Saint Josephine Bakhita 8 Feb

 New Missal – Proper of Saints

8 February

Saint Josephine Bakhita, Virgin

From the Common of Virgins: For One Virgin (p. 1150).

Collect

O God, who led Saint Josephine Bakhita from abject slavery to the dignity of being your daughter and a bride of Christ, grant, we pray, that by her example

we may show constant love for the Lord Jesus crucified, remaining steadfast in charity

and prompt to show compassion.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  

The New Missal includes the Collect of the Saint Josephine Bakhita.
The Principal Celebrant this morning was Abbot Joseph of Mount Saint Bernard.
He is leading our Annual Retreat at Nunraw.

saints.sqpn.com/saint-josephine-bakhita/   

Saint Josephine Bakhita

Also known as

• Giuseppina Bakhita
• Madre Moretta
• Sister Moretta

Memorial

• 8 February

Profile

Born to a wealthy Sudanese family, she was kidnapped by slave-traders at age 9, and given the name Bakhita (lucky) by them. Sold and resold in the markets at El Obeid and Khartoum, finally purchased in 1883 by Callisto Legnani, Italian consul who planned to free her. She accompanied Legnani to Italy in 1885, and worked as a nanny for the family of Augusto Michieli. She was treated well in Italy and grew to love the country. An adult convert the Christianity, she joined the Church on 9 January 1890, she took the name of Josephine as a symbol of her new life.

She entered the Institute of Canossian Daughters of Charity in Venice, Italy in 1893, taking her vows on8 December 1896 in Verona, Italy and serving as a Canossian Sister for the next fifty years. Her gentle presence, her warm, amiable voice, and her willingness to help with any menial task were a comfort to the poor and suffering people who came to the door of the Institute. After a biography of her was published in 1930, she became a noted and sought after speaker, raising funds to support missions.

Born

• 1868 at Oglassa, Darfur, Sudan 

Died

• 8 February 1947 of natural causes in Italy

Venerated

• 1 December 1978 by Pope John Paul II (decree of heroic virtues)

Beatified

• 17 May 1992 by Pope John Paul II

Canonized

• 1 October 2000 by Pope John Paul II at Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, Italy
• thought to be the only saint originally from Sudan

Patronage

• Sudan

Presentation Candlemass St Luke 2:22-40

Presentation in the Temple - Bellini.bmp Thursday, 02 February 2012 Presentation of Child Jesus in the Temple - Solemnity Anniversary of the Foundation of Sancta Maria Abbey - Nunraw      Community Sermon - Fr. Raymond

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: Raymond . . .
Sent: Friday, 3 February 2012, 9:29
Subject: Presentation  2012

No matter how far one travels back in time one finds everywhere and always the evidence of mankind’s instinctive need to offer sacrifice to the Divine.  Man has an innate need to take some living creature to represent his own life and kill and consume it in fire as a symbol of the gift of himself to his God.  The Jewish feast of the Presentation was nothing but the con-tinuance of this fundamental religious trait in the lives of God’s chosen people

For us who live in the fullness of God’s time, in the Christian Era, however, there is an added dimension to this feast.  The Victim offered on our behalf is That First Born, the First Born who is merely foreshadowed by all the previous victims.  He is The Christ himself, the only begotten of the Father.  And the offering of this First Born is not to be merely symbolised by the slaying of a lamb or a dove.  Our offering is himself, in all the fullness of tragic reality, the very victim who is sacrificed; and in this, since he is himself one of us, he represents the complete and perfect offering to his Heavenly Father of each and every one of us.

This whole episode in the temple is also shot through with beautiful symbolism.  We must ask ourselves why, for instance  were there two prophets, Simeon and Anna, and not just one? Would either one not have done?  And why was one male and one female?  And why were they old and not young?          By their duality of gender, man and woman, Simeon and Anna surely represent the whole of the human race welcoming its Saviour.  They are a reflection of the original couple, Adam and Eve; the founders of our race; the male and female  to whom the promise of this child was originally made so many centuries before in the Garden of Eden.  And by their old age this couple surely represents the fullness of the coming of age of God’s chosen people.  God’s designs are always fulfilled and never frustrated.  No matter how many of us are unfaithful, there will always be a faithful remnant. The acknowledgement by Simeon and Anna that the Messiah has come at last is the living proof that God’s call and choice of the Jews was fulfilled, at least in these two.  Here we can call to mind that also the beginning of the new Messianic era is likewise represented by man and woman, male and female, Joseph and Mary, of course.

Finally we may consider that, Simeon and Anna represent by their holiness the ultimate success and triumph of the work of Redemption; the work that was to be accomplished by this child;  the Child in whom, not only they, but all of us were chosen from the beginning to live holy and upright lives awaiting the fullness of our redemption.

Gospel for Sunday 29 January 2012

St. Anne chapel  

http://www.h2onews.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=224450518&catid=50&Itemid=14
Gospel for sunday 29 january 2012

Jesus came to Capernaum with his followers, and on the sabbath he entered the synagogue and taught. 
The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. 
In their synagogue was a man with an unclean spirit;
he cried out, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are--the Holy One of God!"
Jesus rebuked him and said, "Quiet! Come out of him!" 
The unclean spirit convulsed him and with a loud cry came out of him. 
All were amazed and asked one another, "What is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him." 
His fame spread everywhere throughout the whole region of Galilee. 


Cistercian Founders 26 Jan 2012

Sent: Thursday, 26 January 2012
Subject: Founders' Sermon - Fr. Mark 

Sts Robert, Alberic and Stephen                                 Chapter Sermon, 2012

• What is it that makes us celebrate our founders?  They lived in a very different age and time from our own.  Much of their style of living seems worlds away from what we do today. 
• But if history is anything to go by, it is amazing how much those in the past can still teach us how to live and how to cope with the vagaries and problems of life, whatever the age we happen to be in.
• Robert, Alberic and Stephen were like any other monks who were seeking to answer their call to seek God in a monastery.  Monastic life has not changed all that much in the basics of community living, where there is a spirit of silence and a fair modicum of solitude even as they live together.  There was an obvious structure to their day, centred as it was on the common work of God in choir.  The day was designed for them by creating a balance between their prayer, reading and work.  Because of their practical personal needs, there had to be a common awareness of the requirements of each other so that they had sufficient time to pray, to read or study. It was important that everyone respected that time for personal silence and the space for prayer and silence.
• It is not always easy to find one’s own balance within the one set up for the whole community.  It is also difficult to continue keeping such balance with the passage of time.  That is why communities need from time to time to reassess how they live their monastic life.
• What led Robert, Alberic, Stephen and some of the members of their community to uproot themselves from Molesme and go to the wilderness of Citeaux was their dissatisfaction with their practice of the Rule of St Benedict. Recent historical studies show that there were human elements in our founders which showed a tendency ― perhaps an over-tendency ― to move on to new fields in their zeal to seek God.  Who is to be sure what is a genuine urging of the Spirit to make a radical move from their present circumstances and what may be, as is mostly the case, a temptation to be ignored.  Novices routinely seek something ‘higher’ or ‘more spiritual’, like going to join the Carthusian.  The same can be true of monks who have lived for a number of years in the monastery.  In a time of renewal there are many examples when experiments failed to achieve anything worthwhile.  That was the case in so many instances in the ‘60s. 
• But renewal within monasteries as well as attempting to set up new foundations somewhere else has been successful.  The 11^th century saw much new life in many monasteries right across the board.  This period was an era of renewal when fledgling attempts at setting up new religious communities where people could go to find God in a more radical way took root and flourished.  Citeaux was one of these.  Through the courageous efforts of Robert, Alberic and Stephen and their other companions the Cistercian form of monastic life was established and promoted.  There have of course been other renewals since then.  Each time the new reform has produced new growth and a more vibrant monastic life.
• Perhaps celebrating the feast of our founders is a good opportunity to take a long look at what we had embarked on when we first entered the monastery and how we have journeyed over the years since then.  Does the vision and willingness of Robert, Alberic and Stephen and the other Cistercians who later joined them in the Order still shine as clear for us today?  Would we benefit from going back to look at what they had achieved in their renewal?  Would some of their innovations still be of benefit to us in our own personal lives?  It is by such simple steps that we can go forward and grow in our vocation.  Such attempts help to find and put on Christ and help us to truly seek God. 

Levinas Emmanuel - Monks of Tibhirine

Precious photo Jan 1996

 Email from friend . . .

Dear Donald,  

I would like to thank you very much for your help.

The pages of the attachment are already very helpful.

They will become a part of the literature the students have to read.

. . .

Thanks for sending me the copy.

God bless you and your work.

Maarten

A Heritage Too Big
Volume 2
Scan of pages 91-95

per Fr. Donald, Nunraw Abbey

17. NOTE: Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas

in the Reading of Christian and Christophe

David Hodges, OCSO, Caldey

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), French philosopher, has exerted a considerable influence on a generation of continental philosophers and religious thinkers. Some of the concepts at the centre of his thought provided Fr. Christian and Fr. Christophe with a catalyst for the expression of their ideals and their understanding of the death at the hands of others which they felt to be approaching. Translations of Emmanuel Levinas and studies of his philosophy have become more widely available in the English speaking world in recent years. The following note indicates some of the references made to him in the writing of Christian and Christophe. (Ed.)

Dom Christian de Cherge, Superior of the monastery of Atlas in Algeria, who was martyred along with six other brothers of the community in 1996, wrote an extraordinary Testament before he died in which he envisaged meeting his death at the hand of a Muslim terrorist and forgave him in advance. He wrote of seeing God in the face of the other, even the assassin, drawing on the categories of the philosopher, Emmanuei Levinas, whom he had studied. He addresses his 'envisaged' assassin: "Qui, pour toi aussi je le veux ce merci et cet 'A-DIEU' en-visage de toi". "En-visage de toi", in whom I see the face of the Absolute Other, and in whom I go to God. God is seen in the face of the assassin, and death and the assassin are seen in the face of God. This could only be seen from the perspective of one who is himself a face of God's love for all. Here was a life totally given to God and to the other, - a vocation that can be seen with some assimilating of Levinas' categories and ideas, and christianising them: the face of the other; responsibility for the Other, even up to substitution and expiation for the other; responsibility for the actions of the other; a deep interiority allowing one to transcend self and to reach to exteriority; being-for-death as being-for-beyond-my death; death as but an opening to the Absolute other. Dom Christian goes further than seeing the face as an encounter with the Absolute other. He is bold enough to contemplate that after his death he will be able to: "immerse my gaze in that of the Father, and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ."    

COMMENT

Panorama of the Clyde  

---- Forwarded Message -----
From: Anne Marie. . .
To: Donald . . .
Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 22:40
Subject: Pic of the day

We had a day out on Sunday to do some photography.  Here is my favourite.  A panorama of the Clyde.

    Anne Marie 

COMMENT

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: William

Sent: Monday, 23 January 2012, 22:20
Subject: Re: [Blog] "Sunset. The Hour of Compline. Salve Regina." Thomas Merton

Dear Father Donald,

Unsleeping, your blog post delights me so much!

With my copy of the book by my bedside, and the window of my mind open to the night sky:

"The shadows fall. The stars appear. The birds begin to sleep Night embraces the silent half of the earth."

And "everything depends on our laying ourselves down "under the sweet stars of the world" and giving ourselves over to the hidden Wisdom of God."

With quiet inner joy,

. . .in Our Lord,

William

'Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, who crowns Christ' Merton

She crowns Him not with what is glorious, but with
what is greater than glory: the one thing greater than
glory is weakness, nothingness, poverty.

She sends the infinitely Rich and Powerful One forth
as poor and helpless, in His mission of inexpressible
mercy, to die for us on the Cross. (Merton)

«Wisdom will honour you if you embrace her   she will place on your head a fair garland   she will bestow on you a crown on of glory.» (Proverbs 4:8-9)

HAGIA SOPHIA

§..  One day Father Louis (Thomas Merton) our friend came from his monastery at Trappist Kentucky to bring an ill novice to the hospital in Lexington. (I had known Father Louis since 1955 when I visited him for the first time. Later we printed several of his books.) We had prepared a simple luncheon and I welcomed him to sit with us at table. From when we be sat he had a good view of the triptych on. the chest and he often looked at it. After a while he asked quite abruptly «And who is the woman behind Christ?  said «I do not know;:yet.» Without further question he gave his own answer. «She is Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, who crowns Christ.» And that she was - and is.

— Victor Hammer

"Hagia Sophia Crowning the Young Christ." A line-cut of Victor Hammer's triptych painting of the same title. Courtesy of the Estate of Victor and Carolyn Hammer, and the King Library Press, University of Kentucky.