Benedictine Monks Rostrevor

EASTER 2019
Very early in the Christian tradition, the boat came to be seen as a symbol of the Church. Tertullian, at the beginning of the 3rd century commenting on the episode when the disciples are in the boat “swamped by the waves” (Mt 8:24), writes: “That little ship did present a figure of the Church in that she is disquieted in the world by persecutions and temptation” (On Baptism XII:6). Today, in our Gospel reading, on the shore of the lake, something important happen...s around the boats. The crowd is quick to see that Jesus has not journeyed with his disciples, he has taken another boat. Everybody assumed that he would be with his disciples. Apparently the disciples’ boat was the one where he was expected to be. And yet Jesus decided to get into another boat.
We have to be careful, Jesus is often where we think he is not to be found… where we think he shouldn’t be. It is a dangerous temptation for us to close Jesus into the boxes we think appropriate for him. It is quite a perilous exercise to try to label Jesus and to try to channel him according to our categories. Yes it is perilous because it is a project doomed to failure. Our Lord is free, utterly free. When we want to enclose him, we ultimately enclose ourselves. Our Lord has the initiative in all things. We have to remember that there is not a corner of the earth, not an area of our hearts and lives where the Lord is unable or unwilling to go. The Lord is present in our lives as a helmsman who does not impose himself but who patiently waits for us to invite him on board. He is not going to come on board because of the appearance or the luxurious design of the boat, but because he is desired and welcomed.
The problem is that sometimes we give the impression that we are at the helm of the boat of our lives or of the boat of our communities; sometimes we decide who is going to be allowed into the boat and who isn’t; sometimes we feel so insecure that we charge the boat with many unnecessary things and then it cannot sail properly.
We do not have to be afraid or stressed, we are neither on a solitary crossing nor engaged in a competitive race. The boat of my life is mysteriously, and yet very really, linked to the boat of all your lives. We are called to journey together and to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus “the bright morning star” (Rev 22:16) which can lead us to the sure haven of God’s love.
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EASTER 2019
Jesus Christ is the humble and wounded servant, patient with his disciples who are so slow to believe. Jesus Christ does not hide the scars of his wounds, the Easter Preface reminds us that if he is the Risen One, he is also forever slain. The Lord is confident enough to appear as he is, sure that his truthfulness will help his disciples to be truthful in their turn. The Risen Lord commissions his disciples and gives them the authority they need in order to bear w...itness to him. Not only does he confide them a mission but he empowers them for it. He bestows on them a part of his own authority so that they may represent him in the world. According to St Paul “Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory (so that) we too might live a new life” (Rm 6:4). To be truthful and to empower others are certainly two features that it would be good for us, as individuals and as communities, to cultivate and develop.
As we long to walk in the newness of life offered us by Christ, the pangs of our new birth will be for us to let go of everything which hinders us from being true to God, to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters. If we want our world to be a freer and a freeing place in which to live, we must begin by allowing the Resurrection of Christ to accomplish its work of liberation within us. The long and painful travail of coming to new birth which requires so much perseverance cannot be accomplished without words of encouragement and support, without the patience and care of our brothers and sisters. Against the spirit of competition and self-centredness which prevail in our contemporary world, the spirit of the Risen Lord invites us to encourage and to help one another to reach “maturity and the measure of the full stature of Christ” (Ep 4:13).
May this Easter season be an opportunity for us to reclaim our true identity as children of God who “have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God” (1P1:23).
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EASTER 2019
This Easter season is an opportunity for us to marvel at the power of God’s love at work in Jesus Christ. It is love which transformed the bare and dead wood of the cross into a tree of life, whose first fruit is Jesus Christ himself. As we can admire in the beautiful mosaic of the church of San Clemente in Rome, it is love which permitted the cross to take root in this earth, to produce a rich and life giving vegetation and to be surrounded by a multitude of plan...ts everywhere. It is important to note all the life which surrounds the tree of the cross, because the cross is not a tree of life destined to remain in the desert, in the midst of weeds and sterile bushes… the tree of the cross engenders life in the world. As St John writes in the book of Revelation, we have a share in the tree of life (22:19). Christ does not want us to remain barren, he longs to see us grow, he loves to see us bear much fruit, there where we are, planted for the good of all. It is as we remain united to Christ, that we are able to become offshoots of the tree of life in our world today. If our roots are deeply entwined in the roots of the cross, then, as the psalmist says, we are in our turn “like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither” (1:3).
The wise man declares that “the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life” (Prov 11:30). So today the Church and each one of us personally have the responsibility to be for one another a tree of life where it is good to find shelter. The good sap which stems from the cross is generously given to us by God in order that we may share it: as good sap for the strength of those who are weak, for the peace of those who are troubled, for the hope of those who despair.
Let us examine our personal lives and the lives of our Churches, and let us ask the Risen Lord to convert all the seeds of death, of bitterness and of suffering into seeds of life. It is God’s work to take care of the trees and to uproot the weeds which prevent them from growing and being fruitful, and it is our responsibility to remain grafted onto the tree of life.
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Pope Francis to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (02.05.2019)
“The Church has warned individuals, peoples and governments about deviations from this bond with their homeland. This deviation is when a country becomes exclusive and a place of hatred for the others; and when it becomes a conflicted nationalism that builds walls, or becomes racist, or anti-Semitic.”

EASTER 2019
Christ is the driving force of our lives. Sometimes when we look at the Church, at our Christian communities, at the way we deal with society we may appear like a people of settlers; in Northern Ireland, as we repeat the same old sectarian clichés and attitudes we may give the impression that we are stuck in the mud and happy to be so… This is completely alien to what true Christian faith is all about. We are a people on the move, called to conversion and growth. ...Christ is the one who leads us. To affirm Christ as our leader means that we must accept to be led… and this is not easy for us.
Clearly the Lord our Shepherd wishes to lead us “beside still waters” and restore our souls (Ps 23:2) but Jesus’ last words to St Peter in St John’s Gospel are also addressed to us today: “When you grow old (…) someone else will fasten a belt around you and lead you where you do not wish to go.” (Jn 21:18)
Moreover if Christ is a pioneer, someone who goes ahead of us, a danger for us might be to believe that he is now at the end of the journey waiting for us, cosily seated on his throne looking down on us from afar. The Risen Lord journeys with us every day. No matter how far we may wander, no matter how often we may forget him, our Leader and Saviour, the Risen Lord is with us always. We may live more or less in his presence, he is always with us.
During this Easter season, the challenge for us is to journey. The great paradox of our faith is that for us, to be rooted in Christ, does not mean that we be immobile and static, on the contrary, because we are rooted in Christ we have to leave the old and welcome the newness of the Resurrection, to move on from what is known towards what is unknown. In this endeavour, we are not left without help… the Spirit is promised and given in abundance in order to help us discern the living and life-giving presence of Christ in our midst and within us.
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EASTER 2019
Jesus invited us not to pray like the Gentiles (cf. Mt 6:5). St Paul repeatedly insists on the fact that, as followers of Christ, we must behave in a very specific way, different from those around us: we must control our bodies “in holiness and honour, not with lustful passion like the Gentiles” (1Th 4:5), we must “no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds” (Eph 4:17), we must not “grieve as others do who have no hope” (1Th 4:13).
We fail... in our witness to the Gospel and its message of life when people who are not Christians cannot distinguish us from all others around us. St Paul sums up the challenge when he invites us not to “be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds” (Rm 12:2).
The apostolic preaching is not first a moral code, a guide to good behaviour, but a call to live in Christ, to be with Christ. As St Paul reminds the Colossians: “Your life is hidden in Christ. Christ is your life” (3:3-4). This is an important teaching for all of us. Our lives will be transformed and be seeds of transformation in the world only if we are rooted and grounded in Christ. Our words and deeds will bear witness to the power of the Gospel only if we are in Christ, only if people discern the features of Christ on our faces.
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EASTER 2019
The Resurrection of Christ inaugurates a new step in human development: we cannot be afterwards what we were before. To live with the Risen Lord implies a radical change in who we are, in the way we relate to one another and to the world.
In our consumerist society, advertisers use and abuse the word “new”. We are invited to buy what is new, newer and improved. The question is not whether we need it or not but whether we want to be trendy and in tune with what app...ears to be new. The newness promised by Christ is not about possessing more or knowing more but about becoming more and more like him. For Jesus the question is whether or not we want to experience new life. This new life is made possible only when we live according to the new commandment of love (Jn 13:34). Only love can make all things new and is able to prepare our hearts for the visit of the Lord.
The problem is that the newness we are ready for is often too superficial, we just want a thin layer of varnish which projects an appearance of newness. We do not want our lives to be completely renewed. This superficial and cosmetic surgery allows us to claim to be Christians, to defend the Christian identity of our country and yet at the same time to promote or to passively consent to many forms of discrimination, greediness, racism, or sectarianism. We can go to Mass regularly and be merciless, unforgiving and unwelcoming with one another in our families and communities. During the forty days of Lent, we have made efforts to prepare ourselves for the death and the Resurrection of the Lord. Why would we not make an effort during the fifty days of Easter to allow the newness accomplished in the Resurrection to become a reality in our lives and in the lives of our communities?
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EASTER 2019
“God loves the world so much that he gave his only Son” Do we ever fully grasp all the implications contained in this affirmation? God loves the world. He does not love a perfect and sinless world; no his compassion and mercy are given to a world in which charity and hate, unity and division, good and evil are present and coexist. God loves us as we are. It does not mean that he is happy with the situation as it is, but it clearly bears witness to his gracious and... unconditional love for his creation. It shows also God’s positive attitude when he looks at us. God knows our sin and weakness but he loves us and loves us so much that he was able to give us his Son. The gift expresses the depth of the Father’s love, he gave his Son, his only beloved Son.
God’s attitude and action is a challenge for us. We have to ask ourselves, as a Church and as individuals, do we love the world and what are we ready to give in order to transform it? We must humbly recognise that as Christians, we do not show a great love for the world in which we live. In 1961, the Blessed pope John XXIII declared: “In the daily exercise of our pastoral office, we sometimes have to listen, much to our regret, to voices of persons who, though burning with zeal, are not endowed with too much sense of discretion and measure. In these modern times they can see nothing but prevarication and ruin (…). We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.” (Opening Speech of the Council, 11.10.1961) These words are still pertinent, today many Christians’ voices are quick to condemn and reject our world. Too many are willing to defend the Church, like a besieged citadel and are not so worried about bringing the Good News of love to their fellowmen and women.
It is true that our world is marked by many shortcomings and failures, and we do not have to be blind. But the point is that we will not change it by prophecies of gloom, but by words and deeds of love, in truth.
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EASTER 2019
The apostles did not believe Mary of Magdala and the two pilgrims. Obstinate and enclosed in their incredulity, the Lord had to come to them and to reproach them, they should have welcomed Mary of Magdala and the two disciples as his witnesses.
To all of us who are called to bear witness to Christ wherever we are, this episode shows us that our vocation is not an easy one. Challenge is inherent to the nature of our status as witnesses. Those who bear witness are u...tterly poor because they have nothing to rely on except their inner conviction and the strength that one can draw from a personal experience. A life of witness must be one which is transformed by Christ. The witness has nothing except his life to show as proof of Christ’s power and love.
This is the difficult bit, because we would like to rely on scientific proofs or on books and teachings and authorities outside ourselves, but that is not the way God works. He needs us and he wants us limited creatures to carry his unlimited love to the world. God’s folly is that he deliberately decided to depend on us as the channels of his love for the world. There is no proof of God’s love except our love for one another. This is why our behaviour, our decisions and attitudes are never neutral.
We have to be honest, we carry our part of responsibility in the present estrangement from the Christian faith of so many of our fellowmen and women. It is always the same question: when people look at us, what do they see?
However what is wonderful is that Christ continues to send us out as witnesses to his love! He never ceases to trust us and to give us the strength and the grace we need in order to accomplish our mission. This Easter season is an occasion for us to welcome Christ anew within us and to allow him to shine through us.
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EASTER 2019
Jesus’ vulnerability and openness of heart on the Cross are the measure of his love or us. Here comes to mind the powerful of words of C.S. Lewis: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of ...your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
How often do we come to worship with hearts that are so locked up that nothing can enter into them? How often do we meet people with hearts so harnessed that they are unable to feel or to express anything real? There is a spontaneous reluctance on our behalf to the idea of being vulnerable. We want to be, and to be seen to be, strong and in control. In our hearts and minds, a deep fear of being wounded coexists with a deep longing of being touched and loved.
In these messy feelings and in our innate tensions, Jesus comes to remind us over and over again that fear should yield way to love because he is the rock on which we can stand securely. Our security, the security which should allow us to be vulnerable, openhearted and compassionate is not found in walls that we build around our hearts or in passwords that we set up at the doors of our lives. In the end, walls and passwords prevent us from being truly alive, fully human, and from connecting with others in a life-giving way.
We have nothing to fear because when we fall, when the worst things happen in this ambiguous world, we never find ourselves at the end of the road. The Risen Lord is always ahead of us, waiting to open a new path for us. The Lord is our strength, he “is the stronghold of our life; of whom shall we be afraid?” (Ps 27:1) Hurts, failures and self-pity will always encourage us to withdraw to retreat within ourselves, and to close the door of our hearts. Like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, downcast and disappointed, we can distance ourselves from others and decide not to speak with them or even to look at them. However the Good News of Easter is that the Risen Lord comes and joins us where we are on the road to rekindle in our hearts the flame of his love.
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EASTER 2019
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, II, 2, 43)
... This verse from Shakespeare is famous and often quoted and yet it is wrong… in a name, there is indeed more than the great poet thinks! We all have experienced this feeling of unease at being called by a wrong name or we are all aware of the heavy presence of those living members of our families or communities whose names, for one reason or another, must not be uttered publicly.
In the Bible and in its most meaningful sense, a name is not simply a label disconnected from the reality it points out. To give a name to a person is to determine his or her character or destiny. This ability to name is par excellence the exercise of God’s power to bring forth from darkness into light and life. As we see in the creation process, when God names, people and things are brought into being. God makes us co-creators and shares with us his power. In the book Genesis, we read: “God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (2:19). But that is not all, God does not just give us an authority that we would have to exercise by ourselves, God gives us the “name that is above every name” (Ph 3:9), a name which is life and life-giving. In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles today, we heard St Peter say: “I have neither silver nor gold, but I will give you what I have: in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, walk!” By appealing to the name of Jesus, the disciples heal the sick, cast out demons, work all kinds of miracles. Jesus thus appears as his name indicates him to be: the one who saves and restores to life.
We must remember that there is a profound significance in the way we use the name of the Lord and in the way we name others. Unfortunately sometimes, we misuse the name of the Lord, presenting it in a wrong way or using it for political or clerical purposes and we may also sometimes misname our brothers and sisters. In so doing we prevent God’s work of re-creation from being accomplished in our world.
The ministry of the name of Jesus is incumbent upon us, like St Paul we have received it as a charge (Ac 9:15). God’s trust in us should spur us on to proclaim with humility the name of our Lord, a name which, according to the Bl. John Henry Newman, “is a name to feed upon, a name to transport, a name which can raise the dead and transfigure and beautify the living.”
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EASTER 2019
To recognise the Lord is a key challenge for the apostles and the disciples.
Evidently recognition implies knowledge. We recognise people only if we know that them. The less we know them, the more difficult it is for us to recognise them.... Moreover recognition implies that we acknowledge and accept changes. When we recognise somebody we say: “Yes I know you despite the fact that you are not completely the same as you were before. You have changed and yet it is you.” To be unable or unwilling to recognise somebody is to consider that the changes are too great, that they prevent us from seeing now in this person the one we once knew.
So if it is essential for us to know Christ, this is not enough. We need to be able to recognise him in all the different ways he comes to us. Indeed “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and for ever” (Heb 13:8), however he always comes to us in challenging ways because he is alive and always new, always greater than what we can think of him, and how we might imagine him to be. In order to recognise the Lord, the first important thing we need is desire. It is important to desire to know him more, to long for his visit, to wish to experience his presence and action within us and around us. “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God” (Ps 42:1). If the words of the psalmist do not find an echo in our hearts, if we are not stirred up by the same longing, then we will not be able to recognise the Lord.
The problem for our personal lives and for the lives of our communities and Churches is that we think that we know Christ, that we know what he looks like and how he should to come to us. Like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time we can become stuck in what we think we know. When this happens we lose our longing, our love to discover more about our beloved, we feel satisfied and settled in the security of our small certitudes and knowledge. The rolling away of the stone from Jesus’ tomb represents the rolling of all that smothers our desire for the Lord, our deep longing for a meeting with him. Our fears and our laziness will try to prevent us from moving out of the dark regions of death and mediocrity but the Lord calls us with force and love: “Come out” (Jn 11:43).
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EASTER 2019
In our Gospel today (Jn 20:11-18), Mary-Magdalene manifests a great freedom in her way of acting and reacting: She weeps, she is free enough to express her feelings and names them. She does it without show-off. She is sad and tells the reason with hope. What do I do with my feelings? Do I master and hide them in such a way that I am dry as a stone? Do they dominate me, hindering me from being in a just and loving relationship with others? And now as she is looking... for a dead body, a living man appears. At once she opens her heart and mind to the radical newness of her relationship with Jesus. And in the same movement of love, she is able to leave the one she cherishes to share her experience with others. For us there are our preconceptions, the labels we attach to people… what about our freedom, our ability to welcome others and events in a new light?
In her joy, even if the temptation was real for her to cling to Jesus, by faith she believes that wherever she goes he will be with her, she knows that love is the renewed bond of their communion.
We often surrender to our inclinations to cling to our ideas and certitudes, to possess others, to establish relationships which are not respectful of our mutual freedom…
Today, Mary-Magdalene has still many things to say to us. She can be a teacher of true freedom. Again, St Paul reminds us: “When Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free” (Ga 5:1). We are called to abandon the yoke of slavery to follow Christ where he leads us, the yoke of our fears, our desires and expectations about things and people. Fears, desires and expectations may be legitimate or understandable… but whatever their origins and raison-d’être we have to submit them to the breath of the Holy Spirit which purifies and order everything towards love and communion. St James invites us to “talk and behave like people who are going to be judged by the law of freedom” (Jm 2:12), so let us invoke upon one another an abundant outpouring of the Holy Spirit, because “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2Co 3:17)
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EASTER 2019
The return to Galilee is a school of truth and humility for the disciples who, like the people of Israel, could forget easily the smallness of the beginnings. And the great lesson is that Jesus does not send the disciples into Galilee in order to humiliate them but in order to strengthen them. Galilee is the place where the fire was lit with enthusiasm, passion and trust and it is vital to rekindle that fire for the mission which lies ahead. Wherever we may be tod...ay, Jesus calls us to go back to our personal and collective Galilees. It is important for us to reconnect with our past, our roots and our stories. Memory is central to our identity, to the extent that when we sever ourselves from memories of what we have done and what has happened to us, we lose our true identity. We must hold fast to our memories otherwise we will not be true to ourselves.
If our beginnings look tiny, fragile, poor and insecure, there is no reason for us to be ashamed, on the contrary, they bear witness to the fact that all that has been done and accomplished is not the result of our own abilities but is God’s work. Maybe sometimes we stumble and fall, because we have forgotten the smallness of our beginnings, we have cut us off from our roots and we spend too much time and energy in showing to others a polished and gratifying image of ourselves, of our communities and of our Church. There is no reason for us to hide our Galilee, it may be a bit rough, or even in some corners it may look a bit derelict, and yet it is precious because it is a part of who we are. In fact, it is all the more precious because, whether it was a dump or a palace, it was the place where the Lord loved us first. The Lord met us there and remained with us all along the journey. The Lord speaks to us today: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness” (Dt 8:2).
If we wish to be faithful to who we are today, the best way for us to do this is to humbly revisit our Galilee, and there to meet with the Lord anew. He is the only one who is able to renew us in strength and in hope so that we may become whom we are called to be, and so that we may truly bear witness to the power of his love for all.
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HAPPY EASTER
Arise Lord, arise. Arise in us; give us the courage... to heal with your healing, to transform with your power and to dare to love with a love that can never be defeated now and for ever. (Richard Carter)

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William Blake 1757 - 1827

I looked for my Soul, but my Soul I could not see.

I looked for my God, but my God eluded me.

I looked for a friend and then I found all three.

It was wonderful to be able to join the monks in The Holy Cross Monastery today, for mass, as our family came together to celebrate the day our very precious daddy was born, 100 years ago.

Many thanks to Fr. Mark and the monks for their prayers and kind words. May God bless you.

It was a great joy to attend the International Ecumenical Conference at the Benedictine Abbey in Rostrevor Co. Down N. Ireland. The Monks Rule exhorts the Monks to receive the visitor and stranger as the would receive Christ. We where very well received. Thanks to All the Community for your Christ-like wlcome, hospitality, silence and prayer.

If your looking to spend 3 days on retreat, I would highly recommend the Monks at Rostrevor. The surroundings are breathtaking, the accommodation is great, the food is fantastic and the prayer is heavenly.

The retreat is silent, I love the stillness and quietness here. Go, it'll do your soul good.

Great hospitality, thank you Brothers for sharing. Ensuite bedroom clean, tidy and relaxing. Outstanding grounds to explore and spend time away from the busy-ness of live. Being able to attend the Monks prayer times in the Chapel is lovely.

HAPPY EASTER
Arise Lord, arise. Arise in us; give us the courage... to heal with your healing, to transform with your power and to dare to love with a love that can never be defeated now and for ever. (Richard Carter)

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William Blake 1757 - 1827

I looked for my Soul, but my Soul I could not see.

I looked for my God, but my God eluded me.

I looked for a friend and then I found all three.

It was wonderful to be able to join the monks in The Holy Cross Monastery today, for mass, as our family came together to celebrate the day our very precious daddy was born, 100 years ago.

Many thanks to Fr. Mark and the monks for their prayers and kind words. May God bless you.

It was a great joy to attend the International Ecumenical Conference at the Benedictine Abbey in Rostrevor Co. Down N. Ireland. The Monks Rule exhorts the Monks to receive the visitor and stranger as the would receive Christ. We where very well received. Thanks to All the Community for your Christ-like wlcome, hospitality, silence and prayer.

If your looking to spend 3 days on retreat, I would highly recommend the Monks at Rostrevor. The surroundings are breathtaking, the accommodation is great, the food is fantastic and the prayer is heavenly.

The retreat is silent, I love the stillness and quietness here. Go, it'll do your soul good.

Great hospitality, thank you Brothers for sharing. Ensuite bedroom clean, tidy and relaxing. Outstanding grounds to explore and spend time away from the busy-ness of live. Being able to attend the Monks prayer times in the Chapel is lovely.