Cultivation Blog

Every year at the beginning of November, we celebrate the solemnity of All Saints, followed closely by the feast of All Souls. As we approach the end of one liturgical year and the beginning of another, it seems appropriate that we take a moment to celebrate and to remember our brothers and sisters in the communion of saints.

The saints are not just static models of what we ought to be. Though they certainly provide powerful examples of holiness across a delightful range of personalities, vocations, and circumstances, they also offer us their friendship – each of us personally – in the concrete realities of our lives. In fact, following the example of our beloved monk, Br. Edward Mancuso, and his love for Blessed Solanus Casey, I’d invite you to listen for ways that a particular saint might be offering you their special friendship today. For the saints remain active in assisting us, praying both for and with us and petitioning God for what we don’t always know how to request. We celebrate the joy of this on the Solemnity of All Saints, November 1.

Speaking for myself, since I’m definitely still learning how to pray, I like to ask the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph to pray with me and make up what I lack in my own words and intentions. I know their wisdom and tenderness fill in the many gaps in what I remember, request, and understand, so that even my weakness can become a kind of strength, fortified by their help.

Ultimately, because the saints are active in our lives, they also show us how to remain active in the lives of our brothers and sisters. In the company of the Communion of Saints, we seek the good of all our loved ones and fellow members of the Body of Christ, recommending them at all times to God’s merciful care and loving will. On All Souls’ day in particular, we extend this to those who went before us and who now await divine beatitude. Purgatory is not a punishment but a mercy: a place that takes the refusal inherent in our sins and selfishness – all the ways we deferred our full commitment to God and our loving participation in the lives of our brothers and sisters – and responds with an invitation to suffering patience, a promise that inflames our desire for God until it burns away those things that hold us back from Him and from others.

As St. Catherine of Genoa writes, “I don’t believe it would be possible to find any joy comparable to that of a soul in purgatory, except the joy of the blessed in paradise. For it is a joy that goes on increasing… as God more and more flows in upon the soul, which He does abundantly in proportion as every hindrance to His entrance is consumed away.” It isn’t that Purgatory is a concrete place or length of time, from which our prayers release souls, but that God allows us to unite our prayers and sacrifices for our departed brothers and sisters with His purifying love as it prepares them to embrace a full and unobstructed life with Him in heaven. What a joy to remember that our participation in the lives of those we love continues even after their death – that our life in Christ remains what it always was: a shared community of love!

This weekend as we embrace our participation in this community, let’s remember all those who have gone before us. And if you have a favorite saint or a story about how they impacted your life, I hope you’ll share it!

Among the many wonderful saint-friends with October feasts, Bl. Carlo Acutis (October 12) immediately stands out for his contemporaneity and youth. Blessed Carlo died of leukemia at age 15 in 2006. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that he speaks only – or even primarily – to the very young, for his life continues to bear astonishing fruit: not only in the website he created to document Eucharistic miracles throughout the world, but also in the witness of suffering love by which he offered up his illness for the Church.

These two gifts, moreover, are not separate sides of a vocation, much less competing visions of Blessed Carlo’s life. Rather, offering his suffering for the Church was itself a way of living out the Eucharistic nature of our call as Christians, to which he attests so joyfully in his curatorial work online. In fact, through it he gives us renewed insight into what it means to be a Eucharistic people.

The source of this eucharistic identity is of course Christ Himself, present to us – Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity – in the Blessed Sacrament. He feeds us in this glorious mystery of self-gift, thus drawing us into His blessed, Trinitarian life and inviting us to become more fully the Body of Christ, the Church.

Yet it’s only recently that I’ve begun to hear this transformative call in the Eucharistic prayer itself. At the Consecration, before the priest raises the Precious Blood, he speaks Christ’s words: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.” I am used to hearing “do this in memory of me” as simply (though profoundly) a call to participation at the altar in the celebration of Mass. And while certainly this is an essential reality, I’ve begun to hear in it also a call to act meaningfully as members of the Body of Christ in the world.

The Blood of Christ is “poured out for [us] and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” When we receive Christ Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, we encounter Him in a personal and intimate way, but we also embrace His Love as an active call in our own lives: to pour ourselves out in sacrifice for others as He pours Himself out for us. Being a Eucharistic people, fed with Christ’s own life, we also participate in His outpouring Love.

When Carlo Acutis offered up his suffering, his cross, for the Church, this was a profoundly Eucharistic act, uniting him in love to Christ’s own sacrifice. Mother Teresa used to tell her community, “Let… the poor eat you up. In the Eucharist Jesus makes Himself the Bread of Life that I may eat Him. In the poor He makes Himself the hungry one that I may feed Him.” In the same sense, Christ invites us to join Him in giving of ourselves to serve and nourish our brothers and sisters.

This weekend, the last in October, as we prepare for all the energy and chaos of the next two months, let’s ask for the grace both to remain close to Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and also to live out His compassion and generosity in our own lives by embodying His sacrificial love in whatever way He might be calling us to give. May we be (small “s”) sacraments of God’s grace in the lives of those around us.

I’ve been wondering about glory. 

The Benedictine motto, ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus, translates “that in all things God may be glorified,” and while I can appreciate that this expresses an essential and defining aspiration, I have to admit I hadn’t really considered what it might mean beyond its most surface level. Watching our beloved monks move between prayer and campus activities with their characteristic humility and kindness, however, I’ve been thinking lately about the motto by which they live.

When the word “glory” comes to mind, usually I imagine some variation on magnificence: the gold of kingship, trumpets blaring, towering mountains, blinding sunsets, or a thundering host. Certainly we have no shortage of evidence of God’s greatness, grandeur, and omnipotence, as the psalmist reminds us daily, but this vision of glory still seems insufficient. After all, what does glory mean – not to a human perspective anchored in notions of earthly dominion – but to a God who makes Himself bread for us? What does it mean when we consider that God embraced our lowliness with so much tenderness that His birth elicited both singing angels and a bed made from a feeding trough? Or that He died the death of a criminal and an outcast to save us from the consequences of our own sin?

God reveals Himself not only in the brilliant light of the Transfiguration or the radiance on Mt Sinai – which so filled Moses’ face that he had to veil himself when he returned to the people – but also in the Cross and the poor. The earth quakes at the voice of its Maker, mountains melt like wax, and yet God speaks to us in the “still, small voice,” and Christ calls Himself “meek and humble of heart.” There is more to this worship we owe to God, then – and which fills the created world – than thunder and clamoring gold. 

When I pray that in all things God may be glorified, what am I asking?

As I return to these words, I realize that the motto’s passive construction means that God is the object, rather than the subject, of the clause. “All things” act, while God receives the action, in itself a startling and a humbling invitation to the “ora et labora” of Benedictine life: whereby we respond in word and deed to the very source of our active being – to all we can do or say. It reminds me of the priest’s prayer at Mass, “…that our praise adds nothing to Your greatness, but our thanksgiving is itself your gift.” If God doesn’t need our praise (and He doesn’t), but our “thanksgiving is itself His gift,” then surely it comes down to love. 

God is omnipotent and utterly beyond our power, but He also gives us freedom to act and to participate in His life. He loves us, draws near to us, and takes on our very humanity in Christ. Without diminishing His glory or power, He actively embodies – and transfigures – the reality of human love: that by loving someone, we allow them the power to hurt us. We choose to will their good – the life for which God created them – even if it leads us to the cross.

To pray that God may be glorified in all things is also to pray that we – in our lives and relationships, our prayers and work – will embrace the love of God with joyful participation, inviting Him to love and live in us with the full freedom of our will. Our praise and gratitude pleases God not because he requires magnification but because He loves us – and all those we encounter. He knows that our turning toward Him unites us more authentically with His will, which is Love and the source of our deepest happiness. 

By voicing our desire to give Him glory, we take part in the eternal hymn of praise that, in the great paradox of God’s incarnate Love, is both beyond us in its undiminished and perpetual beauty and also awaiting our beloved voice. It’s a prayer I hope to learn how to make more authentically, looking to the monks of Belmont Abbey and all those who imitate Christ in His glorious humility.

May we all draw closer to the God who loves us, that in all things God may be glorified!

This past Wednesday, August 7, marked Belmont Abbey’s 2024 Opening Day. Each year, the Opening Day gathers Belmont Abbey faculty, staff, and leadership to anticipate the new semester, enjoy fellowship, and recall our mission. It always offers a joyful and invigorating moment before we plunge into the excitement and challenges of the academic year, but this time as an added blessing, our recently appointed Bishop Michael Martin joined us on retreat to encourage a renewed focus on the particular and vital mission of Belmont Abbey College. Because his words offered such profound and inspiriting exhortation and such a hopeful challenge, I wanted to share some of his message with you today:

“I think we don’t have the opportunity enough, as practitioners, to focus upon mission,” Bishop Martin began. Regardless of our individual roles or “sphere[s] of influence,” all of us, he explained, are called to be “mission-driven leaders.” Essentially, we’re not just “a learning community that’s sponsored by the monks.” We are a “faith community who learns.” And while the world argues, based on their understanding of academic freedom, “that the mission of the Church is restrictive or antithetical to any healthy, vibrant higher education institution,” ultimately “you can’t live into the fullness of [academic] freedom outside the mission of this college.” Quoting from the beginning of Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the bishop reminded us that “a Catholic University’s privileged task is ‘to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.'” The world, he noted, “says you can’t do that, that the search for Truth has to be this blind search,” but “we believe that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and so we can’t comprehend a search for truth” without the source of that truth illuminating our journey. “We need to shine [our Faith] upon our endeavors in the search for Truth,” he continued. “The light of Truth shines on what it is you’re doing and makes what you’re doing possible… That’s what we believe. That’s what Belmont Abbey College believes as part of its mission… “This can’t be a conversation that’s isolated to Day One. …Belmont Abbey is at the heart of Catholic Education for five states in this Southeastern part of the country. Catholic Education in the Carolinas, in Georgia, in Tennessee, in Alabama looks to Belmont Abbey as the pinnacle. …You’re the standard bearer for every other Catholic educational institution within five states… so own it and be proud to profess it. Be proud to carry that standard and say, We’re here; we’ve planted our flag in the ground back in the 19th century and really founded the Church in this area, and we’re still leading the Catholic educational reality of this area. …Because I’ll tell you I’m looking to you for that… I, the bishop of this part of the state need you to be that, and so I pray for you, and I beg of you carry that banner well… We are here because of something greater than us… “Constant reflection on the shared mission has to be done so that [each faculty or staff member] can continue, in whatever capacity [they] exist in this college, to affirm it: Yes, that’s what I’m here to do. Yes, that’s why I’m a part of Belmont Abbey – because I want to share this Mission. I want to make this Mission my own… It’s not about me. I want the students to come to know that Truth… “You’ve got a wonderful opportunity,” the bishop added, “and an incredible uphill battle because God knows [students] are not walking in the door with that perception, with that appreciation. “Will you advance that Truth in their lives?” Because seeking Truth is not just collecting or categorizing the knowledge of the past. At a Catholic college, it is meant to be an active discernment of the heart, happening for each of us and for each of our students. Click here to view Bishop Martin’s full speech >>

During the rest of our Opening Day, and with Bishop Martin’s words vividly urgent in our minds, the Abbey community attended Mass and prayed together, shared lunch and dinner, listened to peer representatives and engaged in large and small group discussions on how best to form students in virtue, to address the particular (as well as universal) struggles of the contemporary student, and to support each other in our shared mission. Now as we prepare to begin a new academic year at Belmont Abbey College, please keep our faculty, staff, monks, and leadership in your prayers, that we may always embrace this mission with faith, joy, humility, and fortitude and that our students may continue to grow in the excellence and virtue that will so powerfully transform their lives.

Those of you fortunate enough to know Br. Edward Mancuso are probably also blessed to recognize the name “Solanus Casey.” Rarely have I encountered the Abbey’s beloved Guest Master without sharing a moment of prayer for Blessed Solanus’ intercession, and since we celebrated his feast day on July 30, I’ve been thinking about this holy Capuchin priest, for whom Br. Edward has such a joyful devotion.

Known for his gentleness, his gratitude, and his merciful compassion for the poor and sick, Father Solanus espoused a trusting simplicity of faith rooted in that “peace the world cannot give.” And though throughout his life he served communities in Wisconsin, Indiana, New York, and Detroit (where the Solanus Casey Center is located), I particularly like to imagine him in his role as porter at St. Bonaventure Monastery, where he welcomed each guest with such attentive hospitality and offered the comfort that never ceases to “thank God ahead of time.” Blessed Solanus trusted that the Lord would bring good from all things, and in response God worked many miraculous healings through his intercession, both during life and after his death.

Before we all rush headlong into the weekend, I wanted to take a moment to share with you the prayer for Blessed Solanus’ intercession and canonization. Since Br. Edward first introduced me to it, I have come to love the way its simplicity and trust cut through the anxious circles I sometimes make in my prayer. Like Blessed Solanus himself, this prayer reminds me that inviting God into my life each day – and trusting Him to act in me even (or especially) when I don’t trust my own capacity – only takes the simplest, earnest movement toward God:  

O God, I adore You. I give myself to You.

May I be the person You want me to be,

and May Your will be done in my life today.

I thank You for the gifts You gave Father Solanus.

If it is Your Will, bless us with the Canonization of Father Solanus

so that others may imitate and carry on his love

for all the poor and suffering of our world.

As he joyfully accepted Your divine plans,

I ask You, according to Your Will, to hear my prayer for… (your intention)

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

“Blessed be God in all His Designs.”

May each of us renew in simplicity our commitment to God and our trust in His Love, which never fails to act in and through all things.