Pentecost Lectures 2014

“IMMORTALITY IN QUESTION”

The 2014 Pluscarden Pentecost Lectures – given by Professor Carol Zaleski,
Professor of World Religions at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, USA

10th – 12th June 2014 at Pluscarden Abbey

    1. Tuesday 10 June at 2.45 pm
    The problem with immortality – we don’t know how to think about it

    2. Wednesday 11 June at 10.15 am
    The problem with heaven – imagination can’t grasp it

    3. Wednesday 11 June at 2.45 pm
    The problem with hell – love can’t bear it

    4. Thursday 12 June at 10.15 am
    The problem with purgatory – Christians can’t agree on it

Each year the Abbot and Community of Pluscarden Abbey sponsor a series of four lectures by an invited Theologian on an aspect of Catholic Theology. Previous Lecturers have included Fr Vincent Twomey S.V.D., Professor Lewis Ayres, Professor John Haldane, Fr Aidan Nichols OP, Fr Thomas Weinandy OFM Cap, Fr Anthony Meredith SJ, Fr Paul McPartlan and Fr Tom Herbst OFM. The Lectures are held on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after Pentecost in St Scholastica’s Retreat House at the Abbey. They are open to all who wish to attend and are free. Limited accommodation is available at the Abbey and those who wish to stay should book as soon as possible. There are also many places to stay in the Elgin area: contact the local tourist office: 01343 542666.

The Lecturer

Carol Zaleski is the Professor of World Religions at Smith College, where she also chairs the Department of Religion. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in the study of religion from Harvard University. She has been teaching philosophy of religion, world religions, and Catholic thought at Smith College since 1989. Zaleski is the author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times and The Life of the World to Come (both Oxford University Press); she is also a columnist and editor-at-large for The Christian Century. She has co-authored, with her husband Philip Zaleski, Prayer: A History (Houghton Mifflin), The Book of Heaven (Oxford), The Book of Hell (forthcoming, Oxford), and a group biography of the Inklings—C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their circle (forthcoming, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Together, Carol and Philip Zaleski are long-time friends of Pluscarden Abbey and oblates of the twin Benedictine communities at Petersham; and they are closely associated with the British Catholic journal Second Spring and its founding editors Stratford and Léonie Caldecott.

The Lectures: “Immortality in Question”

Introduction

With few exceptions, icons of our Lord’s Descent into Hell have a curious detail in common: they show Christ seizing Adam by the wrist rather than by the hand, as he pulls our first parents out of the cave, or the jaws, or the prison, of death. It’s a small detail but, as these four lectures will suggest, it captures in miniature precisely what is distinctive about the Christian understanding of immortality.

My premise is that this distinctive understanding of immortality is not widely understood -- and in some quarters is actually under siege. In these lectures, I will be considering problems that are typically raised by Christians as well as non-believers, occasionally looking over the fence at other religions whose traditions may enrich our understanding, and reflecting upon solutions that become available when we seek to think with the mind of the Church.

Lecture 1. The problem with immortality – we don’t know how to think about it

The expression ‘immortality of the soul’ went out of fashion in the mid-twentieth-century, but it is making a comeback, thanks in no small part to Joseph Ratzinger’s magisterial 1977 book Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life. Christian theological anthropology affirms the creatureliness as well as the dignity of the human person and places the hope for immortality wholly in the hands of our loving Redeemer.

Lecture 2. The problem with heaven – imagination can’t grasp it

If heaven seems boring, as the cliché has it, it is due to an atrophy of our reason, imagination, and love; restless until our hearts rest in God, we cannot help but form an inadequate picture of divine peace. Some seek a cure for heaven-fatigue in poetry, but the best cure is a poetic life, living by a Rule not of our own making, by the Church’s rather than the world’s clock, in the bright shadow of eternity.

Lecture 3. The problem with hell – love can’t bear it

Most serious Christians have sought to affirm at once God's universal salvific will and our creaturely freedom to accept or reject His love. Thus Hans urs von Balthasar could ‘dare to hope that all men will be saved’ while C. S. Lewis, no less hopeful, maintained that hell is ‘locked from the inside.’ This lecture will consider the present state of the question as Christians grapple with the problem of hell.

Lecture 4. The problem with purgatory – Christians can’t agree on it

Purgatory is a belief founded on the practice of care for the dead, present in germ throughout world religions, fully articulated (and discriminated from ‘hell lite’) by the Catholic tradition, rejected by the Reformers, but resurfacing wherever suppressed (consider Hamlet and The Four Quartets). Christians of many confessions are coming to see the wisdom of C.S. Lewis’s observation that ‘our souls need purgatory’; and this development brings with it new opportunities for ecumenical understanding.

For further information or to book accommodation, contact the Abbey.

Easter audio CD

There is a new audio CD of chant from Pluscarden Abbey available from our shop. The twenty-five items were recorded in the Abbey church between 2010 and 2012, and include the most beautiful music of Easter. There is a 32-page booklet with it, giving the full text and translation, together with a commentary on every piece.

2013 Pentecost Lectures

“REVELATION AND REASON”

THE THOUGHT OF JOSEPH RATZINGER/BENEDICT XVI

The 2013 Pluscarden Pentecost Lectures – given by Fr Vincent Twomey S.V.D.,

Professor of Moral Theology at the Pontifical University of St Patrick’s College, Ireland

21st – 23rd May 2013 at Pluscarden Abbey, near Elgin

1. Tuesday 21st May at 2.45 pm
“Man’s Search for the Face of God”
[Ratzinger on Philosophy, Prophecy and Religion]
2. Wednesday 22nd May at 10.15 am
“God’s unveiling of His face”
[Ratzinger on Revelation]
3. Wednesday 22nd May at 2.45 pm
“The Sensorium of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty”
[Ratzinger on Primordial Conscience]
4. Thursday 23rd May at 10.15 am
“Orthodoxy as Divine Worship”
[Ratzinger on Reasonable Worship (Rom 12:1)]

Each year the Abbot and Community of Pluscarden Abbey sponsor a series of four lectures by an invited Theologian on an aspect of Catholic Theology. Previous Lecturers have included Professor John Haldane, Fr Aidan Nichols OP, Fr Thomas Weinandy OFM Cap, Fr Anthony Meredith SJ, Fr Paul McPartlan and Fr Tom Herbst OFM. The Lectures are held on the Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday after Pentecost in St Scholastica’s Retreat House at the Abbey. They are open to all who wish to attend and are free. Limited accommodation is available at the Abbey and those who wish to stay should book as soon as possible. There are also many places to stay in the Elgin area: contact the local tourist office: 01343 542666.

The Lecturer
Fr D. Vincent Twomey holds a PH.D. in Theology and is a Professor of Moral Theology at the Pontifical University at St Patrick's College in Ireland. He is the author of several books including Benedict XVI. The Conscience of Our Age: A theological Portrait (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). A former doctoral student of Joseph Ratzinger and long time friend of the Pope, he felt the need to respond to the common question he read and heard often after Ratzinger’s papal election, “What kind of person is the new Pope?” So often Fr Twomey had read in the past false depictions of both the man, and his thought and writings, especially the image presented by the media as a grim, hard-line, enforcer, “panzer Cardinal”, etc. In this book Fr Twomey offers a unique double-presentation of the man, Pope Benedict XVI – a “theological portrait” that encompasses both an overview of the writings, teachings and thought of the brilliant theologian and spiritual writer, as well as the man himself, and his personality traits and how he communicates with others.

Fr Twomey is the author of several other books and articles, including his most recent acclaimed study on the state of Irish Catholicism, The End Of Irish Catholicism? Other publications include Apostolikos Thronos: The Primacy of Rome as reflected in the Church History of Eusebius and the historico-apologetic writings of Saint Athanasius the Great (Münster, Westphalia 1981); Christianity and Neoplatonism: Proceedings of the First Patristic Conference, Joint Editor with Thomas Finan (Dublin: 1992); Scriptural Interpretation in the Fathers: Letter and Spirit: Proceedings of the Second Patristic Conference, Joint Editor with Thomas Finan (Dublin 1995); Moral Theology after Humanae Vitae: Fundamental issues in moral theory and sexual ethics (Dublin: Four Courts Press, Spring 2010); The Mystery of the Holy Trinity in the Fathers of the Church, co-edited with Lewis Ayres (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).


The Lectures: “Revelation and Reason” The Thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI

“The revelation of God’s name, which began in the burning bush, comes to completion in Jesus (cf. Jn 17:26)” (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, page 30).

“[Ratzinger] has written on almost every theological subject touching on the faith, morality, and Church and State. He is as open to beauty as he is to truth. He lives outside himself. He is not preoccupied with his own self. Put simply, he does not take himself too seriously.
Once he asked me gently about the progress of my thesis. I told him that I thought there was still some work to be done. He turned to me with those piercing but kindly eyes, saying with a smile: ‘Nur Mut zur Lücke’ (Have the courage to leave some gaps). In other words, be courageous enough to be imperfect.
On reflection, this is one of the keys to Ratzinger’s character (and also to his theology; in particular his theology of politics): his acceptance that everything we do is imperfect, that all knowledge is limited, no matter how brilliant or well read one may be. It never bothered him that in a course of lectures he rarely covered the actual content of the course. His most famous book, Introduction to Christianity, is incomplete. Ratzinger knows in his heart and soul that God alone is perfect and that all human attempts at perfection (such as political utopias) end in disaster.
The only perfection open to us is that advocated by Jesus in the Gospel: ‘You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt 5:48), he who ‘makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust’ (Mt 5:45). Love of God and love of neighbour: that is the secret of Pope Benedict XVI, and that will be the core of his universal teaching.” (Introduction, Benedict XVI. The Conscience of Our Age)

Lecture 1: Man’s Search for the Face of God

“Right faith orients reason to its openness to the divine, so that, guided by love for the truth, it can know God more closely. The initiative for this path is with God who has put in man’s heart the search for his Face. Hence, part of theology, on one hand, is humility that lets itself be ‘touched’ by God, and on the other hand, discipline that is linked to the order of reason, which preserves love from blindness and which helps to develop its strength for seeing.” (Benedict XVI: Address to Ratzinger Prize Winners, July 1, 2011).


Lecture 2: God’s Unveiling of His Face

“What did Jesus actually bring, if not world peace, universal prosperity, and a better world? What has he brought? The answer is very simple: God. He has brought God! He has brought the God who formerly unveiled his countenance gradually first to Abraham, then to Moses and the Prophets, and then in the Wisdom Literature—the God who revealed his face only in Israel, even though he was also honoured among the pagans in various shadowy guises. It is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the true God, whom he has brought to the peoples of the earth. “[Jesus] has brought God, and now we know his face, now we can call upon him. Now we know the path that we human beings have to take in this world. Jesus has brought God and with God the truth about where we are going and where we come from: faith, hope, and love.” (Benedict XVI: Jesus of Nazareth Vol. 1, Bloomsbury 2007, p. 44)


Lecture 3: The Sensorium of Goodness, Truth and Beauty

Primordial conscience is “the window that for human beings opens onto a view of the common truth, which establishes and sustains us all and so makes community of decision and responsibility possible thanks to the common ground of perception.” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Wahrheit, Werte, Macht, Prüfsteine der pluralistischen Gesellschaft, Freiburg, 1993, p. 32, Twomey translation)


Lecture 4: Orthodoxy as Divine Worship

“‘I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship’ (Rom. 12:1). [St Paul speaks] “of the desire for true worship, in which man himself becomes the glory of God, living adoration with his whole being.” (Benedict XVI: Catechesis on ‘spiritual’ worship, Jan. 7, 2009)

Oblate Weekend 2012

Homily at Mass

End of Oblate Weekend

Monday, July 31st 2012

Dear Sisters and Brothers how great is our enthusiasm when we first set out upon some good path by the grace of God. So it is with the Christian life; so it is with monastic life; so it is with oblation.

The story is told by the Desert Fathers of the monk who was a hard worker who appeared to his spiritual Father to be becoming crushed by his work – so he observed him closely to see what was happening and how this was coming about. He also prayed that he might be enlightened spiritually as to what was going on.

Very soon as he observed him he saw that all the time a dark little demon was at his side as he worked, urging him on. Whenever he rested or slowed in pace the little demon would frenetically goad him into excessive work and action and so it was by day and by night so that he was unable to pray or do anything useful and would indeed soon fall ill.

The spiritual Father prayed more and then approached the monk and the monk who up until then whose eyes had been unable to see the little demon – his eyes were opened and he saw the trap into which he had fallen and by God’s grace was restored to health.

So it is with zealous Christians and monks and Oblates too – especially the zealous aspirant. The devil seeing that he cannot attack that zeal goads it to an inhuman excess to break the will and spirit. Prayer going out the window the trap is closed and to quote the first reading – like the loincloth we become ‘good for nothing’.

Recently I’ve had aspirant Oblates devouring spiritual books, men and women full of zeal, voracious for prayer, for the Divine Office, usually the whole office and perhaps the monastic office, spending long periods in lectio and every other practice and devotion they come across. Being in the middle of their lives they often have children and sometimes dependent parents in old age, demanding work with unreasonable hours etc, etc. Finally I get a letter saying that Oblation is just too much. Their commitments and duties are just so great that they have no time left for Oblation.

I then think of the little demon and the misplaced zeal that drives to distraction and says Oblation is just ‘one more darn thing’ – the straw etc.

On the contrary our Oblate life is our whole life – not the holy bits. We cannot opt out of life – God’s gift.

Oblation is like the mustard seed or the leaven that grows and grows till the whole is transformed, but the mustard seed needs the rest of the world to grow in and the leaven, the yeast needs all that flour and dough.

Oblation, as also monastic life, as also Christian life, is the whole transformed reality, transformed world, transformed life. The essential ‘bit’, the mustard or the leaven, is worse than useless on its own. Oblate life is life with a capital L, Life transformed in Christ. If we’ve no time for this transformed life we have no time for Christ. Christ is the life of our souls as Blessed Columba Marmion said. Christ came with the leaven of the one thing necessary without which we do not grow; indeed without Christ we cannot rise. Let us not be afraid to expose the dough of our life to Christ’s leaven by our Oblation, our self-offering which we renew today.

DMB

Election of Abbot Anselm

We are pleased to announce the election of Abbot Anselm Atkinson

Owing to the recent appointment of Abbot Hugh Gilbert as bishop of Aberdeen, the monks of Pluscarden have had to elect a new superior. On Tuesday 9th August, Dom Anselm Atkinson was elected by the monks as third Abbot of Pluscarden. His election was confirmed by Abbot Bruno Marin, Abbot President of the Subiaco Congregation. Dom Anselm was duly installed as Abbot by the Right Reverend Francis Baird, Abbot of Prinknash Abbey, acting on Abbot Bruno's behalf. The date for Abbot Anselm's blessing will be announced in due course.

Abbot Anselm made his first monastic vows at Pluscarden in 1976 at the age of nineteen. He was ordained priest in 1982 by the Right Reverend Mario Conti, who was then Bishop of Aberdeen. He was sent to study at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, where he gained a Licenciate in Sacred Scripture. Since the late 1980s he has been permanently resident at our daughter house in Petersham, Massachusetts, where he was Superior until his election as Abbot of Pluscarden. In 2003 he was elected Abbot Visitor, which entails monitoring the progress of all the monasteries in our province.

We warmly invite all our friends to join their prayers to ours in thanksgiving for Abbot Anselm's election and to support him in his future ministry.