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<p>In addition to celebrating Abbot Marmion, October 3rd was the 26th Thursday in Ordinary Time and we had two powerful readings in the ordinary cycle, from the prophet Nehemiah and from the Gospel of Luke.</p>
<p>I had the great good fortune to work with Father Lucien Deiss in the 1980s. He was like a French version of Cipriano Vagaggini, a scripture scholar and a patristic scholar, a <em>peritus</em> at the 2nd Vatican Council, and a multi-linguist as well as a liturgist (besides being a brilliant musician as well as a missionary). I once heard Fr. Deiss give a whole conference on this reading from the prophet Nehemiah (Neh 8:1-12) which he said was one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible. The thing is, when Fr. Deiss explained the meaning of this passage to us that day he actually did the same thing that Ezra and the Levites did for the returned exiles in this reading. I will explain this in a moment.</p>
<p>What's going on here in Nehemiah is that after years of exile, Ezra is reading the covenant to the newly returned repatriates, but he is reading it to them in Hebrew. The problem is that this is a language that the people no longer understand¬¬ after their years in exile. So the Levites are translating it from Hebrew into the language that had become their new vernacular, Aramaic, which was the dominant language in Assyrio-Babylonia where they had been living. And then the Levites are explaining to them what all this means. And the people are wild with joy, with shock and surprise. Most of these people are hearing their scriptures, the covenant, their own story as a chosen people, their own place in salvation history, for the very first time.</p>
<p>You might not have been expecting that on the Thursday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, but this little story chronicles one of the greatest moments in the history if Israel. Some scholars refer to it as the day of the birth of Judaism and this is why Ezra is sometimes called the father of Judaism. He is the one who established which books were sacred and canonical. Israel as it was known in the pre-exilic period is no more and a new "people of the book" appears. From the time of Ezra on, the chosen people of Israel aren't called Israelites anymore, but Jews.</p>
<p>Two lessons can be drawn from this reading. First of all, herein lies our own understanding of the Word, and especially our liturgical understanding of the Word of God. The 2nd Vatican Council was at pains to make Catholicism a more biblical church again, and especially to re-root the liturgy in scripture. <em>Sacrosanctum Concilium</em> 34 says, "In the readings, the table of God's word is laid before the people and the treasures of the Bible are opened to them." Fr. Deiss thought that this story of the exiles hearing the Word of God for the first time was symbolic of what was going on in the church after the Council. Imagine what it would have been like for some Catholics to hear, for the first time, the story of the Prodigal Son read at Mass (it wasn't in the old lectionary). After the Council, not only was there a more ample selection of scripture (in the vernacular) throughout the liturgical year, but a greater emphasis on homiletics, breaking open the Word as if it were a loaf of bread and revealing what is on the inside. There was a special emphasis on the real presence of Christ when the Word is proclaimed (one of the four presences of Christ taught by <em>Sacrosanctum Concilium</em>) and super-eminently so at the Gospel. And so we have here a little re-enactment of Ezra's celebration every time the Gospel is proclaimed. We stand; we sing "Alleluia" to welcome the Lord really present in our midst; we say "Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ!" at the end; on Sundays and bigger feasts we even incense the Book of the Gospels. But it is not the Book itself we are acclaiming and worshipping: it is the Lord Jesus in the Gospel.</p>
<p>The second lesson is that the Word always elicits, nay, <span style="text-decoration: underline;">demands</span> a response. In this reading the people are yelling out "Amen, Amen!" and they are bowing and prostrating themselves on the ground because they are so moved by hearing about this covenant, which was in their history but not in the range of their awareness or memory. But Nehemiah and Ezra and the Levites are telling them Do not weep! <em>Today is holy! Go, eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks and allot portions to the poor!</em> And they did so. We should all be so moved, hearing this Word proclaimed. I couldn't help but think of Saint Romuald who had his enlightenment experience of the Word through reading Psalm 32 and all the meaning of scripture opened up to him and he received the gift of tears. Will the Word ever penetrate so deeply in our beings? And what will be our response?</p>
<p>I was thinking of a few different ways of responding to the Word. One way of responding might be the missionary way: what we see the seventy-two doing in the gospel reading for today (Lk 10:1-12). They had the great luxury of hearing this Word from the Source himself and were sent out as laborers for the harvest to proclaim the saving word, to carry the message of God's peace, to cure the sick, to proclaim the reign of God and somehow to be the presence of the reign of God.</p>
<p>Another response might be the monastic way: like that of Anthony of the Desert who hears the Word of God and goes instead to explore the mission land of interiority instead. As Abbot Marmion wrote: "If we lay open our soul to God, the Divine gaze penetrates this abyss of which we cannot see the bottom. It goes into the most hidden recesses and brings us strength and light." So there is the exterior response and the interior response, both equally valid, and perhaps at some point not constituting two different paths, but a breathing in and a breathing out, as they seem to have been to Abbot Marmion.</p>
<p>But there is one other response that we are called to as well, contemplative monks as well as missionaries: our liturgical response to having heard the Word is to go to that altar. The Liturgy of the Eucharist is a continuation of, a fulfillment of, and, even more, a response to the Liturgy of the Word. That's why I love the choreography of our liturgy here with its two separate spaces. It's as if every day we have an "altar call." Each day the scripture is proclaimed and each day the Lord asks us through the church, "Now that you have heard, will you still come and lay your life down on this altar and allow it to be lifted up and transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ?" The Eucharist is now the rich food and the sweet drink that we are called to consume in ratification of the covenant.</p>
<p>So we pray that we would receive the Word as deeply as Columba Marmion did, that it would reveal its meaning to us, and that we could respond with joy: by spreading the liberation and peace of the gospel, by making the journey to the abyss, the hidden recesses of our own being with the penetrating Divine gaze, and most of all by laying our lives on this altar and allowing them to be lifted up in the form of bread and wine, so that we too may be changed into what we receive.</p>