​+ The Sacred Liturgy is essentially contemplative. It recapitulates the mysteries of God and of His definitive and salvific revelation in human history year after year in order that we might be drawn into and caught up by those very mysteries and come, ever more gradually, to live in and from them. This is certainly the ‘bread and butter’ of the monastic vocation: we are nothing other than men called to celebrate and live these mysteries as the very ground of our being in the Sacred Liturgy as it has grown and developed under the tutelage of God the Holy Spirit over the ages and has been handed on to us in the Church’s Tradition.
 
Of course, this active contemplation of God’s wonders in the school of the Sacred Liturgy is not the preserve of monks alone. Whilst it is our privileged and God given vocation to ‘put nothing before the Work of God’ (Rule, ch. 43), the mysteries of God celebrated and made present amongst us by God in and through the Sacred Liturgy are for all the baptised, and we are all called, mutatis mutandis according to the duties of our particular vocation, to live ever more deeply in and from the realities present in our sacred rites.
 
This is the kernel of what came to be known of “the liturgical movement” of the last century. Both St Pius X and the Second Vatican Council taught this clearly: the Sacred Liturgy is the “the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit.” (Tra le Sollecitudine, 1903; Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 14). If we are to be true Christians we must be in a liturgical relationship with God—a relationship which is an active contemplation of what He has done for us in Christ and what He continues to do for us through the rites of the One True Church He founded.
 
And it is in the context of these Sacred Rites that the Church reads Sacred Scripture. The Liturgy is the Bible’s natural habitat as it were. But in fact, we do not read the Bible at Mass and in the other liturgical rites; rather, the Word of God lives and breathes throughout their entirety, in the prayers, psalms, responsories, longer and shorter readings and other texts. The Word of God lives and breathes and embraces us and teaches and cajoles us, and even chastises us at times, as we penetrate more deeply into its mystery—the mystery of the Word become flesh Who dwelt amongst us, which soon we are to celebrate with apposite solemnity and joy.
 
The more this liturgical contemplation becomes our staple spiritual diet, the more we receive from Almighty God, the more clearly we hear His voice. To this end the Divine Office frequently recapitulates the content of the Epistle and Gospel of the Holy Mass of a given day or feast, having us sing of these throughout twenty-four hours on Sundays and first-class feasts.
 
This fourth Sunday of Advent the Chapter (or short lesson/reading) at First Vespers, Lauds, Terce and Second Vespers comes from this morning’s Epistle, in which St Paul defends himself to the turbulent Corinthian Church and Providentially teaches us about the nature of the ministry of apostles in the Church. “One should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God,” he insists, adding further that “it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.”
 
The Church has pondered his teaching ever since, understanding the “mysteries of God” to be the sacred mysteries celebrated in the liturgy—the sacraments. So too, she has ruminated on the meaning of stewardship and has found it to be clearly distinct from any kind of proprietorial behaviour in respect of the “mysteries of God.” The vocation of the apostles and of their successors today is the be trustworthy dispensers of what has been handed on to them from the apostles by their predecessors in the Church’s Tradition, not parsimonious scrooges nor vain ideologues.
 
Indeed, and above all, the successor of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, is called to exemplify this Pauline teaching, as the emeritus Bishop of Rome taught:
 
“The power that Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors is, in an absolute sense, a mandate to serve. The power of teaching in the Church involves a commitment to the service of obedience to the faith. The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law. On the contrary: the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word. He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism.” (Homily, 7 May 2005)
 
In contemplating Saint Paul’s teaching on this fourth Sunday of Advent, one cannot but recall the teaching of the Letter to the Hebrews: “The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (4:12)
 
Indeed, the Word of God in the inspired words of Saint Paul in this morning’s epistle cuts through much of that which we experience at the hands of some apostles today, revealing much and giving us more still to ponder in its light. And it is in this light—in the light of the Word of God living and acting in the Church’s Sacred Liturgy—that we must persevere in the faith, if necessary, even in spite of the lack of trustworthiness that may be found in the stewards of the mysteries of the Faith. It is in this light that we must ourselves be faithful, even if the requisite fidelity seems lacking in the stewards.
 
Saint Benedict teaches his abbots repeatedly that they are but stewards of the monastery and of their monks, and that the abbot must answer for each one at the final judgment—a teaching that is all the more applicable to successors of the apostles, to whom more has been entrusted. (cf. Lk 12:48)
 
Our contemplation of these realities must needs become prayer—today, a fervent and urgent prayer that those to whom the apostolic office has been entrusted in the Church of our day shall indeed be faithful stewards of the mysteries. In the first place we must pray for our own bishop and father, and with him for the Holy Father, who is called to be “the visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful” within the universal Church (Lumen Gentium, 23).
 
So too we must pray for the whole College of Bishops, many of whom we are privileged to call friends, that they shall without exception constantly bind themselves and their particular Churches “to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism,” that the Word of God, who became flesh for our salvation may ever live and act in the sacred rites of His Church, that we may enter into them ever more deeply, for our salvation and for the salvation of the world. +

Our December 2021 Letter to Oblates and Associates "Absque Labe Concepta" may be downloaded here.

For more information on oblates and associates, please contact the Oblate and Associate Master at this email address.

+ Gaudete in Domino semper: iterum dico Gaudete, St Paul insists in the epistle this morning. “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.”
 
For some of us, at times, the emphasis on joy and rejoicing and happiness and feeling good that we encounter in the Church or in her whitewashed liturgy can seem very hollow indeed. For we suffer. We suffer from sickness and from unexpected illnesses that turn our lives upside down, or even threaten to bring them to an end, as do those whom we love. We grow old and fear much of what that may involve. We have our plans for our lives ruined by the loss of work, by pandemics which cage us in and by individuals with power who, in the pretence of doing good and even in the name of God, for some reason which we cannot fathom, wish us ill and seek to destroy us.
 
It is hard to rejoice when there is not much to rejoice about, indeed, when there is plenty to bemoan!
 
But let us listen to St Paul again:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let all men know your forbearance. The Lord is at hand.  Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
 
My brothers and sisters, by ourselves there is very little about which to rejoice: that is the sad reality of fallen humanity—a reality we know only too well through our own sins and in those of others that are visited upon us.
 
But St Paul is not teaching us to rejoice in ourselves. No. He exhorts us to “rejoice in the Lord.” And it is precisely here, in the Lord, as baptised and confirmed members of His Body the Church assembled to offer Him worship and to be fed from His altar, that we are able to rejoice—no matter what pestilence, potentate or disorder persecutes us. For in the Lord we share in His victory over sin and death. In the Lord, in and through the life of the Church and most particularly through our fervent and frequent reception of the sacraments, we can live and grow in that “the peace of God, which passes all understanding [which] will keep [our] hearts and…minds in Christ Jesus.”
 
Thus, we may rejoice. Thus we must rejoice – even if we must continue the daily struggle to be faithful to Christ in a world which, in respect to the eternal truths in respect of the God-given nature and destiny of every human person, is fast moving from amnesia to euthanasia.
 
Here, too, St Paul teaches us: “Let all men know your forbearance.” Our perseverance in the particular vocation I have been given, in the monastery, in the sacrament of Christian marriage, as a cleric or a single man or woman in the Church, is a powerful witness in a consumerist world in which fidelity, devotion, duty and faith are regarded as, at best, quaint but useless commodities. Our God-given task, our vocation no matter where we have our place in the Body of Christ on earth, is to persevere. For as St Benedict is very fond of teaching his monks, it is “he that shall persevere to the end shall be saved.” (Rule, ch. 7; Mt 24:13)
 
Perseverance, however, is not a facile matter. The crosses laid upon us may well press us down, even beyond our strength at times. Again, St Paul teaches us: “The Lord is at hand.  Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Even if our circumstances have us cry out Domine, salve nos—perimus! (Save us Lord, we are perishing! Mt 8:25) we know that “the Lord is at hand.” With and in His grace we shall experience a strength beyond our own measure. And in this, truly, can we rejoice!

But if we are to be able rejoice, if we are to remain in His grace, we must do our part.  The Sacred Liturgy of the Church, like a wise mother reminds us of this in the Ember Days on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday of this coming week. We must detach ourselves from this world and from our sins through fasting and penance, and attach ourselves to Christ with more fervent prayer and a good and humble confession, if we are fully to receive His grace, His strength, His life.
 
As we offer ourselves the altar this morning, let us rejoice in humble confidence that help, indeed that Hope Himself, is at hand, and pray fervently that we, and those we love and hold dear, shall be truly open to receive Him. +

+ The question posed by St John the Baptist and the response given by Our Blessed Lord in the Holy Gospel of this Mass form one of the most crucial exchanges in the Gospels. A faith-filled prophet asks, “Are you the ‘real deal’; in you do we finally have all that has been promised by God from of old?” And he is given the clear response: “Look and see for yourself: yes, I am He.”

St John the Baptist most probably sent his envoys to seek this confirmation in anticipation of a positive response, and not out of curiosity or of doubt. He was anticipating the coming of the Messiah and, as it turns out, rightly recognised His coming.
 
As I said, this exchange is crucial, for on the question of who Jesus of Nazareth is hangs a great deal—indeed, upon this question hangs everything: our eternal salvation or damnation, no less.
 
Our world, however, anesthetises us to the vital importance of whom He is through its pursuit of comfort and pleasure at all costs. Eternal salvation or damnation are not spoken of in polite company, often not even in ecclesiastical circles, because they inevitably disturb the pact we have (knowingly or not) made with the devil to leave us live our lives in peace. To break this truce, to refuse the sedatives proffered by almost all about us, and to speak of the Truth of Christ, of His Teachings, of what He requires of each of us in order that we may be saved, and to witness to that Truth by trying faithfully to live it, by persevering in carrying the cross in the different circumstances in which we find ourselves, is to upset, indeed it is to scandalise, our contemporaries. So much of modern life and political discourse is predicated on the assumption that worldly comfort and prosperity are the only values, and that without the prospect of them life is not worth continuing (or even being allowed to be born).
 
The Church’s Sacred Liturgy does not (and can never, without eviscerating her very nature) participate in this calculated deception. In this blessed season of Advent she proclaims the coming of He whose coming was foretold by the prophets, the Redeemer, by whose suffering and death the forgiveness of sins and eternal life made possible and which is to this day offered to all of mankind by His One True Church. In the place of finite worldly comfort and passing pleasure the Church is called by her very nature to announce to each of us the realities of sin and eternal death, of forgiveness and eternal life, according to our freely chosen acceptance or rejection of the Truth of Christ that she must faithfully teach until the end of time.
 
To the world, this is scandalous. It is worse than “politically incorrect”—it undermines everything on which modern society is based. It is radically subversive and refuses to accede to policies or legislation enacted by authorities which contradict the Truth of Christ, most particularly in respect of the sanctity of innocent human life from the moment of conception to natural death, of the God-given nature of human sexuality and marriage, of the reality that suffering has a purpose and a real value in God’s Providence, and that there are moral absolutes, that is, there are some things (acts) that are intrinsically evil and can never be justified.
 
Christ’s faithful can never ‘negotiate’ with the world on these matters, and when His Church strays down this path in pursuit of dialogue with the deaf, she has long since left Christ behind. No, by their very nature Christ, His Church, Her Sacred Liturgy and His faithful people all confound the world. We seek to cure and heal the deaf—nothing less!—not to tranquilise them with soothing platitudes and empty gestures.
 
“Blessed is he that shall not be scandalized in me,” Our Lord declares in the Gospel. “Blessed”, not “happy” in the worldly sense, but “blessed” in the sense of living in God’s grace and righteousness—that grace which sustains us in humble and faithful adherence to the Truth, in perseverance in conforming ourselves to its demands, and in supernatural hope amidst the temptations and injuries we suffer from the world, the flesh and the devil.
 
We do not need to look for another Saviour, nor for a panacea to obscure our very need for salvation. He has come in the Person of Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ. What we do need is to purify our hearts, minds and souls so that we, too, can more clearly and efficaciously recognise His coming. This is our Advent duty, through the confession of our sins and the amendment of our lives where necessary; through the more fervent offering of ourselves in worship of our Saviour in the Sacred Liturgy, and through a renewed engagement daily to witness to the Truth Incarnate in the specific circumstances of our particular vocation. For the courage and humility so to do, we implore Almighty God before His altar this morning. +

+ The end is nigh. This is the second Sunday in a row that the Church’s Sacred Liturgy has cried out that the end times are coming—this Sunday using St Luke’s more succinct, but nevertheless clear, account.
 
And this is the first Sunday of Advent; a season in which we look forward to the coming of Christ—to His second coming at the end of time, of which today’s Holy Gospel speaks, to His coming to us personally (or to our going to Him) at the end of our lives, and to the celebration of His wondrous Incarnation in the forthcoming feast of Christmas.
 
The Church has traditionally taken time in Advent to recall the reality of what we call the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell—and rightly, for even if to speak of these matters seems a very long way indeed from what the world would call “the Christmas spirit”, they are in fact at the very heart of it. For Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, did not take on human flesh in order to make us ‘feel good’ in late December. He was not born of the Blessed Virgin Mary in order to provide us with “happy holidays” or “joyful feasts”. No: God became man in Jesus Christ because death and judgement are realities. He came to open for us the possibility of everlasting life in heaven and to save us from eternal damnation in hell.
 
Advent, the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year, is when we are called to consider these truths anew. Thus our Holy Mother, the Church, puts last things first, as it were, because they are the most important. For, as St Thomas More declares during his sham trial in the renowned play, A Man for All Seasons:
 
“Death . . . comes for us all, my lords. Yes, even for Kings he comes, to whom amidst all their Royalty and brute strength he will neither kneel nor make them any reverence nor pleasantly desire them to come forth, but roughly grasp them by the very breast and rattle them until they be stark dead . . . so causing their bodies to be buried in a pit and sending them to a judgment . . . whereof at their death their success is uncertain.” (Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons)
 
Princes and Presidents, Popes and paupers will all die. So shall we all. Such is the reality of the human condition after original sin. In the end, there is no avoiding this stark reality.
 
St Benedict teaches his monks “to keep death daily before one’s eyes”. (Rule, ch, 4) This is not so that monks can be kept in a state of paranoia or debilitative fear, but so that we shall live each day in conspectu æternitatis—with the reality of eternity before us. This, surely, is a joyful reality, filled with hope, and not something of which one should be afraid—if we are faithful to Christ, to His Church and to her teaching.
 
This, surely, is the import of Advent. This, surely is the point of St Luke’s cry “Levate capita vestra: quoniam appropinquat redemptio vestra.” (Lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand.)
 
Our redemption by God made man is at hand. It is time, this Advent, whether our own particular judgment or the end of the world is soon, or whether it may yet be a little while, to lift up our heads and attend to the eternal realities of death, judgment, heaven and hell. For we shall each face them: their existence is not a matter of personal opinion or preference.
 
But we can face them with hope and anticipation: the hope made possible by Hope Himself in His Incarnation which clear and distinct reality we celebrate at Christmas. If holidays and feasts are to be celebrated, if we are to have happy times with family and friends in a few weeks’ time, they will have meaning if each one of us has devoted the necessary time and effort this Advent to prepare ourselves spiritually. For then we shall truly have something about which to celebrate. If Christmas 2021 finds me advanced in virtue and more determined to conquer vice, if it sees me having made reparation for the damage I have caused, if I have reconciled with God and with others in areas where I have been estranged—most certainly through the making of a good confession, but in other ways, as necessary, as well—then, if I have done all of these things, I need not fear death or judgment or the everlasting torments of hell. I can live and rejoice in the hope of the unending communion with God and all who are faithful to Christ in heaven.
 
My brothers and sisters, Advent can be a very busy time in which the world can engulf us in the trappings of the coming feast. Let us resolve to begin Advent well today, and to continue it with clarity and resolution. In this first Mass of Advent let us ask for the grace to lift up our heads and to see clearly and with humility that which each of us must do at this moment so as to be able truly to rejoice in the coming feast of Christmas. +

Before celebrating first Vespers of the first Sunday of Advent it was a great joy to bless our newly made altar, to place within it the names and intentions of our over five hundred benefactors, to put in place the ancient altar stone made available to us by the diocese and to bless the three new altar cloths and dress the altar with them.

It will be some time before the final restoration of the monastery church – with, please God, a marble altar – will be possible, and we wanted to put in place something more worthy than our temporary arrangements for the altar hitherto. It seemed only right to dedicate some funds to the worship of Almighty God amidst those going to plumbers, electricians, masons and architects!

We are profoundly grateful for the dedicated, highly skilled and professional work of our local carpenter, Menuiserie Pierlot, and to those who have contributed towards this project. Contributions towards the cost are still needed and most welcome: they can be made through our support page.

A blessed Advent!