Come Let Us Adore: St. Gregory's Abbey, 1999-2011

Contents

Introduction

By Abbot Andrew Marr

Prologue:

Easter-Summer-Fall-Christmas

By Fr. Jude

Part One:

CHRISTMAS

Three to Get Ready

By Fr. William

Welcoming Jesus

By Abbot Andrew

Origins

by Br. Martin

Good Enough for God

By Br. Abraham

Where Your Heart Is

By Fr. William

Joy to the World?

By Br. Cuthbert

Rejoice … The Lord is with You!

By Br. Martin

A Hide and Seek Prayer

By Fr. William

Making Peace

By Abbot Andrew

Part Two:

BENEDICTINE INSPIRATIONS

Monk’s Best Friend

By Br. Abraham

From Discernment to Obedience

By Prior Aelred

Following the Shunemite

By Fr. William

Changed Perspectives

By Br. Abraham

Let us Bow and Bend Low

By Fr. Jude

On Disinterested Reading

By Abbot Andrew

Friends of God: A Sermon on St Benedict’s Day

By Br. Abraham

Nothing is to Be Preferred to the Work of God

By Prior Aelred

Hobbies at the Monastery

From the Fall 2008 Abbey Letter

Let Us Pray

By Fr. William

Across the Universe

by Br. Abraham

With Gratitude in our Hearts: A Sermon for St. Benedict’s Day

By Abbot Andrew

Part Three:

SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS

What Kind of God Do We Really Want?

By Br. Martin

Brando, Cher, & Me

By Fr. William

On Being Spiritual and Religious

By Abbot Andrew

Blast from the Past

By Br. Abraham

Homily for Trinity Sunday

By Fr. Aelred

Working for the Kingdom

By Br. Cuthbert

Baptizing the Imagination

By Abbot Andrew

Evolution, Creation & God’s Love

By Br. Martin

The Strength of Compassion

By Br. Abraham

If You Get There Before I Do

By Fr. William

Part Four:

EASTER

Darkness & Light

By Prior Aelred

The God of the Living

By Abbot Andrew

Easter Day Homily 2007

By Prior Aelred

Saved by the Life of Jesus

By Abbot Andrew

Christ Shall Give You Light

By Fr. William

They Discussed Among Themselves What Rising from the Dead Could Mean

By Prior Aelred

Marantha!: Come Lord Jesus!

By Abbot Andrew

Introduction

By Abbot Andrew Marr

I start a typical day by entering the abbey church at four in the morning, my head still fogged with sleep, to say Matins. (On Sundays and major feasts, we sleep in to five-thirty.) Before I joined the monastery, I had heard that the human body is at its weakest between roughly two and four in the morning. My experience of getting up at that hour to pray has convinced me that this is true. And yet I feel that there is great value in praying at an hour when I am weak because, in my weakness, God prays through me with greater freedom than later in the day when I have more energy.

Matins opens with Psalm Three and then moves to an invitation to prayer we call the Invitatory: Psalm 95 plus an antiphon, a verse that serves as a refrain. Psalm 95 starts out as a hymn of praise: O come ring our joy to the Lord; hail the rock who saves us, but moves on to warn us not to grumble as did the Israelites in the desert at Meribah, a salutary warning for any community.

Many of the antiphons for festive occasions include the phrase: Come let us adore. At the beginning of Advent, the antiphon is The Lord the king who is to come * Come let us adore. Starting with the third Sunday in Advent, the antiphon changes to Now the Lord is near * Come let us adore. When Christmas comes, we say: Christ is born for us * Come let us adore, and then for Epiphany the antiphon becomes: Christ has appeared to us * Come let us adore. Some antiphons for saints’ days also use this verse, such as the antiphon for the feast of an apostle: The Lord, king of apostles * Come let us adore. For John the Baptist, we say: Lamb of God foretold by John * Come let us adore.

Normal week day antiphons are key verses from Psalm 95 so it isn’t all that often that we have come let us adore antiphons, but they are numerous enough to set the tone of the office for me. Whether we use this particular refrain on a given morning or not, coming to adore Christ is what our life at the abbey is all about.

Coming to adore Christ first thing in the morning is what we were doing at St. Gregory’s Abbey throughout our first sixty years covered in Singing God’s Praises and it has continued to be what we have been doing in the twelve years covered by this book. No news there. Just the same old thing, day in and day out. But doing the same old thing day in and day out is par for the course in Benedictine monasticism. For a Benedictine monastery, it is closer to the norm than the exception to have a dozen years or so with nothing new to report.

And yet, there is a news item to report. We have completed the building program that had been going off and on since 1988. I remember, back when we started, recalling that many monastic building projects have taken decades to complete. I hoped, in vain as it turned out, that it wouldn’t be so with us. Even so, twenty years for a major building project is faster than some monastic projects have taken. I have learned through all this that sometimes we have to learn to be patient whether we like it or not. In the end, our patience was rewarded. Now, the community and our guests eat in a new dining hall and our books are housed in a new library which has proved to be infinitely more comfortable and convenient for all readers. Our building project was completed in 2009 when we built a great hall that connects the dining hall and library to the church. The old farm house that was replaced is shown above and the new building that replaced it is shown below. A bell tower is now the focal point of our layout. The great hall makes a perfect space for the blessings of the palms on Palm Sunday and the lighting of the Paschal candle at the start of the Easter vigil.

This exterior makeover has enhanced our sense of well-being in many ways, but it has not changed our monastic life interiorly. We still have the same group of life-professed monks we did when we published Singing God’s Praises, though we were graced with the presence of Br. Cuthbert for over five years before he came to the conclusion that he was not called to a life-long monastic vocation. During these past years, we have continued our practice of publishing the Abbey Letter with a feature article in each issue. The only change here is that Br. Abraham has taken over the duty of producing it, relieving Fr. Jude who did the job so well for over thirty-five years. I think these articles show that although we keep on doing the same old things, we keep seeing the same old things anew. Praying the Divine Office and reading scripture daily challenges us to think and pray and think and pray again about what our lives are all about. In this book, we offer a generous selection of articles published over these last twelve years. They are now conveniently available to read again and again while reflecting on the words that have come out of our reflections. As often happens in a collection such as this, some of the same points come up in differing contexts, leading to some repetitiveness. Even so, these repetitions lead to differing nuances of insight. In any case, these articles are designed to be read one at a time for maximum effect.

We are still waiting on God to send us more vocations to sustain the life of St. Gregory’s well into the future. We have a postulant at this time, and that is a start. I think we can take some encouragement that waiting for the building program’s completion led to the monastic buildings we have now. It is up to those of us committed to life in this monastery to continue building the house inside the heart of God for the sake of all who benefit from our ministry of prayer.

Prologue:

Easter-Summer-Fall-Christmas

By Fr. Jude

From the Easter 2002 Abbey Letter

The monks of St. Gregory’s Abbey have been publishing their small magazine under the name Abbey Letter since 1969, having changed to that name from Benedicite at the same time that English replaced Latin as the language of worship in the abbey church. The four issues of the Abbey Letter published in the course of a year were labeled Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, an easy, sensible scheme. However, the Abbey Letters mailed out in December of 1973 said Christmas 1973 on the cover. The following issue read Easter 1974. But there was no change in the first part of the date on the next two issues; they remained Summer and Fall. And the yearly sequence is still Easter-Summer-Fall- Christmas, not quite logical, a bit odd.

I had joined the community in December of 1971, and I don’t remember that there was any discussion in 1973 about changing Winter to Christmas and Spring to Easter. Although I don’t know why the dating scheme was changed, it seems to me that it was a good idea. Besides adding a note of mild eccentricity, a traditional monastic trait, the sequence expresses something about the relationship of time and eternity, about God’s time and our time. That is, two historical (datable, in principle) events crucial to us Christians and, we believe, to all creation, receive mention in the titling of two of the four issues of the year, coexisting with two expressions of repetitious cyclical time in the names of two seasons of the year.

Each year, we are concerned about getting the Abbey Letter to our readers before Easter, but not too long before. Even though Easter’s date moves from year to year with the wandering moon, it has a definite place in earth’s own calendar. Sometimes it wanders too far for convenience; there was one year when the Abbey Letter mailed in spring said Eastertide because we could not manage to get it out by that year’s early Easter. The summer and fall issues are easier to schedule. We allow ourselves a couple of weeks leeway in getting those into the mail. [Recent postal regulations require sending the Abbey Letter out at precise intervals four times a year, so the mailings now occur at fixed times rather than varying with the dating of Easter. Ed.]

I come across the opinion here and there that the Resurrection took place out of time and should not be thought of as a historical event. Certainly God’s own metatemporal eternity was involved, but his Time touched and invaded our earthly time most wonderfully. The Resurrection is a real event in our earth’s history, an event which overarches all our days, past, present, and future. Jesus’ resurrection culminates the earthly life which began with the day for which our Christmas Abbey Letter is named. I haven’t heard anyone suggest that our Lord’s birth did not take place within time. We would not insist on December 25, but we are certain that Jesus does have an earth- time birthday.

Something that did not take place in time, though, was God’s first gift to us, that gift without which other gifts could have no being: Creation. It didn’t take place in time; it was the beginning of time. For the time of this earth the daily round of light and dark, the changing phases of the moon, the procession of the seasons is inherent in God’s creation of the world, and was established from the beginning. So we don’t have an anniversary on which to celebrate creation. But God’s act of creation must not be forgotten nor our thanks for it omitted. For God’s creative love is the basis of our being, here and now, the power by which you and I exist. For that love we give him glory.

We monks have an advantage here; early every Sunday at Lauds we offer in praise the great hymn of Creation Benedicite omnia opera Domini (see page 88 in the Book of Common Prayer). Both the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer and the seven-fold monastic office that we pray here at St. Gregory’s are offered in response to God’s gift of being, both to ourselves and to the whole creation. The returning day by day, even hour by hour, to the praise of God the Creator is an imitation of God’s own constancy and faithfulness in providing the arena where his saving work rains blessings on his creatures. We can’t say when this first gift began to be, but we do know that wonderful things have taken place there within the passage of created time.

Having been born into a Christian family, I had known from my earliest days that God is the maker of heaven and earth. But that fact did not become real to me until St. Francis de Sales told me—I must have been in my early 20s at the time—in his Introduction to the Devout Life:

Consider that a certain number of years ago you were not yet in the world and that your being was a mere nothing. Where were we, O my soul, at that time…God has drawn you out of this nothing to make you what you now are.

I have not yet come fully to realize the implications of my having been drawn out of nothing by the Creator and held in existence by him. But I often consider my dependent state and God’s power and love in bringing me and everyone and everything out of nothing. And especially do I ponder it at Easter, when we see that power and love acting in a new and previously unheard of way in the Resurrection. God’s ingenuity was not exhausted in that first material creation. There is more to come. More has come! In Christ the First Fruits there is the new, improved humanity, the continuation of creation, the ultimate result (so far as we are concerned, I suppose) of the big bang. We can’t put a date on the first appearance of matter out of nothing, but we can put a date on the beginning of matter’s glorious transformation in our resurrected Lord.

And we can’t place a date at the other end of time, at least not yet. It will indeed be on a date within our earthly scheme of time when our Lord Jesus Christ comes in glory to finish this present phase of creation’s being