesus that changes him.

This Gentile woman teaches this Jewish man the true meaning of what he has just reminded his followers in the prior verse, which is that social conventions should not stand in the way of helping those in need. Mark is showing us that the incarnation is no easy task. If Jesus is fully human, he must face his own hypocrisy and work through his own self-integration. He must suffer under the conditions of human existence, the challenge of the human condition. To be otherwise would not allow him to be fully human. To be fully God, he cannot avoid this suffering either. Mark provides a way to see how the divine and human are combined in Jesus. Jesus is fully God and fully human only if he can be faithfully opened to both at the same time. 

The story of the deaf mute that follows serves as an example of how being opened empowers one to be open to others. People bring a deaf man with a speech impediment to Jesus and beg Jesus to heal him. The miracle is done privately. Having been opened himself, Jesus gives special attention to this man. Jesus leads him away from the crowd.  Whatever fear, anxiety, or frustration he felt were shared in a more intimate setting. Jesus speaks the language of touch to him putting his fingers in his ears, his saliva on his tongue. Joining him in his pain Jesus groans aloud, and he proclaims God’s action – “Be opened!”  “Be opened”, a prayer more than a command. The action is all God’s.  Immediately the man hears and speaks clearly. 

How often do we question in our own hearts why God would take special care or be bothered with us?  The deafness that afflicts us is a spiritual deafness, an inability to believe that God loves us enough, just as we are, to sigh for us---to wish we be opened---to hear God’s love and to speak it to others, to be opened to trusting more and controlling less. Sometimes the pain of being bound in silence and isolation is thought to be preferable to the risks of hearing and speaking----of being in relationship. This insecurity pushes us to create rules that give status and value to some while denigrating others including ourselves. The Letter of James underlines the human tendency to show partiality to some and to neglect others. Since God erects no barriers between God and humans so there should be no barriers between human beings. Status is a product of our imagination. It is invisible to God. The reading from Proverbs reminds us that “The Lord is the maker of them all.”  When we acknowledge that there are no walls separating us from God and each other, then love and mercy flow, and all are deemed equally valuable. 

It’s so easy to become anesthetized by the repetitiveness of our daily routine. It’s natural to block out dissonant messages that stoke our fears and raise our defenses. At present, we’re fatigued from marshalling all our resources to get through the disruptions of this pandemic in such a polarized society and fractured world. The inclination to shut down, to be less than our best selves, to see less and to hear less, is understandable. Yet Jesus wants to speak healing in our lives.  He wants to help us experience the world in a bigger, more textured, and messier way. How might we be opened that we might broaden our outlook to see the redemptive work that God is performing in us and all around us and join in? 

Our ability to be open to God, to our world, and to our own need issues from God’s gracious activity within us. God desires to touch us. God desires to heal us. God desires to give us the life for which we have been created, calling us to look at life and ourselves through his merciful eyes. In the end, it’s about opening our hearts to a relationship---coming into the love and peace of God that we know in Jesus, so by seeing him, we can see ourselves and others as he sees, with the same infinite compassion.  

+Amen.      

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 18 A - September 6, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Proper 18 A - September 6,.2020

Exodus 12:1-14
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 18:15-20

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If we go to the Bible for practical advice, sometimes we can be disappointed.  Not this Sunday. Jesus lays out a step-by-step process for seeking forgiveness and reconcilation in the church (and I would say any other Christian community.)  If someone injures us, we should first of all go to them directly and try to work it out.  If that doesn't work, then try it with one or two others as witnesses.  And if that doesn't work, then bring it before the whole community.  It sounds very straight-forward and simple, doesn't it?

Well, it sounds simple, but is it really that simple?  Most of the time when someone injures us, we go to someone we can trust, and tell them what happened, trying to get an ally for ourselves in our pain.  If we tell enough people, eventually the person who hurt us starts getting a reputation for being a nasty person, and may not even know that what they did was hurtful.

Why don't we go to the person themselves to start with?  Well, if we really have been hurt, we may be afraid of getting hurt again, and out of self-defense, we seek an ally.  That might be OK if we stop with one person who we trust, and who has the wisdom to encourage us to deal directly with the person involved.  Otherwise we run the risk of creating division in the community, and once that has started it's very hard to undo the damage that it causes.

Jesus is talking about relationships within the Christian community, and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.  In the community, we can hope that everyone has the intention of “loving our neighbor as we love ourselves.”  In Christian community we would hope that no one sets out deliberately to harm another by their selfishness or lack of regard for others.  That might be unrealistic, but if I really want to live by Jesus' great commandment of love, then I need to be willing to give others a chance to know when they've hurt me, and give them a chance to apologize so that I can forgive them, and we can both move ahead in our relationship.

Paul makes this point so clearly in the section we heard from the letter to the Romans today:  “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”  He says all the commandments are summed up in the great commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  That's what it means to “lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”  We need to go beyond what might seem reasonable in our relationships with others to give them a chance to fulfill that same commandment of love.  

And we can trust that God will be with us in the process.  Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  We are gathered in his name, and we can trust that God IS with us, here as we worship, and as we work to create the Beloved Community that God desires for us.  Forgiveness and reconciliation may not be the “normal” or “expected” thing to do.  But it IS the Christian thing to do.

Proper 18, Year B: Sunday, September 9, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Proper 16- Sunday, September 9, 2018

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

Br. Aidan Owen

" She knew the rules. She had been warned. Yet . . ."

Proper 18 Year C- September 4

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams,n/OHC 

Proper 18 Year C- Sunday, September 4, 2016

Icon of Christ The Teacher

There once was a young minister, who traveled with great difficulty to a faraway monastery because there was an old nun there who had a reputation for asking very piercing spiritual questions. "Mother," the minister said. "Give me a question that will renew my soul." "Ah, yes, then," the old nun said, "your question is what do they need?" The minister wrestled with the question for days but then, depressed, gave up and went back to the old nun in disgust.  And said “ Mother ," "I came here because I'm tired and depressed and dry. I didn't come here to talk about my ministry. I came here to talk about my spiritual life. Please give me another question." Ah, well, of course. “Now I see," she said, "In that case, the right question for you is not 'what do they need?' The right question for you is “What do they really need?”

Both the question and the answer are clear: What do they really need? They, we, need what was needed when the temple became more important than the Torah. We need what we needed when the faith was more a vision than an institution. We need what we have always needed:  An authentic and dynamic relationship with the true and living God!

Christian discipleship is by nature a very dangerous thing. It has put every person who ever accepted it at risk. In the early church to be a Christian community meant to defy Roman imperialism. It was to stretch Judaism itself. It was to counter pagan values with Christian ones.

It took great courage. Unending fortitude and a willingness to step beyond the old ways of doing and being that were never life-giving to begin with. Real discipleship meant the rejection of real things:

• it meant the rejection of emperor worship,

• the inclusion of Gentiles,

• the elimination of dietary laws,

• the acceptance of women

• the supplanting of law with love,

• of nationalism to universalism,

• of a chosen people with a we a global people!

You see, then as it is now, to follow Christ was not an excursion into the intellectual, or a withdrawal into our infinitesimal world. No, it was real and immediate and cosmic. It was not easy then and it will not be easy now.

To follow Jesus, in other words, is to follow the one who turns the world upside down, even the religious world and our distorted way of seeing ourselves and the other. Real discipleship is a tipsy arrangement at the very least. Following Jesus is a circuitous route that leads always and everywhere to places where a 'nice' person would not go, and to moments of integrity we would so much rather do without.

 Christian discipleship is the commitment to live a gospel life, a marginal life in this place, at this time at whatever the cost. Its about living in this world the way that Jesus the Christ lived in his – touching lepers, raising donkeys from ditches on Sabbath days, questioning the unquestionable and - consorting with the Other. Discipleship implies a commitment to leave nets and homes, positions and securities, and inheritance to be now - in our own world - what the Christ was for his.

If discipleship is what you're here for, be not fooled! The price is a high one and history has recorded it faithfully.

• Discipleship cost Oscar Romero,

• Martin Luther King,

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

• Sister Margaret Held and Sister Paula Merrill, in Mississippi  their lives.

No doubt about it, the nature of discipleship is passion and risk.

But to understand the nature of discipleship is not enough. We must be marked by its mark. And what is the mark of true discipleship? True discipleship says the truth in hard times. The disciple not only preaches the gospel, but lives it, breathes it. Because to be a disciple means to be in deep relationship, with Christ Jesus in prayer and in action. And so because you and I have been called out, we share the responsibility for affecting the world with the effective love of God. Our partnership with the Spirit is based on being claimed by Christ for the world.

Here the words of our father Benedict: God calls out and says again: Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?  If you hear this and your answer is "I do," God then directs these words to you: If you desire true and eternal life, come follow Jesus. The road will not be easy. At times it will seem to be a lonely road. But it is the road that leads to wholeness, love and the fullness of life.

The choice is ours to make.