Today is the feast day of St. André Bessette. The holy brother who, as he said, was shown the door, and there he stayed.
Br. André Bessette, C.S.C., more commonly known as Brother André, or since his canonization as Saint André of Montreal, was a Brother of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He was credited with thousands of healings associated with his devotion to Saint Joseph.
On October 17, 2010, André Bessette became the first saint of the Congregation of Holy Cross when he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI. On this day, the Church recognized that God chose a very simple man for a remarkable life of service to the Church. He had previously been beatified by Blessed John Paul II on May 23, 1982.
“We must pray without ceasing, in every occurrence and employment of our lives – that prayer which is rather a habit of lifting up the heart to God as in a constant communication with Him.”
“The first end I propose in our daily work is to do the will of God; secondly, to do it in the manner he wills it; and thirdly to do it because it is his will.”
“The accidents of life separate us from our dearest friends, but let us not despair. God is like a looking glass in which souls see each other. The more we are united to Him by love, the nearer we are to those who belong to Him.”
“And in every disappointment, great or small, let your heart fly directly to your dear Savior, throwing yourself in those arms for refuge against every pain and sorrow. Jesus will never leave you or forsake you.”
“God is everywhere, in the very air I breathe, yes everywhere, but in His Sacrament of the Altar He is as present actually and really as my soul within my body; in His Sacrifice daily offered as really as once offered on the Cross.”
And specially, from euery shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
( Chaucer – Canterbury Tales – Prologue).
29 December St Thomas of Canterbury
Patron of the English Pastoral Clergy
Saint Ambrose presenting to God the letter of Emperor Theodore, Louis Lagrenée 1764, Paris, St. Marguerite Church
We have the liturgical memorial of Saint Ambrose, bishop, confessor and doctor of the Church.
Ambrose is quite an interesting person and one we ought to think about more often. His personal history is daunting to wrap the mind around: a convert, a motivating speaker, a provocative thinker, a reformer of civil and ecclesiastical works, an author, a composer (the Te Deum), a zealous preacher and valiant defender of the Christian Faith, a worker of miracles, a man of virtue, and a man of the people. He is the saint the Holy Trinity has given us, he is the saint I want and the one I need.
As said before in this forum that saints beget saints, one great example is that Ambrose baptized Augustine.
He was fast-tracked to the ministry of bishop. I merely point this fact out because he was acclaimed to be bishop of Milan prior to be baptized. One biographer noted that “He accepted holy Baptism from an Orthodox priest and, passing through all the ranks of the Church clergy in just seven days, on December 7, 374 he was consecrated Bishop of Mediolanum [Milan].” Today’s feast, hence, doesn’t commemorate a saint’s death as most often happens saint’s memorials, but Ambrose’s feast is on the day he was consecrated to the episcopal order.
Reading up on St Ambrose I realized that I hope this happens to me: St Ambrose, who departed to the Lord on the night of Holy Pascha. What better day than to make one’s transitus to the Lord of Life than that of the day we celebrate Easter! His death on Pascha encapsulated all that he believed, preacher and loved.
The Church’s liturgical hymns are key in our forming our own theological heart and mind. Below the Troparion and Kontakion tells us what the faithful and the magisterial church believe when thinking of Saint Ambrose.
In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith,an image of humility and a teacher of abstinence; your humility exalted you; your poverty enriched you.Hierarch Father Ambrose, entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved. (Troparion)
You shone forth with divine doctrine eclipsing the deception of Arius, shepherd and initiate of the mysteries, Ambrose.you worked miracles through the power of the Spirit, healing various passions; righteous father, entreat Christ our God to grant us His great mercy. (Kontakion)
Today I am praying for two monk-friends named for Ambrose, the Parish of St Ambrose and its pastor in North Branford, Connecticut, the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation whose origins is that of the Diocese of Milan and the Benedictine monks who colonized just outside the City of Milan. AND I am praying for my honey bees and fellow CT beekeepers.
Today is the feast of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, archbishop of Myra in Lycia.
The Byzantine Church honors Nicholas in several beautiful texts. This one taken from the sticheron from the Lamp-Lighting Psalms, teaches us:
“What crowns of praise shall we confer upon the saintly Nicholas? Once present in the flesh in Myra, he is present in spirit to all who love him purely. He is the leader and defender of everyone, a comforter in distress, and a haven of all in danger, a pillar of piety and conqueror for believers. For his sake, Christ overcame enemies and shows us great mercy!”
Nicholas has captured the imagination of many through the years because of charity which morphed into gift-giving. He’s not remembered in popular culture as a teacher of the Christian Gospel, or the holy bishop who faithfully served the Divine Mysteries, or for saving the innocent from death, or calming storms, nor challenging the false teachers. And yet, he’s more than all these things. He allowed the Lord to speak eloquently through his life and thus comes to us in 2021 as a friend and disciple of the Lord Jesus.
Would that we could live and act as Nicholas did in the face of false teaching by a life of virtue and charity, by listening to sacred Scripture, and by worthily receiving the Divine Mysteries (the sacraments)? We prayerfully ask St. Nicholas to beg Jesus Christ to save us.
As Knights and Dames of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre it seems that to be renewed for mission we have to consider what one of St. Nicholas’ biographers wrote of him:
“In serving the Lord the youth was fervent of spirit, and in his proficiency with questions of faith he was like an Elder, who aroused the wonder and deep respect of believers. Constantly at work and vivacious, in unceasing prayer, the priest Nicholas displayed great kind-heartedness towards the flock, and towards the afflicted who came to him for help, and he distributed all his inheritance to the poor.”
What more can be said of our eucharistic vocation and mission as members of the EOHSJ? What more can asked of us than to be keen witnesses of St. Nicholas in the world today? May we, in fact, have our sins forgiven and be brought one day into perfect communion with the most holy Trinity.
Blessed and soon to be sainted in 2022 Charles de Foucauld failed in his efforts to found a religious community during his lifetime, and he experienced much sorrow and pain and spiritual darkness and obscurity even regarding his own work. How close he is to my own experience.
But in a letter of December 1, 1916 –never posted– “the universal brother” wrote these words: “When we can suffer and love, we can do much, it’s the most that we can do in this world: We feel our suffering, but we don’t always feel that we love and that’s an additional suffering! But we know that we want to love and to want to love is to love.”
In way I take Blessed Charles’ words to be similar to the pious sentiment of “offering it up.” What? The phrase indicates that we ought to connect our sufferings to those of Jesus Christ. He knows that our suffering does have meaning and for it to be fruitful, that is, to be generative of something new, we give our suffering and pain to God the Father. We are meant to give our sufferings Jesus Christ so that he can do something useful with them. St. John Henry Newman has written a brilliantly inspired discourse on the interior sufferings of Christ in which he posits that the interior sufferings were indeed much greater. (https://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse16.html)
Father James Brent, O.P. teaches us the basis of this practice. The video is a beautiful way to connect to a venerable spiritual practice.
Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus Christ, love him tenderly and seek always better to understand the meaning of a God who died on the Cross for the salvation of souls.
Today we celebrate the liturgical memory of the early twentieth century saint, Silouan the Athonite (+1938). For many Christians, East and West in the North America St. Silouan is an unknown personage but he is worth knowing as one his biographers writes he has “a sense of cosmic unity and the way that we are called to love and have compassion on all things:
He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. His heart is filled with pity for all God’s creatures…For them, more than himself, he prays day and night, that all may repent and know the Lord” (352).The Lord bestows such rich grace on His chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with that love (367).
Once I needlessly killed a fly. the poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for three whole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory….One day, going from the Monastery to Old Russikon-on-the- Hill, I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces, and each piece writhed convulsively, and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation, and I wept bitterly before God (469).That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked – it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the little leaf. The heart that has learned to love feels sorry for every created thing (376).The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even a green leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field. Thus the Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being (469).
Today is the liturgical memorial of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus. As Benedictines we have been celebrating all three together for a long time. They are models of the virtue of hospitality. A good application is the guesthouse at the Petersham (Mass.) Benedictines is named in honor of today’s saints.
Chapter 53 of The Rule of St. Benedict has two crucial lines: “All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: I was a stranger and you welcomed me (Matt 25:35). Proper honor must be shown to all, especially to those who share our faith (Gal 6:10) and to pilgrims.” The Father of Western monasticism sets the stage to how we receive the other.
In January 2021, a Decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship on the celebration of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus (26 January 2021) was issued.
The Decree
In the household of Bethany the Lord Jesus experienced the family spirit and friendship of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, and for this reason the Gospel of John states that he loved them. Martha generously offered him hospitality, Mary listened attentively to his words and Lazarus promptly emerged from the tomb at the command of the One who humiliated death.
The traditional uncertainty of the Latin Church about the identity of Mary (the Magdalene to whom Christ appeared after his resurrection, the sister of Martha, the sinner whose sins the Lord had forgiven), which resulted in the inclusion of Martha alone on 29 July in the Roman Calendar, has been resolved in recent studies and times, as attested by the current Roman Martyrology, which also commemorates Mary and Lazarus on that day. Moreover, in some particular calendars the three siblings are already celebrated together.
Therefore, the Supreme Pontiff Pope Francis, considering the important evangelical witness they offered in welcoming the Lord Jesus into their home, in listening to him attentively, in believing that he is the resurrection and the life, and accepting the proposal of this Dicastery, has decreed that 29 July be designated in the General Roman Calendar as the Memorial of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus.
Mass collect
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that the example of your Saints may spur us on to a better life, so that we, who celebrate the memory of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus, may also imitate without ceasing their deeds.Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
In the Gospels, Elijah appears with Moses on the Mount of the Transfiguration, bearing witness to Jesus as the fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecies. Elijah is venerated above all in the monastic tradition as a model of prayer and unshakeable faith amid trials. Prayer and contemplation sustained the Prophet not only in moments of great success but also in the face of adversity and persecution. Elijah teaches us that fervent prayer and union with God cannot be separated from concern for the needs of others. In prayer, he grew in discernment of the Lord’s will and found the courage to denounce injustice, even at great personal cost. Elijah’s experience of God in prayer culminated, as we know, when the Lord appeared to him not in wind and fire, but in a quiet whisper. May we too, like the Prophet, persevere in prayer, strive to discern God’s will every day of our lives, and come to experience, even at times of uncertainty and trial, the consolation of his presence and providential care.
