Message of Abbot Paul - Monday 21st November 2022

Today the Catholic and Orthodox Churches celebrate the feast of the Presentation of Our Lady, the Mother of God, in the Temple. It is a feast based not so much upon the Scriptures as on the Protoevangelium of James, which scholars date before the year 200, and ancient Coptic Christian tradition. A very Eastern feast that spread into the West, it was celebrated in monasteries in southern Italy by the 9th century and gradually spread north and became popular in the Papal court at Avignon. It was introduced into the Roman Missal in 1472 and is undoubtedly one of the loveliest feasts of Our Lady that reflects the Presentation of her Divine Son.

 

​Today, for us English Benedictines, it is the Dies Memorabilis, the special day on which, in the year 1607, the old English Benedictine Congregation, suppressed by Henry VIII, was restored through the person of Dom Sigbert Buckley, the last surviving monk of St Peter’s Abbey, Westminster. For us who live in Herefordshire, it’s interesting to note that the last abbot of Our Lady’s Monastery, Abbey Dore, became a Benedictine monk of Westminster at its restoration by Queen Mary Tudor in 1556.

 

​The Gospel reading for the feast comes from Matthew, (Mt 12: 46-50).

“Jesus was speaking to the crowds when his mother and his brothers appeared; they were standing outside and were anxious to have a word with him. But to the man who told him this Jesus replied, ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ And stretching out his hand towards his disciples he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of my Father in heaven, he is my brother and sister and mother.’”

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​Jesus does not criticise his mother in any way. Rather, he would wish that all his disciples could be as obedient as Mary to the word of God and his will expressed in that word. At the Incarnation, she uttered the words, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word.” She is the first and the very model of one who, ”does the will of my Father in heaven.”

 

I attach a photograph of Adoration in the abbey church yesterday, feast of Christ the King.