Proper 12 C- July 24, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Joseph Wallace-Williams, n/OHC

Proper 12 Year C - Sunday - July 24, 2016

Lord teach us to pray!

This past week for the first time the novices and postulants had our first international formation Google Hang Out!!  Our Br. Charles, in Canada said: I think I was a person who said prayers before I entered the community. Now, I can say that I am a praying person. I don't want to speak for my other brothers, but I think in my class at least, most of us would agree with this insight from our brother Charles. Each one of us has become more deeply, in our own way, praying men and not simply men who say prayers.

Over and over again in the spiritual life I think there is one question that emerges. What’s holier: to pray or to work, to be involved in the world with all it its pains and troubles, or to withdraw from it to meditate on the next one?

Last week I began to watch the new film “Straight Outta Compton” which tells the story of the group NWA. I say began because I found that I could only watch small portions of this film at a time because it’s a lot to take in at once.  All of the rich social commentary which was poignant in the 80s when the group released its first album then is still relevant and powerful in our present context. 

There is one scene in particular that has really captured my thinking these past few days. It is the scene in which the group is forced to have a press conference to defend their incendiary hit “F  the police” .  In that scene Dr. Dre says the following:

"What’s happened is Y’all just got a snapshot of how Americans really feel. We have given the people a voice."
To which one of the white reporters replies: “Yeah, but doesn't your songs glamorize the lifestyle of gang bangers, guns, and drugs?” In response to this question from the reporter Ice Cube replies: “Our art is a reflection of our reality. What do you see when you go outside of your door? I know what I see.  And it ain’t glamorous.”

My jaw dropped and my heart ached when I heard this deeply insightful observation.

So, why do I tell you this story?  I tell you the story because I think it helps us to understand prayer and contemplation. You see, the danger in the contemplative life is that it may become only one-half of the spiritual life. The danger is that prayer and contemplation, will be used to justify distance and unconcern for the world and all of its hurts.

Contemplation is not for its own sake. To live a contemplative life, to be spiritual, does not mean that we spend life in some kind of sacred spa designed to save us from having to deal with the down and dirty parts of life. The contemplative life is not spiritual escapism. Contemplation is immersion in the God who created the world for all of us. Our Christian faith tells us, “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”

And that is the point: if all things are of God, then all things demand, deserve justice. God wills the care of the poor, the aged, defenseless, and needy! So, therefore, must the contemplative. God wills the end of oppressors who stand with a heel in the neck of the weak. So does the contemplative. God wills the liberation of human beings. So will the contemplative. God desires the dignity and full development of all human beings. Thus God takes the side of the defenseless. Thus, must the contemplative too. 

Otherwise, the contemplation is not real, cannot be real, and will never be real, because to contemplate the God of Justice is to be committed to justice. 

You see the contemplative; the spiritual person, must do justice, must speak justice, must insist on justice. 
And they do:

• Thomas Merton spoke out against the Vietnam war and spoke out in support of the civil rights movement. He did his part intentionally. Wholeheartedly the way that he could. The way the times demanded from behind the walls of the cloister.
• Our founder James Huntington did his part to support the labor movement in his day.
• Hildegard of Bingen preached the word of justice to emperors and to popes. 
• And our Holy Father Benedict of Nursia sheltered strangers and educated peasants. 

And so must we do whatever justice must be done in our time if we claim to be serious about really sinking into the heart of God. A spiritual path that does not lead to a living commitment to the coming of the will of God everywhere for everyone is no path at all. It is, at best, a pious illusion, a dead end on the way to God.

Contemplation is a change in consciousness. It is a conscious decision not to sleepwalk. It brings us to see beyond boundaries, fears, and past hurts. Beyond institutional self-interest straight into the face of a Mothering God from whom comes all the life that comes. We must  learn what the Spirit is trying to teach us. When we feel rejected, we learn to seek the love above all loves in life. And perhaps, the Spirit is trying to teach us that when we are threatened by differences, we must come to realize that otherness is what stretches us beyond the narrowness of sameness. Instead, the desire for conquest or  to hold the world hostage comes when we try to shape the world to our own limited ideas of it. 

Then differences begin to be a threat rather than a promise of inspiring new possibilities or daring new experiences in life. Then, we set out to mold the rest of the world to our own small selves.  And we build our private little walls higher and higher and higher. To feel good about ourselves, we measure ourselves against  the other  and call them lesser, call them enemy. We entomb ourselves in ourselves. But when we  become transformed from within, the contemplative becomes a new kind of presence in the world, signaling another way of being, seeing with new eyes and speaking with new words the very Word of God. The contemplative can never be a complacent participant in an oppressive system. From contemplation comes not only the consciousness of the universal connectedness of life but the courage to model it, as well.

Contemplation and prayer are very dangerous. 

• They not only bring us face to face with God. 
• They bring us, as well, face to face with the world, and with ourselves. 

And then, of course, something must be done. Nothing stays the same once we have had an experience of The True and Living God. Once we have seen face-to-face and have felt deep within the piercing power of God's love. We become new people and, in the doing, see everything around us newly, too. We become connected to everything, to everyone and We carry the world in our hearts.

Feast of St Benedict - Jul 12, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Peter Rostron, OHC
Feast of St Benedict - transferred - Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Proverbs 2:1-9
Luke 14:27-33

St Benedict

I want to share something with you that I don’t think will come as a surprise. Community is hard. It is where what we want, and what others want, and what God wants, collide. Many times, all our various desires can coincide, but often there is conflict, within and between our selves, and with God. But engaging in the hard work of community is what expands our capacity to love. As Br. Reinaldo expressed in his sermon on Sunday, living into God’s commandment to love our neighbor as our self is a revelation that there is in fact one love - God’s love - and that the more we can love our selves, in all our inner messiness, the more we can love our neighbor. We must know and come to terms with our own personal demons, and learn how to treat our selves with compassion, before we can fully love others. We are like vessels and conduits for God’s love; the more clogged we are with our own stuff, the less readily can God’s love flow through us.

This hard work of “cleaning house” so that we are better able to love, has been presenting itself to me in many ways these past months. Occasionally, it seems too much for me, and a voice yells “Flee!” But I’ve learned to pause, knowing that an even more imperative and truthful voice soon says, “Stay.” This voice has been appearing in so many different places, that I am convinced it is God’s voice. It has spoken to me in the Breakthrough program, in my new work with a therapist, in the declining health of my mother with its resulting magnification of long-festering and dormant issues among my siblings and me, in the reverberations within this community that naturally occur when four new men enter in a short period of time, and in the surprisingly profound amount of knowledge and wisdom that I am still unpacking from my recently completed spiritual direction program. I find myself in the midst of a profusion of challenge and change and growth, but within that, I’m finding a growing awareness of God’s boundless love.

One of the channels through which I’ve been receiving encouragement from God lately has been Richard Rohr’s daily email meditations. Here is some of what he has been saying recently about the hard work of community.

Our shadow self is any part of ourselves or our institutions that we try to hide or deny because it seems socially unacceptable...Our shadow is often subconscious, hidden even from our own awareness. It takes effort and life-long practice to look for, find, and embrace what we dismiss and what we disdain... Shadow work is what I call "falling upward." Lady Julian put it best of all: "First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!"...[For this recovery to happen], we have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, into liminality. All transformation takes place here. We have to allow ourselves to be drawn out of "business as usual" and remain patiently on the "threshold,” where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That's a good space where genuine newness can begin. Get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible. It's the realm where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way. This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed.”

Here is that place. Here is that liminal space in which I feel my self - our selves - operating. And this is precisely the kind of space that I believe St. Benedict was seeking to create in his “school for the Lord’s service.” A school of love. A school in which the bigger world, God’s world, is revealed. Benedict would not have been familiar with some of our contemporary language, but Rohr’s message, I think, would resonate with him. His Rule provides a structure designed to offer the stability and encouragement and safety required for the hard work of which Rohr speaks and in which I, and we, are engaged. We are now seventeen men, each with his own, unique story, each with his wounds and challenges and gifts. Each doing his own work of conversion. Living so closely together, with Benedict’s Rule as our guide and source of stability, if we interact fully and honestly with one another, if we make ourselves vulnerable to one another, if we obey Christ’s admonition that we heard in today’s gospel to give up our possessions - that is, those things that weigh us down and inhibit our freedom to grow and love - then real transformation can happen. Therein lies the value of community, especially one that is grounded in the wisdom of St. Benedict.

The earliest Christians, too, understood the importance of living in community, as was reflected in today’s reading from the book of Acts. Community is essential to the full expression of a Christian life. As members of Christ’s body it is only through coming together in community that we can fully know and be Christ in the world, to experience pain, surrender, and resurrection, as Christ did. Benedict drew on the wisdom of scripture, such as we just heard from the book of Proverbs, on his own encounters with God, on his own battles with personal demons, and on the work of others to craft a brilliant and eloquent document that has remarkably stood for 1500 years. In part, it is practical, providing for a daily routine of prayer, work, and study. It offers guidance on matters such as discipline and diet and travel. It sanctifies our lives through the vow of obedience, stability, and conversion. But, pervading all of this, it is love that gives the Rule its power and longevity and universality. The Rule is suffused with love, with compassion, forgiveness, and humility, qualities that transcend the mundane and that are at the heart of a life lived in Christ. From the opening Prologue, where Benedict says that “we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love” to the closing chapter, where we are gently urged to, “with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners,” one can feel the great love of Benedict, and of God.

Another strong theme in the Rule is hospitality, which is particularly relevant to our life here at Holy Cross. In her book, Hospitality: The Heart of Spiritual Direction, Leslie Hay offers several definitions of hospitality, the truest and simplest of which is “seeing and receiving all as Christ,” an imperative from St. Benedict. She quotes Daniel Homan, OSB, and Lonni Collins Pratt in saying too that “hospitality is born in us when we are well loved by God and by others.” And there again is that central core of Benedict’s monastery: love. With the guidance of the Rule, and through hard work on our selves and on our relationships with each other, we become more fully open to being loved by God, which in turn nurtures our ability to offer hospitality, to be a welcoming presence to our guests and to one another. As a Benedictine community, we can be a font of God’s love, to be spread into the world.

And, Lord knows, ours is certainly a world that needs God’s love. We have tumult and violence and suffering such as Benedict knew. As was his world, ours is in desperate need of hospitality, of community, love, compassion, humility, forgiveness. Br. Reinaldo spoke of this on Sunday. Somehow, our society needs to cultivate an atmosphere in which our impulse is to show mercy to the stranger, the enemy, to offer help and to be forgiving, rather than to vilify the “other” and pursue violent retribution. We, as a Christian community, can’t single-handedly change the world, and we can't expect change to happen overnight, but we can be a living example of the power of love. We can offer the hospitality of Christ and show others a way to live, with the wisdom of St. Benedict as our guide. His voice joins all the voices of sacred scripture and of all the saints in pointing the way. We, with God's help, must continue to listen and respond.

Proper 10 C - Jul 10, 2016

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Reinaldo Martinez-Cubero, n/OHC
Proper 10 Year C - Sunday - July 10, 2016

Deuteronomy 30:9-14
Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

The Good Samaritan - Vincent Van Gogh 1890 - Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

 No beating around the bush. The message is quite clear. Jesus' parables were intended to push his listeners into new ways of thinking, to blow all the conventional notions away, and to challenge the religious elite's sensibilities of moral propriety. Over and over, Jesus broke down the barriers that his religious culture had erected. He made intimate connections between people and God by passing out forgiveness freely without the need of Temple sacrifices. He made intimate connections among people who were regarded as "other". Much of Jesus' teaching had to do with dismantling our binary way of thinking, the various ways we have of making distinctions and creating hierarchies of identity - neighbor and stranger, good and bad, us and them. He replaced that whole system of "either/or" with a new way. We are all connected, like the vine and the branches.

Franciscan friar and author, Richard Rohr writes: "...When Jesus offers the command to love our neighbors as we love ourselves...he connects the two great commandments of love...often, we think this means to love our neighbor with the same amount of love -- as much as we love ourselves -- when it really means that it is the same Source and the same Love that allows me to love myself, and others, and God -- at the same time...How you love is how you have accessed love.... How we love anything is how we love everything". Perhaps loving ourselves is about building our capacity to love in general? I can say, from my own slow conversion experience these past two years that the more I surrender and learn to love those parts about myself that are hard for me to love, those traits that seem to be part of my DNA, and I struggle to learn to live with, the more my capacity to love in general widens.

The command to love God with all one's being, to love one's neighbor as oneself, and even to love one's enemies is central to the Gospels. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus specifies this by showing how the Samaritan- the hated, unclean, heretic, bitter enemy is the one who fulfills the command by reaching out extravagantly, to one who is not only a stranger, but also his enemy. The lawyer who has challenged Jesus, correctly identifies the neighbor as "the one who showed mercy". In The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare the character of Portia describes mercy in this way:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings,
But mercy is above this sceptered sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings.
It is an attribute to God himself.

Perhaps when we show mercy, is when we are closest to God because it keeps us available to one another, and opens our heart to strangers. It requires us to realize our own weakness enough to be kind to those who are struggling with theirs. "Beware those who show no mercy", warns Sister Joan Chittister. "They are dangerous people because they have either not faced themselves or are lying to themselves about what they find there."

When I first saw the news of the horrendous acts of violence that took place this week, I was filled with confusion, disbelief, and outrage! I must admit that my first reaction was to wish retribution for the victims. But there is no way to look at those videos, as horrendous as they are, and not see the policemen's humanity. I find what I saw beyond outrageous and horrifying, but I also saw frightened men; terrified of being shot and killed. Was their reaction based on color bias and preconceived ideas about black men? As a Latino, a person of color, that was my experience of what I saw. Do I believe it to be part of systemic racism in our country? As a Latino, a person of color, that is my experience of what I see. Do I believe it has to do with white privilege? I will let my white brothers and sisters deal with that one because I have my own biases and prejudices to deal with, and to say: "Them! It's their fault!" would be, I believe, unhealthy for my spiritual life. And yes, I do want to shout "Enough!!!
 
And I hope that you, like me, want to a part of whatever would be an attempt to a solution to the racial divisions in this country. In the meantime, showing mercy to those who are like us is not what Jesus was talking about. Showing mercy to those to whom we owe a debt is not what Jesus was talking about. Showing mercy to our own group, our own family, our peeps, is not what Jesus was talking about. Jesus was talking about the much harder choice of showing mercy to the stranger, the outsider, and the enemy. This is the man who while hanging nailed to a cross, bleeding to death, and gasping for air, prayed for the very barbarians who crucified, not only him, but thousands: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." To truly love my neighbor as myself is hard, and it is a different way of being in the world. It is the radical shift I must continue to make as I continue to learn how to live and work for that Reign of God, proclaimed by the one who befriended Samaritan, tax collector, Roman soldier, Pharisee, Sadducee, widow, leper, and the list goes on and on. So, as a follower of Jesus, and with the steady revelation of God's mercy, I must choose the deep unknowing that moves me in the direction of loving my neighbor as myself.
 
And finally, I'll say this: That Samaritan helped that man not knowing what that man would do with the mercy shown him. There's a Spiritual I know that goes something like this:

I helped my brother the other day.
Give him my right hand,
But just as soon as ever my back was turned,
He scandalized my name.
Now, do you call that a brother? No, no
He scandalized my name.

What's the end of the story? The man changed his opinion of Samaritans, and was grateful to the Samaritan the rest of his life, or as the spiritual says: just as soon as ever the Samaritan's back was turned,
he scandalized his name. We are allowed full control of the mercy we choose to show others, but what they will do with that mercy, that is not for us to control. ~Amen 

References:
 
Cynthia Bourgeault: The Wisdom Jesus (Shambhala, 2008)

Richard Rorh, OFM: The Naked Now (Crossroad, 2009)
 
Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM: Buying the Field (Paulist Press, 2013)
 
William Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (1599)
 
Joan Chittister, OSB: God's Tender Mercy (Twenty-Third Publications, 2010)
 
Kathleen Norris: Amazing Grace (Riverhead Books, 1998)
 
Scandalized My Name (African-American Spiritual)

Saint Peter & Saint Paul

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC 

Saint Peter & Saint Paul- Wednesday, Jun 29, 2016

Black Creek Preserve Bridge 
( One of the beautiful natural preserves in our neighborhood.)

Yesterday evening at vespers we heard the lovely sermon of St. Augustine on the feast of  Saint Peter and Paul.  Augustine concludes it by reminding us that: “These two are one.” The icon at the entrance to our church makes the same point. The two Apostles are shown embracing, exchanging a kiss of peace, united in death and sharing in the heavenly banquet together.  And there is indeed a deep truth here: Peter and Paul are now united in the Lord.  

But as we know, this was not always the case.  Scripture itself testifies to a certain tension between the two, a tension that flared into open displays of anger as Paul called Peter a hypocrite publicly and to his face for drawing back from table fellowship with Gentiles in a Jewish milieu, even after proclaiming that such distinctions as that between Jew and non-Jew no longer applied in the wider Christian community.

It became common over time to gloss over these tensions or to paint them in terms of “complementarity” rather than difference.  Peter became the Apostle to the Jews and Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles...or was it the other way around?  In later ages Peter became the symbol of Roman order and church discipline, while Paul was celebrated as the champion of the deep freedom which we have in Christ.  Peter became the model of those who repented after their conversion—even, according to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, of those who sinned after monastic profession. Paul, on the other hand, became the symbol of those whose repentance and conversion went hand in hand.  In the Reformation era, Peter stood for the papacy, Paul for the Protestant voice of  “sola fide, sola scriptura.”  Even more recently, they have been likened to the two lungs of the Church which it needs if it is to breathe fully and freely and powerfully, as the late Pope John Paul II spoke of the two lungs of the church, Eastern and Western.

As much as I love symbolism and typology and archetypal imagery, I wonder if the binary thinking implicit in all these images and explicit in the very title of this feast does justice to either Peter or Paul. 

I came across a reference in that great thesaurus of post-modernity, Wikipedia, quoting a contemporary Scottish New Testament scholar James D. G. Dunn from an essay in a book about the Biblical Canon.  Dunn writes:

"...Peter was probably in fact and effect the bridge-man (pontifex maximus!) who did more than any other to hold together the diversity of first-century Christianity. James the brother of Jesus and Paul, the two other most prominent leading figures in first-century Christianity, were too much identified with their respective "brands" of Christianity, at least in the eyes of Christians at the opposite ends of this particular spectrum. But Peter, as shown particularly by the Antioch episode in Gal 2, had both a care to hold firm to his Jewish heritage, which Paul lacked, and an openness to the demands of developing Christianity, which James lacked." [Italics original] 

In many ways, this picture of Peter as the “bridge man” appeals to me more than  traditional binary images and metaphors, helping to illuminate the ancient church even as it helps us to understand today's church and today's world. 

There is always a need for a bridge, for a go-between, for the mediator, the reconciler, the one who holds together two sides that are in tension and risk shattering apart in their sincerity and passion and certainty.  We know from moral theory and everyday life that the most difficult choices are those that involve two goods, two values.  And it is not always possible to hold both forever.  But it may be more possible—and necessary—than we imagine.  And so, for example, while it is true that “justice delayed is justice denied” it is also true that it may take us a whole lot longer to get there than some might wish. And gradualists, among whom I count myself, often find ourselves vilified by both ends of the political or moral spectrum. 

But what if Peter was just such a person for the emerging Church, valuing (as Dunn says) his Jewish heritage represented by James of Jerusalem, as well as Pauline openness and freedom as the Gospel spreads and developes in a Gentile world?

We know, of course, what happens to bridges. They get walked on, even trampled on.  And sometimes they get blown up.  And very often they need to be rebuilt—witness the Tappan Zee Bridge project south of us.  And sometimes they simply are no longer useful...the opposite shores diminish in importance or alternative routes are created or new modes of transportation render them unnecessary.  Does any of this apply to Peter and the role of reconciliation? Does it apply any longer to our much-heralded Anglican Via Media among the churches or even within our own Anglican family of autonomous provinces?  I don't know.

But it surely applies to our own lives, and in this holy house, and to our monastic conversatio, our monastic conversion.  The Rule of Benedict reminds us that our first call is to listen. And then ,as they would add in Kairos prison ministries, to love.  We are called as a monastic community and a church to treasure what is central to our tradition while remaining open to the signs of the times in an ever-changing world.  We can't abandon either pole, though how we weigh and emphasize each will vary, from individual to individual and from local community to local community.  To hold on only to tradition is to risk becoming a museum; to be swept along with every social and cultural change would risk becoming a mere fan club.

Even more central is the role of bridge person that each of us is called to be in the political and social challenges of our day.  What role can I play in reconciliation, whether it be in a personal relationship or in such areas as racial or class or gender or economic equality and reconciliation?

The work of restorative justice—which is I think another way of speaking about this—doesn't end with the bridge. But it begins with it   It begins with me and you listening and listening and holding on and holding open for as long as it takes. Which may be a very long time indeed.  Long enough until it becomes clear if another way forward is in fact possible and available to us all, another shore, another mode of transportation, another way of getting there together.

Peter is our model in this. Or at least he is for me. That is how I have understood my ministry as Superior. In truth, maybe our Order and our Church has far too many Peters like me and desperately needs another Paul or two...or even another James.  We each have our role to play in the Body of Christ.

In any case, we know how Peter ended up: crucified upside down.  And Paul, we know where he ended:  beheaded in the arena.  And James of Jerusalem? By legend, thrown off the high wall of the Jerusalem Temple that he loved so much.

I trust that the three of them—Peter, Paul and James—feast together today in the heavenly kingdom.  I pray that we too, Christians and all peoples, of many faiths and none, will join in.  Until then, let us journey together with as much integrity and authenticity and obedience as we can muster—listening, listening, loving, loving—so that, in God's good time, our Savior Christ might bring us all together to everlasting life.

Amen.