Pentecost is the great feast of the Church. It is easy to think about the gifts of the Spirit, the fruits of the Spirit, and become "lost in the numbers", so to say. What we often forget is that we already have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us by virtue of our baptism. Curiously, it is our ritual of death that makes this most clear. We bow towards the dead person's body, we sprinkle it with holy water, we place the Easter candle at its head and when finally we come to lay it in a coffin, we place on the coffin the Book of the Gospels — all these are powerful reminders that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. It is the Spirit that gives life, that makes the Church.

The Annunciation is surely a favourite feast, and it is a special joy to be able to celebrate it during paschaltide. Mary is such an encouragement to anyone trying to live a Christian life — a reminder that we do not have to do great things for God but rather allow him to do great things in us. To outsiders, her life must have seemed quite unremarkable, although it had its share of difficulties: an undistinguished marriage followed by the unusually prompt birth of a son who caused much grief to his parents and eventually died a criminal's death. Nothing very wonderful in that, except, of course, that the Son in question was Jesus our Saviour and his death on the cross was not the end of the story. The holiness of Mary is indeed hidden, but it is a holiness stronger and more perfect than that of any other human being who has ever lived. (We are not doing a podcast until Saturday as our voices are all a bit scratchy after having sung and sung during the Octave!)

By a happy coincidence we are reading St Benedict's chapter on the care of the sick on the eve of Palm Sunday and the (transferred) feast of St Jospeh. During Holy Week we shall all be anxious to concentrate on the unfolding story of our redemption in Christ; but we know, without being superstitious or pessimistic, that something, or more likely someone, will probably wreck our plans. Perhaps that is why we need to hear this chapter of the Rule today. Benedict is so often characterized as saying that nothing should come before the Work of God. Quite right: nothing should come before the Work of God. But there are times when we are not sure what the Work of God is at this particular moment. As Benedict reminds us in this chapter, and in the Tools of Good Works, we are not to turn away when someone needs our love or service. We might want to be in choir, but if, under obedience, we are serving a sick member of the community, we can be sure that that is where we will find God — and nowhere else. St Joseph is the type of the quiet man who does his duty faithfully, without grumbling that things have not turned out as he would have chosen. He gave up much to be the adoptive father of Jesus, but in so doing he gained everything. (Our Palm Sunday podcast is scheduled to go up sometime on Sunday.)

We are a little more than half-way through Lent: a good time to reflect on the value or otherwise of the penances we adopted at the beginning. I suspect that for some of us our good intentions are already looking a bit like New Year resolutions, charming folies de jeunesse or mere distant memories. We all know that what we intend to do is not nearly as important as responding, generously and whole-heartedly, to the demands God actually makes of us. Usually, these demands come to us via others, and that is where the difficulty lies. For myself, I had not expected to have quite so many people requiring time and energy, and I know that I have sometimes been grumpy and grudging because their demands conflicted with what I wanted to do. That, of course, is the whole point. It is easy to be a "saint" when we can lay down how and what life should be like; but real saints are made in difficult and demanding situations. Lent may not have made saints of us yet, but it is giving all of us the opportunity to become such.

Maurus and Placid are models of perfect discipleship, while the end of RB 2 is more concerned with perfect abbacy. There is, of course, a connection between the two. Just as the young monk's obedience enables him to accomplish exrtaordinary things, so the abbot's fidelity to the office he has received enables him to order all things wisely, never overlooking the material needs of the community, but always placing its spiritual needs first. Just as the disciple's obedience proceeds from a desire to hear the Word of God (the word obedience has its roots in ob-audire, to listen hard), so the abbot's ability to command proceeds from his attentiveness to the Word of God. Notice how often at the end of chapter 2 Benedict mentions the judgement of God, the examination the Shepherd will make into the flock entrusted to the abbot's care. Whatever our role in community, it is this sense of living always in the presence of God, of being always alert to the promptings of grace, that is our best guarantee of fulfilling the task given us, "to share by patience in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve to share also in his kingdom". (RB Prol. 50)

St Benedict's chapter on manual labour, which we begin reading today, is a remarkably straightforward expression of the value of work. Not for Benedict the false "mysticism" that informs some writing about work (usually from those so fascinated by the subject that they can sit and look at it for hours). Instead, we have an honest recognition that work needs to be done and is an essential ingredient of the spiritual life. That is not always easy to accept. How many a fledgling monastic vocation has foundered on being shown a broom or a hoe! In the monastery, we do not choose our work: it is given to us; and sometimes, seemingly impossible things are asked of us (see chapter 68). What matters is that, whatever our task, we accept it as the perfect means of forming in us dispositions pleasing to God. Our whole life is to be a search for him. No point in wanting to be rapt in choir if God is waiting for us among the soapsuds in the scullery.

Benedict's sixth chapter, which we begin reading today, is more than just a bald summary of the uses and abuses of speech. It is a reminder of the necessity of silence in our lives. We need physical silence just as we need sleep: to process what is going on around us, to recoup our energy, to confront those aspects of ourselves we spend a lot of time trying to avoid. We also need moral silence, abstention even from good things, to allow the life of the Spirit to grow in us. But we can find all sorts of ruses to dodge that kind of silence, pretending that we are quiet simply because we are not actually speaking and ignoring the fact that we spend an inordinate amount of time reading the newspaper/writing emails/or whatever our form of interior noisiness takes. We can also abuse silence by assuring ourselves that we are "observing the rule of silence" when charity demands that we speak "the good word which is above the best gift". Silence as laziness, evasion and cowardice is not at all what Benedict meant.

We keep today the feast of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne, mindful that the Cambrai community shared their prison and only narrowly escaped the guillotine. I remember once being reprimanded for having said the community "luckily" escaped execution. Clearly, I undervalued the grace of martyrdom! In these days, when the words "martyr" and "martyrdom" are most commonly used as self-descriptions by suicide bombers or associated with minor ailments, it is worth reflecting on the Christian tradition of martyrdom. The word means "witness" and the Church has always acknowledged two types of martyrdom, the red martyrdom of shedding one's blood for Christ, and the white martyrdom of striving to live a holy life. Both martyrdoms are a witness to what we believe and hold most precious, and both require courage. We may not seek red martyrdom, but we are all encouraged to live holy lives. Living the monastic life ought to be a powerful witness to the primacy of God. If it also happens to be something of a "martyrdom" in any other sense — tough.

Up early yesterday and an early morning drive through the New Forest. Sang Lauds to a few startled ponies, then discovered I/we had forgotten the coffee flask — so our "festive" St Benedict's Day breakfast was suitably sixth century. No recriminations, just laughter and apologies all round: chapter 74, On Being Nice to Others, in action. That missing chapter of the Rule is worth pondering. Benedict gives us so many helps towards community living: offering opportunities for saying sorry and making amends when things go wrong, ritualising the courtesies of everyday life so that different backgrounds and temperaments cause as little friction as possible. But we often fall short of making community "a good place to be". We know perfectly well how we can observe every precept of the Rule yet miss its point. It is generally easy to do things for others, sometimes, alas, with an inner glow of beatific self-sacrifice and, dare I say it, self-satisfaction; but to overlook shortcomings and accept inconveniences with good grace is much harder. It can be harder still to acknowledge another's good points; hardest of all to hear their praises being sung by someone else. We need generosity of spirit to practise being genuinely nice to others.

This feast of Our Lady of Consolation will always be precious to us by association, and our prayers today will, in a special way, be with the community at Stanbrook. It is a good day to reflect on our vocation both as individuals and as a community. A vocation isn't something one either "has" or doesn't "have" (like measles): each of us is a vocation, uniquely called by God to be a part of the Body of Christ that no one else ever has been or ever will be. Our community, too, is a vocation, called to give glory to God as no other community ever has or will do. We should be awed by the grandeur of our calling and encouraged by the fact that God chooses such weak and wobbly creatures as ourselves. What Hopkins said of Mary is true even of us. Like her, our community
"This one work has to do —
Let all God's glory through."
Let us pray that we may do our work well.

This brief chapter is a concentrated treatise on prayer. The Latin text is full of alliteration and other devices which make it easy to remember. Notice that there is nothing about "technique", merely a reminder that humility and respect are necessary preconditions for prayer, which is linked with "purity of heart" and "pure devotion". The pure heart, of course, is one which focuses all its energy, all its love, upon God. How strange, then, that "puritas cordis" should be the translation of the Greek "apatheia", the original, pagan meaning of which was "detachment". In the Desert Fathers as in Evagrius of Pontus, we find the word "apatheia" occurring again and again, and let's be honest, there are times when the athletic asceticism of the desert strikes a chill note. But the detachment of Christian Tradition is something of a paradox. We are "detached" because we are supremely attached to the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. So, our prayer is an expression of this, and St Benedict warns that it needs few words, indeed none at all.

There is much that we should pray about today – those suffering from the effects of the floods, the sufferings of the peoples of Africa and the Middle East, those who have asked our prayers for particular needs – but let us remember that the most important prayer is the prayer of simple love and adoration. The Father knows what we need before we ask.

This morning we had Mass in St Amand's Chapel, Hendred House. It is always a privilege to worship where Catholics have worshipped for centuries – the communion of saints is a lived reality, after all – and especially in a house where descendants of St Thomas More still live. But today's feast is more than just a celebration of two great and holy men; it is an invitation to reflect on the demands of Christian living in a society which, by and large, has adopted secularised values. How easy it would have been for Fisher and More to submit to Henry VIII's demands as so many other good and sincere men had done. All sorts of reasons might have urged them to do so, including that most seductive argument, that it was for the common good. But as St Thomas Aquinas reminds us, we have a duty to oppose tyranny. With the benefit of hindsight, tyranny is obvious. It is rarely so clear-cut to those caught up in events. Indeed, the person who stands up to the tyrant is often derided by his/her peers, silenced, ostracised (does not Aquinas say that one of the fruits of tyranny is to destroy friendship?), most painful of all perhaps, laughed at. There are many forms of tyranny in the world today, and Church institutions in their human aspect are not exempt. It takes wisom and humility to recognize tyranny, so we must pray for those gifts. We must also pray for courage. Whether it wear a crown or a cowl, tyranny must be opposed: we are God's servant first.

There is so much to like about today's Gospel. The unnamed woman who made her way into the house of Simon the Pharisee and, heedless of the stares and mutterings, expressed both her love and her sorrow so recklessly is at once an inspiration and a rebuke to us who are less generous, less courageous. All sin, no matter how "tiny", is a terrible rejection of God, something we need to repent of; but it is a still greater sin not to believe in God's readiness to forgive. To accept forgiveness is to acknowledge that we are indeed sinners, but forgiven sinners. Sometimes it is easier just to hug one's unloveliness to oneself. It is so much safer. The woman in the Gospel was supremely forgetful of herself, of her own "safety". That is why Jesus was able to see so clearly into her heart: she had not put up any barriers, nor was she going to hold anything back, not even her sin.

The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart is one of those feasts Benedictines sometimes get a little embarrassed by. There is so much syrupy devotionalism associated with childhood memories of the day that some people feel they have "grown out of it", as one might grow out of a passion for jelly babies or sherbert fountains. Nothing could be more wrong. Grown-up religion is exactly what this feast is about. If you go to Netley Abbey in Hampshire, you will see at the base of one of the ruined piers of the old Cistercian monastery the familiar symbol of Christ's wounded heart. It is a reminder that the whole superstructure of monasticism, or indeed any form of church organisation, is raised on something simple and strong: God's love for us – a love that led him to suffering and death. St Benedict certainly understood this. The constant exhortations in his Rule to "prefer nothing to the love of Christ" or to act "out of love of God" and so on, are put there precisely because he knew his followers would try to rob the cross of its power to shock and settle for a religion that was all niceness and good taste. The brutal fact is that the crucifixion wasn't nice nor in good taste. As monks and nuns we are called to follow a crucified Lord, and just as his heart reached out in compassion and love to all at the very moment of his greatest suffering, so must ours. Surely only someone who has really grown up can attempt that.