Caterina Benincasa Dominican Monastery

The Sign of God - the Word of God

In today’s gospel, we read This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it but the sign of Jonah.

Pope Paul VI wrote of religious monks and nuns that they are the sign that there is at work in the world a force that so transcends the limits of this world that it will be capable of transfiguring it on the last day.

What is the sign? It is the sign of Jesus still alive in this world. Jesus, alive in each one of us. Jesus carrying out his mission through those open and willing to be attentive to the spirit within.

Jean-Marie Howe writes God is already praying within us. When we begin to pray, we are, so to speak, already at the second stage of prayer. We are joining God in a prayer which is unfolding within us and within our world. Our task in prayer is that of giving voice to the Spirit’s groaning within us and bringing the Spirit’s utterances to language and conscious awareness.

During Lent we read the Word of God. During Lent, we can also be a sign of God as we become the living expression of that word: the sprit groaing within and bringing utterances to language and conscious awareness.

 Paul Claudel writes  [Christ] did not come to give us a life that would serve only to enable us to die. He did not come on earth to prevent hunger and thirst…He came with his great leaven so that no stone might be incapable of becoming wheat or loaf.

Think of the stones Satan used to tempt Jesus in the desert.  Satan placed them before Jesus with an invitation to change them into loaves of bread. Those stones symbolize our hearts, and Jesus did not come so that we might fed him. He came to transform us through the food of his body and blood.  Even though those stones were meant for transformation, it would not come at the command of Jesus. He could have, but he would not. He waits on us to initiate the transformation by opening our hearts.

In the desert of the monastic life, we too are tempted to feed off the very things that are set before us, our rule or our observances, our silences or our fasts, our prayers or our vigils. They are not meant to feed us, but we are to feed them, with a burning spirit that comes from a heart open to deeper communication. It’s the spirit that prompts the action, not the observance that calls for it, that gives sustenance to the soul.

Jean-Marie Howe writes to open our heart, to open a depth within ourselves: this is the aim of monastic life, and from this flows its fertility. The treasure hidden in the field of monastic life is depth: to arrive at such a depth of being that our whole life flows from the level of the heart, for it is there where God is, there where God gives to us and through us to the world.

He does more than give to us. When we cooperate in our own transformation, a unity occurs whereby we become like that which feeds us. It’s the wonderful assimilation seen when a person takes nourishment, and it occurs on the spiritual plane as well.

Olivier Clement writes to seek the place of the heart. We live so much on the surface of ourselves. We live in our head and in our entrails, and all the vast spaces of the heart we have forgotten. I believe that we must rediscover them.

To be a stone is to be a hard thing. But if stones can be called forth into bread, then no human heart is beyond the spiritual grasp of unitive prayer with God.

Today is the Feast of Lights. It is the day the Gospel of the Lord’s Presentation is read. Simeon and Anna are in the Temple, and they alone recognize Jesus as the long awaited Savior. Why is it that they alone knew him? Surely, he looked the same to them as he did to the hundred of other pilgrims.

Because they had given long years to listening for the voice of God in their hearts.  Their perception became so sharpened that as soon as Joseph and Mary entered the Temple, they knew “He” was there. They didn’t need some exterior “sign” from God. Nor did they test him to be sure He was the one who was to come. They “knew” because they had prepared their hearts, had listened to the spirit, had waited in trust in hope.

John tells us that the Light came into this world, and the darkness did not comprehend it.