Knowing and Loving God and Neighbor

 Mother Rebecca

June 28th 2015

                Mk 5:21-43

In chapter today I am going to share what I am personally studying and reading these days but in the end try to incorporate that into today's gospel.   So  what comes out of this combination may seem a bit strange but hopefully not too incoherent!  I have been reading bits and pieces of Julian of Norwich's “Showings” or “Revelations of Love”.   For those who do not know her that well, she had a visionary experience in 1373 when she was 30 years old.   From this she received 16 revelations centered on Jesus’ Passion.    In chapter 2 of the “Showings”, Julian expresses a desire for three gifts from God.   “The first is the mind of (Christ's) Passion.”  She explains in this first desire, wanting to experience being at the foot of the cross with Jesus’ mother and Mary Magdalene in order to more deeply understand the sufferings of Christ's Passion.   Our Cistercian Fathers talk frequently about the more we know God the more we love God.   Here with Julian, the more she loves God the more she desires to know Him.  The second gift she requested was bodily sickness in her youth – to experientially know the sufferings of Christ in her own body.   She explained that her deeper desire in this request was, through this suffering, to be cleansed by God’s mercy and open her heart to a greater longing for Him.   The more she understood His suffering for her; the more she would understand God’s love.  The third gift she longed for was to be given from God three wounds.   The 3 wounds she desired were the wounds of compunction, compassion, and greater longing for God.  (ch 2)  So with that background, I would like to reflect briefly on these three wounds.

                A wound implies an opening...a painful one.   The first wound she requested was compunction.  The word does not mean just “a pin prick” but to be pierced through completely.  The Hebrew word “saw-reed” means to puncture.  One use of the word is found in Jeremiah 31 (vs1):  “The people who ‘survived’ {or punctured by} the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest the Lord appeared.”   The remnant of Israel was not a people who escaped disaster but who were able to persevere through them to the other side…and not only found rest, but the Lord!   Compunction is to puncture the heart that has become hardened by sin, distorted desire, or disordered loves.  Yet it is a piercing, or repentance, that is full of joy.  Merton calls compunction “the great poverty that is the beginning of joy” - repentance through knowledge of our sin; joy through knowledge of God’s love.  We can think compunction is for beginners in monastic life or the spiritual journey – but it is all through our life, changing us forever.  We are never w/o God’s mercy holding us up.

                This compunction opens us to understand other people’s sufferings with compassion.  This is because it is the false self that has been pierced through.  We could say compunction is about me; compassion is about others – expanding the circle.   According to Merton, the only way to transform from self-centeredness is if God pierces through me to act and love in me.  This opens the door of the heart to universal compassion.  No longer judging others, but in solidarity, we see we are all together in need of God’s mercy and healing.   So the wound of the heart opens wider through compassion - softening the heart - and this leads to Julian’s third wound or gift:  a greater longing and union with the Body of Christ and the whole world in all its suffering.   

In Chapter 75 Julian speaks of God’s longing for us.  “Ever He draws and drinks and yet ever He thirsts and longs”.   In her revelations, she saw “3 longings in God”.  The first is that He longs to teach us to know him and love him.  Second, God longs to bring us joy.  Third, God longs to complete that joy in total union with Him.  But I was reading an article by Domenico Pezzini and he brought up an interesting observation.   He said “it is only natural that what is inferior, and as such wanting, should tend towards the one who is supreme, complete, and infinite:  this movement is what we call desire.  But if we consider desire only, or mainly, as an expression of want or lack, it may seem scandalous to associate desire with God, who is fullness of being and in need of nothing.”  But, while desire means that we want what we do not have, it may also express the longing to share what we do have.  “In this case, desire is not a lack, but a vigorous dynamic power, which...draws all created things towards union.”  Longing becomes a love that wants to share everything. 

                Whereas Julian, a healthy woman, longs to experience suffering and sickness as the means of intense longing and union with Christ, the woman with the hemorrhage in today’s gospel is the opposite.  She has had chronic suffering and sickness and longs for healing as a means of union with Christ.  Then we have Jairus who displays compassion – a desire for the healing of another who suffers.  We see how compunction heals our soul, compassion heals another, and longing for God heals our world.   It is faith that brings about healing for all three.  Julian, in suffering through compunction, reveals God’s mercy and love.  Jairus’, suffering through compassion, seeks wholeness for another through the healing power of Jesus' love.  Then there is the hemorrhaging woman, suffering illness, seeks for a healing that will bring her the completeness of joy.                          

                Faith here is the key and they are all changed forever.  Julian 20 years later re-writes her revelations because through meditating on them all her life she gained more and more knowledge of God and love of Christ manifested in the Cross.  The bleeding woman no doubt is changed forever though she is never mentioned again.  Jairus through faith changed not only himself but brought new life to his daughter as well.  They each sought out Jesus in mercy, love, and union.

                Do we realize the power of these 3 things – compunction, compassion, and longing?  Do we experience them – meditate on them - and so change our life forever!...Opening the door ever wider – entering into the wounds of Christ.  Do we use our suffering to unite us deeper to Christ?...and to others who suffer in the world?  Does our suffering lead us to compassion for the whole Body of Christ?  Or do we look for escapes to suffering? or focus on our self?   Do we embrace them with the passionate desire of Julian?  When we suffer it doesn’t suffocate desire; rather it opens the door wider.  Meditating on Christ on the cross puts our own sufferings into perspective and makes our love for God boundless.  This is our joy.  This is our longing.

All three of them had different journey.  Julian desires suffering to know God’s love; the bleeding woman desires healing to understand God’s love; Jairus desires healing for others because he himself has experienced God’s love.   What do we do with our suffering?  (Not only the suffering that pierces through our heart, but the pin pricks.)  St Therese spoke of these daily pin pricks as a martyrdom of love.  Let us not waste them!

                Today we learn from these three that our wounds are doors opening us even wider to union with God.  Let us be like Julian who sits at the foot of the cross, or the bleeding woman desiring to just touch the cloak of Jesus; or Jairus seeking Jesus for consolation and joy not for himself but the whole body of Christ.  This is the challenge of today’s gospel…do our wounds lead us to Christ?  To greater Love?  To intense longing for God?  To fullness of joy?

Our Potential in Christ

                                                                                 Mother Rebecca

  

June 14, 2015  

Mk 4:26-34

            A long time ago Kathleen gave a few classes on philosophy and one of the things we talked about was Aristotle’s concept of actuality vs. potential.   If I remember it correctly, the idea was that all things from the beginning contain the seeds of its potential.  An entire oak tree is inside an acorn waiting to grow.  Or to use the image in Mark’s gospel today:  the wheat seed already holds within it the blade, the head, and the full grain.  Potential is waiting to blossom in all things and this relates to us as well – to our soul and our capacity for God.   Our choices and passions in life determine how close we actually come to our potential.  Merton wrote, “For me, to be a saint means to be myself”…to become who God meant me to be.  It is one who reaches their full potential in God.    We are like that small mustard seed full of enormous potential.        Often in our culture we think of those who reach their potential as being people with prestigious careers, higher education, or recognized accomplishments.  However it is in God that we reach our full potential.  Our basic life pulse is spiritual and reaching our full potential is more about things like love, humility, peace, compassion, trust…like Merton’s definition of a saint – becoming who God meant me to be.  We see this in our recent Cistercian saints.  St Cyprian Tansi's main job at Mount St Bernard was refectorian.  He was even asked not to give homilies because his English was too hard to understand.  What humility!  Or Blessed Gabriella who died at the age of 24 without any words or writings to pass down to us.  Rather it was her hearts longing for Christian unity that makes her remembered and cherished.  Martha Driscoll wrote in her biography that investigators went to her home village in Sardinia to gather endearing childhood stories.  But she wrote, “No one had any they could think of!”  What humility.  Yet they had all they needed to become saints – they knew their potential laid within.

            So what does the gospel today teach us about how to develop this potential?  To become our true self?  Surprisingly, the first thing the seed teaches us is that we must die…we must die to self.  To bury our egos in the sense of renouncing the false self’s demands and its distractions from the one true love and longing of our souls.  As St Paul put it, we must be “buried in Christ”.  For, “unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it remains alone, but if it dies, it produces much grain”.  (Jn 12:24)  The source of our life is hidden in the depths of the soil. That soil is humility.  Humility involves knowing our greatness and potential but also knowing that this beauty comes not from our self but from God.   So the first lesson of the seed simply put, is we must get out of our self!...not to crush our self but to transcend our self. 

            A second lesson from the seed is that each contains unique potential.  It is what we heard in this mornings Vigil reading from St Paul:  all flesh is different and “star differs from star”. (1Cor15)  Or as Sr Ludi said, a violet cannot hope to become a rose. If a violet tries to be a rose, than it will be neither a rose nor the violet it was meant to be.    We want to live our potential…rooted in the true self and not a false hope.  Because each of us are unique we cannot judge or compare ourselves to others, for this leads either to low self-worth or to pride – the two polar opposites of humility.  Rather, we must remain rooted in humble soil to grow into what God calls us to be.  Only love, planted in the soil of humility, can be our measuring rod - never other people.

            A third lesson we learn is that a seed must wait.  This waiting is full of God’s potential, promise, and presence.  Seen in this way, our waiting can be called contemplation.  So much of prayer is about waiting or more precisely that disposition that comes with waiting.  For we all know how waiting can either create virtue or cause irritation…our disposition is essential. 

            Our culture ingrains in us at an early age that we should always be doing something, so waiting takes on a sense of restlessness.  But our Christian concept of waiting is different – it is central to our spiritual life and in a sense IS our spiritual life.  The difference is we wait with a promise and that promise allows us to wait.  And just as each seed is unique so is its time of waiting.  A Sequoia seed can lie in wait for up to 100 years before germinating while the crocus always blooms at the first spring rains.   Archbishop Hanus spoke of this waiting in our vow of stability.  Quoting Jeremiah: a tree planted by running streams bears fruit even in dry seasons.  We can’t cultivate virtue or fruit w/o remaining planted in one place – bearing the droughts and floods in perseverance.

            Our waiting contains not only a promise but a blessing!  Something will be born through waiting.  As an example, a pregnant woman waits, but waits with confidence and assurance that a child will be born.  In the waiting something is already happening.  It is invisible but certain.  Each day the baby is developing in a hidden way.  The waiting has purpose as well as promise.  It would be impossible, and disastrous, to rush the process.  Or to use the analogy in today’s gospel, a farmer scatters seed…in the waiting things are happening.  He “knows not how” but he believes.  This is important to understand in our spiritual life.  We can think “Nothing is happening in prayer” or “I am wasting time” – when God is working all the while in a hidden way “but we know not how”.  If we don’t understand this, we will confuse waiting with darkness and prayer with absence.  Our job, like the farmer in the parable, is to peacefully have faith in the purpose and to trust in the promise and the blessing.

So the seed teaches us many things:

            First, let us never limit our self to smallness in love and compassion, but realize our potential is beyond what we can see in the buried seed or the blade that shoots up…it continues to grow until the harvest…and then some!   Our only limits in God are the ones we place on our self.

            Second, as Cassian says, humility must be the overarching disposition of all virtues.  Humility is the foundation, or seed bed, in which all virtues grow.  Archbishop Hanus remarked strongly, “without humility we cannot be a monk”.   Blessed Joseph Caussant trusted in this humble waiting and grew into a joyful saint.

            Third, to tweak a line in St Benedict’s Ch 49, we can say our life is a continual Advent.  We are continually seeking and finding God in our life…we are continually waiting and discovering - this is ceaseless prayer.

            Fourth, faith is essential to keep us from wilting on the vine, or being choked by the weeds, or snatched by the birds passing by.  God’s work in us is often invisible, but we are certain He is present with a promise and a blessing.

            So where is Jesus wanting to you grow?  What are some of the lessons you learned from the seed in your lectio?  Let us apply them to our own life, for these lessons will bring us to our full potential in God and allow us to bear much fruit for His kingdom.

Fifth Sunday of Lent

Mother Rebecca Stramoski

March 22, 2015

            Jn 12:20-33

            We spoke last week of the attraction of the cross.  Today this message is repeated: Jesus lifted up will draw all people to Himself.  This repetition is not surprising since last week we were talking about the cross as the center-piece of our lives where all paradoxes, graces, and salvation flow.  So we remain again at the foot of the cross looking with love at Jesus who is looking lovingly at us.  Love always attracts and the cross of Christ is the greatest love.  But there is a catch to this seemingly simple attractive force of love.  We love, but unfortunately, we love many things.  Yes, we do love the cross but we also love our comfort and our will and our possessions and our time…and the list goes on!  Our arms are not big enough to embrace all the things we love! 

            I read a book during retreat that used the image of a magnet and its attractive force.  If you put a nail close to a magnet, the nail sticks.  Put another nail by the nail on the magnet and it sticks too.  We can repeat this on and on until we have a trail of nails piled high.  Things begin to get heavy and messy as the strings of love pile on and on. 

            This is a reason we want to return daily to the cross…to make Christ crucified the center of our passion and the only desire of our heart.  When the soul is filled with Christ it has no more longings.  So here comes another image.  A horseshoe magnet can rapidly pick up pieces of iron.  However if you put a piece of iron right across the two ends of the magnet, it will cease to attract anything else.  The magnetic circuit is completed, and the magnet rests perfectly quiet, refusing to go beyond its own circle of pure content…and content.  When my soul is filled with Jesus, He completes the circuit of my soul’s passions and longings.  He is my salvation and all my desire – I have no need to pick up other things.  Haven’t we all experienced this?  Hasn’t your soul come to a complete rest when it has been absorbed by Christ?  When He has drawn you to Himself, have you not entered into rest?  Just as Jesus said, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest” (Mat11:28).   This peace is another fruit of the attractive force of the crucified Christ.  

            Lent is a time of recommitment…a time for us to examine our lives and set things in proper order with God – with our sole passion being for Christ.   Jesus says in our gospel today “that to serve me is to follow me”, but adds “where I am”.  Jesus says follow me “where I am”- not where I think I should be or where I want to be, but simply, where He is.  Without that completed circuit, so to speak, this one phrase can cause us many troubles.  Purity of heart allows us to see Jesus where He is.  Or like those Greeks in today’s gospel, with our whole being (heart, mind, and soul) we beg “Sir, we would like to see Jesus”.    

            So let us look at where Jesus went in His earthly travels.  We heard at the beginning of our Lenten season that Jesus was led into the desert.  So we should not be surprised when we find ourselves in desert places.  This is where we must all eventually travel.  The desert is not a comfortable place to be.  It is the place of the heart which we must enter - where things are stripped down to essential truths so that our love, desires, and thoughts may become single focused and pure.  It is a difficult road that leads us to the truth of who we are, but it also leads us to the truth of who God is, which brings us to peacefully rest in His heart…where that magnetic circle is complete.  It is where “the grain of wheat dies” in order “to produce much fruit”; where “we lose our life” so as “to preserve it for eternal life”

            But what led Jesus into the desert?  Certainly it was not the flesh because the flesh does not seek out the uncomfortable and barren spots.  Rather we are told that it was the Spirit that led him into the desert.  For only the Spirit can give us the courage to enter our consciences honestly and recommit our lives and purify our hearts. 

            Jesus was led to another place as well…the cross.  With this in mind, can we hear the words of Jesus again:  “to serve me is to follow me where I am”.  In other words, to serve God am I willing to follow him all the way to the cross?  Can I truly say with St Paul, “I want to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified”.

            When I was new in the life I was speaking to someone in community about my struggling with something.  (To be honest I can’t remember what it was but at the time I thought it was huge!!  You know how that goes!!)  I told her I had been taking it to the cross of Jesus every day and yet it was still with me!!!  She responded that I don’t go to the cross and throw my troubles up to Jesus hanging there…I need to mount the cross with Jesus.  I was shocked, or more accurately, “awoken” by that statement!  Later, what came to mind was St Paul’s words “I have been crucified with Christ and the life I live is not my own but Christ living within me.”  Subconsciously I was thinking that if I took my sufferings to Christ He would take them away, but I realized this was a cross I was to bear for Him and with Him.  It was God’s choice on whether it was more beneficial for me to carry the cross or not and God’s discretion on when this suffering would turn into new life.  It was like I was expecting Jesus to be where I was and how I thought it should be, and not following where Jesus actually was and where Jesus wanted me.  It is easy to slip into this way of praying if we are not careful.    

            So yes, Lent is a time to enter our hearts honestly and to look at our commitments and promises.   Sometimes we prefer distractions or even to entertain the temptations in the desert.  But distractions bring a lack of peace and a multiplication of loves like the nails piling high on the magnet.  So whether we are being led to the desert or to the cross, let us stay focused on Christ…let His love attract us to Himself.  This is the only way we can “look forward to holy Easter with that joy and spiritual longing” that St Benedict prescribed during Lent.    

            So let us embrace the cross with joy, peace, and trust, and let its love attract us, knowing that Christ did all of this…for us!

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Mother Rebecca Stramoski

March 15, 2015

Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21

            In today’s gospel Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert so must the Son of Man be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”   Later in John’s gospel, Jesus will address this message to everyone: “when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself.” 

            When a charismatic leader dies a lot of his personal power and attraction dies with him.  What remains is a memory and perhaps a few books and insights.  But with Jesus it is all different.  The Lord’s power to draw all people to himself is mainly in His death, when he was lifted up on the cross.  How ironic it seems that His main attractive force is the cross.  What remains in Jesus’ death is not a memory but a living presence and a Spirit of driving force.  The written words that remain speak as personally to us today as when they were written two thousand years ago!  They are not just insights but have the power to save.

            I remember BJ recalling how Colum would give him a scripture passage to ponder in prayer each day.  She gave him a verse from 1 Cor (2:2): “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified “.   BJ came back the next day and asked for another passage.   But Colum told him to stay with that one sentence for a full week.  He was surprised - how could he meditate on one verse for a whole week?  But Colum told BJ that unless he understood Christ crucified, he could not be a true disciple of Jesus. In other words if we don’t understand Christ crucified we have missed Jesus’ central message and His greatest act of love.  The cross is the center-point of Truth’s many paradoxes.  It is at the cross we understand that death is life, loss is gain, weakness is strength…and our darkest moments are filled with greatest light.  Jesus’ glory arose in His humiliation, love in his suffering, and mercy in his dying words.  This is what we want to emulate in our own lives:  humility grounded in truth, a love stronger than death, and a mercy without limits.  Jesus taught us this not only by his words but by his life – to be His disciple we must do the same.  This is why Colum was saying we must know Christ as crucified, for His cross is the attractive force of God’s love and it is by this that we are saved.  Do you find the cross attractive?  Is it something you want to embrace in your life?  Do you see the cross of Christ as the center of your life?  Pope Benedict remarked in his Encyclical, “God is Love {and} it is only by looking at Jesus dead on the cross that this fundamental truth can be known and contemplated.  In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.” 

            In this Lenten Season we want to spend time at the foot of the cross and let Jesus teach us, inspire us, forgive us, love us, and encourage us.  As Pope Benedict said, it is the place of infinite love and eternal life.  Love and eternal life have been the two greatest desires of all humankind throughout all ages!   The cross is an attractive force because it offers us both.  Jesus held on to nothing in order to give us everything.  To be like Christ is our ambition and our mission - to love like Him and divest ourselves of everything that is not Him…that is not love…that is not life giving.  But in the cross we don’t just see Jesus’ greatest expression of love.  In the cross we see what humanity is capable of - we are capable of tremendous love, like Jesus, but it requires a self-transcendence in surrender and trust.  We must spend time at the cross to learn this lesson and received its grace.

            St Bernard confirms this when he said, “We too when faced with our trials in community, with the crosses we must bear, here is our greatest opportunity to love, our greatest chance to be generous.  So like Christ, we desire to embrace the cross.  We don’t want to erase, but rather embrace, the crosses of Life and Love for the sake of our God.   Divine nature never worked more nobly and beautifully than when human nature must suffer because it is in our weakness that God’s power is strongest.” 

            When I was on retreat I would stay in church and pray after mass.  There was an 8 foot crucifix behind the altar and by its side was a huge icon of Jesus holding open the Scripture passage “I am the Light of the world.  He who follows me will not walk in darkness but have the light of life.”  At first I thought the two being put so close together was strange, but as the days went on I came across in a book I was reading:  “Not to Bethlehem, where the stars of Christmas burned, do we look for our greatest comfort, but to that place where the sun was darkened at midday and the face of eternal love was veiled.”  (Charles Spurgeon)  Yes, how true this darkest of days became our greatest light.  The cross…this is our guiding star in the Lenten Season.  If we are struggling or grieving, look to the cross.  “If the first glance does not quiet you and bring you consolation and peace, then look and look again, for every grief and trial will die where Jesus died.”

            Let us make this Lent a time in which we sit under the cross of Christ and give God our whole being – our mind, heart, soul, and time.   And let us allow the cross to bring us comfort, love, mercy, and salvation, for today Jesus is attracting us to Himself!...The question is “will we come?”!