Posts Tagged ‘Desire’
Keep Digging That Well and Don’t Give Up – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
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Br. Geoffrey Tristram
The Third Sunday in Lent
“Give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty.” The story of Jesus and the woman of Samaria is one of my favorite Gospel stories. One of the great moments of my life was when, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I went to that same well where Jesus met with that woman of Samaria. Jacob’s well is now in the modern town of Nablus, near the Biblical site of Shechem. Archeologists affirm that the very same well has been there, and in daily use, for almost four thousand years, ever since the land had been purchased by Jacob. Having bought the land, the first task was to dig a well to find water. It must have been a Herculean task, for it was dug through bedrock, and it is 151 feet deep, which is the height of a 15-story building! Of all the places in the Holy Land, it is probably the one exact spot where we know that Jesus stood. I will never forget the overwhelming feeling that Jesus had actually stood right here, where I am now! Read More
Craving for God – Br. Jack Crowley
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Br. Jack Crowley
My Brothers know that I love to eat. I eat often and I eat a lot. Every monastery has to have that one Brother who’s always hungry, and I’m that guy. So having said that, I must confess that every time I hear Jesus call himself the bread of life, I get a little hungry.
One of the many things I love about Jesus is he knows what motivates us. He knows our hearts, our minds, and our stomachs. He knows what makes us tick. He knows this for each and every one of us, in our own peculiar way.
Jesus knows that above all else, we crave God. We crave God in the same way we crave food. Deep down, we crave God not one time, but all the time.
This craving for God is good. It’s a good desire. What we do with our desire for God is what matters. How we go about fulfilling our craving for God is what shapes our spiritual lives.
Jesus continually invites us to keep coming back to him with our desire for God. He promises that anyone who comes to him will never be hungry again. We have the freedom to feed on Christ daily. We have the freedom to feed on Christ not just daily, but every moment of our lives.
Think about that for a moment. We have access to God every single moment of our lives. No matter how we are feeling, what we are thinking, or what we are doing, God’s sustenance is available to us. Read More
An Ever-Unfolding Purpose – Br. Keith Nelson
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Br. Keith Nelson
St. Gregory of Nyssa
In John’s gospel we hear Jesus say: “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
What does it mean for us as followers of Jesus to be taught by the guidance of the Holy Spirit? How might that guidance be felt and known in new ways during our journey through the season of Lent?
The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote: “We are pressured from within to become more. The Spirit invites us to evolve; to respond graciously to the changes that God may be inviting us to embrace.”
In this vision, the Spirit is intimately present to who and what we are in this moment. At the same time, the Spirit exerts a dynamic force – a pressure – urging each creature forward into God’s future, a further unfolding of its purpose. Unlike the day-to-day economic or social pressures that bear down upon us from the world; or even the internal pressures of our own psyche; the pressure exerted upon us by the Holy Spirit is always creative, generative, and life-giving beyond what we can anticipate or imagine. Read More
The Powerful Name of Jesus – Br. David Vryhof
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Br. David Vryhof
Numbers 6:22-27
Philippians 2:5-11
Luke 2:15-21
Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Name.[1] It is the eighth day of Christmas, the day on which Mary and Joseph brought the infant Jesus to the Temple, offering him to God with the appointed sacrifices. In Judaism, this was the occasion on which the father named the child, and for Jewish boys, this was the day of their circumcision, which set them apart from all others and marked them as belonging to God’s holy people, Israel. “The Word became flesh and lived among us”… as a young Jewish boy.
We recognize, don’t we, that there is power in a name. In ancient Israel, and in other ancient cultures, there was believed to be a close connection between a person’s name and their soul. It was as if their identity, their personality, their temperament, and their character were all bound up in their name. To know someone’s name was to gain insight into them, perhaps even power over them. Recall the story of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious stranger throughout the night beside the river Jabbok, refusing to let go and demanding to know the stranger’s name (Gen. 32:29). Or remember in the gospels how demons tried to exercise power over Jesus by calling out his name and claiming to know who he was (Mark 3:11). There was power in knowing someone’s name.
To do something “in the name of” another person, or to evoke or call upon a person’ name, was an act of utmost weight and power because it made the other person effectively present in the transaction. Someone who was authorized to act “in the name of” another shared that person’s power and authority. Read More
Desire, Distilled – Br. Keith Nelson
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Isaiah 40:1-11
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
I was blessed in the second year of my novitiate to work with a spiritual director who was a Trappist monk. Once a month, he patiently listened to the many words I would summon as I circled around my inmost experience of prayer. With a verbal precision sifted by silence, and great love, he would wait. And at the right moment, which would always come, he would name the heart of the matter. Suddenly, words would feel small and superfluous, and the way forward obvious, in the presence of a God whose one desire was simply to be with me.
He shared with me an adage I still remember:
Filled with ardent desire
yet not pressing the point
we become a place
where the Lord may rest.
The words capture the essential invitation in swift, clean strokes. We let our thirst for God rise up from within. We refrain from any agenda of our own contriving, any attachment to this or that experience. And we wait. As we wait, it may happen that God rests – and we rest in God, drawn by this harmonious alignment of wills. Read More
Transforming Our Desires – Br. Lain Wilson
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 16:1-8
Today’s Gospel reading is an uncomfortable one for us to hear.
A trusted servant mishandles his master’s property. After being caught, he worries that he will have to labor or beg to support himself. So he plans to ingratiate himself with his master’s debtors, ensuring he will find a warm welcome after he departs his master’s service. And his master, perhaps acknowledging the clever scheme, commends his dishonest servant.
And Jesus commends this story to his disciples, and us: “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.”
It is uncomfortable to hear that we should be more like the dishonest manager. But if we strip away all the details of this story—the manager’s dishonesty, opportunism, and abuse of authority—what remains? A man finds himself in trouble, reflects on and names his desire, and works to achieve it. If you’ve ever set a goal for yourself, I’ll bet this script sounds familiar. Read More
Herod the Perplexed – Br. Jack Crowley
Br. Jack Crowley
Our Gospel this morning centers on Herod the ruler. Herod is not doing well. He is perplexed. He is hearing all sorts of things about Jesus. He has no idea who Jesus really is or what Jesus is capable of. Jesus might be a serious threat to his power. This scares Herod.
At the end of our Gospel this morning, Herod makes an important decision. Herod decides he has heard enough about Jesus and now wants to see Jesus directly. While I do not recommend modeling your life on Herod, there is something we can learn from what he does here. I firmly believe we can always learn something from someone we consider evil or toxic, and Herod is no exception.
Like Herod, we are all going to hear all sort of things about Jesus. This is especially true if you go to church or are like me and live in a monastery. I hear about Jesus all the time. As good as that is, at a certain point, like Herod, we all want to cut through the noise and meet Jesus directly.
It is important to remember that this desire to meet Jesus directly is good. It is a healthy desire. It is a healthy desire to cultivate, day after day, with seeds of prayer and work. Read More
Singleness of Heart – Br. Lucas Hall
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Matthew 5:21-37
I moved into the monastery on January 9th, 2017, about a week and a half before the inauguration of the current president. Several friends told me I was very lucky, as they couldn’t imagine a better time to enclose oneself away from the troubles and instabilities of the world, insulated from a constant torrent of news coverage.
They weren’t completely wrong. But I must confess, I speak today from a place of intense distraction, here in the midst of the longest and most stressful election of my lifetime. But it’s not just the fault of the media. Nobody requires me to have multiple tabs open on my computer, reading through various news sources, then, when I get to the end, going back to the first and refreshing the page, “just in case.”
No, the voracious consumption of this stuff is a symptom, not a cause. An unending appetite for junk points to a deeper dissatisfaction, deep-seated feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, isolation, confusion, frustration. I think our culture right now is very prone to this. And maybe your “junk” is not election news. Maybe it’s news about the coronavirus. Maybe it’s not news media, but the endless stimulation of social media. Maybe it’s work, ceaselessly giving yourself external tasks to complete. Or maybe it’s more embodied; maybe it’s alcohol, or porn, or literal junk food. It doesn’t matter. Maybe I didn’t list yours here, but there are myriad varieties of this experience, and I am convinced that they come from the same source of division, dissatisfaction, and a desire to be comforted in our inmost fears.
Read MoreSermons for the Beach: Contemplative Vision
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During the month of August, while the Chapel is closed, we are reposting sermons that we hope will inspire you to embrace play, silence, and recreation. The Chapel will reopen on Tuesday, August 30, 2016.
It is so good to be back again, worshiping in this lovely place, after our time away of retreat and community discussions. And it is so good to see you all again. I do hope you have had a great summer – a time for rest and refreshment.
We had a wonderful retreat. To spend those days amidst the natural beauty of Emery House was a great gift. Certainly for me, and I know other Brothers, it was an occasion to deepen our contemplative vision. In the Letter to the Hebrews which was read this morning, verse 14 says, “For here we have no abiding city, but we are looking for a city that is to come.” And I think that’s really what the contemplative vision is all about. It is about seeing with the eyes of faith; seeing that this life which we have is not the only reality. When our contemplative vision grows, we see that the apparently ordinary things of life are shot through with the glory of God. Spending time on retreat is a wonderful opportunity to really see again heaven breaking through – or as William Blake put it, “to see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.” Read More
Ask, Search, Knock: Passionate Persistent Prayer – Br. Geoffrey Tristram
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Luke 11:1-13
“How do you recruit new monks?”someone asked me the other day. The answer is: we don’t recruit new members of the community. We make ourselves known – on the internet – but I would never encourage a man to come as a postulant. In fact, I often try to put people off! It’s really important, that if someone wants to join the community they have to ask – and maybe ask several times, before we say yes. Read More