Christmas Eve - Dec 24, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother James Michael Dowd, ohc
Christmas Eve – Tuesday, December 24, 2012

Isaiah 9:2-7
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-20

Rage with Hope

Our Christmas tree on December 23,
before being trimmed by our guests on  Christmas Eve
Picture by George Reiner, AHC

Merry Christmas!

Again, I say to you, Merry Christmas!

It is nothing less than essential that we say Merry Christmas and that we greet this night with great joy, loud praises, and exuberant glorias. And so, I say to you again, Merry Christmas!

This greeting of joy is so urgent, my sisters and brothers, for we are a people who walk in darkness and yet we have seen a great light. We live in a land of deep darkness, and yet, on our land has shone a great light.

Our nation has been reeling these last ten days from the unspeakable violence unleashed in Newtown. We have, I believe, finally, awakened to the violence that plagues our suburban communities, infects our countryside, and handicaps our urban centers, only to realize that it was not a nightmare that we had been having, but a real experience of the slavery of violence that grips our people and seems to capture us in an endless loop of hopelessness and submission to that same violence. The violence that grips our nation – both in our foreign misadventures and in our own hometowns - is a darkness so pervasive that many have convinced themselves that to be an American is to have no choice but to bear the weapons most murderous. Weapons that can destroy as many people as possible whether that be in Pakistan or Afghanistan, Newtown or Aurora.

But again, I say to you, Merry Christmas.

I say, Merry Christmas, because we have a God who who has taught us that:

I have come into the world as light,
to prevent anyone who believes in me
from staying in the dark anymore.

1 John 12:46 NJB

And so I must tell you, my brothers and sisters, that the Incarnation demands that we rage in hope. The Emmanuel, the “God with Us” calls us to let every candle we light this season and every string of lights we hang these holidays, to be a symbol of our resistance to the darkness. The darkness cast by drones over Pakistan and a war fought in Iraq for fabricated reasons; the gloom befalling our land because of death in the darkness of a movie theater, or in the darkness of a corner closet in a kindergarten classroom. Rage with hope against this darkness because so much of this can be prevented. And the Incarnation demands that we prevent it.

But this darkness must not only be prevented, rather our lives must be illuminated, indeed our entire beings must glow with the glory of God. Because if we believe in Christ we do not have to stay in the darkness anymore. We can be freed from the dark shadow of hopelessness in the face of this gruesome violence; a violence that has become the American religion: a pagan belief system that worships weapons of mass destruction held in the hands of our government and our citizens.

So, I think, the questions to ask ourselves are: Do we believe that the darkness is so pervasive that we must arm ourselves into oblivion? Or do we believe, as the Prophet Isaiah did, that the light of the Prince of Peace is growing continuously and that there will be endless peace for his kingdom? These are not choices that others can make for you. This is a choice you can only make for yourself. Do you believe in the darkness or in the light?

And again, I say to you Merry Christmas! Because you see, there was another time in history in which a republic had descended into empire and wreaked a violent havoc on the poor of the world. They, or their minions, slaughtered men, women and children in unprecedented numbers in the name of the Pax Romana. They took what was not there's, they desecrated sacred sites, they imposed their will on innocent people. And it was into that world, that Christ came to “prevent anyone who believed in him from staying in the dark anymore.”

Into the darkness of the Roman Empire's occupation of Israel and into the darkness of Herod's vicious puppet kingdom, shone the glory of the Lord because the angel had come to the poorest of the poor – those shepherds living in the fields around Bethlehem – to tell the stunning news that God was no longer a distant un-nameable figure in a heaven far away, but a Savior, a Messiah, the Light that was good news and great joy for all the people. A God of this earth, this realm, these people. A God who loved us so much that God would make Godself one with us. Yes, even in our very broken humanity, God was desperate to show us a way to worship the God of Life, not a god of death. To bring us a light so bright that it would banish the darkness forever. And God would show us that way by teaching us to lay down our swords, our glocks and our drones and instead, focus our resources on the poor and the sick.

And so, like the shepherds, let us go to Bethlehem, but let us go to the Bethlehem of our hearts and, like Mary, let us ponder these things there, in our heart. Grotesque violence is not new. It is not particularly American. It is an aspect of humanity throughout recorded history and no doubt before that as well. We are broken to some degree, though we were created as good, indeed very good. But the American obsession with violence is centered on what amounts to the worship of weapons of mass destruction. And so we must bring the light of Christ to all those who fall victim to this profane worship. And we must be the light to the rest of us who have buckled to the “powers that be” in fear of their alleged control of the political process.

Bethlehem, Scripture tells us, was a village of great life as represented by the birth of Christ; and of terrible death, as represented by the murder of the Holy Innocents. I believe this is true of the Bethlehem of our hearts as well. When we go to the Bethlehem of our hearts and really, honestly, ponder these things, we know that we each have violence within us, whether we've ever touched a gun or not. But we also should know that we have Christ within us and that we have the same call as Mary did: to birth Christ in the form of a life lived in non-violence. We know that we have the same call as the shepherds did: to proclaim the Good News by sharing the hope of a loving, non-violent God, with others.

I believe in the Bethlehem of Life. I believe in Christ. And I believe in the Christ within each of you. And I believe in the Christ within me. And I believe that the Christ within you and within me can overcome the darkness and can shine so brightly that our prayer and our work will lead to a community led by the Prince of Peace. And that this community will share in that peace. And that we will sing with great gusto, all the while raging with hope: Glory to God in the highest heaven and on earth: peace, peace, peace. And because I believe that, I say to you again: Merry Christmas!

Advent 1 C - Dec 2, 2012

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Advent 1 C - Sunday, December 2, 2012



Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:9-13
Luke 21:25-36

The Monastery's Advent wreath with greenery from our grounds;
pine, spruce, holly and red-barked dogwood.

When I was a youngster – up through first year of college, I tried to be a fundamentalist. I could talk about the plan of salvation, the four spiritual laws, wallowed in the inerrancy of Scripture and looked for God to clear up all the chaos that was in my life. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But some of Scripture just didn’t make sense if I took it literally. Seven heads and ten horns…what would that look like? Total destruction except for people in a boat? Evolution was too fascinating and believable. And I couldn’t hold on to all that assurance. If God had a plan for my life set from before I was born, it wasn’t working very well and why was he keeping it a secret? Bit by bit, I changed direction and began the walk into freedom and an awareness of a God who isn’t unbending, who hasn’t stoked the fires of hell for anybody who hasn’t said the right formula to be saved. It’s a long walk.

It’s a long walk because I’m afraid most of us don’t want that kind of freedom or indeed, can bear that kind of love. It’s much simpler just to throw everything on to God and for me to bear no responsibility – just to believe.

We proclaim a God with attributes that are of the Gospel. We say that God is loving; God is forgiving; God watches over us; God will protect us and the people we love. When God comes up in conversation that’s the God we talk about. Especially, at this time of year when we are surrounded with carols in the shops and “Away in the Manger” is juxtaposed with “Have a Holly, Jolly Christmas” and the Little Drummer Boy just keeps beating his damn drum. But except for sensory overkill and a generally frazzled feeling, most of us are quite happy during these days of preparation.

Yet the lectionary for Advent is unsettling. What is with all these doom and gloom readings? Are they predictions of punishment? Does “watching” really mean “watch out?” There’s a road sign on the single lane roads in Scotland that says “Beware of sheep!” Is it safe to turn your back on a God who brings all these things? Within us we seem to believe in a God who punishes in pretty cruel ways. Our talk says “No” but deep inside I’m afraid that’s the God I may believe in.

It is a striking thing to me that when Jesus gives us a choice of two things, we seem to glom on to the harder of the two. “Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven…” why do we choose to focus on the binding and not the freeing? For I think most do go for that option. Certainly the much of the Church seems to.

And when tragedy strikes, why do we try to affix blame? It’s women bishops or gays or socialists or Big Business or welfare recipients who brought it on – whatever the “it” may be. It’s Black Friday; it’s legalized marijuana; it’s whatever seems not to fit my expectation of what is decent or moral.

But what we are truly saying when we express such opinions is that we believe in a God who is capricious and vindictive. We believe in a God who made us and who waits with bated breath for us to mess up before we are blown away or burned in hell. And, friends, that is sinful. That’s idolatry. That’s worshipping a false God. That’s not the God revealed in Jesus.

I can find nowhere in Scripture an instance where catastrophe is not countered with promise of restoration. Exile and the desert wandering always point to the Promised Land. Wars and rumors of war always indicate the coming of the Son of Man. The prophets warn us but point us to return to our God who seeks. Jesus says that when bad things happen, look for the Son of Man, God in the midst of the heartache and struggle – right there – not absent. God with us.

Maybe that’s what’s frightening. Maybe this Advent, in the aftermath of Sandy and the bitterness of the political campaign, in the exhibition of the boys in government strutting in contest over the fiscal cliff, may be what we really fear is that Christ will come and speak the Word that will not pass away.

Maybe Jesus is not talking of a distant future but today – today messed up as it is may be may turn out to be the time. Today may be the day when He calls us to cease all wars, to feed the hungry, to cherish the abused and terrified children, the degraded women, the demeaned Gays and Lesbians. To give the barefoot beggar some shoes. To turn to our neighbors in love whether here on in Afghanistan or Israel or Palestine or Uganda.

We get glimpses – after disasters people open their hearts and wallets to help. It’s when things get back to normal that we slide back into indifference or worse.

And so, Advent is a time of expectation, of longing.

Maybe the expectant One; the One who is longing most is God.

Watching for us.

Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Adam McCoy, OHC
Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington, OHC - November 27, 2012 
(transferred from Nov 25)

James Otis Sargent Huntington, Founder of OHC

    Today we are gathered in celebration of the man we count as our Founder, though he never considered himself so, James Otis Sargent Huntington.  Many are the glories, many are the triumphs of his life: pioneer of the monastic life for men in our Church; tireless worker for the rights of working people and for social justice; founder and promoter of work for the poor and neglected; spiritual advisor to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people during his long ministry; a man of deep and transcendent prayer whose mere presence radiated goodness.  

    Two weeks ago or so Br. Robert circulated to the community a report of a meeting of Buddhist and Roman Catholic monks.  The monks spoke of mid-life crisis and senior burnout, disappointment and disillusion.  At the end of the discussion, the participants in that discussion realized that “To be disillusioned is to recognize the truth that I stand on no ground, to discover how dependent I have been on everything around me, to realize that everything I was looking for, had I found it, would have been a substitute.”  The reporter quoted the very wise words of Michael Casey: 

    "Monastic life is not really about self-realization, in the immediate sense of these words:  it is far more about self-transcendence. These are noble words, but the reality they describe is a lifetime of feeling out of one’s depth: confused, bewildered, and not a little affronted by the mysterious ways of God. This is why those who persevere and are buried in a monastic cemetery can rarely be described as perfectly integrated human beings.”

    Using this as a lens, I would like to look not at the glories but at some of the struggles Fr. Huntington faced, to see if we might profit by his example in facing them, as we profit by imitating him in his bright and public successes.  In this I am also thinking about that avatar of monastic life, Anthony of Egypt.  There are plenty of mighty works recorded in St. Athanasius’ biography of St. Anthony, but what we remember best, I think, are his struggles.  He and the whole desert tradition made it their primary business to discover, confront, name, struggle against, and in some measure, with God’s help, reach a point where the reappearance of their particular demons could be put in their proper perspective, and the life of the monk could be directed more and more powerfully to God.  This was Anthony’s heroism, it was the heroism of the desert, and, I would suggest, it was Fr. Huntington’s, and perhaps ours, as well.  I want to suggest five crises in his life which Fr. Huntington met and struggled with and turned to good.

    Fr. Huntington did not “found” the Order of the Holy Cross.  It arose from a conversation he had with Fr. Robert Stockton Dod, whose excitement seems to have been the greater of the two.  They were joined by Fr. James Cameron.  When the three of them began the Order’s life in the autumn of 1881, it was Fr. Dod who led the way in the formation of community life.  It was Dod who consulted the experts in England, who wrote the first Rule, and who led them in the early days.  What must Fr. Huntington’s feelings have been when, just a year later,  Fr. Dod entered into a cycle of chronic illness that turned out to be both emotional and physical.  For the next year and a half, his illness was the constant backdrop to their community life, and Fr. Cameron left a year later, in October, 1883.  By March, 1884, Fr. Dod had left as well, leaving Fr. Huntington alone of the first three.  Fr. Huntington was young - he was only 29 when Fr. Dod left - and he was strong, but what a blow.  In his later life he was occasionally troubled by the small numbers of people coming forth to join the Order and persevering, but he never let that get in the way of new exploits.

    In the summer of 1902 the Church of the Advent in Boston invited Fr. Huntington to become its Rector.  For a Boston-born-and-bred Anglo-Catholic like Fr. Huntington, could there be a more attractive prospect?  It is instructive to understand the context of that offer.  The Order had acquired the West Park property in the fall of 1899.  The hard work of planning and fund raising occupied almost three years, during which time the community prevailed on Fr. Huntington to write a new Rule.  He was reluctant to do so, but did, and it was adopted in October, 1901.  Construction began with the laying of the cornerstone in June, 1902.  Bishop Potter of New York, who had warmly encouraged Fr. Huntington in the early stages of his vocation, refused an invitation to attend, writing in utter disdain, “Once you were the head of a Brotherhood engaged in the service of the poor.  Now, I believe yours is a “contemplative” brotherhood, and you a roaming preacher.  I must own that neither your aims nor life interest us.”  During all this time Fr. Huntington had been Superior, and had borne the brunt of these great activities.  How interesting that the writing of the Rule Fr. Huntington was not at all eager to put down on paper, and that the preparation for construction of the monastery come at the same time.  And that Bishop Potter’s renunciation of Fr. Huntington is almost simultaneous with The Advent’s invitation to priestly glory.  Fr. Huntington did not answer that call for at least two months.  We can perhaps imagine the struggle in his soul, stinging from Bishop Potter’s utter disdain, uncertain of his worthiness to write a Rule, tired from the efforts to undertake construction.  In the end, he decided to stay.

    Fr. Huntington was devoted to his family.  He was in constant contact by letter and visited them often.  He was especially close to his father and mother.  His father, Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington, was in many ways the inspiration for Fr. Huntington’s vocation as an evangelist, and Fr. Huntington cannot be understood either as a person or as a religious figure without reference to Bishop Huntington.  His father died in July, 1904, followed soon after by the death of his brother, George Huntington.  Fr. Huntington seems to have borne up for two years, but in September, 1906, tendered his resignation as Superior.  The Chapter re-elected him nonetheless, 
and he consented, but soon afterward embarked on a long trip to Europe, which lasted into the summer of 1907.  When he returned, he again tendered his resignation, and this time the Chapter accepted it.  His mother, Hannah Dane Sargent Huntington, died in 1910.  Soon after that, Fr. Huntington spent a considerable time with his three sisters in Syracuse, who ministered to him.  The next winter, that of 1911-12, he went to Florida with Fr. Lorey, who seems to have been similarly afflicted, to convalesce.   These events were clearly something close to nervous breakdowns, and they coincided with the difficulties of Fr. Henry Rufus Sargent, the third member of the Order and a titanic personality.  During exactly these same years Sargent underwent a long and fairly public crisis of conscience, which culminated in his conversion to the Roman church and subsequent expulsion from the Order, the month before Fr. Huntington’s mother’s death.  Heavy times, but Fr. Huntington, wounded though he was, sought help and soldiered on.

    Just before going with Fr. Lorey to Florida for convalescence, Fr. Huntington wrote and published a series of articles on the failure of the ideal of the religious life as he had understood it.  They are depressing reading.  The background to them is what was perceived by many Anglo-Catholics of the social justice persuasion as the failure of their movement, crystallized when in 1907 the General Convention passed a canonical change allowing preaching at Sunday services by clergy who were not ordained in the Episcopal Church.  This Open Pulpit movement gnawed at Anglo-Catholics for years afterward, and was the straw that broke Fr. Sargent’s back.  It obviously laid heavy upon Fr. Huntington as well.  He lays what he sees as the failure of missionary monasticism, which, building on his father’s teaching, was his own vision, to a lack of nerve in a church now driven by a kind of  congregational life which looks to its own well-being and not to the conversion of the nation and the world.  It seemed to him the death of an ideal, and one can wonder whether so much recent death in his own life is not the emotional background to his analysis.   But he did not let the death of what he hoped for discourage him.  He writes, in peroration:

    "The virtues of the monastic state are, indeed, the virtues which characterize the Christian life everywhere, – humility, otherworldliness, obedience, self-sacrifice, purity, love.  But that which distinguishes the monastic ideal is that, according to it, these virtues are no longer practiced by each individual, living his own life, doing his own work, but they are practiced by a number of individuals who have abandoned themselves to live and act in common, as a single unified body, moved by one impulse, guided by one will."

    The fifth struggle of Fr. Huntington which I would like to point out happened at the Chapter of 1930, when Fr. Hughson and the adherents of his more “advanced”, ritualist, historicist and conservative brand of Anglo-Catholicism carried the day.   The Chapter elected Fr. Hughson Superior, and officially titled Fr. Huntington as “Father Founder”.  It was a title Fr. Huntington never wanted, knowing it to be factually untrue.  If anyone was the founder of the Order, it was Fr. Dod.  Fr. Huntington felt elevated to irrelevance, put out to pasture, made redundant.  But despite his protestations, even as the Chapter of the Order – we in the corporate sense – were sidelining him, enacting our own particular patricidal drama, the greater truth did not escape the community.  Fr. Huntington had persevered.  In face of so many struggles, many more than those we have examined this morning, Fr. Huntington had remained steadfast.  The demons of abandonment, of exhaustion, of grief, of the loss of his original vision, had been met and struggled with and recognized and named and had lost some of their power.  He was, in the late autumn of his life, not unlike St. Anthony, who emerged from the fortress of his struggle an almost-new Adam: “The state of his soul was one of purity, for it was not one constricted by grief or relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection.”  He had seemed to have lost in the struggle between his vision and Fr. Hughson’s, and so he turned that loss to good.  His last five years are a marvel of public speaking, spiritual counsel and private encouragement to multitudes of individuals who sought him out.  The fiftieth anniversary of his life profession in November of 1934 was greeted with a vast outpouring of love and praise from every part of the Church and beyond.  After his funeral in 1935, which Fr. Hughson did not attend because he was in Liberia, the Presiding Bishop called him “the best loved priest in the Episcopal Church.”

    So, what is struggle and what is glory?  Is there something problematic with a person who has great times of struggle?  Should we view such a person as a detriment to monastic life because it does not, at the moment, seem productive?  Is monastic life to be measured by our successes according to the standards of our culture?  Sometimes I wonder if the glory we gain in the ordinary understanding of glory – institutions founded, buildings built, people attracted to vocation and membership, financial and other kinds of stability – sometimes I wonder if all these are not like the simple service of a meal.  The food must be cooked, the table must be set, the dishes must be served, the mess must be cleaned up.  But the important thing is not the cook, the servers, the cleaners, but the food and the fellowship of the meal, what the food can build in the body and what the spirit can gain from friendship and conviviality.  All of what the world sees as our great work is in service of the actual lives of the monks, messy and incomplete and fraught as they are.  All in service of providing an arena for their battles, small and great, a safe place for them to meet the demons, to engage the struggle.  That is why we do all this.  

    We are always talking of being counter-cultural.  Perhaps Fr. Huntington’s life can point us the way.  Which is greater – the founding, the preaching, the writing, the counseling, the great works, or the acceptance of the struggles that his life brought him, losing companions, facing exhaustion and the temptation to escape, owing up to his own weakness in the face of grief at the death of loved ones and the loss of friends, the realization that his ideal had not triumphed, the indignity of an honor which placed him on the shelf?  I would suggest that his greatness has its roots in his struggles, that without the struggles the greatness would not have emerged, and that the greatest struggles are those he feared the most because they penetrated to the heart of his life.      The monastic life gives to monks the time and the space and the opportunity to encounter our demons and to engage in the struggles they bring.  Fr. Huntington was not diminished by engaging his struggles but rather those struggles created in him capacities for growth and for a deepened character of sympathy with others.  Could he have accomplished his great works if he had been spared his griefs?  Perhaps some of them, but perhaps only in the vigor of his youth.  Would he have been the man from whose life flowed such grace and goodness?  I doubt it.   

    I think God loves us because of our struggles.  What kind of monastic life does not have its demons?  Is a monastic life without struggle worth the effort?  In the Kingdom of Heaven, who will be marked out as the greatest among us?  Perhaps it will be those who do great things that the world can see and touch and measure and remark and praise.  But I think, in fact, the greatest among us in the Kingdom of Heaven will be those who courageously faced their demons and engaged in the struggles their life brought them.  And of those demons, those struggles, only God knows the true story.  Perhaps the greatest in God’s eyes are not the strongest but the weakest among us, as the world would account them, who only with God’s help can meet and name their demons, and who even with God’s help win perhaps only small victories.  Perhaps we should revise our estimates of each other and ask, Who among us faces their demons, who among us struggles perhaps without our even knowing?  Perhaps the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are quite unknown to us now, but so greatly loved by God because he knows and sees them in their fullness.  

    Maybe being perfectly integrated is not the goal for monks.  Maybe the monastic goal is to put our imperfection into the heart of Christ.