1. Memorial of St. Cyril and Methodius
    February 14, 2017
    Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB
    Today, as we know, the cultural emphasis is on so-called St. Valentine’s Day. We know what that means out there. We have all of us been out there. We know what it means in a grade school world. We know what it means to the candy people, the flower people, the restaurant people. 

    In here, perhaps St. Valentine’s Day has less meaning, I don’t know. I was hoping to get a cupcake or something. Nothing showed up. 

    Here, there are no serious valentines, no date nights, no heart shaped confections, no dinners out. At least I pray there are not. 

    Here there is a little of the threat we encounter in the Book of Genesis:
    I will wipe out from the earth the men whom I have created,and not only the men,but also the beasts and the creeping things and the birds of the air,for I am sorry that I made them.
    Not exactly a love feast. 

    But we are told that this is a feast of love. And that might mean something. It should mean something. It must mean something.

    Because, at least for us here, far from the vicissitudes of Valentine’s Day is love itself and that perhaps is equally embarrassing.

    For …

    Love is the power that fuels the world. Love is the sensibility that governs the movement of planets. Love is the fiber of the beating heart, its only true and valuable cadence. 

    Love is power as no earthly power can know

    Love is heroism as no battle scars alone can confess

    Love is the only sure mechanism of peace

    Love is what we celebrate daily in this chapel, this temple of the Spirit whose dedication to the God of love we remember not only annually but daily as we pour out our lives in service to the God who masters all in his overwhelming love.

    Here we know that love is the corner stone around which this place is built, the sure foundation which is Christ the Lord.

    That goes beyond candy and flowers, beyond intimate candlelight dinners. 

    I am thinking today of SS Cyril and Methodius.

    Here are a couple of old celibate men who knew something about love.

    For these old codgers …

    Love propelled them to literally go to the nations, to the ends of the earth, to proclaim the 

    Word of God in foreign tongues.

    Love impelled them to produce new languages to communicate the message of the Gospel to tribes of folks longing to hear Good News.

    Love was the cadence of life the steady beat of heartbeats and footprints trampling the steeps of Slavic lands.

    Love that looked like the pouring out of body, mind, soul, energy, passion on a world barely able to understand them. 

    Last month around this time, our Roman pilgrimage took us to an isolated spot, below the ground on a little street in Rome, in an excavated place today lit only by the ugly phosphorescence of white glaring beams, in the corner of this subterranean world, there is a shrine that bears a simple inscription, Cyril. 

    From the world his mortal remains were gathered into that little underground space in the church of St. Clement in Rome. 

    Cyril’s message, the message of love we celebrate here every day, here especially in this chapel, in this Eucharist, this message is one that breaks the barriers of time and space and erupts into the cosmos. 

    And so …
    Do you not yet understand or comprehend?Are your hearts hardened?Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?
    Blessed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb

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  2. Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Times
    February 5, 2017
    Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB
    A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;it is set on a lampstand,where it gives light to all in the house.
    Jesus’ injunction in today’s Gospel seems so easy to comprehend. Put your light out there. Let you talents shine. 

     Realize what Isiah promises:
    Light shall rise for you in the darkness,and the gloom shall become for you like midday.
    Why is that saying of Jesus so hard for us to comprehend? 

     Perhaps it’s the way Jesus frequently does things: he states as obvious what is not, in fact, obvious to us. 

     He says: No one does this.  Well, Jesus, everybody does that. 

     It doesn’t make sense in your divine imagination, or really in any dimension of imagination we may, well, imagine but frankly, it touches on something quite, well, touchy in the Christian way of life. 

    When we think of ourselves we might stand in the place of Saint Paul:

     I came in weakness. I came in fear.

     At least so far as I was concerned

     But Jesus is having none of it. 

     We don’t like to put ourselves out there. We don’t like to shine. Why is that?

     We don’t like to pray in public, or make the sign of the cross, or anything

     Why do we find it so difficult to celebrate ourselves in our faith?

     Why do we find it so troubling to let everyone know who and what we are, so much that we spend a great bit of our lives metaphorically hiding under the bushel basket. 

     Yesterday in our overseers’ meeting we had an interesting presentation by Marc Bentley on religion in Appalachia. 

     In one of his videos Bentley showed the preaching style of a young man named Elisha Justice. 

     You may know him better as a great basketball player, but I would be willing to bet he is an even greater preacher. And why is that?

     In his preaching in very out of the way places, not unlike those visited by Saint Paul, Preacher Justice loses it. His preaching carries him away. He seems little in control of his voice, his text, his method, and most certainly his and the other congregants’ time.
    Let your light shine before all. 
    What do we have to offer? Maybe that’s not the question. May be the question is: What are we willing to offer?

     I wonder sometimes, even as Catholic men and women if we celebrate anymore? 

     Or do we celebrate things, but they are usually the wrong things or things we do not have. 

     I get so tired of watching people, even being told that I should admire, idolize people who spend their lives by throwing their lives into the crap holes of what is popular, up-to-date, meaningful today and meaningless tomorrow. Celebrity throws its nakedness onto the internet and then tweets vitriolically at people for looking at it.

     We celebrate the Super Bowl with chili cook-offs and loud reveling. 

     We celebrate the latest internet craze with a thousand, a million hits.

     We celebrate the mundane with riotous abandon. 

     We celebrate the stupid things, but leave the God-fire unattended in lives burning surreptitiously into ash. 

     Brothers and sisters you must be aware that the Lord God has something that he is offering us today and every day. 

     We must be aware that he is offering us life. He is offering us an alternative. He is offering us a way out of the simpering mendacity into which we so carelessly cast the great gift given us in his love, in his power, in his great mercy, in his sacrifice, in his wonder, in his plenty. 

     He wants to help us cast our cares upon the water, to see in him that great ship of state, that bark of hope that journeys us toward our true home, our authentic destiny, our only meaningful encounter. 

     And what do we find in that encounter?

     Like Isaiah we find the living God who alone can write in our hearts, write on the sinews of our imagination the prescription of his love. 

     Like Paul we find the Christ, wrecked on our backsides on the side of the road and inundating us in the traffic of his great kindness, his pure reality, his overwhelming patience

     We are offered the light of the divine imagination and we fritter that precious gift away. And so cast away from the ship of life, we are left floundering in a hole-infested dingy stuffed with beer and pretzels with chips and salsa, with overpaid players playing over hyped games that are really only there for the commercials. 

     There is something deep within us that wants to be refashioned, wants to be structured anew, wants to be rebuilt but sometimes we think rebuilding is more about dusting the tenement than investing in the wads of dynamite that burst the walls of that putrid tenement open.

     What I want to say is get a life and make the most of it, or rather, make the most of the life you have already been given. Put your fire out there. 

     But we say: This happened to me. This is my past. This is the thing I cannot get over. I don’t have any shine left in me. Perhaps I never had any at all. 

     This is BS. Put your trust in God and in his Holy Church, deal with your issues and pitch that personal mess talk back into the cesspool from which it crawled. Blow open the rock that seals you in. 

     God has come to give us strength, strength to overcome any obstacle at all and we know enough people in our lives who can bear witness to that power.

    God has come to give us the truth and the truth will indeed set us free, free to live our lives in holiness and righteousness until death. God has made that promise.

     God has come to give us power, let’s not crawl all too willingly back into the confining holes of original sin.

     Let us wrestle ourselves up on that lampstand brothers and sisters and set the light of Christ on a promontory so high, so meaningful that it makes us shine out like a lighthouse on a storm-tossed sea. And, like a lighthouse we might give hope to those still drowning in the depths of the damning waters of that sea. 

     And besides, if you put a lamp under a bed or a basket, you will not only burn up the bed or basket, you may burn down the house, the town, the seminary, the diocese, the world. 

     Put it out there and God and your brothers and sisters will respond. That is what we do here. That is the hope we instill here. That is the threat we make here. That is the promise God has made to us here and he gives us the power of this Eucharist to support us for the very dangerous journey, this arduous journey, this truly blessed journey. 

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  3. Spring 2017 Opening Mass
    January 30, 2017
    Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

    "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

    The question of the demon, speaking through his victim is an essential one for us today as we stand here on the precipice of a new semester

    "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

    The encounter between Jesus and the man possessed is a momentous occasion. It is momentous certainly for the man, the poor victim of the devil who has been torn by and wrestled with the demon for many years, but perhaps more so by the townsfolk who, seeing a new dispensation, a new possibility a new and definitive reality, worry that Jesus is going to upset their collective applecart.

    They are afraid of change; they are scared of conversion because it will mean something new, something decidedly different from the customary herding of the swine, their trafficking in the uncleanliness of living.

    It will mean that they must some be transformed, transmogrified by what they will experience just as the poor man possessed was changed forever by his encounter with the Lord.

    Thank again about what we heard in the first reading tonight.
    Some were tortured and would not accept deliverance,
    in order to obtain a better resurrection.
    Others endured mockery, scourging, even chains and imprisonment.
    They were stoned, sawed in two, put to death at sword's point;
    they went about in skins of sheep or goats,
    needy, afflicted, tormented.
    The world was not worthy of them.
    They wandered about in deserts and on mountains,
    in caves and in crevices in the earth.

    Yet all these, though approved because of their faith,
    did not receive what had been promised.
    God had foreseen something better for us,
    so that without us they should not be made perfect.

    What an amazing promise is that, particularly for those of us who sometimes dwell on the past, see what has been (and therefore easily controlled) as what is true and good and sees what is before us as something disdainful, something to be trodden underfoot.

    Here is the message again.

    We have been changed by the Lord

    "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

    The answer of course is everything.

    He has taken us on, taken us in because he knows us, he knows us intimately.

    How does God know us?

    He knew us in the womb, even before we were a twinkle in our parents’ eyes. Before our first yelp, our first cooing, his designing finger traced providence in the sand of our souls. He saw the retching babe and said, this is a wonderful, beautiful little creation good. He plotted. He planned. He gave vent to his awesome vision.

    He knew us in our waddling years. We struggled to stand as if we could ever stand on our own. He placed his hand in the small of our little backs. He looked with the Father’s love on us, a big brother’s pride. He prodded, pushed, he plied. He let go and fretted. He watched us walk, run, walk away, run away. We guarded our childhood games as we dressed up in the rags of freedom and autonomy. We tried to hide, and he pretended to seek, but only pretended, because he knew where we were all the time.

    He knew us as we learned to transgress, experimented with the minor sins of playground pranks, petty theft, the lie, and then, more. Accusation, ridicule, derisive laughter, the easy bullseye, and then we’re the bullseye. We learned to inflict pain in the most painful places, twisting the blade of self-image in to the hilt. We learned to do that with others and we learned to do that with ourselves.

    The wild claims came, the recrimination and still he knew us … and he knows us.

    He knows us in our confusion as we struggled with relationships, with vocation, family, vocation, ideals, vocation.

    He knows us in our doubt in those moments of shear panic when we can hardly remember where we have been, hardly recognize ourselves in the mirror, and believe without reservation that God is no longer interested in lives such as ours.

    He knows us in our selfishness, our grasping, our groping through the treasure troves of self-promotion, gripping tightly to the handles of that tarnished trophy we call ego.

    He knows us in our compulsiveness, our wickedness, our neediness, our laziness, our restlessness. our carelessness

    "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

    The answer of course is everything, and that is what he demands of us, everything.

    Can we give it? Are we willing?
    Brothers and sisters, how willing are you today, as we stand looking out over the precipice of this new formation time to offer everything to God?

    Are you metaphorically ready to walk the aisle tonight?

    Are you prepared to meet the savior of the world in the common guise of some bread and wine.

    Are you prepared to become his presence in the world in the guise of your own commonness?

    "What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?

    Everything and more. We are the more.

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  4. 4th Sunday in Ordinary Times
    January 29, 2017
    Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

    The beatitudes, especially as they are unfolded for us in St. Matthew’s Gospel are encouraging, encouraging if you wish to see a vision of perfection, a way in which the Church can understand itself in light of Jesus’ teaching.

    But they may also be somewhat discouraging, discouraging to us poor mortals who attempt to slouch by every day in our faltering will to fulfill God’s commandments, even here, even in this oasis of holiness and, well, beatitude.

    The truth of the matter is this: We want to be good but we somehow continually, struggle and fail.

    And it is our fault of course.

    My mother once famously remarked: “Don’t blame the Cheetos if your fingers turn orange.” Truer Gospel words were never spoken. Jesus’ delivery of the Sermon on the Mount is a call to action, a call, like that of Moses to obey the Law, yet Jesus offers us something more human, more profound than the stony tablets of the Decalogue. He offers us a vision of love and peace, of goodness and kindness, of welcome. And Jesus refuses to allow responsibility to be passed to any other agent for the lack of will in the human person.

    We might see similar instances of Jesus’ concern today:

    If the internet is offensive to you, who logged on? If you drink too much, who opened the bottle?

    If you eat too much, who bought the case of Velveeta shells and cheese at Sam’s?

    If you are offended by the program on Netflix, who paid for the subscription?

    Blessed, blessed, blessed

    Perhaps we need a few of St. Luke’s woes to guide us to a more fertile field

    The morality of inanimate objects, of various kinds of entertainment, the debilitating slime of the social drain trap, nothing can be blamed for our poor judgment, our lack of will, our sinfulness. Nothing can be blamed but ourselves. And this is the story of the human condition.

    The conflagration of sin, and it is a conflagration no matter what you may have heard, the conflagration of sin begins with a spark, a taste, a peek, a thimbleful, a bite of the otherwise innocuous apple.

    But there is something blessed in this world, something that can lead us somewhere.

    Take and eat, Take and drink …

    Do this in memory of me.

    Don’t blame the Cheetos if our fingers turn orange


    Perhaps it is time to stretch out our hands to a different God, the true God who alone offers salvation. 

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Fr. Denis Robinson, OSB
Fr. Denis Robinson, OSB
Fr. Denis Robinson, OSB

Fr. Denis Robinson, OSB, is president-rector of Saint Meinrad School of Theology in St. Meinrad, IN. A Benedictine monk, he is also an assistant professor of systematic theology. A Mississippi native, Fr. Denis attended Saint Meinrad College and School of Theology, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1989 and a Master of Divinity in 1993. From 1993-97, he was parochial vicar for the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Memphis, TN. He joined the Saint Meinrad monastery in August 1997. Fr. Denis also attended the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where he received a master’s degree in theology in 2002, a licentiate in sacred theology in 2003, and doctorates in sacred theology and philosophy in 2007.

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