February 2008
Vol. XXIX, No. 2
Dear Oblates and Friends of Portsmouth,
This year Lent falls earlier than usual with the promise of spring already on the horizon and the need for us to begin our annual spiritual renewal for the triumphant feast of Easter. One of the key words in the Prologue of Saint Benedict's Rule is hasten or run to signify the urgency of our progress on the path to salvation. Lent is the time when we should become more aware of this sense of urgency as we journey to our goal, which has been secured by the death and resurrection of Jesus on our behalf. Ash Wednesday, when we begin our Lenten observance, has become an opportunity for many Protestant denominations, to provide their congregations with a call to repentance through a ritual which is a forcible reminder of the transience of life. The ashes of Ash Wednesday, produced for Catholics from the palms of last year, make possible physical contact with a symbol of the dust to which we all must return.
Later in Lent another symbol is used to suggest the regeneration through water that Easter brings about. The water of baptism is the means by which we enter the Church, and an important element in the Paschal rite is the renewal of our baptismal promises, a way of showing that we are truly committed to discipleship in Christ. Water is one of the dominant symbols in the Gospel of John, and a key narrative in this Gospel is the story of the Samaritan woman. She is pictured significantly at a well, giving Jesus the opportunity of explaining to her in addition to all who hear of this account, the doctrine of the living water that will never fail and the means by which we are regenerated and reconciled to God. The first step in the woman's metanoia or conversion is the recognition of her sinful condition and the need for change. She is indeed a sinner, who has had five husbands, and Jesus points out that the man she currently lives with is not her husband. His knowledge of her personal life she attributes to a prophetic charism; this is the beginning of a deeper understanding of who exactly Jesus is and the character of his mission. By the end of this encounter Jesus convinces her of the spiritual nature of the worship of God, and that the place of worship, and by implication the manner of worship, whether at Mount Gerizim for the Samaritans or on Mount Zion in Jerusalem for the Jews, will soon become irrelevant, since God is spirit, and they that adore him must adore him in spirit and in truth. The water that Jesus is giving her is His Word: spiritual, life-giving, regenerating, just as the Kingdom he is preaching is likewise of a higher order.
The next step in her conversion is the willingness to accept Jesus as the Messiah, the one who will tell us everything. Jesus' admission to her that he is the Messiah, the one who is speaking with her, confirms her faith in him, and she shares the same reaction that others have felt, the need to proclaim what has been revealed to her, from the humble shepherds at his birth, to the first disciples who abandon their fishing nets to follow him and eventually announce the good news to the world. The villagers with whom she wishes to share her newborn faith come to see for themselves, and believe also, not because of her word, but rather through their own contact with Jesus, acknowledging him as the Savior of the World. These Samaritans, despised by the Jews, repeat the pattern of salvation, by which the humble and ignorant, those in the eyes of the world most unlikely to be the recipients of God's favor, turn out to be the most willing to accept Jesus as the Messiah, whereas those learned in the Law and the Prophets, the scribes and the Pharisees, fail to accept Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophecies through their stubborn, self-inflicted blindness.
Water again figures prominently in John's Gospel when Jesus performs the miraculous cure of the man born blind by ordering him to wash in the pool of Siloam after he had rubbed damp clay on his eyes. Again there is a special revelation to the cured man of Jesus as the Son of Man, a title of the messiah. This incident echoes that of the Samaritan woman as he also grows in knowledge and faith, and is then given the ultimate gift of a special revelation: Show me who he is, he asks Jesus who replies: You have seen him (physically and through the eyes of faith) and the one who is speaking with you is He, at which the blind man falls to his knees in an act of worship. In a neat reversal, he, now cured, is a witness to the truth and confounds the official teachers who refuse to accept the miracle as the work of God, and accuse him of being wholly born in sin, whereas Jesus pronounces them to be the guilty ones through their failure to accept the truth when it appears, so convinced are they that they already have the truth. You say "We see," therefore your sin remains. Lent gives us the opportunity to open our eyes to the truth and allow Jesus to cure us of our spiritual blindness. He, the incarnate Word of God, can deepen our faith through the Word of Scripture. All that is demanded of us is the willingness and desire to be taught with the same degree of trust and gratitude shown by the Samaritan woman and the man born blind.
Lourdes and The Song of Bernadette
Shortly after the fall of France to the Germans in 1940, Franz Werfel, the celebrated Austrian novelist, found himself with his wife in Lourdes, fleeing from certain death at the hands of the Nazis because of his Jewish background and criticism of the Hitler regime. So impressed was he at hearing of Bernadette and her sanctity that he vowed that if he escaped to America, he would tell the story of her life. The book he wrote became an instant best seller, going through six printings in just over five months and soon after made into a popular film. Werfel, married to the Catholic widow of Gustav Mahler, the distinguished composer and a fellow Austrian, was sympathetic to
Christianity, but felt that renunciation of his Judaism by converting to Catholicism would be regarded as betrayal of his fellow Jews at a time when they were undergoing the ordeal of the holocaust. Franz Werfel's book, The Song of Bernadette, in its treatment of the simple, courageous girl who has had such a profound impact on modern spiritual practice and devotion, remains a testament to his own religious convictions.
On February 11, 1858, Bernadette Soubirous experienced the first of 18 visions of Our Lady in a grotto near Lourdes in the Pyrenees. This marked the beginning of a pilgrimage movement which has steadily increased in numbers and advocates of many religious persuasions, young and old, some seeking cures and many in search of the unique encounter with the divine that Lourdes offers, through opportunities to help the sick and find spiritual fulfillment in their lives. What started as a young peasant girl's tale of an apparition of a beautiful young woman clad in white holding a rosary in a grotto located in a remote part of France has grown into a world-wide phenomenon attracting over six million pilgrims during the centennial celebration in 1958. Bernadette's role was simple and brief, and once the visions ceased after a six-month period, her mission was ended and she returned to the obscurity from which she had come, protected from fame and celebrity by eventually entering a convent and dying at the age of 35 from the sickness she had known all her life.
What was Bernadette's message? Like the 20th-Century visionaries of Fatima and Medjugorje, she was told by the Blessed Virgin to urge repentance for sin, to pray the rosary, to have a church built and to drink from a spring, which till then had been hidden, but now flowed abundantly, with what many believe to have healing powers. Unlike the other Marian visionaries, Bernadette had no message of doom to deliver; there were no secrets to unveil, and while Lourdes attracted instant and lasting publicity from its reputation for cures, Bernadette was able to escape notoriety and find refuge in the simple, uneventful life of a cloistered nun. Many physical cures have been attributed to Lourdes; the hundreds of crutches left near the grotto testify to this, but only a small fraction of cures have been authenticated scientifically. The real cures, most agree, are in the spiritual realm. Faith is deepened and if one is a pilgrim in search of a cure, acceptance of one's condition and resignation to God's will is often obtained in place of the hoped-for cure. The true miracles are miracles of faith.
Liturgical Calendar for February
Cycle of Prayer for Lent: Women; the Needy; the Hungry of the World
Candidates for the Sacraments; Penitents and Wanderers
2 Presentation of the Lord
3 SUNDAY IV OF THE YEAR
Oblate Day of Recollection - Dom Matthew:
Topic: Passion of SS. Felicity & Perpetua
Omit: St. Blaise, Bishop & Martyr
& St. Ansgar, Patron of Scandinavia
5 St. Agatha, Martyr
6 Ash Wednesday
10 SUNDAY I OF LENT
11 St. Benedict of Aniane, Abbot
Our Lady of Lourdes
14 SS. Cyril and Methodius, Patrons of Europe
16 St. Bernadette (in France)
17 SUNDAY II OF LENT
21 St. Peter Damian, Bishop & Doctor
22 See of St. Peter, Apostle
23 St. Polycarp, Bishop & Martyr
24 SUNDAY III OF LENT
(March 9: Sunday V of Lent: Oblate Day of Recollection)
Monastery Notes
The special collection taken up at the Christmas Midnight Mass, which this year exceeded $2000, was donated to the following charities: Bishop Tobin's Keep the Heat On Fund, Covenant House in N.Y., Catholic Relief Services, and St. Bernard's Indian Mission School in North Dakota. Money from the Poor Box was contributed to the Rhode Island Community Food Bank.
On Christmas Day the wind turbine registered 2,000,000 kilowatt hours, from the time it was inaugurated in March of 2006. This source of energy has helped substantially in responding to the exorbitant rise in oil costs as well as serving as a catalyst for other energy-saving initiatives in the State.
Dom Julian and a member of the monastery staff, Mr. Jose Soares, held a joint exhibition of their art work in watercolor, tempera and oil, at the Greater Fall River Art Association during the month of December. Many of Dom Julian's pictures were painted while he was serving as chaplain to the nuns at Saint Walburga's Convent in Colorado. The oil paintings, chiefly landscapes, of Jose Soares represent work he has done since his exhibit of portraits at the Abbey's Art Center held several years ago.
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