LOVE - PRAY - HOPE

There will be a pause in the posting of new sermons while the Chapel is closed and Brothers are away in August for our Annual Community Retreat, time for Community Discussions and Chapter, as well as Vacations and Family Visits. For a daily dose of monastic wisdom, subscribe to “Brother, Give Us a Word.” Sermons will resume once the Chapel opens on Aug. 31.

“We lift up our hearts and minds and all that we are in offering to God and here God becomes present to us in these gifts of bread and wine: the bread broken for us, the wine poured out for us. It is the re-membering of the ultimate sacrifice of love given by Jesus on the cross, forever joining the eternal to the temporal, and by grace the temporal to the eternal.”

Br. Jim Woodrum ponders how we – temporal beings that we are – can be containers of eternal love.

“James and John don’t know it yet, but ‘We are able’ may well be the shortest, simplest, most direct, most honest prayer of their lives. It is a prayer that expresses the truest, noblest, and holiest intention of their lives, a prayer that will never be fully translatable on this side of heaven; a prayer that fulfills their vocation in God.”

Br. Keith Nelson finds in James and John an example of how Jesus takes our willingness – which is not to say our readiness – and makes us worthy.

“God’s love for us is channeled through Jesus, who has come to love us, and who is able to love us, and who does love us quite personally, all of what has made us who we are. This is not unconditional love; this is conditional love: our personally experiencing love given the conditions that have formed and deformed our lives.”

Br. Curtis Almquist pulls back some of the legend surrounding Mary of Magdala to find lessons for us all in healing and love.

“Work serves an end. Even the holiest work of your life is not your purpose. It facilitates your purpose. If a person steeped in a Jewish culture that mandated sabbath and jubilee needed this reminder, people steeped in an American culture of bootstrap-pulling and 24/7 work emails need it all the more.”

Br. Lucas Hall returns to the familiar story of Mary and Martha as he struggles – like so many of us – to balance the demands of work and prayer.