February 24, 2022
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

This you have been called to do, so you may receive a blessing as your inheritance.

My brothers and sisters, our gathering this evening speaks volumes about the ideal of vocation. What are we called to do?

The project of realizing a vocation is the true human project, no matter if that vocation is understood as being in the Church, in married life, in the world, wherever and however it may be.

We are all called to live a certain reality, that is the reality of our lives in Christ, our lives with God, but also the reality of our lives as real human persons.

So often I think we neglect that true humanity or we believe that it has no purposeful role in our beautifully imagined vocation. 

Our humanity is seldom a part of our well-rehearsed scenario of perfection, and let’s be honest, our humanity is messy.

Our past is compromised, compromised by the inadequacies of our parent and our own failures, our sins, our neglect of self

Our present is confused by the ignoble intercession of what we want to be and what we are, between the ideals of the priesthood and our personal sin. 

Our future is obscure because we do not know that path we will follow or that we will be compelled to follow as though both that path and the compulsion were not of our own choosing. 

We do all kinds of things, have all sorts of feelings and suffer all kinds of self-imposed indignities. It makes these ridiculous words of St. Peter somewhat challenging

This you have been called to do, so you may receive a blessing as your inheritance.

When we step back from the ideals we create, we discover something meaningful, our world, like our lives is full of imperfection and compromise and confusion and obscurity.

Sometimes it seems to me like Jesus is running a kind of soteriological used car lot. And not the good kind either with the wonderful polished up cars and slick interiors.

Not the shiny used car lots, not CarMax or Carvana with their incredible ads and the fashion models who deliver your new vehicle to your door.

Jesus doesn’t operate a CarMax.

Jesus runs the kind of used car lot that has a bunch of junkers. 

The disciples are sort of like used cars. Junkers. This one is an old Edsel, that frankly never ran that well and now might need to be propped up on blocks.

This one gets going fine but then just decides to stop running halfway to the hospital.

This one is a Pinto that looks great in the front, but blows up if you hit it in the rear.

This one has a leaky window.

This one has windshield wipers that only work if it isn’t raining.

Junk, weirdos, problems. Mistakes? I think not. 

The apostles were old junkers, but Jesus saw something in them. He saw potential. He saw one good run. He saw perfecting rather than perfection. Jesus is your salesman but …

You too are preparing to run a soteriological used car lot. 

You will have a few shiny models, some really dependable models that will be there every time the Church’s garage doors open. 

But also some old junkers, I would say mostly old junkers, mostly wrecks. And tonight you resolve for yourself to be a used car salesman

This you have been called to do, so you may receive a blessing as your inheritance.

When you think about the used car lots that will be your parishes over the next 50 years …

Here you will find old beat up models, and some that are shiny on the outside but rusty on the inside. 

Here is Winny the faithful old lady who loves to be in the sacristy mostly because she doesn’t want to be at home with her alcoholic husband

Here is the Smith family, who struggle day and night to make ends meet for their kids to get a good parochial school education and keep up appearances

Here is Max who has tried every kind of drug at the age of 16 and can’t keep himself running yet, now his parents are intervening and you are there to help.

Here is Abner, he’s five and has Down’s Syndrome, in spite of Safe and Sacred he cannot help but run up and grab you around your knees. 

And here you are in the midst of all of it. Here you are, here. Here you are offering all of these old junkers a new lease on life. Because that is your vocation my brothers, soteriological used car salesmen and … 

Tonight your promises are a new lease on life because guess what, you are old junkers too

You are broken by your sins

But God will make you shine again

Your internal combustion engine always seems to need attention

But God will make you run and not grow weary

You are up on blocks and headed for the junk yard

But God will make you YOU, because he will make you like himself

This you have been called to do, so you may receive a blessing as your inheritance.

Tonight God is standing by to perfect your promises.

And I can say this: I have presided over this used car lot for fourteen years. I love a used car, no matter how ratty. 

I love a used car and I love you. 

February 10, 2022
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

“Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”

Scraps, crumbs, leftovers. 

It is odd how images get into your head or how scenes from the past get randomly reconstructed in your mind by some word spoken or something seen. 

Last weekend when Fr. Jim offered us the very compelling image of the man in India gathering the grains of rice from the muddy road, my mind immediately went back to my eight- or nine-year-old self. I was reminded about how I would sit on my grandmother’s front porch (with drinks and snacks of course) and watch every year as the huge lumbering cotton trucks made their slow, swaying way down Main Street to the big cotton gin. 

These trucks were piled very high, really filled to overflowing. Soon their burdens would be distributed, and they would go back for more of the fluffy stuff for the next round of ginning. 

Because the cotton was so light and the trucks were so full, as they made their way down the street, the boles of cotton would fly off of the truck like summer snow. They went everywhere, in the trees, in the ditches, onto lawns, into bushes, some of it even settling at the feet of the children watching from the front porches (with drinks and snacks of course).

The summer snow storm created joy in my grandmother’s neighborhood every year, but the real entertainment came from the pickers.

The pickers were men and women, some old, some young, some really old, and some really young who followed behind the trucks and ran to catch the fleeing boles and stuff them into the long cotton bags that hung from their shoulders. Some of the really old and really young could barely keep up and hardly handle the bags as they became heavier and heavier. 

Their task was to pick up the crumbs of cotton that had escaped. They were able to keep it and sell it, not in truck sized loads, but in smaller loads, a little money. A little money for a lot of work. 

I loved the sight of the pickers racing and grasping, of thoroughly gathering and storing. I loved the sight of the bags growing in girth as the old and young slogged along Main Street in search of scraps. 

“Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”

I used to believe, in fact, in the past, I preached about those trucks laden with plenty and I saw them, in the innocence of my youth as a symbol of God’s love. Perhaps they are. 

I saw them as a vision of the great eschaton in which all of us are gathered into the cotton gin of the four last things and we will be judged. I am certain we shall. 

Somehow, I liked that idea of all of us boles going side-by-side to the reckoning, the final ginning. God’s truck was big. Jesus was the driver. We are all going together. 

Now, however, something has changed in my vision. Perhaps it is wisdom or more likely, the onset of senility. Now I see Jesus, and hence the disciple, the priest, the minister as less of a truck driver and more of a picker. Because, ultimately, I believe that is our calling. 

“Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.”

So often we think our ministry is driving the truck, gather us in. But I want us to think about running along the road, chasing the boles that are getting away. That is God’s way. Let nothing go unaccounted for. 

I remember in my seminary days, back before the Council of Constance. When I was the Master of Ceremonies, we used to have what was jestingly referred to as the “crumb brigade”. These were erstwhile seminarians who would, completely un-invited come to the sacristy after Mass to clean the vessels and gather up the crumbs. I suppose in my ignorant youth I watched this with some degree of amusement. 

As I grew older, I came to know that there was something biblical there. Let no morsel of the Body of Christ go unaccounted for. There is no particle so small that it does not deserve our attention, because it has already gained God’s attention. 

I wonder brothers and sisters, are we willing to trudge the roads in search of treasure caught up in the wind?

There may not be much reward in it, but it must be satisfying because it is our salvation. 

Crumbs, scraps, leftovers. Us.

February 2, 2022
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

There is a wonderful quote by the American literary critic, Barbara Johnson. 

"Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness."

How appropriate for our feast today. 

When we look at our ancestors in faith, their eyes saw only darkness. 

From the sin of Adam, the time of our first parents, in shame the light had been cut off from the world. Wandering in the darkness of the outer Eden, they groped the ragged ground for meaning, they became lost in incomplete relationships, they cursed themselves, they became enslaved, they denied the prophets, they refuted the Law, they sold one another into exile. 

So it was, there was nothing but the grave Sheol of the grave that overwhelmed them, wallowing in the memory of creation, but lost, blind to its truth. 

This is the legacy of St. Luke’s Gospel, a Judaism old and lost. Zachariah the ancient priest, Elizabeth, his barren wife, Simeon the doddering old man, Anna the widow. They were losing, but they were holding on, hoping that the light extinguished so long ago by their own folly might be restored to them. 

"Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness."

And so they haunted the temple, that monument of Herod’s victory and his down fall, they wandered its cold precincts filling their old lungs with the daily stench of burning animals, fractured dreams and hopelessness.

They felt their ways along the walls of its precincts, its wailing walls hoping to pick up some gossip, some shred of good news.

They knew the darkness, knew it intimately in their ancient bones, felt it keen as wind winding across the desert at night, understood it like the loss that had already circumscribed their withering lives.

And then, one day it happened. They appeared, the poor couple from Nazareth, money spent, aching feet for the presentation of their (her) little boy in the Temple, the fulfillment of the Law’s strict code. The teenage mother, the older stepfather and the fat baby, known as Jesus waving his dimpled hands in the air as the whole precinct teemed with action. 

Who were they? They were nothing in the world’s eyes, nothing, lowly peasants for whom these isolated visits to the temple were the highpoints of otherwise drear existences. 

Mary the mother clutching a candle that she prayed the futile traversals of the temple’s stampeding worshippers would not extinguish.

Joseph, the shield, the protector

And the ever conscious baby, did he know that all of this activity was ultimately about him?

It was then that the old man and the old woman spotted them in the chaos, from the depths of their souls they spotted them, from the longing in their hearts they caught hold of them, from the rolling tide of history they grasped them. 

Israel, raw with darkness, tottering on extinction saw in its last moment that flame, that flickering glow of light that looked for the world like a child’s eyes, a baby’s eyes. 

From the soul of those eyes shone the light of nations, from his eyes he communicated in a moment to those old folks the history of a people, a shabby people rising to meet God face to face once again, from those eyes the pools of darkness swirled and then were illuminated by the light of Mary’s little candle.

"Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness."

From the depths it trembled, as the smoke consumed the pigeons, the poor boy’s offering. The little fire quaked. It might so easily have been lost, but it was not lost. 

Its flame was passed along. Passed over Simeon and Anna to fishermen, anxious to hear a word of Good News in the midst of their nets.

Passed along to tax collectors lost in the morass of their ill begotten greed.

Given to political pot boilers and doubters and traitors

And there was more beyond the ragged twelve. The light passed to sinners, to Gentiles, to adulterers, the unclean, to politicians, to sorcerers, to hermits, monks, nuns, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers. It passed on and on.

The light passed down the litany of saints and sinners, holding on, tentatively as flame passed to an unlit column of wax, the work of bees.

It made its way into the halls of power, into house churches, into basilicas, monasteries, humble homes.

It burned its way through the pages of history, a history of ravaging wind that might have stifled it but for its divine temperament. 

It burned its way across the threadbare landscape of human history until he touched the lives of those who continued to cling together in the shadows of darkness and shiver in the cold of indifference.

It burned its way over the fields of folly cultivated even in our day with the plowshares of men’s ignorance

It burned and it eradicated bigotry, racism, sexism and all the other isms that plague the human heart.

It burned and lightened lives controlled by the horrific darkness of addiction.

It burned and touched the molting draperies of turmoil, sending their shards flying aimlessly in the air.

It burned down the corridors of culture and comes to us today.

That flame which wavered in the Temple, that fire which is the very Son of God is here brothers and sisters and now it is a conflagration. It consumes us. It tears at our mantles of indifference that false armor we have composed for ourselves.

It touches us, it opens our hearts, our skin and makes us vulnerable. It wounds us, flays us, but it makes us warmer in a cold world. It gives us light when vision fails.

It passes its brilliance over lives shut off from the hermeneutic of salvation. 

It is Christ the light. It is ours today. It surrounds us as it surrounds this altar, drawing us ever nearer to the source of light and tearing away our blindness, our stumbling ineptitude, our spiritual darkness.

Simeon and Anna finally saw him in the Temple. That same temple is opened for us now. That same revelation. It is the temple of our hearts, the revelation of our deepest desire.

"Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness."

January 31, 2022
Very Rev. Denis Robinson, OSB

He asked him, “What is your name?”

He replied, “Legion is my name.  There are many of us.”

Whitfield was, and is, the shorthand name for Mississippi’s most famous, perhaps infamous, public mental health hospital. It was also shorthand for the state of a person’s mind, hence: Mister, you’re going to end up in Whitfield, or you need to be sent to Whitfield. It is a threat very well known to Mr. Taylor Steggs and even though Whitfield was in the southern part of the state and, therefore, beyond Mr. Taylor Stegg’s sphere of influence it was, nevertheless a potent threat. He heard it all the time in Rushing’s drug store, the old men, listening to a particular theological opinion of Mr. Taylor Steggs would cry: Why Mr. Taylor Steggs you’re going to end up in Whitfield if you keep going on like that. One time, even his Uncle Taylor Steggs threatened to send him to Whitfield if he didn’t modify a particular exegetical quandary concerning the Book of Revelation.

In general, Mr. Taylor Steggs was fearless. He really didn’t care what people thought about him and his preaching, no preacher really could. But the threat of Whitfield, its locked doors and straight jackets frightened him beyond measure. Most of this had to do with Jasper Legion Puckett. A little-known point of Mississippi jurisprudence is that every small town was required to have two things; one, a pair of spinster sisters. Oxford had the Cook sisters, Nancy and Tootsie who lived on Main Street near Mr. Taylor Steggs’ grandmother, Mrs. Taylor Steggs. They were wonderful. They always smelled like Vicks VapoRub and apple pie filling and fed every child in the neighborhood. The other requirement of Mississippi towns was not quite as warm and cozy. It was the law that every town in the Magnolia State must have a town lunatic. If they didn’t have one of their own, they were required to import one from a town that had two. Such was not the problem for Oxford however as they had their own and a prize he was, Jasper Legion Puckett. Nothing on earth struck terror in the heart of Mr. Taylor Steggs more than Jasper Legion Puckett. Such had been the case his entire life. 

No one really knew how old Jasper was. He seemed to have been around Oxford for as long as anyone could remember. It is thought he wandered into town one day from Yalobusha County and never left. It was rumored he lived in a drainage ditch south of the Piggly Wiggly. He was often seen around town, or near the graveyard or even on campus. He yelled at people, poked at people, cried out at people. He was always dressed the same, with a battered old seersucker suit, a crooked clip-on bow tie and some beat-up saddle oxfords. His pants were too short and his jacket was too loose, hanging on his wiry frame like a dumpy potato sack. He would often show up around churches on Sunday or near the Abbey restaurant. He got around and he was famous and Mr. Taylor Steggs avoided him like the plague. Because, Mr. Taylor Steggs was afraid of crazy.

For years, this game of cat and mouse went on. In his ministry, Mr. Taylor Steggs had encountered and knew on a personal basis, almost every last citizen of Oxford except for Jasper Legion Puckett. Undoubtedly one day his number would be up and Mr. Taylor Steggs faced the prospect stoically. It happened seemingly by accident on a frost January day when Mr. Taylor Steggs had been evangelizing at the barber shop. He was having very little success and frankly, he as a bit down in the mouth about it. Bowing his head he made his slow way home, cutting through the alleyway right between the drugstore and the undertaker. About halfway through the alley, Mr. Taylor Steggs felt a kind of chill come over him, and then from some dark recess of the brick walls he heard a somber voice. “Crazy is as crazy does” the voice solemnly intoned, echoing off the walls of the drug store and rebounding off the walls of the undertaker. Mr. Taylor Steggs froze in his place, at first not seeing the source of the voice but fearing, at some level, its gravity. “Crazy is as crazy does” the voice repeated and Mr. Taylor Steggs spun around to see Jasper Legion Puckett standing in a crook in the wall nibbling on his fingernails as he casually assessed Mr. Taylor Steggs up and down.

“What did you say to me?” Mr. Taylor Steggs queried.

“I said crazy is as crazy does, you little jackass.”

In all his seven long years, no one, even his worst enemy, had spoken in such a rude tone to him. 

“I’m sorry, sir, do I know you?” Mr. Taylor Steggs asked. 

“Well, you’ve been avoiding me your whole life.” The shadowy voice countered. “Is that knowing?” The man spoke with quiet eloquence, and, manners really, hardly like a maniac at all not that Mr. Taylor Steggs had extensive acquaintance with the species. 

Stepping out into the light a bit Mr. Taylor Steggs had a better look at the town lunatic. His ill-fitting seersucker suit reminded Mr. Taylor Steggs of someone, but he could not think who to save his life (and his life might need saving in very short order). 

“Why have you avoided me, Mr. Taylor Steggs?” the odd-mannered man asked.

“I have not been avoiding you?” Mr. Taylor Steggs countered somewhat hesitantly.

“Oh yes you have” Jasper Legion Pucket replied. “And the reason is that you know very well that I am the devil, just like you.”

All of this was too much and Mr. Taylor Steggs felt as though he might faint. The alley temperatured up somehow oppressively hot even though it was wintry January. Though the gloom Mr. Taylor Steggs could see the stark face of Jasper Legion Puckett leering at him, standing in front of a poster with dancing pigs on it: “Three Pigs BBQ Sauce: Pour your way to porky happiness”

Suddenly Jasper Legion Puckett began to laugh a demure laugh, a refined laugh. “I’m just like you” he repeated. “We both want the same thing, souls Mr. Taylor Steggs, souls. I do believe however that I want them somewhat more than you do. I really do. Do you want souls Mr. Taylor Steggs? What are you willing to give for them? What will you sacrifice I wonder? Your suit? Your shoes? Your bow tie? Your hat?”

Mr. Taylor Steggs was shaken to the core of his existence and so he did what any seven-year-old evangelist would do. He screwed up his eyes and shouted in a loud voice, “Get behind me Satan” and he stood stark still. When he opened his eyes, Jasper Legion Puckett was just looking at him, his face so reminiscent of the faces of the dancing pigs. And he laughed in a high-pitched voice, a devily voice. 

“Oh Mr. Taylor Steggs, the things you don’t understand are legion” and with that parting salvo, he walked away. Mr. Taylor Steggs never saw him again, some say he ended up in Whitfield, and some folks claimed that he had never really even existed, but Mr. Taylor Steggs knew without a doubt in his heart that this was decidedly untrue. He had seen Legion and it was him.