March 24, 2021
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

Covid quarantine does strange things to us. It changes us, or perhaps makes us more of who we really are.

Many of my accustomed habits for each day, getting up early, office reading at precisely, novel reading, everything to the ready, shower, shave, ear hair cut, teeth, meds, all strangely strangled by ironically having MORE time to do things.

One of the really odd habits I have picked up during CQ is watching YouTube videos. I’m a bit addicted to them in fact. Is there such a thing as YA meeting? I don’t know, I’ll look it up on You Tube.

The videos I love are animal rescue videos.

After living under a dumpster for 11 months this dog gets rescued and goes from sad to happy.

Puppy is so malnourished it might not live, then a miracle happens.

Bernard the poodle had no hair and was blind a family takes him in and loves him.

Maya the cat has Down ’s syndrome.

There are so many rescue videos you can really wile away the whole day with them. Sometimes I have.

What do these rescue videos teach me, or show me.

Perhaps it is that there are good people in the world.

Perhaps these poor pets stand in for human beings, many suffering, many starving, many without love in our world.

I wonder for every poor dog found under a Winnebago, how many children or men or women there are suffering in our cities, in our “centers of civilization”?

Perhaps I can watch pets but I could not stand in any way to see a baby suffering from deprivation, or abuse, or neglect.

I don’t understand how a person could mistreat a poor animal.

I understand even less how an innocent child could be in pain at the hands of a parent or anyone.

After all of this stuff is over, how much healing will we need to bring one another back into focus?

Now, back to Hope for Paws, my favorite pet site.

The most important part of saving the dogs or cats is getting them to trust you, and here you really have to creep up on them. Whether they are hiding under a porch, or in a sewer as Winn and Dixie were last night before the flood, they need to establish trust. 

They are afraid, broken, hurt, and a bit skittish, sometimes a little violent.

It seems to me that is a great metaphor for us.

And that insight is not new.

The angel Gabriel came to Mary.

She was a nobody, the daughter of a conquered people, a girl without husband (yet) or anything else. She must have been roughhewn. She must have worn scraps for clothing. She must have worked hard day and night to help support her aged parents.

She must have been careworn and brown, even for one of tender years. She must have been a sight not to behold. She must have smelled. She must have been, I don’t know, poor. She must have been poor, living in a mud house, working day and night, no hope, no future, no plans to be made other than the carpenter.

She must have been like a frightened beast, after all wasn’t everyone essentially a frightened beast before the coming of this day.

Then the rescue …

The frenzy of beating wings, of feather dust.

A whirlwind of light.

The angel called out to the lowest of the earth, the slave of men’s expectations and in that place of squalor a feast of insane beauty was carried out.

Hail full of grace, he said to the girl with rough hands and rougher life

Hail full of grace, Mary …

He knew her name and then he whispered in her ear the secret she had been prepared to hear from the first stirring in her own mother’s womb. She had been prepared to hear it but could the vessel hear the news of what was to be poured into it?

Will you change the course of human history?

Yes, of course, this is why I was brought into the world.

Yes of course, this is God’s dream.

Yes, of course, this is the endpoint of my very soul.

And God sighed and the breath of that sigh completed the Virgin’s yes.

The breath of that sigh, held so long throughout the time of our collective pain breathed forth full and welcome.

It poured forth like water to a parched earth, like breeze in the arid desert in the farthest outpost of civilization.

And I wonder, on that day, if the dust of the desert around that town stirred up?

I wonder if the dirt rang out in joy like a rescued puppy.

I wonder if God ran around heaven filled with happiness at seeing his rescue plan come to fulfillment in the poor scared vessel.

Brothers and sisters,

That is the only promise of Lent, that in the middle of this season of confusion and doubt, there is a certain promise. But Mary’s answer is a certain promise as well.

You know he had a name, a name which resounds over the hill country of Nazareth and echoes around the world, it’s syllables penetrate the folly of human enterprise, it bounces off the walls of human edifices of power, it seeps through the cracks of quarantine and, like the angel’s beating wings, it portends joy.

Now, perhaps we can find a way to get that onto the You Tube.

March 11, 2021
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

Whoever is not with me is against me. 

Trials 

Stark words, final words, penetrating words from the mouth of Christ.

I would never have thought when I preached to the deacons last year that what would have followed would be days and weeks and months and now a year filled with such trials. 

At every turn, we have had to make decisions that might have affected not only people’s sense of well-being, but their, our, very lives.

Last year at this time I would never have imagined quarantine and the long slog toward summer, then fall, flowing down into winter and now rising into spring. 

I would never have imagined that a year later we would be thinking about, preparing for truncated events, glorious events reduced, reduced, reduced. 

I would never have wanted you, beloved deacons to have spent the past year like this, wrapped up in a cocoon of chronic care that sometimes, perhaps often, seems like a straitjacket. 

As a father, I would have never wanted my sons not to feel the cool, clean air of freedom sweeping over them. I would never want paranoia, retreat, crippling fear. 

I would never have wanted any of that for you, but by God’s grace you have what you have. 

And that, my brothers is a pattern that you will follow. That is the design of the months and years to come. Not of COVID, God willing, not of illness, contagion, and contention, but a pattern of unpredictability. 

None of us can anticipate the days ahead. None of us can know where we will be assigned just a few months on, none of us can know what kind of people we will be called to care for.

None of us can know what dramas we are going to enact, what passions we will experience, what little deaths we will know. 

None of us can anticipate the future, but all of us can anticipate our response to whatever that future brings. 

Whoever is not with me is against me.

Jesus draws the line clearly. That line defines us, it tells us what our lives as priests is about, and, perhaps more importantly it tells us what our lives as priests is not about. 

All this business here, all these wordy promises, all these signings and sealings is about who we are and who we are becoming apart from those moments in which we are so carefully wrapped up in vestments and chalices and wish lists and catalogs and comfort. 

Because brothers, this vocation is hard, and it is cosmic.

This vocation is not about comfort. It is not about you settling in with some degree of job security and doing the least you can do to draw your measly paycheck.

This is not about going out and getting around, investing your goods in the glorious splendor of the local Walmart or Mexican restaurant.

This is not about golf, or the rust accumulating on your clubs.

This is not about fine tuning your social skills by escaping to the wilderness of inappropriate places and activities on your day off.

This is not about bells ringing, dinging, tinging at the appropriate moment during the Mass.

This is not about lace, this long, or this long on your sleeves and hems.

This is not about texts that are always transitory and truncated.

This is not about finery and finagling. 

Brothers, these promises tonight, these promises so sterile and forced are setting you up for another kind of life. 

This vocation you have sought after and prayed over and fought for for years, 

This is about a battle for the human soul. 

It is about a battle for your soul. 

This is about pain.

This is about suffering.

This is about perseverance.

This is about fighting.

This is about bruises.

This is about wounds.

And it is not your pain, your suffering, your perseverance, your fighting, your bruises, your wounds.

It is about the pain that comes from rising and falling from the same sins again, again, and again and bringing to you as confessor the same struggles.

It is about the suffering that comes from seeing real hunger and real abuse every day, hunger and abuse that so transcend the boundaries of your pleasant rectory. 

It is about perseverance when the obstacles are so difficult to overcome, when people tell lies about you, when people slander your good name, when people cause you pain because of their selfishness, when they stab you in the back.

It is about the fighting that you find in the confused face of a tiny child, caught in a dirty room, bruised by his parents, beaten by his father, concussed by his mother. 

It is about the bruises that are hidden under too-voluminous clothing of the wife whose drunken husband beats her up every night just for the hell of it. 

It is about the wounds handed on from generation to generation that fester in your parish whether it is in the hills of Appalachia or the suburbs of Little Rock. 

And this is the life of Christ that you now seek to have in you, to be all of you, to control you, to define you, to penetrate you, to absorb you until there is nothing left of you and there is only Christ, only the Lord, only the suffering savior, only Jesus.

That is what you are promising tonight.

Whoever is not with me is against me.

In ourselves, there still battles two forces.

There is evil of course. What does it look like?

It looks like your pride seeping out and torturing you in the resentment of a celibate life that creeps up on you and that you curse. You never knew you said. You knew. 

It looks like your selfishness that wants some little comfort, some little solace when there is none.

It looks like your willingness to turn the blind eye.

It looks like nothing, a priesthood that become nothing.

There is evil but there is also the force of good. You are called to be the force of Good.

What does it look like?

It looks like your emptiness in the face of Christ’s fullness.

It looks like the life of a man whose promises are fulfilled.

It looks like your willingness in the face of Christ’s acceptance of pain and death. And to accept them with joy, 

It looks like your singlemindedness in the face of Christ’ determination to drive the sins of men and women, sins placed upon your shoulders in the burden of the priest, the determination to drive those sins to the Cross and in suffering and in endurance to drink the last drop of that bitter cup of gall. 

It looks like your willingness to pound the pavement of a cold, hospital parking lot at 3:00 in the morning because someone you have never heard of is dying in the ER and needs the Sacraments of the Church, needs YOU, the agent of those Sacraments. 

It is the force of good that looks like your love, crawling to the altar from sheer exhaustion, and welling up with tears in the face of your utter helplessness, your helplessness without God.

That is the force of good. Brothers, let us strive after it. 

Whoever is not with me is against me.

What force will you bring to the altar tonight?

I know you, I know it will be the force for good.

Now, bring it all my brothers and you will want for nothing. 

Make your promises tonight and keep them.