Were I to testify on my own behalf, my testimony would not be true; but there is another witness who speaks on my behalf, and I know that his testimony is true.
Since we are talking about testimony: I have one.
It is said that the rector has only two commands. The first you have all already heard. You’ve heard it many times. It is the invitation to be here. From the very first day of your arrival the rector said: “Be here”. It was a command, but also an invitation.

Be here and witness the power of the love of God in the ordinary workings and inner workings of this community, in the laughter and tears of your brothers, in the wonder of new discovery, in the satisfaction of hard work.

Be here and know the miracle that Christ can wrought in lives full of doubt and despair, the hope that Christ can give in men who seem to have no hope.

Be here and see the daily foibles of men engaged in formation through fits and starts until they are finally able to run the race with grace and dignity.

Be here and witness the annual joy of work completed, prayers answered, lives fulfilled in ordination, insights gained, spiritual realties revealed in the horizons of faith that are ever expanding, ever broadening, ever deepening.

The first command of the rector is to be here.
And the second is like unto it: Obey God
What did we hear in the Gospel?

Were I to testify on my own behalf, my testimony would not be true; but there is another witness who speaks on my behalf, and I know that his testimony is true.
Obey God.
This second command you have also heard or at least I hope you have heard it. I hope you have heard it in the daily workings of this house of God, in this place of the Lord’s service.

I hope you have heard that when existential push comes to shove it is the only thing for you to hear.

I hope that you have heard that it is the only meaningful way of carrying forward the good work that our Lord has already begun in you.

Obey God. that is the commandment and tonight I repeat it to our brothers who are publically proclaiming their priesthood promises. Now at the end of your sojourn on this Hill the rector says: “Obey God”. It is a command, but also an invitation.

Obey God and confront the Body of Christ in all of its personal grandeur and depravity. See in the eyes of your brothers and sisters, men and women and children who long for the human dignity so often denied them in the daily commerce of the world.

Obey God and observe in your trembling hand the host, the chalice, the contents of a universe, the Lord and Master of All, in what appears to be bread and wine. See in those simple things the miracle that nothing is what it seems to be, not bread and wine, not the world, not the parish, not brothers and sisters, even the troubling ones.

Obey God so you can realize that you are called to another place and when you have arrived at the other place, be there. Give your lives there; pour out your blood there. Give that place where you will be for three weeks, three months, or three years, everything you have. Hold nothing back because the Body of Christ deserves good priests, they deserve the best priests. I cannot help tonight but to think of Fr. Jorge. He gave for only a month but he gave everything because he obeyed God.

Obey God and be aware perhaps for the first time of the skills and knowledge you have gained here. And be aware perhaps for the first time of what you do not know, cannot know without the living witness of the Body to inform you.

Obey God and realize that you hold in your hand, in the promises you make tonight your passport. These promises are food for a hungry world. They are hope. They are the promise that men and women are still free, that it is still possible to make a commitment for life, that it is still possible to sacrifice and love in the sacrifice, that it is still possible to profess faith in something greater than the ephemeral, passing interests of popular culture, that it is still possible to give your life to something greater than your tastes, your opinions, your momentary whims.

Obey God and you will make these promises tonight in the presence of this community, but you make them in light of those other communities, in towns and pit stops from here to the farthest corners of the world. You make them for men and women, for people you have never met, for the thousands upon thousands of people whose lives you will touch in your decades of priesthood, you make these promises for them and for us. In the light of these promises you can truly say:

Were I to testify on my own behalf, my testimony would not be true; but there is another witness who speaks on my behalf, and I know that his testimony is true.
Who is that witness? It is God the Father
Who is that witness? It is Christ the Lord
Who is that witness? It is the living Holy Spirit active in the Church
Who is that witness? It is the savior who died for you and for me
Who is that witness? It is his vibrant body in the Holy Church
Who is that witness? It is the teaching Christ to whom you are about to beg loyalty
Who is that witness? It is the witness of angels and saints
Who is that witness? It is you. It is your martyrdom on the altar of service. It is your breadth and your depth realized in time and place, in times and places as yet unseen, unheard of

Make your promises my brothers and with those promises I want you to make some promises to us as you prepare to leave us, leave this Hill, and leave Saint Meinrad.

Promise us that in the twilight of some evening wherever you may be, when you are downcast and distressed you will see in some glimmer, in some golden glow off a surface, the golden sandstone of these walls in the spring evening and be comforted.

Promise us that when you are crying, when you are feeling sorry for yourself, when you are sad, you will remember some stupid joke, some turn of phrase that made you laugh in these echoing halls so long ago and be consoled.

Promise us that in all of the difficult places that life will take you in the coming years, you will occasionally remember the Unstable, and cheap beer and improving pizza, and the stuffed nose of a moose.

Promise us that as you traverse the classrooms of your future ministries, the numerous schools, you will remember the stinky gray carpet after cleaning days and those tables lined up and the order in which everyone sat.

Promise us that when you think of your alma mater you will think of the laughter not the tears.

Promise us that when you can no longer kneel because of your knee replacement you will remember days of prayer in this chapel, and on this Hill.

Promise us that you will remember all the characters that were here and stayed or were here and left in vivid detail.

Promise us that you will remember the old monks who have devoted their lives, every ounce of their lives to the formation of men like you.

Promise us that you will remember the bells, those irritating bells when you need to be called back to sanity and reality.

Promise us that you will remember those sandstone crosses and their vigil candles on a blustery November night, every time you bury the dead.

Promise us that you will remember the Holly Tree, and chant, and roadtrips and unread books and indifferent food and black napkins and invented drinks in the coffee shop and the scholar shop and the Celtic cross and the stained glass glow of these windows at 8:00 in the morning and Esther’s voice and the sound of machinery and eggs and Lent and the Angelus.

Promise us that whenever you are awake at 2:30 in the morning worrying about the finances of the parish, or drafting a difficult letter for the third time you will remember the old rector of your seminary who may be sitting at that very hour in his room, head in hands, praying for his lost sheep.


Promise us that every year in the early autumn you will take a moment to remember the now faceless, nameless men who will climb this hill with their hearts full of fear and hope and joy and expectation and will hear some future rector say whatever he says to them, and promise us that you will pray for them as so many faceless, nameless alumni of this sacred place have remembered each of your journeys and feared and hoped and rejoiced and expected again to be revived in an invitation to promise their lives for the good of the Church and the world.

Were I to testify on my own behalf, my testimony would not be true; but there is another witness who speaks on my behalf, and I know that his testimony is true.

This has been a difficult week for many of us. There is no need to go into all of that. It has also been a hard week homiletically. Usually the core of the Sunday homily congeals by Tuesday. This week I have produced five homilies, none of which I had any confidence in at all.
A few years ago I experienced a bit of a homiletic block and I hit upon this technique which I heavily employed in those days called “Random Thoughts”. Of course, the random thoughts ended up being better than any homily I could have written through because it gave the folks the opportunity to shade it in, to fill it out, and to work with my disparate images.
Guess what?
“Random Thoughts” is back.
For God so loved the world …
Last week I was reading a book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Thinking by Susan Cain. It was an amazing book because it gave me some additional insight into something I have little knowledge of, the minds of extroverts. The insight was that they tend to see the world rather simply while introverts see the world rather complexly. Being an introvert, I thought about this for a good long time. Faith for introverts is something rather complicated, while faith for extroverts is something rather forthright. Nicodemus must have been an introvert. It takes him a while to move the process along in the Gospel. I think we see this a great deal in our community. Extroverts tend to think that introverts don’t care. Introverts tend to think that extroverts are superficial.
For God so loved the world …
I was thinking about sports events (I know that is shocking) and the Today Show. I was thinking about how people make signs at home out of large poster boards that say: John 3, 16. I think it is admirable that they should devote their fleeting seconds of fame to evangelical causes. But I wonder what happens to the sign after the game or after the Today show. Is John 3, 16 something that can be placed in a closet to use at appropriate times or does it get pitched after the cameras have stopped rolling. Perhaps it gets framed and put up at home. One of my sayings is that the first four words I learned as a Baptist child was: Mama, Dada, Baba and John 3 ,16. I hope that the fourth was as deeply ingrained as the first three and not just a glittery sign to take out when the cameras are around.
For God so loved the world …
As you have probably figured out I am now officially obsessed with this film of Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski called The Mill and the Cross. I ordered a large reproduction of the painting of the artist Pieter Bruegel that is the basis of this film. I have showed the painting to about 30 persons asking them what the subject matter of the painting was. Only a few guessed correctly that it was the way of the cross. Bruegel’s painting is crowded with hundreds of figures going about their daily business not noticing the events of the passion unfolding at the very center. Above the image an old fashioned wind mill, also in the shape of a cross, continues to grind out its daily business. It can be difficult finding our faith in the midst of the daily. Jesus is always at the center, but sometimes we have trouble looking around. Until of course, that we see that “around” is also the center, that passing life is also the passion, that the painter’s vision is our vision if we have the patience and time to really pursue a life of faith. There are many types of people here. Some do not have the ability or time to look for Christ in the mess. Some have spent so much time in the mess that they have lost sight of Christ. Some are gaining, please God, the vision to see that even the mess is not a mess when Christ is there. Does that make sense? I hope not.
For God so loved the world …
I’m thinking about rose vestments because it is latare Sunday. I have been in many parishes in Advent and Lent. Some avoid the rose question all together. Perhaps that is wise. Some, very few, have invested thousands of dollars in sets of vestments they only use twice per year. Foolhardy perhaps? The monastery has a very rare hand-woven rose colored vestment that it brings out each year for these two Sundays. What a blessing. We have this. Its nice but is it rose? Rose tends to be either too pink or too dusty. I wonder if there really is a rose? Color-blind people do not care. Those who do care spend so much time trying to find the right shade that the centrality of the event itself is overlooked. I thought for a minute about the musical Gypsy. The main character sings a song called: Rose’s turn. Her name is Rose. She is a failure. The song, which is one of the great songs in the Broadway repertoire is a great song about failure. Rose is a difficult color to get right, but we keep trying. After all this is latare Sunday.
For God so loved the world …
Isn’t it odd that in our time, we still long for love, a love with which God first loved us?
Loved us to creation
Loved us to forgiveness
Loved us to redemption
Loved us past our infidelities, past our exiles
Loved us past the darkness of our preferences
Loved us to the point that we long to feel it in the presence of others
Long to know it in our care for our brothers and sisters
And when we cannot find it
We seek in wreck less places
Or we hide our loneliness in mind and spirit numbing substances.
And all we have to do is believe, believe a little for whoever believes in him will not be condemned. Whoever hopes in him will not be cast aside. Whoever even in the small places of his hearts calls upon something greater something more will receive it from God’s infinite bounty.

This truth is in the very marrow of our being, we need God and what is more, we need each other
We need each other, we need our brothers and sisters even the jerks, the idiots and the sinners.

We yearn for company, for understanding, for love, for human affection, for warmth, for a gentle hand, a consoling smile.

We hope for presence and So this passage, this all too familiar passage is one of singular promise

God is community, that is his nature, communion,
Entangled in the mystery of persons
Entrenched in the life of the world and in the beatitude of heaven
In Touch with the longing of humanity
In contact with our deepest desires
Present to us
Real presence

And we, who are created in his likeness
may also be, can also be, must also be
Involved in the lives of others
Engaged in the messiness of the human condition
Entangled in the joys and sorrows, the hopes and despairs of our fellow pilgrims.
Entrenched in life, in the pure essence of living
In Touch with the misery of the world
In contact with the pimply skin of creation
This encounter with the Divine Reality which is also an encounter with our neighbor is an encounter with our deepest selves
Our deepest desires
Our most profound hopes

It is intimate and primordial
It is the God contained even in random thoughts

These are reflections on this coming Sunday's prayers that I offered for the monastic community earlier this week.

Brothers, we have arrived in the dog days of Lent. Things started out well enough. We certainly felt something of the penitential fervor of Ash Wednesday. In the first Sunday, we went with Jesus into the desert and were properly chastised by its omnipresent sparseness. Perhaps we felt the need to renew that same spirit of sparseness in our lives as monks. Last week, inspired by the conference of Br. Silas, we prepared our hearts for the shocking reminder of the goal, the experience of Jesus, transfigured in his glory. We have seen the impact of our Lenten observances on our lives. We have incorporated new ideals of monastic living. And now? And now perhaps the spirit is waning, the resolves are diminishing? Where is that bona opera form? I think I had better start that book. What was it again? The Third Sunday of Lent takes us into the cold heart of the matter. The Third Sunday of Lent separates the spiritual men from the boys. The Third Sunday of Lent gives us a proverbial kick in the scapular and sends us down the road that stretched out so menacingly for Peter, James and John in last week’s Gospel.
In the call that this Sunday affords us to renew our fervor, we are not without aid. Certainly the Holy Scriptures, but perhaps for US Catholics, the new translations of the prayers of the Roman Missal give us new fuel for the spiritual fire, igniting the cold embers of our Lenten imaginations with the vivid blue of its fervor. I cannot say how individuals may think or feel about the new translations. Perhaps we run the gamut. One thing is certain however, none of us can sense that the new translations are not an opportunity to rethink, re-imagine these essential prayers of the Church.
The new translations of the prayers in the Roman Missal offer us a lucid picture of this challenge. This week, as has been prescribed, I would like to offer some rather random reflections of these prayers for the dog days of Lent. Let’s begin with the collect. First of all let us ask ourselves what the collect does. The prayer of the collect in the Mass begins with an implied question: From where do you come? In our Catholic parishes, this undoubtedly has many and varied answers. One need only spend a bit of time in a parish reconciliation room to realize the complexity of the lives of those who gather weekly in communities around the world. People’s lives are knotty, triumphal, disappointing, heroic, holy, and sinful. Indeed our lives as monks are not so different. Each week when we gather for the Sunday celebration we bring the most important thing with us, really the only thing we can bring, ourselves. Our selves, that have gathered in the course of a living week all of the flotsam and jetsam of worldly living. We bear the burdens of the week like water drenched clothing. We come to Church with a faint hope of relief, for the experience of reconciliation. The collect aspires to gather us in, to give us direction and purpose in response to the randomness of our living. The collect hopes to unveil the connectedness of our disparate conditions. It seeks to find unity in diversity, creating through its words a united voice, a gathered people, a newly hope-filled community. And who does not realize the need for that unity, even in monastic communities where things can become, shall we say, a bit self-centered as we move through the routines of weekly life. Which one of us does not need the reminder that we are not in this alone, as lonely as the road may sometimes feel? Which one of us does not need to recognize in his own struggles, the needs of his brothers, the common understanding of our alienation and the common understanding of the resolution of our alienation. What does the prayer exhort us to do? Perhaps more significantly what does the prayer ask us to be? Let’s listen to the new text.
Collect:
O God, author of every mercy and all goodness
who in fasting, prayer and almsgiving have shown us the remedy for sin,
Look graciously on this confession of our lowliness,
that we , who are bowed down by our conscience,
may always be lifted up by your mercy.
The collect of the Mass for the Third Sunday of Lent is a study in conversion, of turning over, turning around. First it invokes God as author (in Latin, auctor). For us the word implies not one who writes as though God were somehow the writer of the mysterious pulp fiction of our existence. The Latin word, auctor, while engaging the creative act, is tied more closely to authority and a more profound creativity. It is the right to write the law of life. God not only conveys every mercy and all goodness (the latter being one of the four elements of transcendence along with beauty, unity and truth). He is the true source of all goodness. There is no goodness without God. Even the goodness that is displayed by others who deny the existence of God is a kind of anonymous theism. The naming of the deity in this instance gives us insight into his more profound authority. If God is the auctor of goodness, he has the right to tell us how it is to be pursued. God alone is our guide. Of course this is difficult for us because we like to think that we are the author of whatever is good in us. Yet Our Holy Father St. Benedict reminds us that if anything is good in us, give God credit. So, if God is the true source of goodness then he will tell us how to live. And what has he prescribed: Ah, there’s the rub for now we are back to fasting, prayer and almsgiving. These three keep coming up in the Lenten prescription. They present themselves repeatedly throughout this season as the mute sentinels of our spiritual programs. And what is our first instinct? How can we get around them? We may understand the authority of God. Unless we are complete knuckleheads (a characteristic I never discount in myself), we must know how God intends for this Lent to be lived and yet we make compromises. Our fasting is symbolic. Our penance is perfunctory, our almsgiving is, well, after all we are monks. Perhaps such a sentiment is not new. St. Augustine, writing on the Sermon on the Mount, says: “Vainglory can find a place not only in the splendor and pomp of worldly wealth, but even in the sordid garment of sackcloth.” If we may at times have a tendency to overly stylize the tried and true disciplines of Lent (and certainly Saint Benedict understood this as well), we may also, in these days of zeal have a tendency, at times, to overdo them so that these disciplines become ends in themselves rather than means to an end. They are indicators of our spiritual heroism. Perhaps this is especially true among the young. The disciplines of Lent are not semi-Pelagian magic tricks. They are the means to an end and the end is a greater openness to God. An anonymous author of the early Church says this: “All acts which a person does, that person does according to his capabilities. He brings them forth from the store of his capacity to afford him greater access to the divine.”
Now we go back to the collect. “Look graciously on this confession of our lowliness.” The question of course is are we making a confession of our lowliness. Are we willing to make a confession of our lowliness, to humble our pride and accept not only what is about to transpire in the Mass, but also, in a greater sense in Lent itself. Graciousness meets lowliness. They are mutually beneficial. God gives as much as we are humble enough to receive. Graciousness and lowliness should offer us, at least a faint echo of the characteristics exhibited by Our Lady, whose feast we celebrate in the coming weeks. An image of Mary in the collect offers us two pointers. One is toward the end of Lent, that is to say the telos of Lent, to gain access in renewed grace to the throne of the resurrected Christ. Mary is our guide in this as she is our precursor. The other Marian image however, comes in the contrast between the life of Our Lady, airbrushed in the collect, to the subject of the scrutiny Gospel, celebrated on this weekend but not everywhere in this Gospel cycle, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. She is, in many ways the anti-Mary by origin and background and yet, like our Lady when she acknowledges her lowliness to the omniscient Jesus she becomes a powerful witness to the presence of Christ, just as his mother was in the aftershock of the annunciation.
The last two lines of the collect also impress upon us the image of the Samaritan woman into their folds.
that we , who are bowed down by our conscience, may always be lifted up by your mercy.
What is the purpose of our Lenten resolved but to find a way of acknowledging what is true? Our being bowed down by our conscience is not a false act of piety. It is acknowledging what is true. It is the key to humility and thereby the key to unlocking God’s graciousness. The scriptures for Lent, the injunction of St. Benedict all gear us toward this end. What is true about my monastic life, my Christian life? No one who honestly asks these questions can ever come away unscathed by the blackboard-clawing answer. Lent convicts us. But here is the end. We will be lifted up, not by our efforts at faulty fasting, prayer and almsgiving, but by his mercy. Misericordia, however, is not cheap. It is purchased at a price that in a few weeks will become all too apparent to us. It is purchased at the price of suffering from the only one whose blameless life makes him free from the need to suffer. It is pure giving and mercy is God’s to give. Therefore, our Lenten practices, impoverished by human weakness are made perfect when they are viewed, not as an instrument to salvation, but as a thanksgiving for God’s mercy. The collect, collects the misery of failed lives and places them squarely where they belong, in the light of God’s endless misericordia, open-heartedness. In the background of all of this is the image of the Samaritan Woman, but as is the case in St. John’s Gospel, she is also us, in all of her foreignness, sin, pride, she is us. Thus the collect truly collects the desire of the people to find solace and comfort in God, but as God wills, through conversion, through turning around, by means of metanoia. Those who do not celebrate the scrutinies in this year have the passage, also from John’s Gospel of the cleansing of the temple. Here again, the readings amplify the need for the disparate elements of the assembly to gather themselves into one person of conversion, moving away from our money changing ways to the worship of God, in spirit, in truth and in purity.
Now we turn to the prayer over the gifts.
PRAYER OVER THE GIFTS
Be pleased, O Lord, with these sacrificial offerings,
and grant that we who beseech pardon for our own sins,
may take care to forgive our neighbor.
When we consider the prayer over the gifts, we should begin with a small consideration of where it comes in the liturgical celebration. The prayer over the gifts is the culmination of an action. In the rite, the people bring forth gifts. What are these gifts? What do they represent? What will they become? The prayers for the preparation of the gifts give us some insight here. They are the gifts of the earth, the fruit of the vine and the work of human hands. Our Lord chose these very gifts to be the accidental forms by which his holy body and blood would be communicated to the world in a perpetual sacrifice of praise. Obviously they had ritual implications in the chabura/seder meal he celebrated with his disciples in the upper room at the institution of the Holy Eucharist, an event we are anticipating at the end of our Lenten observance. Even in that context, however, they represented something deeper than aspects of a cultural pattern; they represented and represent the basic elements of our livelihood. The bread and wine of the Passover represented the Jewish people’s liberation because they represented the Jewish people. Bread and wine are basic to human sustenance in what amounts to an almost universal anthropological signification. Bread and wine are what keep human persons alive. They are also the creative engagement of earthly elements and human labor. In the anthropology of food, culture is required for bread and wine as opposed to wheat and grapes. Bread and wine require our participation and our intentionality. We have to make them. In the theology of human labor then, they are a part of us. Bread and wine not only keep us alive, they keep us living through our positive intervention in our creative longevity. When the gifts are presented then, the holy people are giving not only what they need to survive, they are giving the best and most basic elements of themselves. Now the transformation. Lent is calling us, again, to realize who we are, people caught in the whirlwind between the temporal and the eschaton, the space between receiving forgiveness and being agents of reconciliation. Like the collect of the Mass it is a place of hopefulness. What could be more descriptive of monastic life? We are caught here between the temporal and the eschaton. We know all too well the temporal, where is the eschaton? I believe that like the prayer over the gifts, monastic life catches us looking for something in the future that is already present to us here. God. One thing that Lent has to remind us of each year is God’s burglaristic character. God breaks in. He breaks in to our carefully constructed ideas as to how things are supposed to be and with the determination of a four-year old tramples down the little temples of our expectations, reducing to dust what we think he can do. Is the message of Lent to be open? Perhaps we have had no better opportunity for that than in these liturgical changes we are highlighting tonight. Is the new missal a call to conversion, a call that we monks should not only welcome but see as our essence? That connects us to the prayer after communion
PRAYER AFTER COMMUNION
As we receive the pledge of things yet hidden in heaven
and are nourished while still on earth
with the bread that comes from on high,
we humbly entreat you, O Lord,
that what is being brought about in us in mystery may come to true completion
The collect for this Sunday points to the nature of transformation, of conversion, that is of the basic themes presented in the Samaritan Woman readings. Strangely enough, here in the midst of Lent, the prayer after communion calls us back to Christmas, as indeed it must do. The hidden in heaven, the bread from heaven, will nourish the earth. The mystery begun in heaven and continued on earth is brought to its completion in us in the most corporeal way. The prayer demonstrates that far from a semi-Pelagian (again) denial of bodiliness in Lent, we are united with God in our bodies, in the act of eating the bread that comes from on High. The prayer after communion is always a prayer highlighting exchange. Exchange here is mightily represented. The Samaritan woman’s exchange of guilt and hiddeness for open proclamation of the presence of the Word, the exchange highlighted by this coming Sunday’s second reading from St. Paul:
Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
but we proclaim Christ crucified,
a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
The exchange is particular, but it is also generic.At the close of the Mass we are led to understand a significant truth about our lives of faith, perhaps especially about our monastic lives. It is this: the tension is never relieved. What do we receive in the Holy Eucharist? How is it an image of our lives of discipleship? It is the tension of things yet hidden in heaven, and nourished while on earth. Once again, the closing prayer draws us back to the central theological idea of our faith, the incarnation. We see the same tensile strength again in our acknowledgement of the bread that comes from on high. What we encounter in the Holy Eucharist is essentially what we experience in the unfolding of Lent, Christ, suffering, Christ risen, Christ, glorified, Christ in his fullness yet still accessible to us, still available to us, still as close to us as the bread we eat, the cup from which we drink. The prayer also mentions completion. This is the completion of the Mass, it is also, a representation of the fullness we have received. If we are open to the mystery, if we complete in our lives the saving action of Christ in the Incarnation, if we have received this Holy Eucharist with joy although we are unworthy that he should enter under our roofs, then we shall know true completion. We also know that our pilgrim path through this life is still one of moving, unfolding, unveiling. We do not see it yet and our continuation of this saving mystery of Christ will bring us once more to the existential place of loss and confusion where we found ourselves at the inception of the mystery of this Mass. Thus we come to the final blessing, words of comfort to an unfolding people but also words of challenge.
BLESSING
Direct, O Lord, we pray, the hearts of your faithful, and in your kindness grant your servants this grace: that, abiding in the love of you and their neighbor, they may fulfill the whole of your commands.
The oratio super populum offered at the end of Mass is not new. The older version of the sacramentary offered the translated prayers over the people proper to each Sunday of Lent. What is new with the recent translation is the proper prayers over the people for each day of Lent. In the prayer we are asking for something significant from God, direction. Perhaps this is the most difficult gift for modern man to conceive. In a culture of self-direction and self-determination, it is difficult as we leave the Eucharistic assembly to ask God to continue to direct us even outside of Church. What do we ask? To abide in the love of God and neighbor implies something profound. the Latin word here is manentes, to maintain which implies in Latin a state of permanence. We want to remain always in the love of God and neighbor and fulfill the command given us by Christ in the Gospel of St. John, from which this image stems. It is our parting gift in this Third Sunday of Lent, in this celebration of the Eucharist. For monks, it may well imply a greater desire to renew our vow of stability.
I recently saw a very powerful film titled, The Mill and the Cross. The film dealt with the life and work of the painter Peter Brughel. The narrative surrounded the painting of Christ carrying the cross, which Brughel completed in a tiny Dutch village using local people as models. Like most of Brughel’s religious paintings, you need to look for the subject matter carefully in the midst of a great deal of activity. In this case the cross is at the center of the action and Jesus in his journey is surrounded by villagers, soldiers and passersby in his way of the cross. The impact of the painting comes not from the poetic depiction of the event of the crucifixion. It comes rather from seeing the passion of Jesus in the context of what was every day. What was usual. What was their world? The soldiers wear Spanish uniforms. The execution wheel, all too familiar in local villages is seen on the right of the image. Children play in the background as if nothing is happening. Mary weeps in the foreground. People are fishing. A city sleeps to the right. The tree of life blossoms to the left. A fire circle burns in the background. A crow or vulture flies overhead and through it all the cross shaped mill continues to operate. The film demonstrates the presence of the passion in the daily lives of the folks, now long forgotten who are depicted in the painting. It is a passion that cannot be far from our lives, if we are honest with ourselves, if we are true to our calling as Christians.
The Gospel chosen for this coming Sunday is the account of the cleansing of the temple. The passage forms a pivotal part in all of the Gospels. In the Gospel of John, from which the account is taken in this coming Sunday’s readings it includes the important quotation from Psalm 69. “His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, Zeal for your house will consume me.”
The quotation offers a foreshadowing of Christ’s passion. It forms a connecting bridge between his ministry and his ultimate suffering, death and resurrection. Lent is that same kind of bridge for us. It is meant to draw us more intimately into the reality of Christ.
Zeal for the House of the Lord, that is this house, that is the house of the Church, that is the living Body of Christ, zeal for God’s house is the renewing work of this Lenten season. It is a housekeeping season, a housecleaning season. One of the opportunities this Lent affords us is that of cleaning our spiritual lives with the new Mass texts. With these new texts we are invited to experience in fresh ways the message of Lent offered to us through the saving mysteries of Christ. Surely it is a test for the monk, indeed for the Christian, to encounter zeal in our lives, even in these dog days of Lent.