Blessings to you! Today is the Feast of Saint Scholastica, the sister of Saint Benedict. She may even have been a twin sister, but that is not certain. There is also a possibility that the mother of Saint Benedict was of Jewish ancestry.
I am still in Vietnam and in spite of this being the Feast of Saint Scholastica, this year it is Ash Wednesday. In Vietnam this year, their New Year began on February 8 and the celebration goes on until February12th or 13th. I will return to the United States and to Christ in the Desert on the 12th.
So I pray for you to have a good Lent this year. May this time of increased awareness of our need to draw close to the Lord be effective in all of our lives. We are invited to fast and pray and give alms. We are invited to struggle with more strength against our sins in this time of Lent.
In this Year of Mercy, especially in this Lent, we must come to know more strongly this Merciful God who delights in loving us. We have to use our minds in our spiritual life because we are rational beings. When I was young, my novice master had the saying: use the mind to control the feelings—and your mind must be guided by faith. Using the mind, being rational, helps us to deal with our emotions. So much of modern culture is based entirely on emotion and does not want to have any rationality interfere with it. We are invited to live in faith, using our reason to guide and form our emotions.
This use of faith, reason and emotions helps us to be gentle people. We want to have a balanced personality that can be used by the Lord for His Kingdom. A gentle person does not have to be a weak person. In fact, when a gentle person is also very strong, it is an incredible gift. We don’t want to harm anyone and so we can be cautious in our judgments and we must be capable of refraining from impulsive and hasty actions—all for His Kingdom! In all of this we must be resolute in our will, clear in our vision and obedient to God—always seeking the salvation of others.
As we continue to reflect on Mercy, we can think of Jesus cleaning out the Temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps we would not think of that as a gesture of mercy, but mercy takes many forms. Making the Temple once more only a House of Prayer is surely mercy to those who are seeking the Lord. This action shows Jesus in one of his strongest actions in the Gospels—and yet he condemns no one in particular, only reflecting that the House of Prayer has become a den of thieves.
Jesus throughout his public ministry does the works of mercy. He heals the sick, cures blindness, drives out demons and feeds the hungry. Jesus lives the Corporal Works of Mercy—He does not just speak about them. Think of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This parable is told to remind us that every person is our neighbor, not just those who live next door.
The man who was assaulted on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho needed help. Probably none of those who passed by was his physical neighbor. Jesus tells us this parable to make clear that we are all neighbors. There are no exceptions!
Mercy always implies justice and so we must not think that the merciful person is just a do-gooder, a person who just automatically does lovely and sweet things. No, the merciful person is aware that he or she is going beyond what is required in justice—for the sake of the Kingdom, for the love of Jesus Christ.
Jesus lives the mystery of his own suffering and death so that he can save His People. This is a notion that is almost foreign to us today but occasion we hear stories about this kind of mercy and love. One of the people executed by the Islamic extremists was a Muslim man who had refused to abandon his Christian friends. St. Maximillian Kolbe substituted his life so that another prisoner could live. In order for us to understand more profoundly these mysteries of one person taking on the suffering of others, we have to understand a bit how the Old and the New Testament understand us as a people, not just a group of individuals.
Most of us, me included, don’t think about ourselves as part of a People. We tend to individualism. Perhaps we may think of ourselves belonging to a particular group, such as a monastic community, a parish community or even part of an ethnic community. But to think of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ is no longer common. To think, as does Saint Paul, that all together we Christians form Christ present in the world—that we are truly His body present in the world—is not a common way of thinking. Yes for the Old and the New Testament, it is almost taken for granted.
So we are invited in this Lent, in this Year of Mercy, to think again about the People of God, about the Chosen People—so that we can understand how Christ could offer Himself for “the People of God.”
God does not ignore sin and injustice but God does seek to heal it and forgive it. Thus when Jesus takes on himself death for us, He becomes the end of death. Saint John Chrysostom put it this way: “death seized a body, and, lo! it encountered heaven; it seized the visible, and was overcome by the invisible.” It is not God tricking death. Rather death has no power over God. When Jesus died, death seemed to have the victory, but in the resurrection of Jesus, death is destroyed.
We can end this reflection on the Year of Mercy by quoting Psalm 146:
The Lord remains faithful forever.
He secures justice for the oppressed;
He gives food to the hungry.
The Lord sets prisoners free.
The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.
The Lord loves the righteous;
The Lord watches over the sojourner.
The Lord upholds the widow and the fatherless.
The way of the wicked, He brings to ruin.
As always I promise my prayers for you and will celebrate a Holy Mass for your and for your needs and intentions. Please remember to pray for me personally and also for the sisters and brothers of our community. I send you my love and prayers.
Your brother in the Lord,
Abbot Philip
