Cultivation Blog

While the monks of Belmont Abbey – and Benedictine communities around the world – reserve March 21 for the most solemn celebrations of St. Benedict, yesterday’s more generally observed feast of July 11 nevertheless holds a special place in our hearts, and it is often a day when our monks observe vocational milestones.

Last year Br. Leo Young made his Solemn Profession, embracing his vocation and dedicating his life to God through the rooted particularity of this monastic community. And this year the monks of Belmont Abbey welcomed two young men into the next stages of their discernment: one as a novice and one through First Profession, or Temporary Vows.

As I listened to these vows yesterday during Mass, I thought about the ways we discern God’s will in our lives. A Benedictine monk in discernment seeks the will of God through prayer and work, ora et labora. He listens within the Divine Office, the Mass, and the Scriptures. He attends to the shared life of his confreres, the humble rhythms of community life. And although the monastic life is a distinct calling and a particular vocation, discernment is something we all need, and we seek God’s voice in many of the same places: in our own prayer and work, in the Liturgy, the Bible, our families and communities.

We, too, can cultivate the quiet patience that waits for God to reveal Himself. And even if most of us don’t formally vow ourselves to a discernment period, we can still commit to following God’s will no matter what He asks, knowing that the more we give ourselves over to Him, the more He promises to fill us with the Life and the Love that surpass understanding.

Please join me in praying for the Belmont Abbey monastic community – and especially its newest members, as they continue their journeys of discernment over the coming years. May this joyful Feast of St. Benedict remind us to listen to God’s voice in our own lives, knowing that His love and generosity are always orders of magnitude greater than we can fathom.

I’ve been thinking this week about St. John the Baptist, whose feast we celebrated on Monday. The Forerunner of Christ, John the Baptist is “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord!’”(John 1:23) His call to conversion disturbed or inspired, depending on his listeners, but he spoke out fearlessly to all, even to King Herod himself, who had taken his brother’s wife in contravention of God’s law.

It can be a challenge, at any time, to speak up in defense of the Truth, and St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom is a sobering reminder of why. But Monday’s feast, June 24, doesn’t commemorate his death, the way such days usually do. (For that we have another feast on August 29.) Instead, this week we celebrate John the Baptist’s birth, and this unusual circumstance reminds me: there’s another side to our call to speak the Truth, a side that doesn’t diminish the risk or the danger but instead shows us why it’s worth facing.

After all, Christ Himself was present at the birth of John the Baptist, within the Blessed Mother’s womb. The unborn John leapt in recognition within Elizabeth when Mary arrived, ready to tend to her cousin in the last months of pregnancy. And the purifying joy John expressed in that moment, even before his birth, evokes the joy of a call that is more than a call – that is a Person – and reminds us just how profoundly our human calling embraces who we are in our divinely created selves, even before we take our first breath.

The One for whom we help “prepare the way” in each other’s lives actually precedes us, offering the joy of His promised salvation long before we are conscious of our need for it. He accompanies us from the beginning.

Our God is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, so proclaiming Truth at all costs means proclaiming Him, truly. It can be easy to distract ourselves with fear and anxiety at all the obstacles to speaking up, but St. John the Baptist reminds us, at his birth, that embracing this call is embracing the deeply personal Love of Christ, enduring forever and worth the cost.

Happy Feast of the Visitation!

Following the Annunciation, with the Christchild newly alive in her womb, the Blessed Mother must have felt the need to process and cherish all that was taking place in and through her. Nevertheless, instead of retreating into a perfectly understandable period of adjustment and preparation, Mary immediately reached out to help her cousin. 

From the angel’s message, Our Lady knew that Elizabeth had “conceived a son in her old age” (Luke 1:35). She knew, too, that this would mean not only the jubilant fulfillment of her cousin’s longing for a child but also the physical and emotional burden – however welcome – of bearing a child late in life. Elizabeth’s joy and Elizabeth’s need both called to Mary, who set off without hesitation for the hill country. 

This in itself would be reason enough to celebrate today. After all, it shows that our Blessed Mother goes out of her way to be present to those who need her, even before they ask. But the Visitation brings with it so much more.

True to the irrepressible abundance of God’s generosity, even Elizabeth’s miraculous motherhood and Mary’s responsive love only express a portion of the beauty in this feast. For Mary does not arrive alone. Her “yes” to God means that God Himself is incarnate within her, and her “yes” to her cousin’s need means that she carries this Presence to Elizabeth and her unborn child, John the Baptist. 

I can only imagine Elizabeth’s joy at conceiving a child after so many years – and at a point in her life when the possibility, even under the best of circumstances, would have been impossibly remote. Not only did God answer her prayers – not only did He use this answer to herald the long-awaited Messiah of her people – but as if these things weren’t already far beyond her hope or expectation, He followed this answer with His own presence in her home: “Who am I,” Elizabeth wonders aloud on Mary’s arrival, “that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43) 

The Feast of the Visitation shows us how much and how tenderly God wants to bless us, even in and through each other. Mary reminds us that in reaching out to those in need, we become vessels of God’s merciful Presence. And Elizabeth reminds us that even when our prayers seem to go unanswered, God is preparing to visit us with the unsurpassable joy of His presence.

May God bless you on this glorious feast!

Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph, one of my absolute favorite saints.

Although not biologically Jesus’ father, St. Joseph nevertheless lived an authentic vocation of fatherhood as the head of the Holy Family, loving and protecting his wife and Son through danger, poverty, and the anxieties of daily life. Jesus was fully human – as well as fully divine – and He needed a human father to model what it meant to be a man, to work and serve and sacrifice in the ways that men are called to do. When God the Father entrusted His Son to St. Joseph, this was a call to embrace authentic fatherhood.

Though he never speaks a word in the Gospel, St. Joseph – like that other Joseph of Old Testament tradition – hears the messages of God in dreams and responds to them with trust and alacrity. He takes Mary into his home. He flees with his wife and Son to Egypt. Attentive to the word of God, he ultimately embraces and protects the Word Himself, contemplating in Christ – as a child and as a man – the Incarnate God.

In considering St. Joseph’s contemplative vision this week, I found myself thinking about the Seven Joys and Sorrows of St. Joseph, a popular devotion I came to know through Belmont Abbey. And what struck me most forcefully was the way these joys and sorrows embrace the same seven events. Often the cause of sorrow and the cause of joy are intimately tied, even when each arises in response to a different element within the experience. In the birth of Christ, for example, St. Joseph found unparalleled joy; in having no more than a manger to give Him, however, he encountered true sorrow. Likewise, hearing Simeon’s prophecy brought to light both the sorrow of Mary and Jesus’ suffering and the joyful glory of Christ’s mission. Throughout his life, St. Joseph held joy and sorrow together in his heart, embracing both and entrusting himself to God with trust and patience.

There are so many reasons to love St. Joseph: the strong, quiet, and humbly steadfast father who willingly supports us without even our recognition. As members of the Body of Christ, and as brothers and sisters in Him, we have not only a spiritual mother but also a spiritual father within the Holy Family – and St. Joseph has never stopped working for the good of his children.

But of all the reasons to love Papa Joseph, the one for which I’m most grateful today is his capacity to embrace both suffering and joy, to acknowledge and receive both with complete trust and generosity. St. Joseph teaches us to contemplate the way God speaks in our lives, the Word He speaks. St. Joseph’s sorrows don’t preclude his joys, nor joys his sorrows. Together they model a wisdom that the Season of Lent can help us to practice and appreciate, always leaving patient space for mystery.

Through the intercession of St. Joseph, may God continue to bless your Lenten journeys!

It’s hard to believe that Lent begins next week… It feels like the year is barely underway, and already it’s time to consider how best to approach our time in the penitential desert.

I have to admit, usually my preparation revolves almost exclusively around the question: “What am I giving up this year?” It’s an important practical question, certainly, and I do plan to devote some discernment time to answering it this weekend, but sometimes I think I start to view Lent as little more than a period of compartmentalized self-discipline.

So this year, in addition to the traditional sacrifices, I wanted to invite you to join me in taking a page out of the Benedictine rulebook. This year, let’s open up our Lenten journeys to the hallmark of community.

Of course, each one of us makes an individual journey through Lenten death to Easter resurrection, but we also walk together as the Body of Christ. We participate in Christ’s own life and death, part of which means helping our loved ones to carry their crosses, whether through our sacrifice and service or simply by being present to them in their need. Part of this also means accompanying each other in prayer, praying with as well as praying for one another.

Whatever form this takes in your life and your Lent – making time for a struggling friend, joining a family member in a particular devotion, praying together for a shared intention, or even gathering with a group to walk the Stations of the Cross each Friday – I hope you find a way to invite the graces of community into your Lent.

As a step toward this, each Friday during Lent I look forward to sharing with you two Stations of the Cross video reflections from the monks of Belmont Abbey. After all, taking a few minutes to join Abbot Placid, Fr. Elias, Br. Chrysostom, or Br. Leo in contemplation gives us the chance to journey with the monks and the whole Abbey community during this holy season.

As we prepare for the beginning of Lent in a few, short days, may Christ guide our footsteps and give us good companions along the way.