Towards Dawn‘It is often casually said that we live in post-Christian times. I believe that statement to be false. Theologically, the term ‘post-Christian’ makes no sense. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, and all the letters in between. He carries Read More
No Blond SkiesThere is clearly a Norway of the imagination. An attentive reader, having seen my note on Emily Dickinson last week, sent me this supremely melancholy poem by the symbolist Émile Nelligan, who says of himself in a moment of near Read More
AntisemitismThroughout the West, antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, is raising its ugly head, more or less sublimated in political terms, but instantly recognisable. Much is being written about this development. This is good. Wise heads must think together to counter Read More
Renewal of VowsThis homily was given in the abbey church of Fontgombault at the conclusion of the community’s retreat, at a Mass during which the monks renewed their vows. In the monastic world, 13 November is celebrated as the feast of All Benedictine and Cistercian Saints. An English translation will follow. Alors Pierre prit la parole et dit à Jésus : « Voici que nous avons tout quitté pour te suivre : quelle sera donc notre part ? » Jésus leur déclara : « Amen, je vous le dis : lors du renouvellement du monde, lorsque le Fils de l’homme siégera sur son trône de gloire, vous qui m’avez suivi, vous siégerez vous aussi sur douze trônes pour juger les douze tribus d’Israël. Et celui qui aura quitté, à cause de mon nom, des maisons, des frères, des sœurs, un père, une mère, des enfants, ou une terre, recevra le centuple, et il aura en héritage la vie éternelle. Quand Saint Benoît décrit la profession monastique, il souligne le rapport entre celle-ci et l’autel. Le candidat demande d’être admis par une pétition écrite ‘de sa propre main’ qu’il dépose sur l’autel. Seulement ensuite entonne-t-il ce verset du Psaume 118 qui fait frémir tout coeur bénédictin: Suscipe me, Domine, secundum eloquium tuum et vivam; et ne confundas me ab expectatione mea. Son oblation, suscitée par la parole du Seigneur, a été perçue comme un appel. Le profès a pris au sérieux la question posée par le Christ dans le Prologue à la Sainte Règle: Quis est homo qui vult vitam? Bien sûr qu’il désire la vie, et comment! Il veut vivre en plénitude, sans compromis. Voilà pourquoi il se consacre à vie au service du Seigneur de la Vie, qui donna sa vie pour que nous vivions, sauvés une bonne fois pour toutes du Règne de la Mort. La source dont coule ce salut est le sacrifice du Christ. L’autel le manifeste. L’autel est le gardien de la plus noble aspiration du moine, qui, par sa profession, entre librement dans une dynamique pascale. Le moine consent à être conformé au Christ crucifié pour connaître la force de sa résurrection. Dans l’obscur quotidien il choisit de participer, par la patience, à la passion du Saveur. Le lien entre l’oblation monastique et l’oblation du Calvaire devient plus explicite encore quand Saint Benoît décrit la procédure pour accueillir des oblats présentés par leurs parents au monastère. Dans ces cas, la pétition, écrite par le père de l’oblat, est non seulement mise sur l’autel mais enveloppée, avec les dons de l’offertoire et la main de l’enfant, ‘dans la nappe de l’autel’. La valeur symbolique de la nappe est prodigieuse. Elle nous met devant les yeux les langes dans lesquels l’Enfant Jésus fut enveloppé à sa naissance; elle représente le linceul où son Corps Sacré fut placé 33 ans plus tard, après la déposition de la Croix; elle nous laisse pressentir le vêtement blanc des élus, conviés à se réjouir éternellement de l’alliance nuptiale de l’Agneau. Toutes ces dimension de la vie de Christ, de la vie en Christ, marquent l’existence du moine. Il s’associe aux éléments qui deviendront le Corps et le Sang du Christ. Le moine aussi est destiné à la transformation, exposé par grâce à la divinisante lumière qui le fera christophore, un porteur du Christ, une preuve vivante de la grâce de l’incarnation. ‘Nous avons tout quitté’, dit Saint Pierre dans l’évangile. L’affirmation s’applique à la vie monastique. On arrive au monastère avec bien peu de bagage, ayant laissé derrière soi des choses précieuse et chères. Pendant un certain temps la mémoire de ces choses peut inspirer en nous la nostalgie. Bientôt, pourtant, la réalité du centuple promis se manifeste à nous, nous laissant ébahis. Comparée à la générosité de Dieu, la nôtre n’est qu’une bien pauvre chose. Le moine apprend à se réjouir de sa pauvreté pour que Dieu la comble. Il apprend à se réjouir de sa faiblesse pour que Dieu y déploie sa puissance. En renouvelant nos voeux, mettons notre espérance en lui; conformons, à nouveau, notre volonté à la sienne. Avant-hier, à Saint Anselme, le Saint Père a dit à la communauté bénédictine rassemblée: ‘Nous ne pouvons répondre aux exigences de la vocation qu’en plaçant le Christ au centre de notre existence et de notre mission. Il faut partir de l’acte de foi par lequel nous le reconnaissons comme Sauveur pour ensuite traduire cet acte dans la prière, dans l’étude, dans l’engagement d’une vie sainte.’ Il faut viser la sainteté. La fête de ce jour, la Toussaint Bénédictine, nous rappelle que la vie monastique a été une voie de sanctification pour des multitudes. Une nuée de témoins aimables et crédibles nous entoure. Puissent nos vies radicalement données être dignes de leur exemple, apportant de la joie au Coeur de Dieu et du réconfort à notre monde qui pleure. Amen.
Towards Dawn‘It is often casually said that we live in post-Christian times. I believe that statement to be false. Theologically, the term ‘post-Christian’ makes no sense. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, and all the letters in between. He carries constitutionally the freshness of morning dew. Christianity is of the dawn. If at times, during given periods, we feel enshrouded by twilight, it is because another day is in the making. It seems to me clear that we find ourselves in such a process of awakening now. If we do want to deal in the currency of ‘pre’ and ‘post’, I think it more apposite to suggest that we stand on the threshold of an age I would call ‘post-secular’. Secularisation has run its course. It is exhausted, void of positive finality. The human being, meanwhile, remains alive with deep aspirations. It is an essential task of the Church to listen to these attentively, with respect, then to orient them towards Christ, who carries the comfort and challenge for which the human heart yearns.’ From my new book, Towards Dawn, just published. You can read more about it here.
Desert Fathers 46You 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. They say about Abba John the Dwarf that one day he told his elder brother: ‘I wish to live without cares, like the angels, who are without cares, not having to work but ceaselessly offering praise to God.’ Then, untying his garment, he went into the desert. After a week he came back to his brother. When he knocked on the door, [his brother] heard him from within. Before opening, he said: ‘Who are you?’ And he said: ‘I am John’. But [his brother] answered, saying: ‘John has become an angel! He no longer dwells among men’. So he besought him and said: ‘It’s me! Open for me!’ But he did not open, leaving him afflicted until the next morning. When eventually he did open, [his brother] said: ‘You see, you are a man after all. If you want to eat, you will once again have to work.’ At that, [John] prostrated himself and said: ‘Forgive me!’ Abba John the Dwarf is a towering presence in the Desert. A pupil of Pambo, a teacher to Arsenius, his authority was held in high regard. It was John, short of stature, who as a novice was given a task destined to become legendary. His elder took a dry stick, plonked it in arid ground, and instructed John to water it daily ‘until it should bear fruit’. The only well was so far away that John, to draw from it, had to leave in the evening and come back the next day, spending all his time, and most of his strength, on an exercise that seemed, to all intents and purposes, not only useless, but a kind of mockery. John, though, persevered. And at ‘the end of three years the wood came to life and bore fruit. Then the elder took some of the fruit and carried it to the church, saying to the brethren, “Take and eat the fruit of obedience”. Andrei Tarkovsky, the master cinema director, used this story as a framework for his final essential feature, the film Sacrifice released in 1986, the year of his death. He invoked John the Dwarf’s silent, trustful, patiently gratuitous work, a source of paradoxical fecundity, as a corrective to the forceful yet insubstantial impact of ‘Words, words, words’, an exclamation from Hamlet uttered in despair by the intellectual Alexander, the film’s protagonist, when he considers his own trajectory of spouted hot air. It is touching to find John, an illustrious specimen of monastic virtue, falling prey, at a given moment, to illusion. His intention is noble enough. Taking stock of his life, John considers that too much effort goes into chores. Did he become a monk to work in the kitchen, weave baskets, and attend to practical needs that are often dull? Had he not opted for an angelic life, the transformation of his whole existence into praise? When this thought came to him, he lived with his own brother. That is, I should think, relevant information. Family relationships are complex. If the Lord let a third of the apostolic college consist of pairs of brothers, it was partly to show how blood-ties must be illumined by a supernatural call. There may, for all we know, have been a latent quarrel in the shared hermitage. Did John sometimes think along the lines ‘Argh! He has always had a way of dodging the dishes!’? Given the fraternal straightforwardness that marks the exchanges after John’s return, a dynamic of this sort may have contributed to tension felt, in any case, by those who embrace a life of spiritual pursuits when they discover the continued exigence of practical life, those times when Benedictines dream of becoming Cistercians, Cistercians hanker after the Charterhouse, and Carthusians dream of a solitary mountain-top with steep access. John wished to live an angelic life. So off he went, loosening his robe, no more needing, now, the girdle or apron with which he had tied it in for efficient work. He had forgotten one thing, though: angels have no need for supper. Also, they are never quite on their own. Theology shows them to us configured in choirs and hierarchies. We do not know what went through John’s head during seven days and seven nights in isolation under the vast desert sky, with the distant calls of jackals his only perceptible company. In any case, life at home with his brother no longer seemed so awful. Perhaps, he mused, one might after all live a God-pleasing life there, too. Schadenfreude, spontaneous pleasure in others’ misfortune, especially when they have acted against our advice, is no monastic trait. Among brothers, however, it can find licit expression, and is not always wholly incompatible with charity. John’s brother reinforces the lesson circumstance had taught the ex-hermit. ‘Ah! My angelic fratello of whose company I was not worthy!’ He let John spend a further night out in the cold, just to bring the point home. Then he volunteered a wholly Biblical correction — for already St Paul had written to the Thessalonians, a lot rather given to airy-fairy religion: ‘If any one will not work, let him not eat.’ The end of the story is typical of this genre of literature. Nonetheless it is surprising and beautiful. John does not waste time on explanations. He does not go into some long tirade about how he had felt when he decided to leave, how accumulated frustration had made life a trial. To seek to justify himself even implicitly would have seemed to him both a waste of time and somehow unworthy. He says simply: ‘Forgive me’, and assumes the full weight of his mistake. Therein lies this story’s principal lesson. Detail from Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement.
No Blond SkiesThere is clearly a Norway of the imagination. An attentive reader, having seen my note on Emily Dickinson last week, sent me this supremely melancholy poem by the symbolist Émile Nelligan, who says of himself in a moment of near despair: ‘I am the new Norway from which the blond skies have departed’. Nelligan is a tragic figure in the literature of Québec. Afflicted with a bipolar condition he was hospitalised at the age of twenty and remained in institutions until his death at 44. He seems not to have known the soft luminosity that marks even the depths of Norwegian winter – not to mention the summer nights untouched by any darkness at all. https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Emile-Nelligan-Soir-dhiver.m4a
AntisemitismThroughout the West, antisemitism, the world’s oldest hatred, is raising its ugly head, more or less sublimated in political terms, but instantly recognisable. Much is being written about this development. This is good. Wise heads must think together to counter a trend that lies within the body politic as a latent virus. In such straits I miss the intelligent, humane, fearless voice of Jonathan Sacks. Fortunately many of his videos and texts are available on a website dedicated to his legacy. Rabbi Sacks spoke of antisemitism as ‘the first warning sign of a culture in a state of cognitive collapse. It gives rise to that complex of psychological regressions that lead to evil on a monumental scale: splitting, projection, pathological dualism, dehumanisation, demonisation, a sense of victimhood, and the use of a scapegoat to evade moral responsibility. It allows a culture to blame others for its condition without ever coming to terms with it themselves.’ Those words were written ten years ago. Meanwhile they have only gained in relevance.
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✨💕Today is World Kindness Day ✨💕 World Kindness Day is a global day that promotes the importance of being kind to each other, to yourself, and to the world. This day, celebrated on November 13 of each year, has the purpose Read More 1 Comments
World Kindness Day is everyday! There is a difference. Whoever founded World Kindness day is completely wrong! Its a cause Read More
Today we celebrate the feast of St. Josaphat, Bishop and Martyr. He was Bishop of Polotz, worked for the reunion of Ukrainian Catholics. His murder by those who opposed it brought about many conversions. 7 Likes
Today is the feast of The Dedication of the Lateran Basilica. The church of St. John on the Lateran in Rome is 'Mother and head of all the churches of the city and the world'. It is the cathedral church of Read More 4 Likes
Today we celebrate St. Willibrord St. Willibrord was born in Northumbria in 658. He entered the Benedictine order and sent to study, including spending twelve years, 678-90, at the monastery of Rath Melsigi, near Milford, Co. Carlow before going with Read More 7 Likes
☘️Today we remember all the Saints of Ireland The feast celebrates the gifts and the glory of God in his saints, their sharing in the paschal mystery of Christ, our communion with them in Christ, their example and their intercession Read More 2 Comments
