Canta et ambulaSt Augustine’s sensitivity to music is well documented. In the Confessions he says how struck he was by the singing in the cathedral of Milan: ‘How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through Read More
CommunionHomily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity. Jesus reached the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and he went up into the hills. He sat there, and large crowds came to him bringing the lame, the crippled, the blind, the dumb and many others; these they put down at his feet, and he cured them. The crowds were astonished to see the dumb speaking, the cripples whole again, the lame walking and the blind with their sight, and they praised the God of Israel. But Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I feel sorry for all these people; they have been with me for three days now and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them off hungry, they might collapse on the way. Matthew 15 29-37. There is an aspect of Christ’s life we tend to erase, abetted by exegetical and artistic tradition: the fact that he, as the Gospels present him, is almost always surrounded by a motley, unruly, demanding crowd of people. Those who seek to get to know Jesus nowadays, to commune with him in prayer, are often anxious to ensure they have peace, solitude, and a predictable life. We easily think that prayer can only be found in some rural monastery or retreat house. It is good, by all means, to go to such places now and then to rest. Christ himself bade his disciples rest — but he did immediately add: ‘for a while’ (Mk 6.31). The implication is clear: they’re afterwards to come back to the fray, for there, too, God can be found, worshipped, and beautifully served. Today’s Gospel shows us Jesus assailed by ‘the lame, the crippled, the blind, the dumb, and many others’, that is to say, by people like us. The disciples are inclined to shoo them away: ‘Let them go and get themselves supper!’ Jesus, meanwhile, is concerned to console and feed them, moved by compassion for their need. This concern brings about the multiplication of loaves and fishes, a miracle foreshadowing the Eucharist. It shows how a little, once it is blessed and given in love, can go a long way. The saint we commemorate, St Francis Xavier, was a man driven by Christlike compassion, wholly surrendered to his mission. In a letter to his friend Ignatius he speaks of how, on a mission to India, children ‘would not let [him] say [his] Office or eat or sleep’, wanting his attention, demanding to be instructed and fed. Like his divine Master, Francis gave himself over to the people who needed him in this way. Thus he became a shining example, not only of Christian virtue, but of Christian prayer. During Advent we pray, again and again, ‘Come, Lord, do not delay!’ Our eyes are raised heavenward. Let us make sure we also look closely round about. For the Lord comes to us not just in sublime, spiritual realities; he comes no less in the ragged, the poor, the lonely. On the day of judgement, he will tell us (we have it on his authority): ‘Whatever you did not do to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.’ It is wholesome to nurture our spiritual lives in private; it is good, at times, to be quiet and at ease. Let us never forget, though, that the Lord whom we await says of himself, ‘My Father is always at work, and I too am working’. The unruffled communion of the Blessed Trinity is not disturbed by constant engagement in the work of redemption and the fulfilment of history. On the contrary: these works are the natural expression and effluence of divine communion in charity. ‘The consolations of God’, wrote St Francis Xavier from Travancore in 1545, ‘are so great that they make all troubles sweet.’ That sweetness is what we seek. By living as Christ lived, we shall find it. Amen.
VeritasHomily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity. Filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, Jesus said: ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Luke 10:21-24. So are divine realities really inaccessible to the learned and the clever? If so, it’s bad news for a community of Dominicans. Before we despair on their behalf, however, let us consider the context of the Gospel words. Jesus exclaims them as he welcomes back the seventy proto-disciples sent abroad to spread his peace and to proclaim the proximity of God’s kingdom. The seventy are amazed at what they have accomplished. Returning with joy, they say, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!’ Jesus assures them that he has seen Satan fall like lightning from heaven. That is what causes him to rejoice ‘in the Holy Spirit’ and to speak the words we have heard. There is a connection, then, between the sort of ‘intelligence’ Jesus condemns and demonic presumption. The demons are intelligent but soulless creatures. They can be cunning. They excel at manipulation. But they are uninterested in truth. Their purpose is confusion. The Gospel cuts through their stratagems by proposing, not just a theory of the universe, but new life as man’s integrity is restored by grace. Grace-filled man rises above deceit when he discovers that the ultimate reality making sense of things is not some speculative, abstract formula but love, divine love incarnate in Christ Jesus and sharable by women and men who freely let his peaceful power work through them. Jesus does not celebrate stupidity. The power of reason is an integral aspect of his image in us. We are obliged to develop it as well as we can. St Peter, one of those to whom Jesus speaks in this scene, urges us, in his first epistle, to be always ready to make a defence to those who call us to account for the hope that is in us (1 Pet 3.15). For that, we need all our resources of learning. What we must remember, quite simply, is that arguments are not enough. Argument left to its own devices is only too prone to stray off course, abandoning the lead of truth-inspired reason for self-generated chaos. Our Dominican friends, thank God, are kept on the straight, narrow path by their Order’s glorious motto: ‘Veritas’! Human intelligence deployed in search for truth, illumined by love, is a wonderful faculty apt to enable growth in wisdom and virtue, apt to bring light into darkness. Let us resolve to use our intelligence responsibly and well, according to our calling or state of life. Not everyone has to give lectures or write books. Being intelligent is primarily about maintaining a concern for the meaning of things, about resisting demonic disorder, about courageously unmasking senselessness. If you think of H.C. Andersen’s well-known tale of the emperor’s new clothes, an important use of intelligence right now is ability to state that the emperor is naked when, in fact, he is. To do that, we must indeed become like children — not by becoming childish, but by retaining, or redeveloping, an ability to see reality clearly, in truth. Amen.
Desert Fathers 49You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here. The reason we have written this rule is that, by observing it in monasteries, we can show that we have some degree of virtue and the beginnings of monastic life. But for anyone hastening on to the perfection of monastic life, there are the teachings of the holy Fathers, the observance of which will lead him to the very heights of perfection. What page, what passage of the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not the truest of guides for human life? What book of the holy Catholic Fathers does not resoundingly summon us along the true way to reach the Creator? […] Are you hastening towards your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teachings and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection you will reach them. Amen. Throughout this series I have referred to the teaching of St Benedict. The time has come to speak of him specifically. Benedictine monasticism has shaped the West. Not for nothing did Pope St John Paul II in 1980 proclaim St Benedict a patron of Europe. When we think of Benedict’s legacy we may think first of imposing buildings, venerable institutions, Gregorian chant, and thick, learned, leather-bound tomes. St Benedict seems to represents the settled solidity our world today has largely lost. So we may assume that his mindset was different from that of the Desert Fathers whose humble cells were provisional, who set up no schools, who prayed in private, and were more concerned with giving books away than with gathering them in libraries. Of course, there are distinctions. Benedict was a Roman through and through. He excelled in organisation and expressed himself in lapidary prose. His was a world of forests and broad fertile plains dotted with villas. A desert of sand he could only have imagined. Benedict was by character discreet. His governance was exquisitely balanced. It is hard to fancy him giving the sort of counsel Antony gave when, to teach a man detachment, he sent him out among birds of prey and wild dogs covered in bacon. Let us not, though, make too much of these external features. Inwardly Benedict stood in grateful continuity with those monks who had lived and fought in Egypt. If you have studied the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers in depth, then turn to the Regula and Life of Benedict, you will pick up countless resonances. Should your ear not yet be sufficiently attuned, turn to the index pages of a critical edition of the Rule and you will see the frequency and range of its author’s references. Let us not forget that monastic life became highly organised in Egypt as well. Already in Antony’s day, colonies were set up so that Athanasius, travelling inland from his see of Alexandria, could note: ‘there were in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other.’ What Antony’s spiritual descendants built was a new civilisation. Athanasius saw it and was glad. St Pachomius, born a generation later, took the task of establishing monasticism further. He brought monks together in fixed, intentional communities. At the command of an angel, Pachomius composed a monastic rule destined to have great influence. St Basil read it and used it in his ordinances. St Jerome translated it into Latin. In these ways it came to nourish St Benedict as well. By the time Pachomius died in 348, his community had well over a hundred members. It would be wrong, therefore, to entertain the idea, a caricature, that Egyptian monasticism stayed somehow primitively pure, charismatic, and personal while in Europe it was shackled by institutions. To the south as well as to the north of the Mediterranean Basin, wise women and men worked hard to pass on and perpetuate the fire that the likes of Antony, Macarius, and Moses had lighted in many human hearts. Any charism, to last, must eventually find objective expression in a framework of sharable stability. There is no inevitable contradiction between rule and life. The challenge is to maintain the rule infused with life, and to regulate vitality. The passage cited above is from the last chapter of Benedict’s Rule. Summing up his teaching, it provides a list of Further Reading. Benedict’s project continues that of the earlier Fathers. He distils their insights. What he modestly calls a little rule for beginners is in fact pure essence. Any monk or nun who has read it and sought to put it into practice will testify to this. Even more so will abbots or abbesses who, over time, have taught the rule to their communities, discovering what depths exist under surfaces of seeming simplicity. Benedict, too, incites us to set our sight high, to aim for ‘perfection’ in the sense I developed in the first few episodes. The wisdom of the Desert Fathers is not confined to the past, or to books. It is alive, a generator of good zeal, in countless monasteries now. Their continued flourishing is crucial to the ecosystem of the Church’s life. We may hope that generous, courageous women and men , thirsty for fullness of life, will answer the monastic call still. St Benedict being clothed in the monastic habit. Fresco from the church of Subiaco.
Not WorthyHomily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity. When Jesus went into Capernaum a centurion came up and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my servant is lying at home paralysed, and in great pain.’ ‘I will come myself and cure him’ said Jesus. The centurion replied, ‘Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; just give the word and my servant will be cured. For I am under authority myself, and have soldiers under me; and I say to one man: Go, and he goes; to another: Come here, and he comes; to my servant: Do this, and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this he was astonished and said to those following him, ‘I tell you solemnly, nowhere in Israel have I found faith like this. And I tell you that many will come from east and west to take their places with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 8.5-11. This encounter of our Lord with the centurion is intimate to us. Each day, before Holy Communion, we repeat the officer’s words: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof!’ The meaning of the words in the Gospel seems self-evident. Let us note, though, this this humble confession is made in response to Jesus’s benevolence. When the Lord hears of the paralysed servant, he does not hesitate, but says at once: ‘I will come myself’. Unconditional kindness prompts the centurion’s self-reflection. After all, he had not come disinterestedly. He carried a request, expected assistance. He was a military man of might. Jesus’s kindness disarms him. If at times we find people we deal with lacking in humility, we might well examine ourselves in the light of this scenario. Does humble generosity on my part call it forth in others? Or is harshness I encounter a reflection of my own hard heart? Jesus does not go to the centurion’s house, but sends him home with the word: ‘Go, be it done for you as you have believed.’ We are told that the servant ‘was healed at that very moment’. A visitation did, then, take place nonetheless. For God is in his word. And a word gone forth from his mouth does not return to him empty (Isa 55.11). There is another aspect to consider. Jesus enters not under the centurion’s roof, but welcomes the centurion under his. We have heard how Isaiah, in a wonderful prophecy, says that ‘the glory of the Lord will be a canopy and a tent to give shade by day from the heat, refuge and shelter from the storm and the rain.’ God’s glorious mercy manifest in Jesus is for us this canopy. The centurion found respite underneath it, and immense spaciousness. It matters to keep this incident in mind when later in the Gospel we hear Jesus say, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Mt 15.24). By his actions he had already broadened the scope of this mission, inviting us always to interpret what he says in the light of what he does. So how can we best make our own confession, at this Mass: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof!’? By recognising the immensity of God’s grace and our own limited graciousness; by acknowledging frankly aspects of our life that need repair; while daring to whisper nonetheless: ‘Yes, there is quite a mess under my roof, but enter anyway’. Then by resolving to get up and move without delay when the Lord summons us under his roof, there to find comfort, nourishment and strength, grace to live by and to share, that others may live. Amen.
Canta et ambulaSt Augustine’s sensitivity to music is well documented. In the Confessions he says how struck he was by the singing in the cathedral of Milan: ‘How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through your Church!’ Better than anyone he has made sense of the jubilus in chant, ‘a certain sound of joy without words, the expression of a mind poured forth in joy’, joy that is ineffable, yet singable. Today, on the last day of the Church’s year, the Divine Office gives us another wonderful text on singing. Augustine speaks here of the kind of singing apt to keep our courage up as we pilgrimage towards hope in a world that often appears like a vale of tears. His words have great poignancy. They resound credibly still as the counsel of a father, a friend: ‘Always go onward in goodness, right faith, good habits. Sing, and walk onwards.’ Thus we shall be preserved from discouragement and pusillanimity. https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Canta-et-ambula-1.m4a
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Pope’s Prayer Intentions for December 2025: For Christians in areas of conflict: Let us pray that Christians living in areas of war or conflict, especially in the Middle East, might be seeds of peace, reconciliation, and hope. 1 Likes
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