hope in the resurrection. We may be your faithful witnesses, all those who are in need of your gospel. We ask this through Christ the Lord, that is the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I think you caught the Galloping Gitch or something while I'm here, so I'll let you listen to What the fuck? You're trying to determine what the galloping bitch did. Whatever I have. What the fuck this morning? First hour. About nutrients and social consciousness. In a book that was published in 1979, Philip Haley tells a true story of deeply religious people who were profoundly informed by the Word of God.

[01:15]

People who opened their lives Sunday after Sunday in the wisdom and strength of God's Word Then, as prophetic people, living in obedience to God's Word, shared their lives and their possessions with others, as also all of those in dire need, the story is told lest innocent blood be shed. And it opens with a knock on the door of a Protestant parsonage in France during the Second World War, one night during a raging snowstorm. It was later recalled by the Jewish fugitive who was shuddering on the doorstep. Magnus Jacques May, the pastor's wife, opened the door

[02:17]

looked at the stranger asking for entry and she cried, come in, come in, as she drew the Jewish woman into the warmth of her kitchen. Now the pastor's wife was aware as everyone else in the village of Lee stronghold of the penalty of harboring Jews. death both for the Jews and for those who parted them. And yet, the refugee slept across her threshold that very bitter night. It was only the first of hundreds who were given shelter, were fed, and escorted to freedom from the farmhouses, the schools, and the barns of Glishomor. And years afterwards, when asked what had made them risk their lives for these unknown Jews, Iglobali Shongol found the question quite disconcerting.

[03:26]

And after another, they hesitated. But after a few moments of silence, they replied, we had no choice. They would have died without us. As they had all shared in the Table Fellowship of worship year after year, so they also shared Magna Trachmae's immediate characteristic response. Amen. Amen. And the Jews, on their threshold, they implicitly would have recognized the life of Christ was at the center of their common worship. A light that they shared week after week through the Word of God in Jesus Christ and the embrace of the Holy Spirit. Who need I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of those who are members of my family, you did it to me.

[04:36]

Now that story raises hard questions for all Christians who by baptism are committed to laying down their lives for others just as Jesus laid down his life for us. It raises critical questions for us as monks because we are presumably formed by the word of God and sacraments of the Lord Jesus Christ week after week, day after day, year after year. Through Christian initiation, we are in fact publicly committed to bear prophetic witness, not only to the meaning, but also to the ethical implications. Christ's death and resurrection, the outpouring of the Spirit on all of creation, on all of us,

[05:39]

What difference does the celebration of Christ's pastoral mystery make in the way we Christians live and relate to God, to the world, and to each other? The Christian Eucharist is primarily the celebration of the work of God in Jesus Christ acting through the power of the Spirit. It is that Trinitarian work which is given expression in Christian assemblies of believers who should be facing contemporary ethical and political issues. Therefore turn to God in Jesus Christ to the power of the Spirit. Very present and powerfully operative in human hearts and in human communities.

[06:52]

We Christians turn to God in order to procreate to receive the gift of salvation. to strengthen and deepen our faith and our communion, not only with God, but also with each other. And as a result, we have a distinctive identity which is expressed, hopefully strengthened, through our regular celebration of the youth. This sense of identity It empowers us then to relate, to live for others, to relate to the world just as God lives and relates to all of creation in Jesus Christ through the power of the Spirit. Our Christian Eucharist then should always have a Trinitarian shape.

[07:57]

In other words, it expresses the inner life of God. revealed in Jesus Christ as three persons in one God with both personal and cognitive. God's unconsciousness revealed in Jesus Christ with both personal and social. The Eucharist also expresses the self-gift of the incarnate Son of God offered to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit. But it's the self-gift offered also to us as God's people. His whole life is one spent for God and others, one which ended, as we know,

[09:00]

his death on the cross. As I mentioned the other day, he was put to death by political and religious leaders. He was in fact threatened by this commitment to God and God's people. Especially this commitment to the poor, the marginalized, and the sinners of his day. Jesus himself passed from death to life. He rejected false idols, power, and pleasure, while committing himself to the Father as the ultimate source of meaning and value in his life. In other words, unlike the Lord, he entered very deeply into the healing and corrective dimensions of life. And he brought light where there was darkness, brought light where there was death.

[10:08]

And just as he himself died to the temptation, to isolation, self-preoccupation, self-sufficiency, so he invited and empowered us make up our cross daily by responsibly embracing the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the All-Living God comes to us moment by moment in the context of other living people. As I mentioned this morning, Jesus himself and to pass from this baptismal experience of unconditional acceptance by God, you are my beloved son, in you I take delight. He had to pass from that to the desert experience, loneliness and pride.

[11:15]

He had to come to grips with the mystery of evil. He had to tap his own hidden inner resources. Confront the mystery of life, rampant in life, and firm above all, the ultimate saving power. The way of suffering, the way of the cross, is the way to liberation, to freedom, to eternal life. So it has to be in the lives of all of us who profess to be disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. As we all know, there is an enormous amount of suffering in the world today. Much of it comes from the injustice And the experience, I think, offers us the opportunity to search out and to find the unsuspected resources that are buried deep within the heart of each one of us.

[12:33]

As Léa Boix once wrote, there are places in the human heart which do not yet exist. Suffering enters into them, so they might not exist. There are places in the human heart which do not yet exist. Suffering enters into them, so they might not exist. Suffering is often the key, the discovery of what we are. what we have in us to become. If only we summoned forth that power and strength. Senator Gries, you know, cringe once observed. What makes the desert beautiful sits somewhere far below its surface, holds a spring of fresh water.

[13:43]

Our challenge is to discover that life-giving spring. In one of his plays, Eugene O'Neill wrote that man is born new. He lives by mending. The grace of God is new. There are better moments. We know that the grogginess and the burdens of life are not pointless. Sometimes it's very difficult to go on convincing ourselves of that point. For example, if a person we love deeply dies suddenly, subject to a violent accident, or a little child develops cancer, When a very important relationship is frustrated, or again when we see people hungry, poorly housed, and ineptly clothed, depression often sets in, sometimes even despair, sometimes feel marooned in pain.

[15:00]

Yet, over the course of time, It often happens that many mysterious events seem to work together for good. Because life is always something we live forward, understand only backwards. Eventually we come to grasp the positive meaning and value of what at one time appeared to be simple madness. Christian initiation is the celebration in which the Christian community affirms life on its deepest levels. It's really meant to move us into the life and mission of Christ himself. Christian initiation is most fundamentally a call to life, to love, to communion of life with God and God's people.

[16:08]

Yet the marvel is that before we're asked to love others, we first of all love thy God, who operates through the community. It's meant to symbolize for us God's love for all people through Christ and through the Spirit. In other words, our baptismal experience is meant to be like Christ's baptismal experience. The contemporary quality of Christ's baptismal experience was captured very imaginatively by the British painter Stanley Spencer in his scenes from the Gospels which he set in his native village of Cookham in England. And in his painting which he calls Baptism by John Jesus is immersed in the river Thames at Kukum with contemporary people in bathing suits swimming all around him.

[17:18]

Spencer would probably have agreed that a Christ is not contemporary. He doesn't live with us in our time. His power of the Spirit is really not the Christ. So the Lord Jesus invites us who are sometimes, perhaps often, weary and burdened. Come to Him. He doesn't promise that He's going to take our burdens away. He does guarantee us great courage and peace. You know the New Testament regularly protests against a spirituality without suffering and punishment. Protests against the false delusion that God is to be found apart from Jesus Christ, who is God.

[18:27]

If we want to be reformed in God's image, share in the risen life of Christ, we must first of all be found in the image of Jesus on the cross. However, I would stress that the acceptance of suffering must not be equated with passivity, with indifference, with abstract endurance. Those responses, in fact, simply harden the human heart. They dehumanize the human person. As a result, then, the real self never surfaces. The trap that's always set for us is exemplified in an amusing but very disturbing Charles Adams cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago.

[19:31]

Two women are looking at an enormous blob sitting in an armchair and the only signs of light are its beady eyes. One woman turns to the other and she says, we're still waiting for Stanley to jail. We're still waiting for Stanley to jail. Sadly, sometimes we're tempted to yield up all responsibility. We just drift. We refuse the ongoing gift of God's Spirit. We simply become blobs, destined never to gel. In fact, we're called to confront suffering and struggle through it. So we might become more capable of love, more capable even of suffering.

[20:40]

And in bearing our cross, our isolation, our self-protection, they're often broken open. So that a result then in our hearts are broken hearts. There is in fact more room for others above all. or is it for God? It is the prophecy of Isaiah who claims that the way of the just will be smooth with food and choice wines for all along the way. I think most of us know those who have strived to walk the way of justice and peace whose faces are worn bodies were very tired. Powerful image of Dorothy Day, which you may have seen in the National Catholic Reporter a number of years ago, which comes to mind.

[21:42]

She's sitting on a stool in a Chauvet boycott line, her face turned to the heart of California sun, her wrinkled hands, the pig rats in her knee. There are persons who are especially sensitive to the ways of God, the dreams for the world that were entertained by the prophets, among all by Jesus. Those people often experience a pain that is not shared by others. Pain of weariness and sadness frequently shows in their faces. That was expressed well, I think, on the American poet's Galway Canal. It's that each year I lived, I watched it fissure between what was and what I wished for widen.

[22:44]

But there was nothing left, the gulf of end. It's as most men have not seen the world divide. Or if they did, it did not open wide. or why they've clung to the safer side. But I have felt the thundering. Then we ask them, is the way justice and love always true? Certainly the image of the radiant God as a banquet is often tried and tested, purified even, When we see hatred and injustice living side by side with those who celebrate the Eucharist every Sunday, perhaps every day, they need to be disciples of Jesus Christ.

[23:48]

Receptive people tend to grow disillusioned by institutional violence, by benign endeavours. At that moment then, one must be just with one's own consciousness and one's own conscience. Because then one learns the meaning of honesty and truth. One learns how to respond to the mystery of God's Spirit in the human heart, calling us all into a deeper entry into the pastoral mystery of Jesus Christ, in order that somehow, in our own distinctive vocations and ways, we might come to share in the transformation of our world. But often the meaning of the Eucharistic banquet simply transposed to a deeper level where folk from the future

[24:54]

comes the great source of nourishment and perhaps the only source of nourishment that we can offer to others. Our Christian initiation, our monastic initiation, we've heard in the reading in the Refectory, has launched us on a journey as to last all life long. In other words, we spend our lives becoming the Christians that we're called to be. And although we have died together with the Lord Jesus and have risen with him to a new life in baptism, we're still en route. En route to where the Lord Jesus sits in law. Half of all of us has to follow, always takes us through the world.

[25:57]

And so, as we live in the world, we do not know precisely where fidelity with Jesus Christ is going to lead us. We do know along the way we will be supported regrets. But the specific contours of our journey simply remain unknown to us. Journey by faith, not by full knowledge. Consequently, major decisions have to be made along the way. I think our Christian lives are often stymied by our failure to recognize that we are called to venture into an unknown future.

[27:02]

Unfortunately, the strong faith of Abraham has so often been replaced by a calculating shrewdness which prefers a very clear blueprint. to an uncharted course. Such an attitude excludes really any positive decision-making. God's invitation to us in Christ is not something that we initiate, nor can the risk involved in Christian living be eliminated by our human calculation. In the Eucharist, the ground over which we must journey, as I said yesterday, is set out for us symbolically. Food for the journey is shared. The ground, however, is often very unfamiliar. The terrain is often very rugged and steep.

[28:09]

Symbols are always ambiguous. They do yield their meaning only to those who are willing to engage in the complicated task of interpretation. Perhaps the reason God is sometimes hard to find these days that we do not look low enough. I think that's so well illustrated in Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan. The priest and the Levite in the parable thought that they would find God and salvation in the clarity of the law which forbade them to have any contact with the dead or anyone soon enough to be dead.

[29:15]

They knew well that if they had touched a dead body they themselves would become impure and so they would have been prevented then from carrying out their very religious duties. Samaritan, a man despised by the Jews, he looked down in the ditch and was overcome by compassion or the man that he saw there. So he was the one who set about fulfilling the duties of mercy and hospitality, the other two simply ignored. In our complex world, there is the temptation to act like the priest and the leader. There is the strong temptation To look for precise laws, for very clear rubrics, for unambiguous doctrinal statements, is the way to finding God and salvation.

[30:25]

Life today is much more mysterious, much more complex. There are no easy answers. I mentioned the other day Freud was fond of telling his patients the measure of a person's maturity is his or her ability to live with ambiguity. I think the point of Jesus' parable is clear. Don't look up to the precise law. Find the way to God and salvation. look rather down if I the neighbor. Neighborliness is all, and all are our neighbors. If we are to learn the secret of eternal life, loving God with all our heart and strength and mind, teaching of Jesus I think is quite simple.

[31:36]

love the other person. So the human bodies have always been in danger of introversion, trying to encapsulate the spirit, sometimes even of masquerading as God in the midst of the world. the danger in financial systems can become so inward-looking, so self-preoccupied, and so does even more evil, we could become very vulnerable. We really did, in a welfare state, we have excellent food, and we often complain about it, wonderful housing, all sorts of educational opportunities, secure health care and hospital care.

[32:47]

All these things so easily take for granted by comfortable life. I think in this regard, one might think of Federico Fellini's film, Eight and a Half, in which Guido, languished for the emptiness of his life, desperation and youth, arranges to meet the Cardinal at the baths. And it's a marvelous scene, ensconced in steam, wearing his buckled shoes and his scarlet zucchetta. The Cardinal gets a snug and very facile answer to Guido's plight. His response is a solemn oracle's. extra Ecclesiam, new love, solace. Outside the church, there's no salvation. Cardinals like Joshua in the Bible who complained because there were other people kept prophesying in the camp.

[33:56]

Moses asked the very hard question, are you jealous? Are you jealous? Would that all people of the Lord were thoughtless. Would that the Lord might bestow his Spirit on all. But whatever the evidence, the future simply belongs to those who embrace it. Belongs to those who seek the truth, Remain confident of the power of the powerless, the gentle, the repentant, the poor. Confident in the power of simplicity scorns which idols. Confident in the power of those who are in fact voices of the voiceless today. confident in the power of those who stand by the intrinsic value of the truth and goodness implanted in their lives and their communities."

[35:07]

What a mysterious quote. That is the very message of the Old Testament prophets certainly was the message of Jesus. Ezekiel, such a prophet, He wasn't a political or a military man, but he spoke God's holy word, justice and righteousness. His concern was about a nation's sin, and each person's involvement in that sin, and dissuading the wicked from their guilt as it's taxed. Well, nowadays, We call such people missile blowers. It is a sad and often unpredictable fact of life. Those who stand up for righteousness these days often get knocked out.

[36:10]

Missile blowers are a prime example. reports that other policemen are abusing suspects. You shun death, punished in very clever, but often violent ways. A woman reports accounting abuses in a large corporation. Her boss thanks her, comments on her courage. In a week, she's downsized. in all paraphrases. You see, criticism and kamara go together. Part of the kamara is to eliminate the criticism. No constriction can be put on the Lord's assertion. Love, often tough love, is always meant to be the response to human life and its predicaments.

[37:18]

Such love always demands initiative when a fellow human being is victimized by evil. Of course, reconciliation becomes possible when people possess the skill to accomplish it. Yet, custody of the conduct of others never goes away from us. In the workplace, in neighborhood situations, community and family life, in the schools that we run. Responsibility for the conduct of others is almost always inescapable. As you know, many of us tend to escape from the responsibility, either by temperament or by constitution. Nevertheless, the responsibility does not go away.

[38:23]

We play it safe. Why get involved? There's always, too, the matter of courage. Confronting another person's behavior is never easy. Never easy. And so, in fact, often the one-to-one encounter, for example, in our communities is skipped. We conclude that, well, he's hopeless. The situation is hopeless. He's incorrigible. And what's worse, he's simply neurotic. And so immediately, what do we do? We go to the apparatus. We go to the friar. We go to the abbot. In the hopes of having the offender somehow chance die. Strangely, often we seek punishment first. because reconciliation demands on our part mental and emotional qualities that we say, oh, we don't have those qualities.

[39:30]

You know, each year in September, the Americans celebrate Labor Day. And it marks a movement that really has been extraordinarily influential on the lives of all of us. Its concerns are certainly in accord with the papal encyclicals, Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, John Paul II. As a matter of fact, I think there will be no United States, as we know this country, without the gains of organized labor. They are gains which were wrested from the rich and the powerful, who resisted at every step along the way.

[40:32]

If you've studied American history, you may have heard of those signs that appear in sweatshops and factories regularly in the early years of the 20th century. You don't come in Sunday. Don't come in on Monday. You're extendable. All of you. We can find people in greater need of a job than you. They're the ones who will be working here next week. That's precisely the way it was in Manhattan in 1901. Sadly, that's the way it is in this country, even now. We have undoubtedly read in the Catholic papers or the secular papers of very subtle threats to those who seek to organize workers in this country, even in Catholic diocesan schools and hospitals across the country.

[41:40]

He may also have read the deeply disturbing book by Vardra Ehrenreich called Nickel and Die. Nickel and Die. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks. It's a classic about undercover reporting. The simple fact is that millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty wages. And so Aaron Wright decided to join them. As far as part of the hollow rhetoric surrounding our welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how could anyone survive, let alone prosper, on six to seven dollars a night?

[42:54]

To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, a hotel maid, a house cleaner, a nursing aide, and Walmart salesperson in Minneapolis. She soon discovered that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. She also discovered that one job is not enough. You need at least two. You're not going to live on the streets. Sickle and Dine reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, its anxiety, and its pain. This is a land where people are forced to live in cardboard boxes, in underpasses.

[44:04]

A land where some people only can eat fast food. A land where they must resort to desperate measures justice your government. Gary Wright has brought the news of America's poor to our attention then with deep and long courage. She's a premier reporter of the underside of capitalism. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer and poorer and poorer. I think it is significant. Because of her efforts, you probably know, Wal-Mart's policies have been challenged in court across the country. There is no doubt that abusive labor practices continue to plague workers both here and around the world.

[45:10]

I think that's a circumstance that should give pause to all of us, because we're very fortunate enough to live comfortably in our community. For many in this country, it might come as a surprise that even here, worker exploitation is forbidden. As Aaron Wright pointed out, Walmart, the country's largest retailer, offers an excellent case in point. Among other issues, the company has been cited for child labor law violations in two dozen stores nationally. After a federal investigation of such issues in Connecticut, Arkansas, and New Hampshire, that giant corporation fined $135,000, a sum that child advocacy groups derided simply as pauper.

[46:21]

Likewise, the use of child labor in poor countries is also widespread, but is far more blatant despite the prohibition in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but weren't considered dangerous or detrimental to children's education and development. Human Rights Watch, for example, has documented harmful practices in El Salvador. One of the reports found that children as young as eight planting and cutting in sugarcane fields, which is back-breaking work in which accidents are very common. Young girls working as domestic servants around the globe. They got another frequently exploited group. The International Labour Organization has estimated that more children work as domestic

[47:30]

than any other type of child labor. And because it is a hidden employment, working as they do in private families, often unseen by the outside world, physical and sexual harassment and abuse are really quite common. And of course, their long hours of work then preclude the possibility of education. For adults worldwide, resistance to unionization by big corporations militates against fair labor practices. It all raises the question, what do those who teach management in our colleges and universities, what do they communicate about all this to students?

[48:39]

State jobs were overrun with management. Students are honest, but they'll tell you, I want to make money. Again, Wal-Mart is a good example. For example, when ten butchers at a store in Jacksonville, Florida, voted to join a union, Wal-Mart simply eliminated their jobs by shipping in free companies. For more reaching examples, take it up in Canada. When workers at a store in Quebec moved toward unionization, the whole store was closed down. Exploited labor practices had become increasingly common here, among the estimated 10 million undocumented workers now in the United States.

[49:46]

And because of their irregular immigration status, they can so easily then fall prey to unscrupulous employers. In 1986, federal law mandated that employers verify the legal status of their workers, especially in some physically demanding jobs that many Americans won't take like construction, agriculture, meat processing, employers then become desperate for help. And so then we stay weak at these immigration issues. These poor people apply for jobs. Of course, should the workers then complain about their working conditions or their low wages? The threat of being reported to the integration authorities is immediately called into play.

[50:51]

One notorious example, a fraternity group of eight Mexican workers at a holiday inn in Minneapolis. Many poor workers, mostly housekeepers, came to join the union. The inn's manager simply fired them. and then immediately reported them to the Immigration Service. It is very significant that you look at the labels on the clothes that we wear. Much of the clothing is now made in third world countries where wages are competitive and low. Likewise, many of the books that we read now are printed in China. The wages are low, and so the costs for printing are much lower than printing costs, so to say. And you're probably asking, look at those examples that I've set out here.

[52:01]

How many things to do with the Euclids? They have everything to do with the Euclids. The Eucharist is everything to do with that. Our appreciation of the Eucharist must be rooted in our embrace. God's great love for us manifested above all in the gifts of His Son, the outpouring of the Spirit of all of creation. In other words, the Eucharist provides us a context in which we celebrants can discover or rediscover who we are in the world and what the nature of the world we live in is really like. The worldview that is set out for us in the celebration of the Eucharist

[53:08]

certainly at odds with the highly privatized view of religion and salvation so often espoused by contemporary Christians. I think that individualistic view of religion often gets reinforced in contemporary literature on spirituality where the language is very narrow. It's autistic. It's private. Hence, it's far removed from the broad social language of both the Bible and the Christian New Course. It's often a language which simply advocates individual growth, individual fulfillment. It shies away, then, from the gospel themes transformation through suffering and death to oneself so that others might live.

[54:12]

But obviously, there's no coercion in the Eucharist. It's only a loving call. It's an invitation to act and to relate to one another and to God. according to prescribed patterns in the ritual. As we know, so much of modern life spent in competition with others has been so strongly motivated by success in consumers. You know, in the Eucharist, there's no need to justify our existence. There's simply a need to be there. who acknowledge our need for a Savior, for a loving God, when we find in Jesus Christ the power of the Spirit. There's simply the need to embrace the gift that's offered to us to respond with thanksgiving and praise.

[55:21]

And if we allow God to be God in our hearts and our communities, that God in fact is creative, compassionate, loving, just. We ourselves and our communities then will in fact become loving, compassionate, just. It's in a world of turmoil. You've just unfortunately discontaminated if it doesn't serve as a paradigm for honest, just, loving relationships outside of the celebration. Spiritual celebrations which do not correspond to the worldview of Christ, readily, I think, becoming corrupting agents in the lives of our persons and our community.

[56:23]

Certainly, in the Eucharist, We do not celebrate the failure of a said Messiah. We rather celebrate the fact that the One who identifies with us in all of our failures, because He loves us so much, is precisely the One who brought us raised from the dead. So as Gerard Manning Hopkins' really lovely words say, Every time we celebrate the Eucharist, we want that risen Christ to Easter in us. Easter in us. Be a day string to the dimness of us. Be a crimson precedent in us. That's precisely why we celebrate the Eucharist. Come back at 11.30 so you can follow me.

[57:41]

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