“If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him.”
These are words that are meant to be dwelt with, not rushed past. Here, near the end of his earthly discourse, Our Lord opens a window into the profound intimacy he offers. Not simply commandments to obey, nor doctrines to recite, but a dwelling—God desiring to make His home in us.
For we monks, here in Mountheaton, these words are not poetry—they are architecture. This Abbey, built in the rhythm of Ora et Labora, is not merely a place to live, but a place to be made into a dwelling for God. In the silence of early vigils, in the stillness between psalms, in the weight of our work — this Gospel speaks: “We will come to him and make our home with him.”
St Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the great lights of our Cistercian way, once wrote: “You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from masters.” And what they teach us is not always grand or dramatic. They teach us patience, listening, rootedness. They teach us what it means to be a place of welcome for the Divine Guest.
And today’s Gospel is about precisely that: welcome. But it is not welcome in comfort or triumph. Jesus speaks these words on the cusp of his Passion. He speaks peace into the tension. Love into the parting. He says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” As if to say—yes, the road ahead will twist, but the Father’s presence will not depart. The Advocate will come. Peace will remain.
In the monastic tradition, peace is not the absence of trouble, but the fruit of stability. Stability in place. Stability in heart. Stability in the Word. When the world shifts around us—wars, fears, even the unknowns of our own Church—we anchor ourselves in the peace Christ gives, not as the world gives, but as one who knows the cross and has passed through it.
The 12th-century Cistercian monk Isaac of Stella once wrote that “the soul in whom God dwells becomes herself a heaven.” This is the wonder of today’s Gospel: that the triune God does not only visit, He abides. The cloister is built not to escape the world, but to remind it—and us—that God desires to be at home in the human heart. Not just in sanctuaries of stone, but in sanctuaries of flesh and spirit.
And so, in this late spring light, as the fields beyond our Abbey turn lush and green, and the long days stretch out like psalms sung slowly, we listen to Christ’s promise: “We will come to him.” We pray to be ready. To open the door. To become still enough, simple enough, surrendered enough to receive such a guest.
And in that quiet receiving, peace takes shape. Not peace as the world gives—not comfort, not ease—but the deep, still peace that flows from knowing that the Father and the Son have made their home in you. In me. In all who love and keep His word.
May we be that home, in silence and in song, in work and in waiting. And may the Advocate—the Holy Spirit—keep stirring in us the memory of all Christ has said, until peace becomes our path, and love becomes our dwelling.
Amen.