Feast of Saint Andrew, 30th November 2020 History is full of charismatic personalities with ‘instant appeal’ – for good or for bad. Perhaps it is simply a matter of mirror neurons – a deeply ingrained facility in us which encourages imitative behaviour – an ‘inner principle’ which guides us for …
Advent Sunday 1B, 29th November 2020 There is not a moment when Christ is not present. It’s a monk’s role, partly, to know this presence by forever being aware of it, and the best preparation for this awareness is a pure heart and a clean conscience, so you see there’s …
Christ the King, 22nd November, 2020 . . . we meet (the) God of transcendence, (the) God of mystery, only in the earthiness of things. We have no other way of finding God, and we also have no way of escaping God’s presence. (p.5 Gerard W. Hughes: God where are …
Sunday 33A, 15th November 2020 We are not meant to live poorly. There’s a deliberate ambiguity in that sentence because neither are we meant to make money in order to make more money. This Parable of the Talents is subtler than it seems and leads one commentator to argue that …
Dedication of the Lateran Basilica, 9th November 2020 Today, we celebrate forty years since the first Mass here at the Monastery of Christ Our Saviour and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, both in and from the monastery itself, and in the world outside. It …
Sunday 32A, 8th November 2020 In a delightful collection of poems entitled ‘Why I wake Early’, Mary Oliver touches on many of the themes that come together in today’s celebration: remembrance, division, glory, judgement. We remember the dead of all too many wars and our own more familiar loss; we …
Dedication of the Oratory of Our Lady of Peace, Turvey Abbey We live in the midst of an extraordinary welter of uncertainties, highlighted today, by an, as yet, unresolved American election and the beginning here of another Covid 19 lockdown with Brexit still looming and the issue of climate change, …
All Saints, 1st November 2020 Most people cast in their lot with the visible world; but true Christians with saints and angels. (John Henry Newman: Parochial & Plain Sermons IV, 234) Be prepared, then, to be misunderstood: Because the world refused to acknowledge him.therefore it does not acknowledge us. It’s …
Feast of Simon and Jude, 28 October, 2020 We know little of Simon and Jude after Pentecost — even the Oxford Dictionary of Saints seems to misattribute Jude’s emblem of a boat to Simon, or vice versa, and Jude is known as ‘patron of hopeless causes’ because so few people …
Sunday 30A Reading Thomas Merton’s journals we see a great struggle as he seeks to find and clarify his own identity or self-understanding vis á vis others; what, in particular, the Church is making of him, focussed especially on his relationship with his Abbot. He knows that love is central …
