We Honor the Brave Dead and Pray for Peace in Iraq

(Excerpt from Midday Prayer before our Memorial Day Picnic)

Lord of hope and compassion, Friend of Abraham who called our father in faith to journey to a new future, we remember before you the country of Iraq from which he was summoned, the ancient land of the Middle East, realm of the two rivers, birthplace of great cities and of civilization. May we who name ourselves children of Abraham, call to mind all the peoples of the Middle East who honor him as father; those who guard and celebrate the Torah; those for whom the Word has walked on earth and lived among us; those who follow their prophet, who listened for the word in the desert and shaped a community after what he heard.

Lord of reconciliation, God of the painful sacrifice uniting humankind, we long for the day when you will provide for all nations of the earth your blessing of peace. But now when strife and war are at hand, help us to see in each other a family likeness, our inheritance from our one father Abraham. Keep hatred from the threshold of our hearts, and preserve within us a generous spirit which recognizes in

both foe and friend a common humanity.

(Alan and Clare Amos -Iona Community – www.iona.org.uk )

We praise and thank you, our loving God, for all those down through the ages and into our own time whose sacrifices made it possible for us to utter this prayer. For our peace and freedom and the feast laid before us make us truly grateful. This we ask in the name of the one who came to offer us the costly gift of abundant life, Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Tribute to Father Thomas Travers

Please do not miss the post of May 21, an effort to salute a great friend and Redemptoristist priest celebrating his 50th jubilee of religious profession on May 27. Father Tom has been a gift to this community of contemplative nuns. We are most grateful to him and to his generous Rector, Father George Keaveney, and the other priests at Mount St. Alphonsus for providing daily Eucharist in our chapel.

On this Pentecost Sunday, may the winds of the Holy Spirit blow mightily through our world bringing peace and justice to all.

The Pentecost Sequence

Veni, Sancte Spiritus

Come, Holy Spirit, come,

and from your celestial home

shed a ray of light divine.

Come, Father of the poor,

come, source of our store.

Come, within our bosoms shine.

You, of comforters best;

you the soul's most welcome guest;

sweet refreshment here below.

In our labor, rest most sweet;

grateful coolness in the heat;

solace in the midst of woe.

O most Blessed Light Divine,

shine within these hearts of thine,

and our inmost beings fill.

Where you are not, we have naught;

nothing good in deed or thought;

nothing free from taint of ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;

on our dryness pour your dew;

wash the stains of guilt away.

Bend the stubborn heart and will.

Melt the frozen, warm the chill.

Guide the steps that go astray.

On the faithful, who adore

and confess you, evermore

in Your sevenfold gift descend.

Give us virtue's sure reward.

Give us your salvation, Lord.

Give us joys that never end.

Amen. Alleluia.

Pentecost is a great feast for our Order. It recalls the great mystery of the fulfillment of the promise of Jesus Christ to send His Spirit to be with us as wisdom and guide and companion. But for Redemptoristines it is the foundation day of the Order, the day of its birth on the Feast of Pentecost in Scala, Italy in 1731. In that small hillside town above Naples, Maria Celeste Crostarosa's vision, the inspiration received from Jesus himself, came to fruition. Shortly to be clothed in red, the color of love, they were to be imbued with the identity and virtuous nature of the Savior himself; to become his viva memoria, his living memory and witness to all of the immeasurable love of the redeeming Christ. By their way of life, their constancy in prayer their mutual charity they were to be flesh and blood illustrations of Jesus who had told Maria Celeste, "If they ask you who I am, tell them I am pure love."

This evening, with the close of Compline (Night Prayer) we will enter three days of retreat in preparation for Sunday's great solemnity. Daily we invoke the Holy Spirit to penetrate our world ever more deeply so that unity, peace, justice and the preservation of all God's creation will become our reality.

Ad Multos Annos, Father Tom

Redemptorist Priest Father Thomas Travers

Celebrates the 50th Julilee

of

Professsion in Religious Life

on Sunday, May 27, 2007

Solemnity of Pentecost

Father Tom celebrating Mass on Easter Sunday 2007 at Mother of Perpetual Help Monastery of the Redemptoristine Nuns, Mount Saint Alphonsus, Esopus, New York

In these times, many monastic communities of nuns do not have the benefit of daily Mass because fewer priests are available to come to offer the Liturgy of the Eucharist with them. Our community has had the great benefit of close proximity to Redemptorists at Mount St. Alphonsus in its days as a seminary and now as a retreat center. In the seminary's hay day not only daily Mass was assured. Professors of Sacred Scripture, Theology and Psychology came to the monastery to offer their class lectures. The sisters report that this input was a real boon to them in the days of renewal after the Second Vatican Council. They speak too of many fond relationships forged in faith sharing and general discussion, not to mention the pleasure and laughter generated by groups of seminarians coming to the monastery to present their amateur theatricals. For some seminarians, the sisters both collectively and individually were sources of wisdom and encouragement by example and prayer.

Today we are privileged and blessed by he ministry and friendship of four priests in residence at the Mount. Father Thomas Travers offers mass here two to three times a week. He brings a lifetime of broad ministerial experience, the depth of a compassionate pastor, and personal knowledge of Jesus honed by prayer, service to the poorest of the poor, and academic study. He served as a missionary in Puerto Rice and the Dominican Republic and later as Provincial for Puerto Rico. In well-crafted homilies reflecting his commitment to mission, his love for the most abandoned, and the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime we are always touched in our hearts, stimulated in faith, and challenged to renew each day the Christian commitment to on-going transformation in Christ.

As if all of that was not enough, Father Tom likes to laugh and likes to make other people laugh. Being a born and bred Boston-Irish Red Sox fan contributes to the mix. A further contribution to his well-balanced approach to life is his pleasure in tinkering whether the object be a jeep engine (a skill learned in the seminary), a jury-rigged water filtration system, or construction of an intriguing bird house. And everything is shared with generosity - the faith, the ministry, the mechanical skills and the unassuming humor.

Father Tom has done us all the favor of creating a BLOG http://journals.aol.com/tjtrower/Reflections to which he publishes his homilies. I urge you to visit the site. Excerpts of his homily given on Sunday, May 20 appear below.

AD MULTOS ANNOS, Father Tom. Thank you for your faithfulness to your religious profession and for the gift you are to our community.

*************************************

One of the greatest sermons that Jesus ever preached was not with words. It was the sermon he preached by his actions, specifically by the way he treated his apostles, his apostles who were power seeking, envious, and as he himself said “were slow to understand” (“slow learners”, as we would say today), his apostles who abandoned him when he needed them most… one denying him three times and the another betraying him for 30 pieces of silver.

And yet, after all that he suffered with them, and knowing all that he would suffer for them afterwards, Jesus still calls them, in today’s gospel, a GIFT, the gift that the Father gave him. They were often a burden, a stumbling block to his mission, slow to comprehend and yet he calls them a GIFT. Can you imagine! And then he does what you do with all gifts: first, he gives thanks for them to the Father and secondly, he cherishes them, he holds them in his hand and puts them in a special place in his heart.

It is a powerful sermon, perhaps one of his most powerful, and it should cause us to reflect on how we see and treat others… how we see our brothers and sisters in family and in community. Do we sometimes see each other as a burden around my neck, an obstacle to overcome in my personal path to salvation or as a necessary evil in community life? Do we sometimes long to be a hermit, or to live on an island, or be on a perpetual retreat where we don’t have to worry nor attend to our horizontal relationships to others and can have all the time we want to attend to our vertical relationship with God? We can dream of a life like that a life of just me and God, with no one else to get in the way.

The gospel today challenges us to reflect on how we see others who are part of our life or who come into our life. Sometimes we honestly see them as burden and they turn out to be a great gift.

I think it is good, every once in a while, to look around at the people in our life, or those who come into our life and ask ourselves how we see them, how we treat them. Do we see them as God’s gift to us, as a gift that we cherish? This is what Jesus did for his apostles and what he does for each of us today. He tells us that we are his gift from the Father and he gives thanks to the father for us and holds us in the special place in his heart. AMEN.

The Universal Impulse to Contemplation

(not just for contemplative nuns!)

Jesus, sweetest name, be the daily music of my soul and the joy of my heart that when in the agony and pangs of death the last sigh of my soul may be "Jesus."

We have come across a comparatively new magazine entitled Spirituality & Health. The subtitle reads "the soul and body connection." It would be hard to find something more indicative of specific features of today's popular culture. First, it points to the distinction made these days between being 'religious' and being 'spiritual.' Two of my three sons, real Gen-Xers, have told me that when engaged in conversation with those curious about their mother's life choice, they find themselves speaking of me as not typically 'religious' (read as: institution-bound, conservative, narrow minded) but rather as 'spiritual' (read as: one following a contemplative path, searching for universal truth via the divine, open minded). These distinctions reflect an abhorrence for institutionalization of any kind which is perceived as automatically threatening to personal freedom.

The second value of current culture demonstrated here is the emphasis on the body; its appearance, its comfort; its general health. This focus includes at its extremes addiction to diet and exercise as well as drugs, an explosion of anorexia and bulimia, a preoccupation with fashion and generalized materialism.

However, when I open the magazine I wanted to cry out, "Me thinks they doth protest too much." The contents draw readers over and over again to philosophies and practices rooted in the world's great religious traditions. A sample of articles is revelatory: "Do You Need a Spiritual Teacher?"; "Bead Here and Now" - How and why to make prayer beads; "Extreme Simplicity" - A theologian takes us on a guided tour of timeless lessons form the fourth-century desert dwellers. There seems little awareness that in rejecting the institutional, aka the established world religions, the very environments which gave birth to these traditions is being jettisoned. These traditions give testimony to the universal human impulse to contemplation; to the fact that human beings are innately spiritual and drawn to the transcendent.

A particular article especially drew my attention: "The Sufi Practice for Healing Your Heart - A crisis in the life of a cardiologist open him to the miraculous power of an ancient cure." The author describes a practice from the tradition of the Sufis, the mystical branch of Islam. This points to the fact lost to many, that each religious tradition has a mystical expression. Jewish mysticism is expressed in the Kabbalah. Perhaps the most well known expressions of Christian mysticism may be found in the writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

The Sufi practice, as out lined by the author, can be summarized in this way:

Use meditation beads

Set aside at least 15 minutes a day initially

Sit comfortably erect

Breathe through the nose and exhale deeply and rhythmically

On the exhale speak the name "Allah" slowly

Allow the sound to resonate in the region of your heart

Aim for 500 repetitions

As I read, I thought immediately of the most ancient and honored Christian tradition of the Jesus Prayer. I must say that the article served a good purpose in bringing me back to this prayer in my own life. However, it seemed a pity that many nominal Christians reading this piece would not be aware of its roots in their own tradition, a tradition which came to birth within an institution.

I renewed my devotion to the practice of the Jesus prayer, rejecting the beads, but placing my right hand over my heart and slowly invoking the name of Jesus at exhaling each breath. In the healing context, utterance of The Name was, for me, an invocation, an appeal, for its healing power to enter into my heart and spread like a balm within every corpuscle. It is a prayer for healing and simultaneous conversion of heart.

The process drew me to a venerable text in our monastery library, The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology (London: Faber and Faber, 1966) complied by Igumen Chariton of Valamo and edited with an introduction by Timothy Ware. The author was a Russian monk who, during the years between the two world wars, put together a volume of passages concerning prayer from sources dating from the 4th century Desert Fathers into the 20th century. It is a gold mine. These holy souls speak of the ancient tradition of the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner."

Here are two excerpts from the text, both from Theophane the Recluse(1815-94):

To raise up the mind towards the Lord, and to say with contrition: "Lord, have mercy! Lord, grant Thy blessing! Lord, help! - this is to cry out in prayer to God. But if feeling towards God is born and lives in your heart, then you will possess unceasing prayer, even though your lips recite no words and your body is not outwardly in a posture of prayer.

You regret that the Jesus Prayer is not unceasing, that you do not recite it constantly. But constant repetition is not required. What is required is a constant aliveness to god - an aliveness present when you talk, read, watch, or examine something. But since you are already practising the Jesus Prayer in the correct manner, continue as you are doing now, and in due course the prayer will widen its scope.

Quite an invitation! What a calling!

The little quote offered at the beginning of this essay is a pious ejaculation taught to my sophomore class in high school by a blessed Sister of St. Joseph of Brentwood, New York. It is one of the few things I remember verbatim from those years. But that invocation of The Name has stayed with me through the years, an example of the durability of ancient traditions in our Church, which are today being rediscovered in the most unlikely places. The Holy Spirit is, indeed, at work in our world.