“My little children, I give you a new commandment: love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”
Brothers and sisters, in these brief lines from St. John’s Gospel, we hear the very heartbeat of the Christian life. Not a doctrine to memorise, nor a regulation to enforce, but a way of being: to love as Christ loves. This is no sentimental love. It is the love Christ demonstrates at the table, on his knees, washing the feet of those who will betray, deny, and abandon him. It is love that kneels low and lifts up. A love that humbles itself to serve. A love that persists even in darkness.
At Our Lady of Silence Abbey, we spend time seeking the quiet where this kind of love can take root and flourish. In our chant, in our work, in the silence that cradles our common life, we are taught again and again: love is the measure. In the cloister, where personalities rub and stretch, love is no abstraction—it is the daily choice to yield, to forgive, to honour Christ in the other.
And these days, we welcome a new moment of stretching and of grace. As many of you will have heard, Cistercian College—our historic school, long guided by the rhythm of monastic wisdom—is entering a new chapter. The college is becoming fully co-educational. Girls and boys will learn, grow, and mature together under the Benedictine light that has formed generations of young men.
We monks are not educators in the modern classroom, but we are spiritual fathers. And we see this moment not as a departure, but as an expansion—of the very commandment Christ gives us today. “Love one another.” Not only the love that lives behind monastic walls, but love that shapes the world beyond: the classroom, the family, the community. What greater formation could there be than to raise a generation who, together, learn to wash one another’s feet, as witnesses to Christ’s own practices of humility and love?
So we pray, with all the solemnity and simplicity of Cistercian hearts, that this new path for our college may be fruitful. That our monastic witness of silence, stability, and contemplative love may be a quiet light for every young man and woman who walks its halls.
And for ourselves, we return again to the foot of the table, to the quiet commandment spoken at the Last Supper. Let us love, not with words only, but in the fabric of our life—tender, hidden, and persevering. And may the world know thay we are Christ’s disciples, by the love we bear one another.
Amen.