The Procession Continues

Yesterday's dawn was memorable but the camera was not at hand. With the clock change of last weekend, dawn is now just about 6am here. Today I took the camera to the breakfast table and ran out into the frosty air just at the right moment.

Later I came to the computer to view the photos and found among my e-mail messages the following prayer poem from Elizabeth Goral Makowski, Associate Director of the Redemptorist Office for Mission Advancement (ROMA). She has been watching the procession of the season in Esopus documented here. How serendipitous!

A Morning Prayer     

God of goodness and new life,
each day, your plentiful grace
pours a generous libation
upon a thirsty world.


You plant abundant
fields of colorful grace
whose wild array
greets my senses and my soul.


Encourage me
to recognize
your extravagant gift, and
to drink deeply
of the wisdom of
groans and joys
planted within grace.


Stir me to see, touch,
taste, smell, hear and proclaim --
and yes! -- to be a stream,
flowing Love from your side,
watering the earth


Give me fortitude
so I may give myself,
confidently, unreservedly,
and be a place of you
where souls may come
to rest a while,
to drink your sweetness,
and to grow
in you.                   Elizabeth Goral Makowski c2009

Remarks on the Occasion of Profession of Monastic Vows

Romans 8: 18-27 Luke 11:9-13

The early twentieth century British writer W. Sommerset Maugham was a keen observer of human behavior. He was particularly astute concerning motivations of the mystical kind. “I have an idea,” he said, “ that some men are born out of their due place…they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not…this sense sends men far and wide in search of something permanent…sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.” (1)

The great St. Paul and my friend seem to me to have had that nostalgia, that longing, for a place they knew not. Each began life with a sure desire for God. Each followed life’s circuitous and astonishing path – an exploration of longing and discovery – to an end surprising and yet familiar.

Paul did not know that his dual identity as an educated Greek-speaking Jew and citizen of Rome uniquely suited him to God’s purpose in the plan of salvation. Our friend did not know that the longing in his heart would best be satisfied not in the canyons of Wall Street but in the monastic cloister.

Our reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans spoke of “eager longing”, that desire of the heart to see the face of God. It is possible for the world to provide a trysting place for that desire. But the trick is to find the place, the best container for next stage of the journey to God; fertile ground for the process to which we are drawn, to find the home we long for but do not know.

To live out of that longing, to live out of the desire for God, demands the virtue of hope. All creation groans in its steadfast clinging to the hope of salvation in our brother, Jesus Christ.

In a few minutes, after the vows of stability, conversion to the ways of monastic life, and obedience to that life are made, we will hear an ancient and plaintive plea. It is a prayer rooted in Paul’s expression of longing and hope. “I have done what you asked, according to your promise, do not disappoint me in my hope.” How do we sustain such hope, hope in what cannot be seen?

Prayer sustains our hope. Paul sees it this way too but he knows his failures in courage and assumes that we will have ours. So he consoles himself and us. “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”

The vows we hear spoken today, the solemn promise to follow the monk’s path of interior silence and solitude lived in community; the promise to be available for conversion of heart and generosity in service; that promise is made public today. In its wisdom, the Church makes it public so that the promise is known to us. In this way his promise becomes a mirror for our promises, every promise represented here; fidelity in marriage and relationship, dedication to nurturing children, the promises of the sacrament of ordination, perseverance in religious vows, faithfulness in honoring the true self, the mundane obligations of earning a living, or the duties of citizenship and service.

Neither our friend’s pledge here at this altar nor the ones we have made are easy to keep. “But the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”

And Jesus, our Savior, whose promise is the source of our hope today – our Jesus assures – “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” Oh, blessed assurance.

And before all things, the monk is a person of prayer – a praying presence before the throne of God. One who, in the words of Thomas Merton, is “like the trees which exist silently in the dark and by their vital presence purify the air.” (2)

Many today question the need for any life long promises. They find the promise of religious vows particularly confounding. They do not appreciate the transformation and the joyful liberation made possible by the promise and its fulfillment. Such freedom is what St. Paul described as “the liberty of the children of God.”

In that spirit of freedom, grounded in the love of Jesus - grounded in the Paschal Mystery of his life, death and resurrection - in that freedom, our friend, our brother, makes his pledge today.

Inspired by that love and with confidence in God’s Word, let us revisit our own promises. Let us enter into our deepest longing. Let us recommit to the journey on our way to a home we have not seen, trusting that the Holy Spirit will be our guide.

Today we can pray with the poet T.S. Eliot:


We shall not cease from exploration


And the end of all our exploring


Will be to arrive where we started


And know the place for the first time.


Through the unknown remembered gate


When the last of earth left to discover


Is that which was the beginning; ……..


Quick now, here, now, always –


A condition of complete simplicity


(Costing not less than everything)


And all shall be well and


All manner of thing shall be well


When the tongues of flame are in-folded


Into the crowned knot of fire.


And fire and the rose are one. (3)


Footnotes:
(1) W. Sommerset Maugham, The Moon and Six Pence
(2) Merton, Thomas, The Basics of Monastic Spirituality
(3) Eliot, T.S., “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets

All Souls' Day

Before Heaven ---

a Graduate School of Love

The Office of Readings of the Liturgy of the Hours provides opportunity to reflect upon some of the most powerful passages of scripture and some of the most inspiring literature of the Fathers of the Church. Every now and then wonderful sections from the documents of the Second Vatican Council appear. For the memorials of saints or feasts readers at Office are free to choose an appropriate alternative text. This morning we heard a reflection from a book we frequently use, Saint of the Day: Lives, Lessons and Feasts, 4th revised edition (ed. Leonard Foley, OFM and Pat McCloskey, OFM, St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001. The editors comment for today:

Whether or not one should pray for the dead is one of the great arguments which divide Christians. Appalled by the abuse of indulgences in the Church of his day, Martin Luther rejected the concept of purgatory. Yet prayer for a loved one is, for the believer, a way of erasing any distance, even death. In prayer we stand in God's presence in the company of someone we love, even if that person has gone before us into death.

The article concludes with a quote from Fr. Leonard Foley, OFM - Believing in Jesus.

We must not make purgatory into a flaming concentration camp on the brink of hell - or even a 'hell for a short time.' It is blasphemous to think of it as a place where a petty God exacts final punishment...St. Catherine of Genoa, a mystic of the fifteenth century, wrote that the 'fire' of purgatory is God's love 'burning' the soul so that, at last, the soul is wholly aflame. It is the pain of wanting to be made totally worthy of One who is seen as infinitely lovable, the pain of desire for union that is now absolutely assured, but not yet fully tasted.

Procession Continues

Masthead photo was taken at dusk. Here are some others. Peak is gone. Some trees are bare. More of the river is visible. A full moon provided some additional special effects.

For All the Saints

Celebrating a Solemnity

All Saints' Day

This is the stained glass dome over the sanctuary of the chapel of Mount St. Aphonsus Pastoral Retreat Center. Our monastery of Mother of Perpetual Help is on the property of the Mount which opened in 1909 as the major seminary for the Baltimore Province of the Redemptorists (Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer). It was transformed into a retreat house in the late 1980s. It is surrounded by hundreds of acres on the west shore of the Hudson River in Esopus, south of Kingston, NY.

Depicted here is the arrival of the soul of St. Alphonsus de Liguori, religious founder, moral theologian and Doctor of the Church, into the realm of heaven where the three persons of the Blessed Trinity and the Blessed Mother welcome him with all the angels. Below them is an array of saints; on the left martyrs and apostles and on the right well known saints like Teresa of Avila and St. Francis Xavier and also Redemptorist saints, most prominently St. Clement Hofbauer and St. Gerard Majella. Just below the dome are seen just the heads of twelve mosaic angels, each representing a virtue. It was the custom of Redemptorists and Redemptoristines to focus on one of these virtues each month of the year.

This work of art is an appropriate image for this great feast - "the saints in vast array." We all have our favorites, our patrons, our courts of last resort when the chips are down. Some may have a very particular devotion to a saint like Therese of Lisieux. Others have made a study of a saint like John of the Cross whose depths can never be fully plumbed.

But today I suggest that we think of the saints we ourselves have known, the saints we may have in our families, in our circles of friendship, in our church communities, or even in the larger culture around us. Those who have died are in the Communion of Saints. We do see and experience and benefit from the saintliness of others. We need to think about them, remember why we call them saints, what made them saints. Maybe in the thinking some of it will rub off on us. For them we owe a prayer of thanks to God. We owe thanks to the 'saints' who may live with us or befriend us or serve us in some way. The age of miracles has not passed. IF we think about it, we will remember some. If we look around we may see some in action.