Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Br. James Michael Dowd's Life Profession - Thursday, April 24, 2011
Acts 3: 11-26
1 Peter 1: 3-9
Luke 24: 36b-48
What a great time for a Profession of the Vow for Life! The octave of Easter.
This holy time when life is at the highest point of triumph. Death has tried its best and has been defeated. One Sabbath day of rest between crucifixion and resurrection and all fear is beaten down. Life blossoms and fruits. God has said “Yes!” absolutely to life.
There’s an image that has kept coming to me as I have been praying about this sermon and I have to tell you about it… when I first started my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) residency I was on call one night. That involved making rounds on all the floors. I got to Obstetrics and checked in. “Anything going on?” The nurse said “There’s just one woman in labor… it won’t be very long now.” I remarked that I had never seen a birth. She said “Wait a minute” and left. Pretty quickly she came back with a scrub suit and said that the patient’s husband wasn’t willing to go into delivery with her and she would like the chaplain! Oh!!
I did as I was told and trembled my way to the mother’s bed. She grabbed my hand, kissed it and thanked me. “I don’t want to be alone and my husband is afraid.” I thought “you think he’s scared?” Just then they came to wheel her into the delivery room and I was dragged along ruing my bravado.
Well, she did great. I didn’t faint. The baby was born. on the 25th of September… the mother’s own birthday, the doctor’s birthday and my younger son’s birthday. So we all sang Happy Birthday and the baby responded…. He howled and then he peed all over us!
I know that’s a pretty earthy story for this solemn occasion. But so is our Gospel reading. Jesus tells the disciples to look at his tortured flesh and believe. He then asks for something to eat because ghosts don’t do that. This is a living Lord… not an ethereal concept. There is no mistaking the reality of his appearance. No chance is given to explain it away to themselves as a wishful thought or a grief conjured manifestation. Here is the Lord embodied and transformed. New life. Earthed yet transcendent.
And from Acts we read that Peter and John react to the surprise of the crowds after they had healed the crippled man by asking why the crowd is surprised. What did they expect? What else could life in Christ bring but immersion in the living of life and its restoration to wholeness?
Our faith is not a philosophy, not a finely worked out way of walking through life unscathed, sheltered and immersed in one’s own spiritual development. It is rooted in the earthiness of the Incarnation. It is humanity glorified but still human.
And although much of the world will ask why you, James, want to “bury” yourself in a monastery, we all know better. Today when you make your profession you do not die to life, you do not remove yourself from the pain of your fellow human beings; you do not become indifferent to the world God has planted us in.
Making your commitment does not mean retreating from life – dying to self, yes! Giving up your own willfulness and selfishness, yes! Monasticism is a call to enter fully into life with all its joy and all its grief. What happens today is that the labor you have been going through for fifty years will come to fruition finally. And just as that mother’s labor I spoke about was inexorable, irreversible, so is yours now.
James Michael you are being born yet again. Not into a sheltered existence but into a life that will take you deeper into the joy of your humanity and yet render you more and more vulnerable to the sufferings God’s children undergo. If you are faithful there will be no escape.
Benedict tried to escape at first. The cave at Subiaco seemed like a good idea for a while but the more he tried to withdraw the more the poor and the lost beat a path to his door. And finally, there at Montecassino his monastery guarded the road to the city he had fled from. It became a shelter and a beacon to the weary and the wanderer.
Benedict’s story is a great one. And it is the story of every monk. It is the story of being drawn by God’s love until the heart fills and overflows and the cloister cannot contain it. It’s not a story of escape or gentle piety. It’s a story of walking on into the full, messy humanness of life. It’s about perseverance and not turning back. It’s about trying to incarnate the love of Christ in this earthy mess we call life.
James, no one needs to teach you to love the poor. You are no stranger to the streets. And yet you give yourself to a life of seeking God that requires stability and labor. Today you claim a life that will be so abundant, so earthy, and so blindingly full that you will never rest again if you listen.
Today you are being born as a finally professed monk of the Order of the Holy Cross. Our roots are not genteel. Our Founder stood against the injustice which grinds down the poor. We don’t draw back. We keep our doors open, we venture out, but we always come home…home to our community, to our life together rooted in Christ.
This is your monastic day of birth. I trust you will be more circumspect in your response to the gift of life than that baby boy was those years ago! You will undoubtedly howl. But know you have come home. Alleluia!
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Easter Sunday -24 Apr 2011
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Easter Sunday - April 24, 2011
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18
On Palm Sunday as we began this Holy Week, Brother Robert preached and in his sermon he said something that hit home with me… talking about the Apostles’ Creed he called it “…the barest outline of a cosmic drama that will take us an eternity to comprehend.” I’ve thought about that all week.
This morning we have done some numinous things – standing in the cloister where so many have prayed for more than a century, lighting the new fire, stealing the flame and passing it along. We’ve listened to eternal promises; words that are evocative and almost magical. Words that have sprung from the mouths and hearts of people of vision and rare understanding of the ways of God. We began with the story of the creation of the cosmos and our place in it and proceeded through our wanderings and fallings to this time of mystery and miracle.
We sang a love song to the Light – an ancient melody that recounts God’s chasing after a people and a universe that so often turned away – a song of love bounding back and forth from God to us and back again.
And after the sun rose, we’ve renewed our promises of baptism and washed our faces in the holy water we made when we plunged the Light into the same water and called on the Holy Spirit for sanctification.
Not all of the above are rational acts! We’ve stopped short of painting ourselves blue and jumping over the fire! But we have recognized powerful holy images and memories that go far beyond what our minds can easily grasp. We have allowed our longing for beauty and union with God to soar beyond West Park and Holy Cross Monastery, beyond diocese and Church, beyond the skies and the stars into the cosmic wonder of God’s creative longing that we call Trinity.
Heart boggling as well as mind boggling! Who can plumb the depths of all this?
None of us, I feel.
I love all that wonder, all that connection like a river that flows through the cosmos. I am speechless in the face of that power of the love of the Creator. I am amazed that it is so. And that should be enough for anyone.
But it’s not sufficient for me. Wonder, silence, amazement are not enough. They give me chills but they don’t take me far enough. They can let me off the hook.
They don’t put food on the table of the poor; they don’t penetrate the loneliness of the widow; they don’t push me beyond the mystery to the new Life Christ brings to all by the Resurrection.
That’s why I love this story from the Gospel. A story of another garden and a broken hearted woman and a working man. A story about a cry of emptiness and longing and a fear that grief will never be relieved. A story of a spoken Word that brings more wonder than we can ask or imagine. The man speaks a name and all the cosmos reels with new life.
The Christ speaks and in his speaking he says the right thing. The thing the woman must hear. The thing all of creation longs to hear. He speaks her name and she is recognized and restored.
This is the beginning for us of the Holy – this is when we hear beyond the stars and the galaxies and the seas and the winds, this is when we hear who we are and who we are to be. And hearing, this is when we know Christ lives and we are alive in him. And the call goes further and further. If I am risen in Christ then I must speak the name; the name of love to all the unlovely; the name of nourishment to all the hungry; the name of recognition to the anonymous lost. The name of God to God’s beloved. That is wonder, that is awe, that is love. That is enough! Alleluia!
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Easter Sunday - April 24, 2011
Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18
On Palm Sunday as we began this Holy Week, Brother Robert preached and in his sermon he said something that hit home with me… talking about the Apostles’ Creed he called it “…the barest outline of a cosmic drama that will take us an eternity to comprehend.” I’ve thought about that all week.
This morning we have done some numinous things – standing in the cloister where so many have prayed for more than a century, lighting the new fire, stealing the flame and passing it along. We’ve listened to eternal promises; words that are evocative and almost magical. Words that have sprung from the mouths and hearts of people of vision and rare understanding of the ways of God. We began with the story of the creation of the cosmos and our place in it and proceeded through our wanderings and fallings to this time of mystery and miracle.
We sang a love song to the Light – an ancient melody that recounts God’s chasing after a people and a universe that so often turned away – a song of love bounding back and forth from God to us and back again.
And after the sun rose, we’ve renewed our promises of baptism and washed our faces in the holy water we made when we plunged the Light into the same water and called on the Holy Spirit for sanctification.
Not all of the above are rational acts! We’ve stopped short of painting ourselves blue and jumping over the fire! But we have recognized powerful holy images and memories that go far beyond what our minds can easily grasp. We have allowed our longing for beauty and union with God to soar beyond West Park and Holy Cross Monastery, beyond diocese and Church, beyond the skies and the stars into the cosmic wonder of God’s creative longing that we call Trinity.
Heart boggling as well as mind boggling! Who can plumb the depths of all this?
None of us, I feel.
I love all that wonder, all that connection like a river that flows through the cosmos. I am speechless in the face of that power of the love of the Creator. I am amazed that it is so. And that should be enough for anyone.
But it’s not sufficient for me. Wonder, silence, amazement are not enough. They give me chills but they don’t take me far enough. They can let me off the hook.
They don’t put food on the table of the poor; they don’t penetrate the loneliness of the widow; they don’t push me beyond the mystery to the new Life Christ brings to all by the Resurrection.
That’s why I love this story from the Gospel. A story of another garden and a broken hearted woman and a working man. A story about a cry of emptiness and longing and a fear that grief will never be relieved. A story of a spoken Word that brings more wonder than we can ask or imagine. The man speaks a name and all the cosmos reels with new life.
The Christ speaks and in his speaking he says the right thing. The thing the woman must hear. The thing all of creation longs to hear. He speaks her name and she is recognized and restored.
This is the beginning for us of the Holy – this is when we hear beyond the stars and the galaxies and the seas and the winds, this is when we hear who we are and who we are to be. And hearing, this is when we know Christ lives and we are alive in him. And the call goes further and further. If I am risen in Christ then I must speak the name; the name of love to all the unlovely; the name of nourishment to all the hungry; the name of recognition to the anonymous lost. The name of God to God’s beloved. That is wonder, that is awe, that is love. That is enough! Alleluia!
Good Friday - 22 Apr 2011
Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Good Friday - April 22, 2011
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:1-25
John 18:1-19:37
Every year on Good Friday I look out at the congregation and hope that there is someone there who is hearing the Passion for the first time. I wonder what it would be like to hear it as something completely new, to be caught up in its drama with no preconceptions, to meet its characters and hear its words and feel its emotion completely fresh. Is that person here today?
What is the power of the Passion story? Is the power in the retelling of the final moments of Jesus of Nazareth, with its memorable characters, words and actions? Is the power in its superb narrative, stripped to the bone, so to speak, stark and plain, leaving, as the best stories do, room for our imagination to insert ourselves into the action? Is the power in the figure of Jesus, at once humble and exalted in John, whose words and deeds reveal more than just glimpses of the presence of God? Is the power in that man, whom we have grown to love, brought to a grisly and terrifying end, which cannot help but move even the stoniest heart? Is the power of the passion in the art of the story? Or is its power in something greater than art? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and ... yes.
Because this is a story of power. It is a story with power, and a story about power, and a story that confers power.
What sort of power would an early Christian find in this story? Imagine an early Christian assembly, before the Gospels were published, before St. Paul had written his letters, before the stories of the disciples were gathered into collections and shared, in a time when the community was telling the story to itself from memory. The Lord is risen, His life is the life of our community. We really don’t know how. We hardly have words to describe why we believe, although Isaiah is a good guide. But at the center of our faith is this mystery: Jesus showed us the power and the wisdom and the life of God and died precisely because of who he was and what he did: God was in what he did and was in him. And the death he died was not the end but the beginning. What he said and did is still alive and growing, and in ways we have a hard time putting into words, there is a new power loose in the world because of him. The story of his death is the story of life. And it transforms the lives of those who begin to live in the power of his story.
As early Christians we would also understand that the story is about power. Power is real in the world. We all live with it every day. But the reality of power has been transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the Passion narrative, the world’s power realities are personified by Pilate, but they are true of power the world over. The world’s power is a hierarchy, up and down. The one with the power is above, and acts upon those with less power. It is his business to get up in the morning, hear cases, make decisions, and supervise their implementation. Power, in fact, is work, in all its scheduled banality. It is the work of deciding things about other people according to the larger story of power of the system this person represents. It is also the worry that it will lose its place if it slips up. Today’s agenda is the same as every day’s: Public tranquility so that money may be made so that taxes may be collected so that the powerful may be glorified. Really, there’s nothing personal here. In the Passion story Pilate is urbane, even witty. He enjoys a bit of banter with Jesus, and at least at first doesn’t seem to mind much that Jesus gets the better of him. But the obscenity of this urbane chatter is in the fact that it doesn’t matter: There is a loser and a winner here, and the loser will be dead before sundown. Cat and mouse. Clever word games in the antechamber of death.
Except to the early Christian, the joke is on Pilate, the joke is on all the holders of the world’s deadly levers of power. Because God’s power is not like theirs, and God’s power will win. We do not need to be without hope as we are used by the powerful of the world for their gain and for their glory. There is another glory, another use to which our lives can be put: we are not raw material for the exploitation of our betters, but each of us is made for God’s glory, for a life in God beyond human imagining.
And because the Passion is a story of power and a story about power, it is also a story that confers power. People who have heard about, seen and understood what God’s power is and how it works and what it is aiming for are no longer easily fooled by the other kind. When told to bow down to that power as if it is God, they will ask rather what is the good it confers on its subjects. When told to pay taxes without murmuring, they will ask what public benefit public money is used for. When advised to reverence persons in high places, they will inquire of their virtuous life and whether they dispense impartial, righteous justice. In other words, they will give to the power of this world its rightful place: an instrument of God for the good of all, not a means for the glorification of those who possess it. When people begin to live in the realm of God’s power, we cast off the fear that poisons self worth, and stand and walk as God wished us to from the beginning.
You will notice that my pronouns are shifting from they to we. We are not early Christians. We don’t have to be. The power of the Passion story is still as much at work in our own day as it ever has been. In fact, it is hard to find anyone at all, Christian or not, who does not already know the outlines of this story. And why is that? Because the power of this story is that it is true. The power of goodness, righteousness and justice rests on a stronger foundation than greed, violence and tyranny, whether goodness, righteousness and justice are labeled “God” or not, and that’s the truth. And at a very basic level the world has learned this truth. It springs up in unlikely places and does inconvenient things to people who thought they were born to rule. The weak who die for good are never lost in God. The Passion of Jesus Christ is truth for everyone.
So we listen to the words of Jesus to Pilate once again this year, fearing what is to come, feeling the pain and the suffering he will shortly endure, but also knowing the truth about power. Oh the irony of the eternal dialog of the Word of God with the word of the world: "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." And the one who does not belong to the truth has only a witty question in reply: "What is truth?" And then, as a detectable anxiety creeps into Pilate’s voice, as he perhaps senses something else is going on here, and tries to get others to take the responsibility from him, he finds he really has no power except the power of death, unless he wants to betray his masters. Which he will not do. Which is his tragedy, and the tragedy of all in power who follow Pilate’s path.
The power of the Passion story is not the power of public order and exploitation administered with the threat of death, but the power of truth: Power, real power, is from God, does God’s will, and builds God’s kingdom. God’s power is built from below and side by side, not from above. Those with the least are the favored of God. The one who told us and showed us and then died for us when we started to hope we could live in God’s kingdom is the one with the power, power so different from what we are used to we can hardly find words for it. We can’t really define it, or even describe it. And since we can’t reduce it to a set of propositions, that’s why we tell the story.
Br. Adam D. McCoy, OHC
Good Friday - April 22, 2011
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Hebrews 10:1-25
John 18:1-19:37
Every year on Good Friday I look out at the congregation and hope that there is someone there who is hearing the Passion for the first time. I wonder what it would be like to hear it as something completely new, to be caught up in its drama with no preconceptions, to meet its characters and hear its words and feel its emotion completely fresh. Is that person here today?
What is the power of the Passion story? Is the power in the retelling of the final moments of Jesus of Nazareth, with its memorable characters, words and actions? Is the power in its superb narrative, stripped to the bone, so to speak, stark and plain, leaving, as the best stories do, room for our imagination to insert ourselves into the action? Is the power in the figure of Jesus, at once humble and exalted in John, whose words and deeds reveal more than just glimpses of the presence of God? Is the power in that man, whom we have grown to love, brought to a grisly and terrifying end, which cannot help but move even the stoniest heart? Is the power of the passion in the art of the story? Or is its power in something greater than art? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and ... yes.
Because this is a story of power. It is a story with power, and a story about power, and a story that confers power.
What sort of power would an early Christian find in this story? Imagine an early Christian assembly, before the Gospels were published, before St. Paul had written his letters, before the stories of the disciples were gathered into collections and shared, in a time when the community was telling the story to itself from memory. The Lord is risen, His life is the life of our community. We really don’t know how. We hardly have words to describe why we believe, although Isaiah is a good guide. But at the center of our faith is this mystery: Jesus showed us the power and the wisdom and the life of God and died precisely because of who he was and what he did: God was in what he did and was in him. And the death he died was not the end but the beginning. What he said and did is still alive and growing, and in ways we have a hard time putting into words, there is a new power loose in the world because of him. The story of his death is the story of life. And it transforms the lives of those who begin to live in the power of his story.
As early Christians we would also understand that the story is about power. Power is real in the world. We all live with it every day. But the reality of power has been transformed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the Passion narrative, the world’s power realities are personified by Pilate, but they are true of power the world over. The world’s power is a hierarchy, up and down. The one with the power is above, and acts upon those with less power. It is his business to get up in the morning, hear cases, make decisions, and supervise their implementation. Power, in fact, is work, in all its scheduled banality. It is the work of deciding things about other people according to the larger story of power of the system this person represents. It is also the worry that it will lose its place if it slips up. Today’s agenda is the same as every day’s: Public tranquility so that money may be made so that taxes may be collected so that the powerful may be glorified. Really, there’s nothing personal here. In the Passion story Pilate is urbane, even witty. He enjoys a bit of banter with Jesus, and at least at first doesn’t seem to mind much that Jesus gets the better of him. But the obscenity of this urbane chatter is in the fact that it doesn’t matter: There is a loser and a winner here, and the loser will be dead before sundown. Cat and mouse. Clever word games in the antechamber of death.
Except to the early Christian, the joke is on Pilate, the joke is on all the holders of the world’s deadly levers of power. Because God’s power is not like theirs, and God’s power will win. We do not need to be without hope as we are used by the powerful of the world for their gain and for their glory. There is another glory, another use to which our lives can be put: we are not raw material for the exploitation of our betters, but each of us is made for God’s glory, for a life in God beyond human imagining.
And because the Passion is a story of power and a story about power, it is also a story that confers power. People who have heard about, seen and understood what God’s power is and how it works and what it is aiming for are no longer easily fooled by the other kind. When told to bow down to that power as if it is God, they will ask rather what is the good it confers on its subjects. When told to pay taxes without murmuring, they will ask what public benefit public money is used for. When advised to reverence persons in high places, they will inquire of their virtuous life and whether they dispense impartial, righteous justice. In other words, they will give to the power of this world its rightful place: an instrument of God for the good of all, not a means for the glorification of those who possess it. When people begin to live in the realm of God’s power, we cast off the fear that poisons self worth, and stand and walk as God wished us to from the beginning.
You will notice that my pronouns are shifting from they to we. We are not early Christians. We don’t have to be. The power of the Passion story is still as much at work in our own day as it ever has been. In fact, it is hard to find anyone at all, Christian or not, who does not already know the outlines of this story. And why is that? Because the power of this story is that it is true. The power of goodness, righteousness and justice rests on a stronger foundation than greed, violence and tyranny, whether goodness, righteousness and justice are labeled “God” or not, and that’s the truth. And at a very basic level the world has learned this truth. It springs up in unlikely places and does inconvenient things to people who thought they were born to rule. The weak who die for good are never lost in God. The Passion of Jesus Christ is truth for everyone.
So we listen to the words of Jesus to Pilate once again this year, fearing what is to come, feeling the pain and the suffering he will shortly endure, but also knowing the truth about power. Oh the irony of the eternal dialog of the Word of God with the word of the world: "You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." And the one who does not belong to the truth has only a witty question in reply: "What is truth?" And then, as a detectable anxiety creeps into Pilate’s voice, as he perhaps senses something else is going on here, and tries to get others to take the responsibility from him, he finds he really has no power except the power of death, unless he wants to betray his masters. Which he will not do. Which is his tragedy, and the tragedy of all in power who follow Pilate’s path.
The power of the Passion story is not the power of public order and exploitation administered with the threat of death, but the power of truth: Power, real power, is from God, does God’s will, and builds God’s kingdom. God’s power is built from below and side by side, not from above. Those with the least are the favored of God. The one who told us and showed us and then died for us when we started to hope we could live in God’s kingdom is the one with the power, power so different from what we are used to we can hardly find words for it. We can’t really define it, or even describe it. And since we can’t reduce it to a set of propositions, that’s why we tell the story.
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