Here I have put together a selection of homilies. The Word of God is ‘alive and active’ says the Letter to the Hebrews. That is not to say that it lives a hidden organic life we can trace through a microscope, as if it were a virus; but that it is inspired, a bearer of God’s eternal Spirit. Therefore it resounds to this day with quite as much force as when it was first spoken. It ever has something new to say. The preacher’s first task is to listen intently to this Word at once ancient and new, then to make his own, necessarily limited words its vehicles. I have not been able to provide translations of texts in other languages; but if you rummage around a little you will find a fair amount of material in English.
By this great sacrament, Marie-Françoise will be made light and free, full of noble potential, equipped, through the power of Christ’s Paschal victory, to unmask every deception of evil, and to live beautifully. She will be made ‘a temple of God’s glory’.
Continue reading Wer versucht hat, dem Herrn unbedingte Zuversicht zu zeigen, weiss welcher Kampf erfordert wird - wie Gott in Christus Mensch ward, muss der Geist in uns Fleisch werden. Das Gottvertrauen ist letztendlich eine Inkarnation: es geht um ‘Tat und Wahrheit’.
Continue reading Try asking an Irishman who, on 17 March, appears with a shamrock why has has adorned himself with cattle food; try asking a veteran with a poppy in his buttonhole why he picked a weed from a railway line instead of getting himself a decent red carnation. Certain ordinary things take on extraordinary sense in given situations, at set times; we must be able to grasp that sense.
Continue reading Your personal exodus journey has acquired a nobility and beauty all its own. Like the Israelites in the desert, you have learnt something precious about who God is, and about who you are yourself.
Continue reading The Cistercian Fathers, so attentive and humane in their reading of God’s action in our lives, never tired of invoking a verse from the Song of Songs that, to them, summed up their experience of grace: ‘Ordinavit in me caritatem’; ‘He has set love in order in me’. If we let the holy angels roll away the heavy stone that blocks the way into our hearts, God enters to heal and recompose our disordered affections.
Continue reading Reconciliation is never unilateral. It has to be two-sided, to be realised in dialogue.
Continue reading Do we wish to be healed and made whole? Our answer must be Yes, yes or No, no: there’s no middle ground.
Continue reading To be a Cistercian is to evaluate oneself constantly in the light of a great, exacting ideal. We are not to be scrupulous (for scruples are rarely life-giving), but we must aim to be truthful—and ready to recompose our lives on the basis of what we recognise as truth.
Continue reading The message of Christmas is this: the Word become flesh in Mary would take possession of our flesh, too; it would fill our lives and make them glorious. Brothers and sisters, do we realise how wonderful this is?
Continue reading The other day, on the Loughborough Road, I met a lorry so ablaze with psychedelic lights it blinded me. Attempts to rebrand Christmas as a ‘festival of lights’, a shopping binge, makes the shining symbol of the season ambiguous.
Continue reading Each night, at bedtime, we invoke the Blessed Virgin as ‘our life, our sweetness, our hope’. Never do we see more clearly what this means than on the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
Continue reading In Mary he would find a human being like those who, on the sixth day of creation, before the serpent’s insinuation, stood upright and free before God’s face, formed in his image. Mary Immaculate shows us what we all could, and should, have been, had it not been for the fall’s tragedy.
Continue reading St Thomas Aquinas offers us a luminous description of holiness, full of refreshment in its brevity. He says: ‘Since good that is loved has the nature of an end, and since the motion of the will is called good or evil in terms of the end it pursues, the love by which the supreme good, God, is loved must possess the supereminent goodness that goes by the name of holiness.
Continue reading A saying often on his lips was a distillation of experience, characteristically devoid of perfumed piety: ‘I have always tried to be obedient’, he would say; ‘often I haven’t liked it much, but I have tried.’ Then he would laugh.
Continue reading The apostles we celebrate today, Simon and Jude, are in very ancient sources associated with a mission to the east. One of the most venerable documents of early Church history, the Doctrine of Addai, tells us how Jude or Thaddeus (Addai in Syriac) was despatched by St Thomas to Edessa in modern-day Turkey.
Continue reading The first companions of St Bruno tell us that this apparently austere, intellectual monk was in fact semper festo uultu: his face was always joyful, like that of a man on his way to a feast.
Continue reading A great deal of nonsense is often said about angels. We may find we’re given to thinking nonsensically about them ourselves, haunted as we are by images of feathers, celestial chariots, and cascading cloaks: so earthbound are we poor human clods, so conditioned by our bodies, that it is hard for us to conceive of pure spiritual existences.
Continue reading The Queen of Peace is our model. Like her, we are called to say a deliberate ‘Yes’ to the lordship of Christ, letting him take flesh in our flesh, becoming his instruments, sacraments of his presence.
Continue reading I recently finished reading a new biography of St Bernard of Clairvaux by the Austrian historian Peter Dinzelbacher. In his effort to place Bernard in context, the author leaves no stone unturned: his book contains 3,000 footnotes.
Continue reading For Guerric, divine contemplation was fundamentally a matter of assimilating, by interiorisation, the prayers we recite with our lips in the breviary and missal. He would have scoffed at any notion that mental and vocal prayer were somehow in opposition.
Continue reading Kolbe’s death eclipses his life; his life, indeed, seems like a build-up to his sacrificial death. That is something to reflect on with regard to our own Christian lives.
Continue reading Even if we can swim there was a time when we couldn’t. We may remember the awful downward pull; how scary it is, even up there in the shallow end of a pool, with people everywhere and lights on, with our father’s arms ready to carry us up.
Continue reading So often, when what we considered a thoroughfare turns out to be a cul-de-sac, we raise our arms to heaven and cry out, ‘Why, Lord, why?’ We’re indignant and hurt, proceeding, as we are, from the assumption that our journey ought to be uncomplicated, that the Lord, like some tour guide, should make the path straight before us.
Continue reading In my first year at Cambridge, I picked up a copy of the Rule of St Benedict from Waterstones. I read it right through, I remember, and thought: Wow, to live like that!
Continue reading ‘Set me as a seal upon your heart’, says the Lord. It would take a brave preacher to expound that verse to two cardiologists.
Continue reading