Words on the Word
26. Sunday B
On this 26th Sunday of the year in 2018 I celebrated Mass in the cemetery of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. Major work had had to be done on the site; some of the old monks’ graves had had to be moved. The conservation authorities had the delicacy to request a Mass to be said for them when the work was done, and invited the nearest Cistercian abbot to offer it. Fountains provided the beginning of Cistercian life in Norway. I am still moved by the example and insight of Dom Ranulph, the founder of Lyse. And so I share the text of this homily though it is a few years old, in the hope that others, too, might find inspiration. It is always pertinent to heed the prophetic counsel: ‘Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn’ (Isaiah 51.1).
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Numbers 11:25-29: If only the whole people of the Lord were prophets.
James 5:1-6: Your wealth is all rotting, your clothes are all eaten up by moths.
Mark 9:38-43,45,47-48: Anyone who is not against us is for us.
The stern words of today’s Gospel should send a chill down our spine. They set out what it means to be ‘for’ and ‘against’ Christ. It is clear that the Lord is not content with lip service. What he requires is an integral response that must shape our behaviour and definitively structure our life. We are to cut ourselves off from everything and anything that incites us to evil. We are to look upon others with creative compassion, striving to anticipate and meet their needs. Above all, we are not to come between them and the Lord, as stumbling blocks. How remarkable it is: we have the potential to reveal God to one another; and we can likewise conceal him from each other. It is a terrifying prospect: by my actions I may effectively block another from seeing God, from reaching true freedom, happiness, and beatitude.
We’re gathered on an old monastic site. How do monks respond to commandments of active charity, secluded as they are from society? A monastic community is made up of many members, of course, and these are called to construct an evangelical life together. But does the monk’s charity stop at the enclosure wall? Is he unconcerned about the welfare, spiritual and temporal, of the world around him? Of course not. Before he is a monk, he is a Christian, a disciple; his vocation, as well as being contemplative, is by its nature missionary, expansive, fired by charity.
That the monks of Fountains were conscious of this fact is clear from an account of their Norwegian foundation, Lyse, undertaken in 1146, during the abbacy of Henri Murdac. Norwegian Christianity was still quite new. The country’s bishops were doing their best to consolidate the faith, to expose their flock to the best of what the Church had to offer. The enterprising Bishop Sigurd of Bergen looked to England for help—naturally so, since Norway was evangelised from England—and to his astonishment discovered Cistercian life as established here at Fountains just a decade earlier. He asked Abbot Henri with insistence for a foundation in his diocese. Henri acceded, glad, probably, to help a young church finds its feet.
How did the monks view their mission to an outpost located by the twelfth-century Statutes of our General Chapter in extremis finibus mundi? By a stroke of good fortune, we have some idea, for the founders of Lyse left a chronicle of their labours. It speaks of the good zeal of Dom Ranulph, their first abbot, who was a shining example et gentem barbaram sub iugo Christi docuit mansuescere. ‘He taught a barbarous people to become gentle under the yoke of Christ.’ I find that sentence strangely moving. Ranulph and his monks set out from this corner of Yorkshire not just to pursue an ideal of interior prayer; they left to display the gentleness of Christ, the new life of the Gospel, to a people still marked by the violence of pagan ways.
As today we intercede for all who rest in the Fountains cemetery, let us pray that they may ever know the gentle love they sought to make visible to others. Let us pray, too, that we may be worthy heirs to their Christlike endeavour and live our Christian calling with dignity and coherence. That is a task as urgent now as ever it was. May God help us to fulfil it. Amen.
