Today’s gospel reports, rather matter-of-factly, that John the Baptist, upon hearing about his disciples leaving him to join Jesus, responds with the now famous statement: He must increase but I must decrease. Unfortunately, we don’t know if this was as effortless as it sounds, or whether it came at the conclusion of an inner struggle. […]

In an age when trees, woods, and forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate, the image of God planting cedars, acacias, myrtles, cypresses, and pines in the desert wasteland, is a rather timely and relevant one. God’s intervention is a reminder that the continuing damage being done to our environment is largely the result […]

The church has sometimes been criticized for adopting a “fortress mentality” in relation to the world and is, thereby, thought to undermine its positive influence and role in the world. Monastic enclosure sometimes receives a similar critique by those who believe that monks and nuns should be out evangelizing rather than taking refuge behind monastery […]

REVELATION 2:1-7: Our reading from Revelation speaks of the dead being judged according their deeds. This raises the question: Which deeds? Our good deeds, or our bad ones? Does our eternal destiny depend on which we the most of—good or evil? If so, then are we not back to earning our way into heaven? An […]

Saint Andrew Dung Lac and Companions: Divine consolation, peace, and the absence of suffering can sometimes be more difficult to bear that their opposites. As monks, we have grown so accustomed to associate virtue and following Christ with self-denial, deprivation, and hardship, that comfort, ease, and relaxation are suspect. Thus, wars, insurrections, famines, and earthquakes […]

The radical and literal laying down of one’s life for one’s friends is generally an exception in the life of most Christians and monks. However, this does not mean that this noble deed is without relevance in our ordinary daily lives. Every time we resist our selfish inclinations or don’t satisfy our self-centered wishes and […]

For the monk, detachment is another word for inner freedom. One of the paths to this detachment is asceticism. A common pitfall, however, is inadvertently reinforcing our sinful self-will with our ascetic practices. More than one novice has clung to his self-will by resisting the novicemaster’s efforts to curb his overzealous asceticism. A safer and […]

Several authors in our present refectory book have alluded to the idea that human beings are what might be termed destructive intruders into nature’s harmony and that the earth would probably be a whole lot better off without us! Similarly, Christianity (in the view of some) is directly implicated in the misuse and exploitation of […]

As more than one wise person has insisted, peace is about more than the absence of war or conflict. True peace is, among other things, inseparable from unity, that fruit of self-forgetting love. Living life detached and separated from one another may obviate conflict and engender a pseudo-peace, but this is usually little more than […]

Dualism, that old and recurring heresy that would pit the body against the soul—seeing the former as evil and the latter good—would seem to find support in Jesus insisting that we are not to fear those who kill the body, but after that can do no more. For, this could be made to imply that […]