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Fr. Henry O’Shea:

My eyes are spent with weeping; my stomach churns; 

my bile is poured out to the ground 

because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, 

because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city. Lamentations 2:11

Even people who are not well versed in Scripture, are aware that the prophet Jeremiah was not a fun person. And, indeed, in Jewish tradition he is called the ‘Weeping Prophet’ – as evidenced by our opening quotation from the book of Lamentations, which some scholars believe was also written by Jeremiah.. 

In today’s first reading we hear of Jeremiah being literally stuck in the mud. Having offended the political and military establishment, he is thrown into a drained cistern to wallow in the slime. But, so-called stick-in-the-muds are not always wrong. 

Interesting how nothing changes under the sun. It seems to be a universal and eternal practice that those who point out uncomfortable truths or prospects or those who dispute currently unfashionable opinions are sidelined, are ‘othered’, sometimes even eliminated. Think of our media with their various agendas and distortions. Think of the varied understandings and uses of the terms ‘facts’, ‘true facts’, ‘alternative facts’. Fake news.  

Jeremiah’s king, Zedekiah, is not the first political, religious or, indeed, family leader to claim helplessness. Claiming helplessness while hanging on until they recognise what is of greater advantage to themselves and seize the opportunity. 

Those who prefer their Jesus to be gentle, meek, mild, amenable, undemanding, may be unsettled by the Jesus of today’s gospel. He makes it very clear that he has not come to bring peace on earth but, rather, fire and division. Does this mean that he favours war? Does this mean that he dismisses peace? The answer is no on both counts – even if many times in the last two millennia, Christians have used this gospel passage to justify war, persecution, exploitation and exclusion.

The sword that Jesus brings is the sword of his living word that, we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews, is alive and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. The warfare Jesus is talking about is a battle for minds and hearts, a battle within minds and hearts. And, as Jesus notes, that battle can even be within families. Within and between one’s own mind and heart.

Jesus has little time for a peace that is the comfortable, or better, the ‘comfy’ peace of material security, well-regulated predictability with the occasional thrill thrown in to reassure ourselves that we have what is often a self-deceiving freedom. Bad things happen, but happen, we pray O Lord, to other people and if possible in other far-away places. We all have our Munichs and Alaskas. We all have our Gazas and our Omaghs.

The author of today’s second reading provides a perspective, that is in and beyond time, but also now and the future, for those singed by the fire of Christ. Uncompromisingly, we are told that our only true horizon exists and consists in Jesus, who leads us in our faith and brings it to perfection. Jesus has gone before us and stays with us on and in this focus on finality. He has gone before us in the battle for minds and hearts by enduing the cross. Enduring the cross for a joy that was still in the future. He stays with us encouraging and supporting us, making everything possible for us, in our battle, sometimes fierce, sometimes half-hearted, our battle with the distractions, the waverings, the false promises of sin. 

In Chapter 4 of his Rule, St Benedict admonishes monks not to make a false peace. Jesus goes before us and stays with us in our efforts not to settle for mindless, self-centered, imagined peace. 

The same book of Lamentations with which we began also tells:    

Because of the loving devotion of the Lord 

       we are not consumed,

for His mercies never fail.

They are new every morning;

great is his faithfulness!

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,

“therefore I will hope in Him.”

      The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,

to the soul who seeks Him. Lamentations 3:22-26

Fr. John O’Callaghan: “Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” 

There are several feasts in the Church’s year where the Blessed Virgin Mary features greatly: like the Annunciation of the Lord (on 25th March); the Nativity of Jesus Christ (nine months later) and today’s feast of Mary’s Assumption into heaven. The foundation of them all, their sine qua non, is what Elizabeth said in today’s gospel: “Blessed is she that believed!” That belief allowed the conception of Christ and the whole sequel.

Belief was her role in what was ultimately the saving work of Christ. Mary was there as ‘the servant of the Lord’, to serve his project. Belief allowed her “to concieve first of all in her heart, before even in her womb,” as St Augustine said. And she continued to believe through the pregnancy, the birth, and Jesus’ youth, during the ups and downs of his mission and, against all the odds, at his crucifixion and into the mystery of his resurrection. She, his perfect disciple, has that to teach us, to believe in God carrying out, fulfilling, his mysterious plan throughout the vicissitudes of life so that, in the end, all may be well. Mary’s assumption into glory, which we celebrate today, is God’s work come full circle for her.

Time and eternity coincide in Mary. Her life, like that of all humanity, is evoked dramatically in our first reading, from the Apocalypse: ‘A woman in labour, crying out in the pangs of birth;….a huge red dragon with seven heads and ten horns – it stopped in front of the woman as she was having the child, so that he could eat it as soon as it was born from its mother’. This scene recalls that scene in the Garden of Eden where Eve, mother of us all, is promised that childbirth would occur in pain. The dragon which evokes Satan, sometimes called the devil, the serpent, represents the more or less explicit presence and power of evil, hostility to God and to his people. And the biblical author may well intend us to also perceive in the woman, Mary, the new Eve, who is giving birth to the Messiah, surrounded by hostile powers, and the imperial power of Rome. 

It is into such an ambiguous world of good and evil that the Messiah was to be born and in which Mary was to make her pilgrim way, and we ours. As her path must have challenged and shaped her faith, so does our experience challenge and, hopefully, mature our faith. Like her, we must rise to the challenge. 

In our own times the sheer monstruous suffering in the world tests our faith. It alone seems to prove there is no God. Alternatively we can take the matter of God’s invisibility. For those able to see with the eyes of faith, that is his very greatness; but for anyone who cannot or will not make the leap, it makes God somehow refutable. Faith is always under threat but it is also our individual struggle with ourselves, and with God. It is not easy, and faith is not a light that scatters all our darkness; it is a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.

We know that personal suffering cannot be eliminated, yet suffering can assume a meaning, can be an act of love, and an entrustment into the hands of God who does not abandon us. To those who suffer God’s response is his accompanying presence; he shares our path. Even death is illumined and can be experienced as the ultimate call to faith. ‘Come!’ is spoken by the Father, to whom we can abandon ourselves in the confidence that he will keep us steadfast even in our final passage. 

Mary’s true greatness is to be found in that enduring trust in God, holding faith through the profound and perplexing challenges of her life. Her belief that the scriptures were being fulfilled called for radical renewal, evolution of her faith, deepening of it and she upheld it right to the end, to the cross itself. She is the perfect icon of faith. She exemplifies the long history of faith of the Old Testament, with its account of so many faithful  women. So Mary is our inspiration throughout the vicissitudes of life, both individually and collectively as the Christian people of God. 

And a life beyond this one, to which she has gone, is part of the Christian way of looking at things. She is one who put her trust in God and now she is gone to God, to glory. May she help us to entrust ourselves fully to Him, believe in his love,  especially in times of difficulty,  until the dawn of the undying day which is Christ himself!

Fr. Simon Sleeman:

Abraham our father in faith. No explanation, no faith definition. But a story, yours and mine, unfolding.

Abraham, called out, leaving,  leaving, leaving self-defined confinement, plunging into the larger reality of grace.

Trusting, trusting, trusting in his God. Aligned to his will, obedient direction, one foot moving, then the other.

Tested, tested, tested…fully. Fantasy and foolishness flushed out. His treasure on a donkey.

Hemingway said that, ‘every generation needs a war or its moral equivalent to test it.’

‘We live by forms and patterns’, Wallace Stegner says,‘if the forms are bad we live badly’.

Faith form untested – falters and folds, a kind of ‘wish upwards’, lukewarm, it buckles, the risk of faith too great.

Abraham’s faith-form holds against the odds of sin and sight. Hard travelling faith, set in muscle and bone, sinews and synapses.

Alert to  the steering power of spirit… freed. Living by faith – living in grace, a strange thing happens…life.

Fr. Jarek Kurek: Good Samaritans. At the end of February this year, we had the joy of welcoming to Glenstal the chief chaplain of the Polish community in Ireland, Fr Stanislaw Hajkowski. Many of the monks still remember him — an energetic, well-built man in his late sixties. At the time of his visit here, he was about to travel to the continent to collect the relics of the Ulma Family — the relics we have with us today. It was Fr Stanislaw’s deep desire to bring the relics to Ireland and to share the tragic, yet uplifting, story of this Polish family with those he had lived among for a long time.

Fr Stanislaw never made it back. He died in the evening on the day he collected the relics. But the relics were brought to Ireland and are briefly here in Glenstal.  As we gather to celebrate the death and resurrection of Christ at Mass, the presence of the relics here today helps us to reflect on how this mystery was also played out in the story of the Ulma Family – their life and death – during the horrible time of World War Two.

But before we look at them more closely, let me tell a story. It may ring some bells, though the ending may strike you as different…There was once a man going about his business, trying to live his life peacefully and without offence to those around him. One day, as he went about his life, a group of men set upon him. They robbed him, stripped him, and left him by the side of the road for dead.

Presently, along came an educated, God-fearing man, known for his generosity and charity. He saw the man who had been beaten and robbed, but he crossed over the road and carried on his way. Shortly after, a priest came along — a well-respected man of wisdom and learning. Seeing his neighbour in distress, he too crossed over to the other side. After all, he would not be seen helping a Jew.

And so the Jew lay in the gutter, waiting for the good Samaritan. But there was no good Samaritan. Not this time.

The Ulma Family, in 1942, were seemingly ordinary people — he in his forties, his wife, pregnant with their seventh child, just turned 30. The times were very challenging — for everyone, it goes without saying — but especially for all the Jews being hunted by the Nazis and their collaborators in every country.

It became crystal clear to Józef Ulma, the head of the family, that he could do nothing other than help the eight Jews who knocked on their door one day. He saw eight people in true distress, beaten and robbed of their right to live. In an instant, he felt that it was his family’s mission to be Good Samaritans — they could not turn their backs on those helpless Jews. For eighteen months, they kept them safe in the attic of their house. But not one of them made it through to the end of the war.

On the 24th of March 1944, the German police came and shot everyone — first all the hiding Jews, then Józef and his pregnant wife Wiktoria, and then, after some deliberation, also their six little children. There was no room for mercy — for anyone.

One could legitimately ask: was it worth trying to help those Jews, if ultimately it ended in utter failure? The answer must be one, and only one: a resounding yes.

As a certain wise man said, there are moments in our lives when we cannot act otherwise. Józef and Wiktoria Ulma didn’t save those eight Jews — but they did save Man. They saved Humanity — also for our sake.

The eight people they saved back then call out to us to respond to any stranger who stands in need of our help today, who, even voicelessly asks for our mercy.

It is for you and me to be — regardless of the outcome — truly humane, following the precepts of the Gospel in our dealings with them.

It is for us to be Good Samaritans, to be people of mercy. In today’s gospel Jesus calls us to become rich towards God. Being the Good Samaritan, like the Ulma family, does precisely that.

Please note changes to the liturgical timetable and opening hours during the monastic community’s annual retreat which takes place from Monday 4^th to Saturday 9^th August:

• Matins and Lauds: Celebrated at 7am from Tuesday 5^th August to Sunday 10^th August.

• Mass: No change to the usual timetable.

• Vespers: No change to the usual timetable.

• Compline: No Compline in the Abbey Church on Monday 4^th, Thursday 7^th and Friday 8^th August.

• Guesthouse: Closed from 3^rd to 11^th August.

• Monastery reception and shop: Open between 10am-4pm from 28^th July to 9^th August.

The concept of a summer spirituality may seem unusual, but the rhythm of the Christian liturgical year can be seen to invite some such phenomenon in our spirituality. The widely acknowledged relationship between the liturgical season of Lent and spring already establishes the beginnings of the connexion between the annual rhythm of nature and liturgical expression.

Easter, as the climax of Lent and spring, bursts upon the northern hemisphere with an eager celebration of light and the promise of early summer. The blossoming trees promise the fruits of a following harvest, through summer and autumn. Meanwhile, the leisurely fifty-day celebration of Eastertide leads up to Pentecost, to mark the release of the energy of the Holy Spirit into time and people; and the splendid feasts which follow, the Holy Trinity, Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Immaculate Heart of Mary luxuriate in this demonstration of divine graciousness.

All this is reflected in the natural sphere, as spring’s new growth matures with summer, buoyed by the Spirit’s energy of life and the earth produces its good things, in vegetables and soft fruit. All this will climax with the longer lasting fruit of Autumn in the apples and pears, when the feast of Christ the King brings the year to its conclusion. Then the earth will enter into its Winter sleep, when Advent invites us to take stock and to begin again with our wonder at the birth of Life in the Son of God.

Christopher Dillon OSB

Abbot Columba McCann: Ask and it will be given to you.  I asked God for a winning lottery ticket, but I didn’t win.  What went wrong? What went wrong is that God was offering me something far greater, something far more valuable, something beyond what I can actually imagine:  the Holy Spirit.

If we ask God for the Spirit we will receive.  We will begin to think with the mind of Christ himself.  We will have godlike instincts. We will live a divine life in human form, just as Jesus did when he walked the earth.  But since all this is, at first, too big for us to handle, God feeds us this new life, this new relationship, piece by piece.

And so we ask God for our daily bread.  We are asking God to keep feeding us this new life, this new way of being with him, this new way of being in the world.  Like any food, you don’t just get this once and then forget to eat again.  We have to get it continually, and that’s why Jesus says ‘ask, and keep on asking’ – because that’s what the original Greek meaning is.  Ask and keep on asking, knock and keep on knocking, seek and keep on seeking.

As a young child I was quite fussy about food, and sometimes my mother would have to coax me to open my mouth and take just one more mouthful, again and again and again until my dinner was finished.  She must have had the patience of Job!  When we repeatedly ask God for heavenly food, for the Holy Spirit, it’s not because God is mean and has to be pestered; it’s more like continually opening our mouth for more.  God can’t force feed us his nourishment.  We have to open our mouth by asking for it.

Once we stop asking for a live relationship with God, it stops.  Because it takes two to tango.  A dance designed for two comes to an end if one partner stops, even though the other wants to continue.  If we stop looking towards God for life, then he can’t bring our relationship with him any further.  It we keep looking to God in every situation, then we are protected, and furthermore, we have a huge influence on the people around us. It’s like a phone conversation.  We have to stay on the line with God.  If we hang up on God then the line goes dead, and we go dead. If we stay on the line, then we really live.

When I was a teenager I was mad about trains, and used to watch them for hours.  Once I was on a train where the driver’s compartment wasn’t in a separate locomotive but was at the end of a carriage.  The curtain that would normally hang behind the glass partition was drawn back.  It meant that by sitting right at the top of the carriage, I could watch the track ahead as if I were the driver, and I could watch what the driver was doing.  It was train-spotter heaven!

I noticed that every minute or so a bell would ring in the driver’s compartment, and a light would flash on his dashboard.  He would then pull some kind of lever.  I noticed that under the light was a label marked ‘vigilance’.  Later I guessed that this was probably some kind of safety mechanism to ensure that the driver hadn’t fallen asleep.  A few days ago I researched this online.  I discovered that in Ireland in the 1970’s they installed on trains a thing called a ‘Vigilance Control System’.  I read:

The system would typically monitor the driver’s actions, such as applying brakes, changing throttle settings, or operating other controls. If the driver failed to perform any of these actions within a set time (e.g., 60 seconds), the system would activate a warning (e.g., flashing light, buzzer). If the driver did not respond to the warning within a further period (e.g., 17 seconds), the system would automatically apply the brakes to bring the train to a stop.

So I think that, when Jesus tells us to keep on asking, keeping on searching, keep on knocking, it’s a spiritual Vigilance Control System.  It’s a way of ensuring that our connection with God remains live at all times, that we don’t fall asleep on the job.  Otherwise our thoughts, our drives, our talk, our actions get corrupted.  Without this system in place we are like a runaway train, dangerous to ourselves and others. Our conversations will get derailed. Our emails will miss the mark. Our decisions will be poorly judged. What we communicate to others may be true, but if it’s not coming from God, it will be wrong piece of the truth, or for the wrong person, or at the wrong time, or said the wrong way.  If we do look continually to God in each situation, we will arrive at whatever the next station is, safely, on time, not too early not too late.  Ask, and keep on asking; seek and keep on seeking; knock and keep on knocking, for your whole life.

Fr.Mark Patrick Hederman:The first reading we heard this morning is one of the great stories of the Bible. It recounts the first time in our JudeoChristian tradition that the Lord our God chose to meet up with a human being in the form of three persons. The text says specifically: ‘The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre.’ So it was ‘the Lord’ who appeared. But then Holy Scripture goes on to say: ‘Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby.’ In other words, what Abraham saw when he looked up and what had appeared in the theophany were not quite the same; he saw three men but it was actually ‘the Lord’ who was present to him. The text continues: ‘When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed down low to the ground.’

Did you ever have the experience of hearing the doorbell ring, of taking a peek out the window, seeing three people hanging around outside, and then closing the curtain and hiding under the bed in case they might find out that you are there. You wait silently, your heart thumping, hoping against hope that they will just go away. Well, I suppose it’s more difficult to do that if you are living in a tent. Whatever his motivation, Abraham did the opposite. He rushed out to meet them and invited them to dinner. 

What is also difficult to figure out is why such readings are paralleled with the Gospels on Sundays, and why this particular reading was twinned with the story of Jesus visiting Martha, Mary, and Lazarus, another trinity, in their home at Bethany. 

I think we can find a clue, not so much in the text itself but in the bit that was left out at the end of the first reading. You may remember that one of the visitors said he would be back the following year and that Abraham’s wife, Sarah, would give birth to a child. 

Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, and she happened to be 90 years old at the time we are told. So she laughed to herself. Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh?’  Is anything too hard for the Lord? And Sarah was afraid, so she lied and she said, “I did not laugh.” But the visitor said, “Oh Yes, you did laugh.”

The child that Sarah gave birth to a year later was called Isaac. Isaac in Hebrew means ‘laughter.’ 

Coming back to the scene that was twinned with this in the Gospel reading. Jesus is at Bethany with Martha and Mary. All my sympathies in this passage are with Mary who is doing the cooking and who sees her sister sitting wide-eyed and star-struck at the feet of their guest. It’s a wonder that Martha didn’t tell them to cut the cackle and get their own food for themselves. 

I think the answer to the whole problem is in the line which Jesus spoke, not just to Martha, but to every one of us: ‘you worry and are preoccupied by many things – few things are needed— indeed only one.’ All that matters is what we are being promised. If you listen to the Lord and do what you are told you will be free. No matter how old or decrepit we are, there is new life in the old creature yet, and nothing is impossible to God. Whatever is preventing you from being fully alive, from being really yourself: whether it be drink or drugs, lethargy or laziness, bingeing or being bullied, you can free yourself and give birth to the laughter in your life. 

For God’s sake stop sniggering at the back of the tent; come out into the open and believe in the power of angels to allow us to live the glory of God. For what is the glory of God? It is each and every one of us fully alive. 

So, let Isaac be a code word for today.

Fr. Henry O’Shea: In 1952, the poet Patrick Kavanagh ruffled many of our feathers by saying, referring to Irish society: 

Parochialism and provincialism are [direct] opposites. The provincial has no mind of his own; he does not trust what his eyes see until he has heard what the metropolis – towards which his eyes are turned – has to say on any subject. … The parochial mentality on the other hand is never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish. 

Both of these attitudes or mentalities can be self-satisfied or chronically dissatisfied. Neither is new. Today’s first reading from the book of Deuteronomy, written at some time between the 14th and 7th centuries before Christ, points out that our real selves are not discovered by trying to wander to heaven, or over the seas, not in fashionable gurus, diets, physical jerks, fairy dust, healing stones or psychological trick-acting. We are told quite clearly, ‘…the Word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your heart for your observance.’ 

Most of us, most of the time, like to imagine that we are intelligent, independent-minded, persons, who make up our own minds about everything. In fact, most of us, most of the time, live lives short-circuited by slogans. And these slogans are very often what is fashionable at any given time in any given society.

A fashionable contemporary slogan is claiming that one is spiritual but not religious. This can let one off many hooks, hooks of thought, behaviour, of commitment, of responsibility – with the bonus, sometimes, of giving nice warm feelings. 

Another common slogan is ‘Everyone knows…’. This often prefaces our more inane, thought-deprived, utterances. We do indeed know all about following the herd or jumping on band-wagons. 

Today’s gospel tells the immediately accessible story of the Good Samaritan. Only the terminally or intransigently hard of heart cannot understand and/or refuse to be touched by the story. Most people can identify with both the victim and with the stranger who helps him. 

In addition, if we are so inclined, we can feel smugly superior to the members of the establishment, the priest and the Levite, who pass by on the other side. We would never behave so callously. Except of course, when the victim, be he or she a foreigner, an immigrant, a Palestinian, a Hindu, a Moslem or, in many circles in modern Ireland, a practising Catholic. The fact is that we pass by on the other side of any ‘othered’ person in our society. Deep down, even if we do not admit it, we think that such persons, or non-persons, actually deserve what they get – or don’t get.

The very dynamism of today’s gospel story can lead us to forget an important phrase early in the passage we have just heard. Replying to the lawyer who was trying to put him in his place, Jesus got him to quote Scripture, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ In other words, we must love with all we have, with our whole selves. Faith does not require brain-death.

But how can we do this? How can we have a self to love and a self with which to love? How can I move beyond regarding myself as the centre of the universe? How can I move beyond self-centredly regarding others as transactional subjects and objects – ‘I am in this to get what I can out of you and presume that you are in it to get what you can out of me.’ Just read the newspapers.

In today’s second reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, the author tells us where the inviting Word with its great possibilities lies – where that Word it is present with its unique capacity to create the self of each one of us. No mere idea can and save, never did and never will.

 We hear about who and what Christ Jesus was and is: the image of the unseen God; in whom everything, visible and invisible, were created; who existed before anything was created and who holds all things in unity. 

And we are told where that Word is to be found: in his Body, the Church. Because the God-Man Christ was in the Beginning and also was the first to be born from the dead, every one of us is invited into the life-giving embrace of his Body. Through the gift of Baptism we are enfolded in this embrace and become, not just isolated self-catering spiritual projects, but real members of one another. This enfolding gives us the opportunity, the capacity to see in every human person, the flame of Christ’s Body.

And so, the Samaritan, though not baptised, was able to go beyond the established, the legally permitted, the selfishly transactional, to help the stranger. It often was and often is left to a person who is not ‘one of us’ to come to the aid of ‘one of us.’

What has all this to do with provincialism and parochialism? The heart, soul, strength and mind with which we must love, can come only from within us. This is where my parish begins. But this ‘within’ is not isolated in a self-created, self-fulfilling, self-satisfied, splendour.

 As members of one another, we learn, journey and grow with and from each other, participating, however, falteringly, in the perfection that God wanted to be in Christ and to be available through and in Christ. This is our parish, the parish of my becoming self, of us becoming ourselves, the place of encounter, of engagement. And all this with the expanding hearts so beloved by St Benedict.  

If we do have any metropolis, it exists in what we call heaven. But we do not look at this metropolis over our shoulders, but straight ahead and in the company of our fellow parishioners in the Body of Christ.       

To be parochial one needs the right kind of sensitive courage and the right kind of sensitive humility. Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals.

    

Abbot Columba McCann: I like the honest, self-interested question of Peter in our gospel story:  what about us?  We have left everything and followed you.  What are we to have, then?  It’s good to be honest and straightforward in our conversation with the Lord!  I like even more the generous promise of Jesus:  for all that we leave behind to follow him, we will get a hundredfold return and eternal life into the bargain.

The promise of a hundredfold return is not an empty promise.  Look even at the generosity of nature itself:  how living organisms increase and multiply with amazing speed and abundance.  Two weeks ago we put out an empty beehive in the hope that it might attract some new inhabitants.  Before we knew it, forty thousand bees turned up and settled in.

The bees go from flower to flower.  Even the humblest flower, even a buttercup or a dandelion has a perfection of beauty that outshines the expensive kingly robes of any king or queen.  God-given beauty.

Look up then at the night sky:  they say there are about a hundred billion stars in the average galaxy.  And they estimate that there are more galaxies in the universe than there are grains of sand on the earth.

It gives us an inkling, perhaps, of the kind of God we are invited to share our lives with.  A God of infinite abundance.

Look also at some of the other moments in the gospels.  Peter and his co-workers went fishing all night and caught nothing.  But then he stepped out of his usual pattern.  More precisely, he allowed Jesus to step into his boat.  He left  behind his professional competence as a fisherman, and fished where nothing should have been found.  The nets filled to breaking point.  Without Jesus:  nothing; with Jesus, abundance.  But that was only the beginning.  It was the sign that, if he continued with Jesus he would fish people out of deep water when they were in trouble. That certainly happened a hundredfold.  The decision to be with Jesus, to let him in, to follow him, to be in the same boat, makes all the difference between narrowness and abundance.  When Peter let Jesus into his boat he didn’t realise that the outcome would eventually affect millions of people. Not just a hundred fold, many millionfold!

On another occasion, when everyone was hungry, a young boy gave up his few loaves and fish that would have been just right for his family, thank you very much.  He handed up, gave up, what he had to Jesus.  The result fed, not hundreds, but thousands. Being with Jesus, handing over to Jesus, brings abundance.

Then there is the amazing story of Peter walking on water.  There are moments when we may feel we are walking on water, for example in the middle of a family crisis where we are only able to take one step at a time, wondering how it will all end. When Peter tries to do it on his own, he starts to go under, looking at the waves.  When he keeps his gaze on the Lord, all is well and miracles happen.

The huge catch of fish, the feeding of five thousand, the walking on the water all speak of an abundance, a source of life and stability that hides gently under the appearances of things, once we remain with the Lord. But there are other miracles that happen all the time, more gently, perhaps without our even realising it.

Think of the wedding feast of Cana: almost no-one realised even where the wine had come from.  It was just there, it was good.  It was there because a need was brought to Jesus, and people did what he told them to do.

Being in the same boat as Jesus, handing over what we have to him, looking constantly to him for stability, voicing our needs to him.  This is the formula for abundant living.  It’s the Christian life.  But St Benedict set up a special environment for those who really need help to make this happen:  a monastery.  Everything necessary to  help us turn our gaze constantly in one direction:  a timetable, spaces for communal and personal prayer, space and time for listening to his word, the right kind of work that harmonises with this.  The gift and task of community life.

And again the hundredfold happens:  St Benedict didn’t set out to form a worldwide movement.  He just knit together some traditional guidelines, adjusted them as he thought best, and proposed them to those who wanted to leave everything and follow Jesus as monks.  In the process, almost by accident, he set in train a chain reaction that produced oases of learning, culture, stability and human community that helped the rebuilding of Europe in the ashes of the dying Roman Empire.  That’s why he is a patron saint of Europe.  But all he wanted to was to help his companions find a way to prefer nothing to Christ.  If we support one another in our life with Christ, then we too will reap the hundredfold.  In the end we are given God.