We’ve just heard the second in our sequence of four Sunday Gospels taken from John Chapter 6: the Bread of Life Discourse. There’s something entirely special about the sixth Chapter of St. John’s Gospel. I’ve heard it said that if you took away all the rest of the New Testament, but left this, you’d have enough.
Homily for Sunday 18B, 1 August 2021: John 6:24-35
Amen Amen I say to you (v. 26). That is: Listen very carefully to what I’m going to say. The words I have for you now are very deliberately chosen, and they bear with them divine authority. They are words of truth, and if you listen you will find life in them. They are words spoken by a man - precisely by “the Son of Man” (v. 27) - but they are words also of divine revelation.
Homily for the 8 o’clock Mass, Sunday 14B, 4 July 2021: Mark 6:1-6
St. Mark tells us in today’s Gospel that in Nazareth, Jesus “could work no miracle”. This certainly cannot mean there was any absolute limitation to Jesus’ power. St. Mark records him elsewhere healing lepers, giving sight to the blind, driving out demons, raising the dead. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus rebukes the storm and it ceases; he walks on water; he twice multiplies loaves. He is put to death, and three days later he rises again, as he said he would.
Oblate events 2021-2023
Official Permission for Development
Friends of the Abbey will be disappointed to read that, on July 13th, Moray Council published an official grant of Planning Permission for the proposed housing development at Barnhill. The site for the 9 new houses is almost immediately opposite the monastery, just on the other side of the Black Burn.
Pluscarden Benedictines No. 194 - Pentecost 2021
Homily for the Feast of SS. Peter & Paul, 29 June 2021
In Chapter 57 of the Holy Rule, St. Benedict briefly discusses the skilled craftsmen of the monastery. His concern is that they avoid falling into either pride or avarice because of their work. He rounds off this Chapter by quoting a line from St. Peter’s first Letter, Chapter 4: ...that in all things God may be glorified (1 Pt 4:11). This line has often been taken as summing up not just monastic work, but the whole of monastic life, indeed of the Christian life itself. Let us say today also, this could fittingly sum up the lives of SS. Peter and Paul.
Homily for Sunday 13B, 27 June 2021: Mark 5:21-43
The interwoven story of the daughter of Jairus, and the woman with a haemorrhage, is told by St. Matthew in 8 verses; by St. Luke in 16 verses; and by St. Mark in 22 verses. We’ve just heard St. Mark’s account. It’s marvellously well told: full of humanly interesting little details omitted by the others. Of the three versions we have, St. Mark’s is by far the fullest, most lively, most dramatic, most immediate.