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Abbot Brendan Coffey OSB

Christmas is very different in Bethlehem this year. The Christian Churches in the Holy Land have decided that the only celebrations in Bethlehem will be religious. No decorations, lights, trees or festivities of any kind. People are in mourning. This is the reality of Christmas 2023 in the land of Jesus’ birth, a sad miserable reality.

This Christmas we are called to go deeper. Tinsel, fairy lights, turkey and ham will not do it this year, not when people are suffering and dying in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza.

Today we like our religion to be like fast food—cheap and easy, something we don’t have to work too much for or think too much about. That’s not how a person becomes fit and healthy, neither is it how a person becomes wise and holy.

This year we must become a Bethlehem; the place where the Word was made flesh. Bethlehem means “house of bread,” and bread here means the Word of God. Bread strengthens the heart, the psalmist says and he wasn’t just talking about nutrition.

This Christmas Bethlehem and the Holy Land are drenched in blood; so how on earth can I find God in this catastrophe of human misery? Christmas teaches us that divinity is always where one least expects to find it. God is never predictable. By becoming Bethlehem we are reminded of the dignity of our humanity, even if we are living through a spectacle of barbarity and lack of humanity.

When Christ was born, Herod, the Roman puppet king, sent his soldiers to Bethlehem and they left behind them a scene of devastation. The Gospel of Matthew records this slaughter of the innocents. We usually airbrush out this part of the Christmas story, because it doesn’t sit well with the idyllic scene in the crib, but this is reality my friends.

The prophecy of Jeremiah still speaks to us tonight.

A voice was heard in Ramah,

lamenting and much weeping,

Rachel weeping for her children,

And she would not be comforted

Because they are no more.

Life is not always sweet and nice. Think of what happened on the streets of Dublin on 23^rd November. This is the world we have become. This is why it is so important to celebrate the real Christmas. To remind ourselves that war is an absolute evil. That violence is never the answer.

The famous conversation between Petrarch, a fourteenth century Renaissance man and humanist, and the madman, seems oddly appropriate tonight. The madman saw soldiers on the march and asked “where are they going?” Petrarch answered, “To the war.” The madman continued, “This war will have to end in peace someday, won’t it?” “Certainly”, said Petrarch. “Well then”, said the madman, “why not make peace at once before starting the war?”

Today we live in a world of fear. We fear life; we fear death, and everything in between. The antidote to our fear is the coming of Christ. The first words of Adam to God after the fall were “I was afraid.” The first words at the birth of Jesus are those of the angels to the shepherds, “Do not be afraid.” Despite everything, do not be afraid.

When the angels appeared to the shepherds, the Glory of the Lord enveloped them in light and that light brought them to the manger. If enough people become enveloped in this light, the world will change.

Fr Jarek Kurek OSB

Please note the following changes to the liturgical timetable during the Christmas period, including details of Confession times and the opening and closing of the guesthouse. Visitors are welcome to attend the liturgies which take place in the Abbey Church, and our friends around the world can join online via the webcam.

LITURGY TIMES

Sunday 24^th December

10am               Mass for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

6pm                 Vespers I

11.20pm          Vigil Office

12 midnight     Mass

Monday 25^th December

8am                 Lauds

10am               Mass (no music)

12 noon           Solemn Conventual Mass

5pm                 Vespers II

Tuesday 26^th December

7am                 Matins and Lauds

12.10pm          Mass

6pm                 Vespers

Wednesday 27^th to Saturday 30^th December

7am                 Matins and Lauds

12.10pm          Mass

6pm                 Vespers

8.35pm            Compline (or Office of the Resurrection on Saturday)

 Sunday 31^st December

7am                 Lauds

10am               Mass

12.35pm          Sext

6pm                 Vespers I

8.10pm            Vigil

Monday 1^st January

7am                 Lauds

12.10pm          Mass

6pm                 Vespers II

8.35pm            Compline

The normal liturgical timetable resumes on Tuesday 2^nd January.

CONFESSIONS

Saturday 23^rd December at 2pm, 3pm and 4pm in the Abbey Church.

GUESTHOUSE

Closes Thursday 21^st December and reopens on Friday 29^th December.

RECEPTION AND SHOP

There will be limited opening hours during the Christmas period. Please call ahead.

Fr Cuthbert Brennan OSB

This third Sunday of Advent is called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin for joy but it’s hard to be joyful when the world seems so full of violence and fear. There are many wildernesses in our world today, the refugee crisis, the places of conflict, the environmental crisis and it is into these very spaces that we are invited to be heralds of joy. John the Baptist who we meet in the gospel this morning shows us how to live as someone who recognises and has a profound understanding of the joy of God and the hope of restoration that Jesus brings.

The gospel of John uses a different title for John the Baptist. He’s called a witness, a witness for the light. And the text this morning tells us more about who John wasn’t than who he was; he wasn’t the light. The religious leaders question John because they want to put him in some pigeonhole, they’re determined to place John in their preconception of what religion ought to be. They want to place John within their conventional expectations, they want to see him fit into their hopes for the future of Israel. No matter what they suggest,
Messiah, Elijah, a prophet, John’s answer is No, no, no, I’m not that, no! The only positive thing John says about himself is that he is a voice. “I am the voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.”

I am God’s loudspeaker, I am the smell of coffee that wakes you up in the morning, I am that alarm bell in the school at 7.30 that shatters your sleep. I am the voice that has only one thing to tell you, the light is coming, “I am not the light. I’m a witness to the light, I’m a voice, I’m someone who points to the light, I’m somebody who tells you that the light is coming but I am not the light.”

To the religious experts who do what religious experts do, they define, classify, characterise and pigeon hole God, John tells them and us “You do not know, you cannot define, you do not know the light that is coming into the world, into the darkness.” At this point in our Advent journey we are told that our hopes will be fulfilled but not necessarily fulfilled as we expect, by the light that dawns to our darkness. Our expectations are going to be met but not in the way we expect. An important question to ask at his point in the Advent journey is “For what am I hoping for Christmas?” It’s an important question because, like some of those people who questioned John, we may miss something so fragile and mysterious as the Light of Christ if we are too full of our explanations, too full of our definitions and expectations.

For what are you hoping? Well, if you’re like a lot of people around here, maybe you’re not sure. What brought you to church on this third Sunday of Advent? Maybe you didn’t even know it was the third Sunday of Advent. Maybe, like the rest of us you are still searching for God. And John the Witness, says that’s ok. An open heart may be a lot better than one that is full of definitions and preconceptions, that there’s no room left for any light. This Sunday, with John, let us set aside our hopes and expectations and simply let the light dawn among us. Let us admit that we are in the dark and let us allow the light to enter our darkness.

When he began his ministry, one of the problems for Jesus was that people thought they knew how the Messiah should act and what the Messiah should say. And when Jesus didn’t do what they expected, they rejected him and crucified him. In these last days of Advent let us cultivate a receptivity for surprise, wonder, the shock of God who is not the God we thought we knew, and not even the God we thought we wanted. Let us be open to encountering God in the person of Jesus Christ this Christmas that we may stand as witnesses to the light, the light coming into the world, the light that the darkness of the world has not, despite over 2000 years, overcome.

Fr Christopher Dillon OSB

Everything that we have heard in these readings is calling us to make ready, to make preparations; but for what? All around the world, people are preparing for Christmas, whether they are Christian or not, because it is a time for mid-winter festivity. But this is different; this involves an encounter with someone and preparation for that encounter. Last week, we were urged to be awake and alert for it; now we are being urged to prepare for it; and all the time against the backdrop of those cautionary words of the Letter of St Peter that,
where God is involved, a day can mean a thousand years and a thousand years a day. Because it is God that we are speaking about, God whose decision and desire, we have discovered, is to be with us and to bring us, ultimately, to be with him for all eternity.

This plan, we are led to believe, has been on the go from the beginning of time and each of us deals with it, in our own time, as best we can, not knowing what point of which thousand years is ours in all the waiting and expectation of the past and future centuries. The one thing we do know, as far as our Christian faith teaches us, this being with, this connexion with God is the heart and goal of our existence as human beings; so our preparing for it is the most important activity of our lives.

John the Baptist is the figure whom God appointed two thousand years ago to alert us all to this great truth, so his words are important for us to hear and to understand. His recommendation to us is repentance and the confession of our sins. By that is meant that we need to adjust our way of thinking and so reset our values and priorities from the ways of the everyday world to the ways and values of God, as we have learned them from Jesus Christ, and that we behave accordingly. It is a regular event, like house cleaning; stuff happens, stuff piles up and we have to deal with it in any walk of life. Christmas presents, the Christmas tree, Christmas dinner are all very well, but they are
second to this.

The really important matter in all this preparation is quite simply our
behaviour. Again, our Christian faith tells us that God has come to us, in the person of Jesus Christ, to teach us how to behave as sons and daughters of God. That is what Advent, the Coming, means. “Learn from me”, Jesus is quoted as saying, “for I am gentle and humble of heart”(Mt.11,29). “Gentle” is fairly obvious, involving being kind and polite; but “humble” is more subtle. It means being down to earth honest and truthful about oneself and everything else. Any one of us could do worse than bringing them as our Christmas gift to those around us. Either way, this is the kind of preparation that we are being
called on to make for the Coming of God into our world, into our lives. So it is up to you and to me; no one can do this for us; perhaps a little less screen time and more attention to what is going on around us.

The monks of Glenstal Abbey wish you a blessed solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us!