Message of Abbot Paul - Thursday 15th September 2022

Message from Fr Paul for Thursday, 15th September 2022

Today I will be travelling down to Peru, leaving Belmont at 3am, and for the very first time I won’t be driving myself and all my luggage to Birmingham Airport, but being taken there by a kind parishioner. As it’s two and a half years since I last visited, there have been many requests from the monastery shop to take out things for sale that cannot be found locally, e.g. 25 kilos of Ethiopian and Greek incense and a vast collection of medals of St Benedict of all shapes and sizes and many other things besides. I hope and pray customs are kind in Lima and let me go through as they usually did before Covid. I doubt it will be possible to send a message tomorrow, so for the first day since mid-March 2020, there will be no message on Friday. We can both take a break.

Yesterday evening I was watching the Lying in State of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and couldn’t help noticing the number of young people filing past, stopping for a moment and bowing in reverence. These past few days have been so poignantly moving that I find tears coming to my eyes whenever I think of her. She was far more than a queen, she was our mother and the linchpin that kept everything in place, the rock on which our lives were built.

Today we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, a feast originally kept as a preparation for Holy Week on the Friday before Palm Sunday. The short Gospel passage is taken from John, (Jn 19: 25-27). “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. Seeing his mother and the disciple he loved standing near her, Jesus said to his mother, ‘Woman, this is your son.’ Then to the disciple he said, ‘This is your mother.’ And from that moment the disciple made a place for her in his home.” At this stage of his Passion, all his followers have run away in fear. Just three women remain, the three Marys, and standing near his mother he sees a young disciple who was particularly close to Jesus, traditionally believed to be John. Jesus commends his mother to his disciple and his disciple to his mother. The young man becomes the Virgin’s protector adopted son while she becomes his mother. Here that disciple also becomes a symbol of the whole Church of Christ. We pray that there will always be a place for Mary, the mother of the Lord, in our lives and in our homes. Amen.