The Sun of Righteousness

"For you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will shine out with healing in its rays." Malachi 3.20

Blessed John H. Newman has a word to say to us on this last line of to-days first reading.

If Christ is our sole hope, and Christ is given us by the Spirit, and the Spirit be an inward presence, our sole hope is in an inward change. As a light placed in a room pours out its rays on all sides, so the presence of the Holy Spirit imbues is with life,strength, holiness, love, acceptableness, righteousness.....That divine influence, which has the fullness of Christs grace to purify us, has also the power of Christs blood to justify. Let us never lose sight of this great and simple view.....Christ himself vouchsafes to repeat in each of us in figure and mystery all that he did and suffered in the flesh.He is formed in us, born in us, suffers in us, rises again in us.....and this divine presence constitutes the title of each one of us to heaven........
Are you living in the conviction of Gods presence ?
Do you believe, and act on the belief, that his light penetrates and shines through your heart, as the sun beams through a room ? You know how things look when the suns beams are on it...Let us then beg him to teach us the mystery of his presence in us, that, by acknowledging it,we may possess it fruitfully.....In all circumstances of joy or sorrow, hope or fear, let us aim at having him in our inmost heart; let us have no secret apart from him. Let us acknowledge him as enthroned within us at the very springs of thought and affection. Let us submit ourselves to his guidance and sovereign direction; let us come to him that he may forgive us cleanse us guide us and save us.

Stay at a Sinner's House

CCC 1127: “… As fire transforms into itself everything it touches, so the
Holy Spirit transforms into the divine life whatever is subjected to its power.”

2 Thess 1:11-12
“We pray continually that God will make you worthy of his call, and by his power fulfil all your desires for goodness and complete all that you have been doing through faith; because in this way the name of our Lord Jesus Christ will be glorified in you and you in him, by the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
We are tempted at every moment to do without God, as though it were a sign of weakness that we should be creatures who have need of others and of God to be happy, and to come to be the fullness of what we have been given life to grow to be.
In all our wandering, in all our encounters with others, in all that we achieve and acquire however, there is always something lacking – a little emptiness, a little loneliness, a little missing.
But we are ones who were, and who constantly strive to be – open to the touch of God. All of us who were baptised into the divine life of the Blessed Trinity, have been given this grace, if we would but receive it, welcome it joyfully. When I realise that only God can fill the emptiness, that not the deepest most intimate human love can understand – when this I see, then He will come – He does come – in fact, He is there already.

We are all of us like Zacchaeus – ‘too short’ in our own sight, yet … wanting to come out of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to grow out of what we are at the moment .. into that person that we could be, if only Someone would reach into us and draw us out. Because, on my own, I will never be more or better or more complete that the one I am now, and I am sadly lacking.

But the grace of God in me, His gift of faith and of hope, He has kept alive and active, and by it I have been kept open to Him, and so I ‘know’ Him. He, Jesus, is all I need, the answer to all the loneliness, the emptiness. He speaks and shows me what Way I am to walk, what I can do with His help, who I am in the sight of God – how, in the life of the Blessed Trinity I am caught up in and surrounded on every side by Infinite Love.

The Lord is my light and my help, my strength and my song: His power will fulfil in me all my desires for goodness, complete all I strive to do through faith: His grace.

And if I lay my life, all my desires and loves at His feet – with all that I am – He will be glorified in me and I in Him.
And after all, Lord, if there was only one thing that I could ask of You – it would be that one thing. Take my life, and me with it: all my love that is Yours, all my desires that are all for You – “stay at a sinner’s house” and let Your Name be glorified in me and I in You.

A Little (Late) News

I know we're a bit late telling you this, but our Dominican Brothers recently became something of a 'news item'. A journalist from one of our national radio shows went along on the Dominican Pilgimmage to Knock a few weeks ago. She was very impressed with the Dominicans. I attach a link to the relevant segment of the show, for anyone interested. Click Here. (It's only eleven minutes). You might enjoy it!

Something Precious

“You have been trusted
to look after something precious,
guard it
with the help of the Holy Spirit
who lives in us.”



How many things have been entrusted to us to look after, and is not every one of them ‘something precious’?

More than any other ‘something’, nothing can compare with the gift of God – and of faith in Him, that God Himself has given us. It is amazing to know that God – Who is infinitely beyond our reach and understanding – could have desired to become small and ‘contain-able’, so that we might have the ability to contain Him. It’s amazing to know that His desire in our regard is that we might know Him, seek Him and be in Him – that we might share in His Divine Life. And that is His will – He wants us, His creatures, to know Him … and we do. He has revealed Himself to us, has made Himself approachable, so much so that we can even call Him ‘Father’ – for so He is.

And, knowing what we are capable of – our wilfulness and our sinfulness – still, He has given Himself to us: has trusted us with the gift of His very self, and if we turn to the Holy Spirit who lives in us – His own spirit – we can guard and protect, nourish this gift, this precious gift we have been given.

We have been baptised into Christ’s body – the Church – in which God wholly abides. Another precious something with which we have been entrusted, that we might look after it.

This contemplative life, it seems to me, is a place where we should be most mindful of this precious gift. The Church in her history, has come near sometimes to disappearing, even dying; but miraculously has always recovered. In the middle ages, the dark ages, it was the monasteries, where the ‘re-birth’ began and overflowed into the world, renewing confidence and inspiring a return to fidelity to Christ and the gift of Himself He gave us – the gift of the Holy Spirit.

It seems to me that more than anything, we need always to be vigilant, to be discerning, so that this gift – this something precious – we have been entrusted to look after, may ever be the gift that Jesus gave us – and not stained by new ways of thinking or behaving or believing. When people are lost, we need to be a place where they meet Jesus, and are found.

Listen to His word; cherish every word He spoke, for He spoke only and always Himself. Love His word and live by it – by Him – and no other.

“In him is life, and the life is the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness
and the darkness has not overcome it.”

The darkness cannot overcome it.

“Lord, increase our faith.”

Icons - A Path to Contemplation

Last week our monasterary hosted a one day gathering of monastic women. Some of our sisters presented reflections based on the theme "Icons - a Path to Contemplation". Below is the text of one of the reflections. (The other three reflections have been posted on the reflections section of our website - Click here to view them)



It is not by accident that we have chosen the Icon of the Transfiguration, written by Theophan the Greek, for our sharing at this gathering. All ancient tradition saw in the Prayer of Jesus on the mountain, depicted in this Icon, the blue print for contemplative life. In the exhortation Vita Consecrata, Pope John Paul II invites us, consecrated religious, to contemplate the transfigured face of Jesus.

In The Eastern theological tradition, man is seen to be on a mystical journey that leads to “Theosis” or deification. Icons represent this union between God and man. The Icon is a manifestation of the presence of God. It draws and brings us into this Presence so that we can experience God in our soul. In this way we become a living icon of God.

For Byzantine theology, the Transfiguration as a “Teofania”, theophany, is on the one hand, a key to the understanding of the Divinity of Christ, and on the other, it is a very concrete model for the spiritual transformation of man.
The Transfiguration has taken a central place in the mystical theology of Byzantine’s monastic world. Whatever method of meditation the monks used, its purpose was always to lead to enlightenment, that is, prayerful immersion in the rays of Divine energy.

An orthodox monk and iconographer, Grigorij Krug, says that
“the disciples did not immediately witness the Transfiguration of Jesus, when they first met him, but only after a long hard climb to the top of Mount Tabor, that is, only through the great effort of climbing to the top of SILENCE.”

Or ,as we would say, entering into the depths of silence.

In Vita Consecrata we read :
We must confess that we all have need of this silence, filled with the presence of him who is adored : in theology, so as to exploit fully its own sapiential and spiritual soul; in prayer, so that we may never forget that seeing God means coming down the mountain with a face so radiant that we are obliged to cover it with a veil (Ex 34.33); in commitment, so that we will refuse to be locked in a struggle without love and forgiveness. All, believers and non-believers alike, need to learn a silence that allows the other to speak when and how he wishes, and allows us to understand his words”

And John Main tells us:
"All of us have to learn…….that we do not have to create silence. The silence is there within us. What we have to do is to enter it, to become silent, to become silence.”

Silence, as Meister Eckhart tells us, is a privileged entry into the realm of God… There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself… For silence is a language that is infinitely deeper, more far reaching, more understanding, more compassionate and more eternal than any other language… There is nothing in the whole world that resembles God as much as silence”

Whereas St. Benedict, who has set the tone for the spirituality of the West, calls us, first of all, to listen, the Byzantine Fathers focus on gazing. This is especially evident in the liturgical life of the Eastern Church as the 2nd Ecumenical council in 787 makes clear, when it says :
“What is communicated through the Word is revealed silently through the Image.”

In Byzantine Liturgy therefore, Word and Icon complement each other. Incompetent listening makes us spiritually blind.
“The eye with which I see God, is exactly the same eye with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowledge, and one love” (Meister Eckhart, sermon 16).

And thus, we can make bold to say, echoing the first letter of St. John :
“This is contemplation- this is contemplative love- not so much that we contemplate God, but that God has first contemplated us, and that now in us, in some sense, and even through us, as part of the mystery of his Risen Life in the Church, he contemplates the world” (Paul Murray op)

While the world is an icon of God, created and held in existence by Him, man, created in the “likeness of God” is, in a unique way, God’s Icon. So each of us is an icon of God. It is impossible to look at God, without seeing our brothers and sisters as He sees them. If we don’t look at God, then we see only ourselves, and we judge others only by our own eyes.


On the question of how to pray before an Icon or with an Icon, I want to coin a phrase from John Main. He says :
“We must learn to BE and then we will learn to DO.”

If we do this, the icon will begin to speak to us in the unique way God has chosen to love each of us individually.


In the Icon the three rays coming from the transfigured Lord, strike the apostles in three different ways. This is how the Icon writer expresses his understanding of the Divinity. Each person is loved by God in a uniquely personal way. We all receive and accept the rays of God’s love but those rays penetrate each one individually and differently from anyone else.


Trans – Formation

At the core of the Gospel is the invitation to be changed, made into a new person, and it is the experience of that transformation which gives the writings of the new testament their power. This is how John Main talks about it, in “Word into Silence”. He has just quoted a favourite passage from Romans 12.2 :

“Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed”

He then goes on to say,
“This is the essential Christian experience of being born again in the Holy Spirit. Being born again happens as we realize the power of the living Spirit of God within us. We all know that we have to change, because we cannot grow without changing and we cannot be really alive in any meaningful or certainly any enjoyable way unless we are growing. To grow, means to go forward into the unknown and obviously, therefore, to leave the past behind.

We need to reflect on the words of Jesus “Leave self behind” (Mk 8.34) to understand what we are created for. We fear letting go of the past, we resist living fully in the present, and so we find it difficult to pray. But in the teaching of Jesus we lose self, only in order to find self, and by losing self, we are transformed. What we are changed into is not, as we fear, something other than what we are. We fear that if we lose self, we will become someone else, someone different. But this fear is totally cast out of our hearts, when we open ourselves to the love of God, that has flooded us, through the Spirit of Christ who dwells in our hearts. It is then, that we experience ourselves being changed, simply into who we really are. We become, through God’s transforming love, truly ourselves for the first time. This is our transfiguration. In the heart of our humanity which we fear to lose, we find the humanity of Jesus, transformed by his utter openness to God.


In the Transfiguration, Jesus is not becoming somebody new, but he is revealing to us who He always is, and he is telling us something about our deepest selves. Our real lives are hidden with Christ in God.


This gradual work of transformation takes place in the ordinariness of our lives. As we journey through life we encounter many problems- problems from the past, problems of integration, adaptation, problems about facing the future. So many things worry us. It seems to us that, in order to solve the problems arising within us in the process of transformation, we have to find solutions outside of ourselves. We think we need to acquire information, increase our knowledge, discover new techniques. The teaching of the Gospel, however, is that our problems are solved, and there is no need for us to multiply ways of dealing with them. What we need to do, is to learn to be poor and to accept our poverty. Poverty confronts our resistance to change more effectively than any mere “solution”

Jesus’ kenosis to the point of becoming “nothingness” out of love, is the climax of God’s self-revelation – it is the icon of the Eternal Love, which is at the heart of the Trinity. This is what we, in our turn, are called to become – “nothingness” out of love for our brothers and sisters, as we share in the self emptying of Jesus, that we may be one with him in his Resurrection.


To him, whose power at work in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, to Him, be Glory forever and ever. Amen

New Master of the Dominican Order

Sunday, 5th September, the General Chapter of the Order of Preachers, founded by Saint Dominic, elected Bro. Bruno Cadoré as new Master of the Order. Elected for a nine year term of office, he succeeds Bro. Carlos Azpiroz Costa, an Argentinean, who was Master of the Order from 2001 to 2010, and before him Bro. Timothy Radcliffe, a friar from England, well known all over the world for his publications and preaching. The last Frenchman to occupy this post was Bro Vincent de Couesnongle, Master of the Order from 1974 to 1983.

Meeting in Rome since the first of September, the General Chapter of the Order is made up of 127 delegates from all the continents. Prior Provincials are members of the Chapter and also the Delegates elected by the friars themselves according to the democratic tradition of the Dominican Order. The General Chapter, which is the sovereign governing body, shall be working for the next two weeks to give the Order some important guidelines which the newly elected Master is expected to put into practice during his term of office.

Aged 56, Bro. Bruno Cadoré was up till now the Provincial for the Dominicans of the Province of France. He served in this office for the past eight years, after having been in charge of the formation of the young friars, especially in Lille. He was a medical doctor when he started his novitiate, and he worked for two years in Haiti before starting his Dominican studies. He is a Doctor in theology and he taught biomedical ethics at the Catholic University of Lille where he was director of the centre for Medical Ethics until he was elected Prior Provincial in 2002. From January 2008 onwards he is a member of the National Aids Council.

During his term of office, the Province of France welcomed many young friars. Bruno Cadoré has also helped develop the Dominican way of life in many countries, from Scandinavia to the Congo passing through Cairo and Iraq which he visited many times.

We pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit on all the deliberations of the Chapter and on Fr Bruno as he begins his task as Master of the Order. Fr Bruno spent three weeks with us in our guest room some years ago! so his election comes as a great joy for all of us.

Some Scenes from the Solemn Profession

Below is a short video from the Solemn Profession in May. We hope you enjoy it.