Benedictine Monks Holy Cross Monastery 119 Kilbroney Road Rostrevor Co. Down BT34 3BN Northern Ireland Tel: 028 4173 9979 Fax: 028 4173 9978 [email protected] www.benedictinemonks.co.uk Christmas 2012 (Letter n°40) “He will stand and feed his flock with the power of the Lord. He himself will be peace.” (Mi 5:3-4) On 24 September, in her home in Rostrevor, Mrs Josephine Nolan, the mother of Fr Mark-Eph- rem, passed away peacefully at the age of 88. Since the end of July, the state of her health had been slowly deteriorating. The first secular oblate of our Monastery (under the name of Sr Benedict), a wo- man of faith and prayer, she was loyal in her support and friendship for our community. On 27 September, we held her funeral in a crowded church, in the presence of our Bishop John McAreavey, Bishop Raymond Field, the Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, the deans of the Anglican cathed- rals of Downpatrick and Armagh, and many friends of all denominations. Mrs Nolan is henceforth re- posing beside her husband Ian, in our Monastery’s cemetery. At a time when Dr Rowan Williams has recently resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury, we in- vite you to reflect on a sermon he delivered on 25 December 2004 in Canterbury cathedral. It used to be said that if you were travelling by ocean liner, the worst thing you could do was to visit the engine room; and I’m afraid it’s a point people make to discourage you from visiting the Vatican or Church House, or even Lambeth Palace... Getting too close to the centre of things (or what people think is the centre of things) can be alarming or disillusioning or both: you really don’t want to know that, people will say; you don’t need to know how things work (or fail to work). Get on with it. And that’s where Christmas is actually a bit strange and potentially worrying. When we’re invited into the stable to see the child, it’s really being invited into the engine room. This is how God works; this is how God is. The entire system of the universe, ‘the fire in the equations’ as someone wonderfully described it, is contained in this small bundle of shivering flesh. God has given himself away so completely that we meet him here in poverty and weak- ness, with no trumpeting splendour, no clouds of glory. This is how he is: he acts by giving away all we might expect to find in him of strength and success as we understand them. The universe lives by a love that refuses to bully us or force us, the love of the cradle and the cross. It ought to shock us to be told year after year that the universe lives by the kind of love that we see in the helpless child and in the dying man on the cross. We have been shown the engine room of the universe; and it ought to worry us – us, who are so obsessed about be- ing safe and being successful, who worry endlessly about being in control, who cannot believe that power could show itself in any other way than the ways we are used to. But this festival tells us exactly what Good Friday and Easter tell us: that God fulfils what he wants to do by emptying himself of his own life, giving away all that he is in love. The gospel reading sets this out in terms that cannot be argued with or surpassed. God is always, from all eternity, pouring out his very being in the person of the Word, the everlasting Son; and the Word, who has received everything from the gift of the Father, and who makes the world alive by giving reality to all creation, makes a gift of himself by becoming human and suffering humiliation and death for our sake. ‘From his fullness we have all received’; Jesus, the word made human flesh and blood, has given us the freedom, the authority, to become God’s children by our trust in him, and so to have a fuller and fuller share in God’s own joy. We live from him and in him. The whole universe exists because God has not held back his love but allowed it to flow without impediment out of his own perfection to make a world that is different from him and then to fill it with love through the gift of his Son. And our life as Christians, our obligations, our morality, do not rest on commands alone, but on the fact that God has given us something of his own life. We are caught up in his giving, in his creative self-sacrifice; true Christian morality is when we can’t help ourselves, can’t stop ourselves pouring out the kind of love that makes others live. Morality, said one prominent modern Greek Orthodox theologian, is not about right and wrong, it’s about reality and unreality, living in Christ or living for yourself. Being good is living in the truth, living a real life, a life that is in touch with ‘the fire in the equations’ and that lets the intense creativity of God through into his world. The goodness of the Christi- an is never a matter of achieving a standard, scoring high marks in a test. It is letting the wonder of God’s love knock sideways your ordinary habits, so that God comes through – the God who achieves his purpose by reckless gift, by the cradle and the cross. When St Paul in his second letter to the church in Corinth insists on the need for gener- osity towards the poor in the church at Jerusalem, he appeals, not to an abstract moral prin- ciple, but to the fact of God becoming human. ‘You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ’, he writes, ‘that though he was rich yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich’ (II Cor. 8:9). He doesn’t argue that we must simply reverse the relations, so that those who were poor become rich and those who were rich become poor, but rather for a situation in which everyone has something to contribute to everyone else, everyone has enough liberty to become a giver of life to others. When material poverty is ex- treme, it is difficult to have that dignity – though, miraculously, so many poor people have it; the greatest gift we can give to another is to let them give as freely as they can, so that they can supply what we are hungry for. Love is given so that love may be born and given in re- turn. That is the engine of the universe; that is what we see in the helpless child of Bethle- hem, God so stripped of what we associate with divinity that we can see the divine nature only as God’s act of giving away all that he is. (…) No-one could or would deny that we face exceptional levels of insecurity and serious prob- lems in relation to an unpredictable and widely diffused network of agencies whose goals are slaughter and disruption. (…) We struggle for a secure world; so we should. But what if our only passion is to be protected, and we lose sight of what we positively and concretely want for ourselves and one another, what we want for the human family? We are not going to be living in the truth if we have no passion for the liberty of God’s children, no share in the gen- erosity of God. (…) ‘I have come to cast fire upon the earth’, said Jesus. We may well and rightly feel a touch of fear as we look into this ‘engine room’ – the life so fragile and so indestructible, so joyful and so costly. But this is the life of all things, full of grace and truth, the life of the ever- lasting Word of God; to those who receive him he will give the right, the liberty, to live with his life, and to kindle on earth the flame of his love. On 25 July, we learned that Luce Lamy had died after a long illness. She had been a friend of our community and former president of St John the Baptist’s Circle, founded in 1944 by Cardinal Jean Daniélou and Mother Mary of the Assumption. On 17 November, Br Thierry was in Paris to attend a Eucharist in memory of Luce. From 29-31 July, Fr Mark-Ephrem took part in the annual chapter of the Protestant community of the sisters of Grandchamp (Switzerland), where he acted as a Catholic adviser. From 29 July to 10 August, Br Thierry was on a visit to his family in Corsica. On 7-8 August, we welcomed Bishop Alan Abernethy, the Anglican Bishop of Connor (Northern Ireland). On 4 August, in Belfast, Fr Mark-Ephrem presided at a Eucharist in memory of Fr Ronnie Mitchel. On 21 August, we learned of the death of Canon Joie (Joseph) O’Hagan, a priest of our diocese aged 101. Fr Mark-Ephrem had been his confessor for several years. On 23 August, he preached during the vigil of prayer, which was organised for the reception of the body in the church. On 24 August, he took part in the funeral in the parish where Canon O’Hagan last served God’s people. On 21-22 August, a meeting of the editorial board of the review One In Christ was held at the Mon- astery.