W finałowym odcinku #MeetTheMonks udaj się z br. Jarkiem w podróż, w czasie której stara się on odpowiedzieć na Boże powołanie do życia mniszego ⛪🎻🌳🇵🇱🇮🇪:
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W finałowym odcinku #MeetTheMonks udaj się z br. Jarkiem w podróż, w czasie której stara się on odpowiedzieć na Boże powołanie do życia mniszego ⛪🎻🌳🇵🇱🇮🇪:
National Geographic magazine once described Mary the Mother of God as ‘The Most Powerful Woman In The World’. Father Simon offers this short reflection after the celebration of the Immaculate Conception:
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
Tuesday 8th December 2020
Genesis 3:9-15,20
Ephesians 1:3-6,11-12
Luke 1:26-38
Today the Church celebrates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This feast is about how God acted in an extraordinary way in the life of the Mary, so that from even the first moment of her own conception, she was rescued from the power of original sin.
What does this even mean?
Original sin is a fact of our existence, a sad fact that characterises the human condition. It darkens our intellect, distorts our imagination, and positions our will so as to be susceptible to sin. We are born this way and it seems that our own efforts have only a limited ability to remedy this situation. Because of original sin, the inclination towards sin is a part of who we are from the very beginning- from the first moment of our own conception. This inclination towards sin affects us in lots of ways and we know its consequences whether in the heroic failings shown recently by men like Theodore McCarrick, Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein.
Sin at its base is our refusal of God. “What we forget is how much religion costs. We can all too easily think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” And as the American writer Flannery O’Connor says, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.” I have always found the idea that Mary is separated from the rest of creation in order to bear God, a bit troubling surely the most interesting thing about her is that she, a person like you and me, could not only bear God, but parent Him. As Michael Longley says “The cosmos shaper has come down to earth and Mary is counting his fingers and toes”. I think one way to look at her sinlessness is to see her being totally aligned with God’s purpose and the mission of her son Jesus Christ. That reading from St Paul to the Ephesians helps us think this through in that it confidently asserts that God chose us to be holy before the world was made and to live through love in his presence and to live our life to the praise of his glory. In other words just as Mary is made sinless by the redemptive action of her Son, so we too have the same possibility of being worked over by the grace of God.
No one will ever be the Mother of God other than Mary. The singular grace conferred on Mary speaks to our own situation in another way, in that the self-evidence of a world animated by Christian principles is no longer apparent. And maybe Mary’s singular calling can give us heart to try and live out our own singular callings. But we are called to live out his call to accept His plan for us formed from before the world was made. That it’s His plan not ours is of course one of the biggest hurdles to accepting it. But this journey is mainly deep within us, and in this regard I believe that the basic experience of everyone is the same experience of human limitation but saints ultimately are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of holiness makes it possible for them to admire everybody else. And then we too can point like she does to the Saviour and the way.
Instruments of the Passion at Glenstal Abbey’s Icon Chapel and Mass Rock link these places of prayer and recall Christ’s sufferings and those of local people, past and present:
Second Sunday of Advent (B) 2020
St Mark’s Gospel, the one we’ll be hearing from most often over the coming year, begins much later than all the rest, around thirty years after the birth of Jesus – with John the Baptist, calling the people to conversion and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
At least, that’s the way it runs from the second sentence forward. But I can’t help lingering a while over the slightly blunt and undramatic first sentence: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”. It would be easy to overlook this sentence. It can feel more like a paragraph heading than an actual part of the Gospel. The reader had already announced “A reading from the holy Gospel according to Mark”. If you were half asleep, it could seem like he was repeating himself when he then said: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”. You might be inclined to tell him to skip the preambles and just get on with it. And that is what he did. He went on to read: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:’” And then we heard about John the Baptist, that voice crying out in the wilderness.
John the Baptist can often come across as a fearsome character. Artistic depictions of him through the ages haven’t always been very flattering either. He comes across as a tough and wild man, a marginal character – travelling through the desert, dressed in camel skin, living on insects and preaching repentance. Not the kind of man whom you would be inclined to let into your home if he came knocking on the door late at night.
But let’s get back to that first sentence in the Gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”. Good news… That is, of course, the meaning of the word ‘gospel’. The beginning of the good news was John’s preaching. And so, Scripture is telling us that John wasn’t a miserable or unhinged fanatical killjoy. He was, in fact, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ. His message of repentance was good news.
And, just in case we might miss the point, the Gospel goes on to liken John to the prophet Isaiah, quoting the passage we heard from Isaiah in the first reading. And what are the first words of that reading? “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” The prophet’s message isn’t fire and brimstone, or doom and gloom. It is comfort. He is told to speak ‘tenderly’. The Almighty commissions the prophet to comfort his people, to speak tenderly to them…. to be a ‘herald of good tidings’. Good tidings… Good news… Gospel… The language is beautiful, as are so many of the texts we hear in Advent. But are they just beautiful words? What do they mean?
Isaiah’s ‘gospel’ certainly wasn’t some abstract ‘pie in the sky’ kind of good news. It was very concrete and tangible indeed: Israel’s Exile in Babylon was coming to an end after 160 years. God was leading his people home. And he wouldn’t delay. The poetic language of Isaiah almost sounds like God was going to create a super-highway for his people. Obstacles would be removed, hills flattened, surfaces smoothed out. Because no barrier can prevent God from doing what he wills.
Isaiah’s ‘gospel’ was that God loves his people. And wouldn’t hide it. Their return from Exile was his very Public Display of Affection. “Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together.” God’s glory, his greatness and his might, would be revealed, not in storms or earthquakes, or in warriors’ victories. Rather, the glory of the Lord would be revealed in his LOVE for his people – a sign for all the world. “And all people shall see it together…” “Comfort, O comfort my people…” “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem…” “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms.” In this was Isaiah’s ‘gospel’: “Here is your God!”
That was the gospel that John the Baptist came to announce too: A new return from Exile. A new Exodus. His message was urgent because he wanted them to be ready for the one, more powerful than him, who was coming after him – who would baptise with the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist’s ‘gospel’ – his good news, his good tidings – was Jesus Christ himself, the Son of God. It still is. Jesus was, and is, the tender, comforting presence of God made visible, who feeds his flock like a shepherd.
But as we bask in that comforting tenderness, we shouldn’t try to domesticate and tame John the Baptist too much. We need to heed this odd-looking man’s message of repentance. Because, unless we recognise our brokenness, our sinfulness and our need for God’s mercy, we cannot truly recognise how desperately we need a Saviour. We can sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, but will we really mean it? Unless we know our need for a Saviour, how can we hear his Gospel as truly Good News, and so open our hearts to receive him when he comes? Let us prepare his way, and standing upon the heights, let us behold the joy which comes to us from God.
We can easily sleepwalk through life. Advent instructs us to ‘stay awake’ to the nudges of the Spirit and the fulness of life:
Dublin priest Father Lyons answered his monastic calling during a cycle-ride to Jerusalem and then entered the monastery on his return to Ireland. Follow his journey in this episode of #MeetTheMonks
Many stories and legends from the life of Saint Nicholas of Myra have a cultural significance at this time of year. Explore this beautiful icon of the saint before his feast on 6th December:
ADVENT 1B – 2020
This past week has brought us to the end of the Church’s liturgical year. We have come to an end, only to begin again, with this first Sunday of Advent. The regular circling of the year conditions us to think and feel in terms of beginning and ending and beginning again; and yet time is continuous and linear. We are, each one of us, moving ineluctably towards our personal end point, as far as our experience of this life is concerned, whatever about the circling measurement of the years. And it is with this in mind, that Jesus’ admonition, “Stay awake!”, sounds the way it does. The suggestion is that we might miss something important, not least, his Second Coming, if we are not alert. But, of course, we are missing stuff, all the time; every second that passes is a moment gone, never to return; a moment of my life, never to be recovered. And so, Jesus is also saying to us, with this admonition, “Be mindful! Savour every moment! Use very moment!”
Isaiah’s dramatic cry, “Oh, that you would tear the heavens open and come down!”, is a challenging reminder to us, as Judeo-Christians, that we believe that God has actually and physically intervened in our world. As Christians, we believe that there has been and there remains a vital connexion between the life and activity of God and our human history.
Advent is the time to look at this God connexion again and to re-assess our engagement with it. What difference does it make to the business of how we live? The question is being asked whether people can have a “meaningful” Christmas, this year. Just what is it that makes Christmas meaningful? Can anything make Christmas more or less meaningful than it already is, just by being Christmas? Either we are marking the event of God being born as a human child, or we are not. That is the point of Christmas, whether or not the family comes together. The in-breaking of God to our world, to redeem us from the mess we have made of it is what Christmas is about, whether or not the table is full for a family dinner, whether or not presents are given and received. These twenty-six days of Advent are designed precisely to assist us to reflect on all this; to assess, maybe to re-assess, just what it is that we believe about Jesus Christ. It might be a time to consider, or re-consider, just what we think about the Church, how closely or distantly we are, or wish to be, a part of it, as a community of believers. And in view of all that, is it also a time to reflect on what kind of Christian I have been, since last Christmas? It is precisely this latter consideration that prompts the purple of the Advent liturgy, like the purple of Lent; because, if we are honest, there is much to regret, much to repent, in our behaviour, over the past year.
This new beginning of the Church’s liturgical year provides us all with the opportunity to draw a line under the year that has passed and to re-set our personal programme for the new year, much as we would do with resolutions for the calendar New Year. God, our all-powerful father, like the potter, is moulding us, in every moment, into the image of the Son whom he loves, the Son who is to come again, as unexpectedly, but not so quietly, we are told, as he came, two thousand years ago. Most of the people then, our Jewish forebears, who had been prepared for that coming, over hundreds of years, missed it, so unspectacular was that coming; while some met it, even, with violent resistance. But more again, very tellingly, met that first coming with indifference; and it is that indifference, missing the point of it, which is the risk for us, today, as we address that oh so anxious question, “Will we have a meaningful Christmas, this year?” Well, will you?
Stay awake; and give it some thought.
We are pleased to announce our programme of Advent talks which will be broadcast via webcam at: www.glenstal.com/abbey/webcam and click ‘Talks’. Recordings will be made available on our YouTube page afterwards.
Sunday 29th November, 2pm – ‘O that you would tear the heavens and come down’ with Luke Macnamara OSB
Saturday 5th December, 10.30am – ‘Living between the already and the not-yet’ with Henry O’Shea OSB
Saturday 5th December, 1.45pm – ‘God became human so that we could become divine. Teachings of Blessed Columba Marmion’ with Columba McCann OSB
Sunday 20th December, 2pm – ‘Unexpected guests at the crib’ with Luke Macnamara OSB