Message of Abbot Paul - Monday 2nd January 2023

As today is already 2nd January and a Bank Holiday in England, it’s a good moment to thank all those who sent Christmas and New Year cards to the monastery and to me and Toby. There was so much work before Christmas, that I have to apologise for not sending cards this year, added to which the constant postal strikes made it almost impossible. I can remember as a pupil at the local grammar school how each Christmas I would work at the Royal Mail sorting office or as a postman doing two deliveries and working from six in the morning until gone five in the afternoon. It was hard work, especially when it rained or was cold and frosty, but it did mean extra pocket money for the holidays.

 

​Today the Church keeps the feast of St Basil the Great and St Gregory of Nazianzen, monks, bishops and doctors of the Church, close friends, men of acute intellect and great theologians who defended the catholic and orthodox faith in the 4th century. They met as students in Athens and became as brothers, united above all in their pursuit of learning, Christian faith and love of Christ. St Gregory wrote of their friendship that, “We seemed to be two bodies with a single spirit. Though we cannot believe those who claim that everything is contained in everything, yet you must believe that in our case each of us was in the other and with the other. Our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of hope in the blessings that are to come; we wanted to withdraw from this world before we departed from it. With this end in view, we ordered our lives and all our actions. We followed the guidance of God’s law and spurred each other on to virtue. If it is not too boastful to say, we found in each other a standard and rule for discerning right from wrong. Different men have different names, which they owe to their parents or to themselves, that is, to their own pursuits and achievements. But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians.”

 

​We are still in Christmastide, so our Gospel passage today comes from John, (Jn 1: 19-28), and recounts the testimony of John the Baptist. There appears to be confusion as to who is the Christ, the Messiah, John or Jesus. “When the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ he not only declared, but he declared quite openly, ‘I am not the Christ.’ ‘Well then,’ they asked ‘are you Elijah?’ ‘I am not’ he said. ‘Are you the Prophet?’ He answered, ‘No.’ So they said to him, ‘Who are you? We must take back an answer to those who sent us. What have you to say about yourself?’ So John said, ‘I am, as Isaiah prophesied:

a voice that cries in the wilderness:

Make a straight way for the Lord.’”

Every year I suggest that you listen to Orlando Gibbons’ This is the Record of John. I can think of no better way of meditating on this text. I wish the whole of the Gospel were set to music like this passage is.