This week the Church marked both the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross and the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. And while this pairing has always felt natural, I’d never paused to consider, before, the more-than-surface relationship between them. This week, however, the readings from Monday’s feast and Tuesday’s memorial have stuck with me, and I’m beginning to realize that together they offer an invitation to a deeper identity with Christ.

Monday’s first reading presents salvation history in microcosm. The Israelites complain against the Lord, a plague of serpents infests their camp, they repent, and God instructs Moses to lift up a bronze serpent in the desert. Anyone suffering the venomous snakebite can look at this bronze figure – the sign of their punishment transformed to a terrible mystery of mercy – and live. In the Gospel that follows, Christ references this story in explicit connection to being lifted up, Himself, “so that everyone who believes in [the Son of Man] may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15).

Together, these readings draw our gaze to the Cross, the sign of our guilt and our salvation by the grace of God. They ask us to acknowledge our own sins and fix our eyes on our Savior, recognizing that salvation history continues to work itself out in our lives and in the sacramental life of the Church, the Body of Christ. But with Tuesday’s Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Body of Christ comes into focus even more explicitly, with St. Paul stating: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ… you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Cor 12:12, 27).

Always before, I saw Our Lady of Sorrows primarily as an onlooker, however affected by the pain she observed. I knew that Christ entrusted His mother to us on Calvary, that she prays for us and points us toward her Son at all times. But as the readings remind us, we are members of the Body of Christ, and as a consequence, her presence at His sacrifice, together with St. John and the holy women, becomes something more. It becomes a sign of our participation in His Passion.

Christ saved us. Christ alone. But by the incomparable mystery and mercy of His divine Love, He draws us into this act and its glorious reward, each so far beyond our human capacities. Just as Mary is, in a real way, the first Christian, she is also the first to suffer with Him and to unite her human suffering, her human love, with His. The Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows reminds us to place ourselves at the foot of the Cross, not as bystanders, but as members of Christ’s Body.

We are all called to carry our crosses. The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross promises that the Way of the Cross leads, in Christ, to resurrection. But the Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows follows to remind us that we are never alone. There is no dimension of human suffering that Christ’s Passion does not embrace and sanctify. We are the Body of Christ; we are called to love with His Love, as Mary did: to recognize His sufferings in those of our brothers and sisters and not to turn away. Christ is with us. Hope in Him.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Every Catholic Church has an altar lamp. Mounted or suspended near the tabernacle, it remains lit at all times of the day or night, signaling Christ’s eucharistic presence within.

Given its ubiquity, of course, the lamp isn’t something we usually focus on, especially when the sanctuary is well lit for Mass. We might glance toward it in an unfamiliar church, especially if the tabernacle isn’t immediately visible, but then we tend to forget about it. After all, it’s meant to direct our attention to God, to His presence in a holy place, not to hold our eye in itself.

But last week, when I stepped inside Mary Help of Christians Basilica outside of the scheduled liturgical times, most of the lights were out and the church was dim and quiet. And in the low light of that space, the small red flame was impossible to miss, marking the alcove where the tabernacle waited. And even though it told me what I knew, the lamp, its vividness in the dusk interior, was somehow still a pronounced comfort, straight through the dark.

The fact is that sometimes, even though we believe, we can’t see clearly. Sometimes we can’t make out the tabernacle we know is there. When the dark obscures God’s presence in our lives, we may not feel consolation or hear answers, but God never leaves us alone. The altar lamp is there to make explicit what we know by faith — and to remind us, in the very act of this reminding, not only that God, Emmanuel, is here with us but also that He speaks signs of His presence in humble, common, and continual ways we often take for granted.

The altar lamp in Mary Help of Christians Basilica, like the altar lamp in every Catholic Church around the world, burns faithfully. Our monastic sacristan, Br. Gabriel, replaces the candle each time it burns low, and in doing so, he not only maintains this gentle sign of signs but also embodies it by his watchful care. His patient service, too, becomes a reminder.

In the same way, your Christian witness – even in the smallest, most ordinary things you do to remain faithful to your families, your friends, and those God has placed in your life – are signs of His presence. You won’t often know when these lamps cut through the dark of someone else’s struggles. But they do.

May God give each of us the grace to recognize the many signs of His love, His presence, and His faithfulness in our lives. May He give us the grace to be these signs for others. And may we always rejoice in things visible and invisible.

Those of us here on the Belmont Abbey campus sometimes joke about “monastic time.” It’s a quip we’ve borrowed from the monks themselves, though it would be hard to imagine actually applying it to their faithful work, despite their good-humored self-deprecation. In the course of our teaching or administrative work, however, if some objective seems slow in approaching or a goal aims far in the future, we can always tease ourselves with the playfully applied truth: that this is just the monastic way. In an overarching, historical sense, the scale of Benedictine time responds to a 1500 year tradition, after all; its units are more properly centuries than days or weeks. But even on an individual scale, the Abbey monk lives his life in view of eternity.

To be clear, Benedictine monks absolutely get things done. One look at Belmont Abbey history shows dozens of visionary servant-leaders who built and sustained this college and community over the last 150 years, bringing it by the grace of God from two students and a few, old farm buildings to a thriving community of 1700+ and a campus full of beautiful, historic architecture. But in looking back at Abbey history, it’s important to remember that these men didn’t always see the fruits of their labors, which unfolded slowly across generations. They didn’t need to see what would come or know how long it would take. Being human, of course, they may have wondered, but they also drew strength and perspective from a community whose way of life, sense of priority, and attitude toward time look ever more radical by today’s standards.

In the monastery, the daily rhythms are steady and consistent, cultivating a faithful interior space in which to await the still, small voice so easy to miss in our urgent, polarized, and media-saturated world. Those of us outside the monastery are bombarded by a culture that believes everything should be immediate, gratifying, and accessible. And while there are many advantages to modern technology, it can all too quickly drown us in a bizarre cocktail of anxious complacency. Relative to the fragmentary whirl of contemporary life, a monk’s ordered balance of prayer and work, ora et labora, seems almost like slow motion – largely because the Benedictine looks to the eternal.

The structures of our daily lives might differ from a Benedictine monk’s – just as our particular callings are different from his — but something in the idea of monastic time remains necessary to all of us. The invitation to do faithfully the work and prayer of today, trusting to a scale of time and a divine plan that far exceed what we can see or predict, might be more explicit in the Benedictine life, but it belongs to each of us in our shared vocation as human beings. Eternity is not an abstraction unconnected with earthly life. The monks of Belmont Abbey live in its light while embracing, without contradiction, the paradox of stability in a particular time and place. Likewise, orienting ourselves toward eternity doesn’t detach us from our humanity but illuminates its dignity, echoing the reality of sacrament and the mystery of the Incarnation, the eternal Word made flesh.

Changing our perspective is not easy, and personally, I still have a long way to go. But I think in the end the key is, well… time. In the end, the time we give to God — in prayer or work or leisure — participates in eternity. And if we set aside even ten minutes each day with no other purpose than directing our attention to Him, our eternal home – if we sit in what is sometimes very uncomfortable and distracted quiet and just keep trying to turn our eyes back to Him – those moments can help to orient us. They can remind us that all time points toward its eternal source. That no moment is defined by itself alone. And that it is never our responsibility to worry about outcomes or timing. Every day the monks’ patient witness reminds us: just leave those to God.