Marlene Milasus, OSB

Sister Marlene Milasus is a member of Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ, St Walburga Monastery. Currently, she is serving as community treasurer and liturgist. She works in a monastery retreat program and is a licensed New Jersey boiler operator!

Sister Marlene's reflections begin Easter Sunday and continue through Pentecost.

Pentecost: There's More

Pentecost
May 23, 2021
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

There’s More
Well, I had a nice Pentecost reflection ready to put on paper, until this weekday morning as I did lectio on the day’s Gospel, John 16: 12-15. During his Last Discourse to the Apostles at the Last Supper, Jesus says that he has much more to tell them, but that they’re not yet ready to hear it all, that the Holy Spirit will be with them to reveal it at the proper time.

So the Gospel, the Good News, is not a tightly-wrapped package that we open to inventory its contents and put them on their proper shelves. It’s rather a gift that keeps on giving, as we become more transformed by what we have already heard and seen, more ready for the next revelation.

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Seventh Sunday of Easter

Seventh Sunday of Easter: WITH
May 16, 2011
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

What do you think is the most important word in the Gospels, if not in the entire New Testament? According to one writer (and If I could recall who wrote the article and where it was published, I’d give her/him full credit) that word is “WITH.” Not God, or Jesus, or love, or peace, or any other word you might expect, but “WITH.”

Once I encountered that insight, I began to see “WITH” everywhere: in the common life I live with my sisters in the monastery, in the companionship of praying/working/eating/recreating with them, in the care and concern that Jesus calls us to show to others, in the life of our Three-Personed God who is an eternal, infinite “WITH.”

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Sixth Sunday of Easter

Sixth Sunday of Easter: Be the Dance
May 9, 2011
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

Here at our monastery, and in Catholic parish churches as well, we’re listening to daily readings from the Acts of the Apostles during this 50-day Easter season. The calendar also tosses in a few apostles’ feast days, like Philip, James, and Matthias, and we get a sense of the amazing stretch of the Gospel message as it begins in Jerusalem, spreads rapidly through the Middle East, and by the end of the Acts of the Apostles, comes to Rome in the person of Saint Paul. The more those early Christians were persecuted, the greater the spread of the Gospel. The small band of disciples who had followed Jesus and later experienced him as alive again had grown to the point where the Gospel message was now, only a few decades later, at the center and capital of the then-known world. And remember, there were no social media platforms or 24-hour news cycles to convey the message.

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Fifth Sunday of Easter

Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 2, 2011
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

It seems that I’ve always shared my life with potted plants. Remember those spider plants that were so popular a few decade ago? Well, I have several generations of them. They are somewhat assertive and invasive, but also quite impressive in their ability to produce junior plants that can be cut off and rooted, or left to flourish by their continued physical connection to the mother plant. They’re not fussy, either. They forgive me when I forget to water them, and the slightest hint of more light in January is enough to start off a whole new generation of little spider plants, patiently waiting until they get their own pots.

Today’s Gospel, from John 15, speaks of the vine and the branches. The connection is obvious, of course: the Risen Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. We share Jesus’ life so radically that cut off from that Resurrected life, we really have none of our own, although our false self may try to convince us otherwise.

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Fourth Sunday of Easter

Fourth Sunday of Easter
April 25, 2011
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

Have you ever been in the presence of someone who makes you feel that you’ve come home?

If our global community, slowly emerging from the depths of the pandemic, has learned anything, it’s that we are simply not meant to be in isolation. Human beings are meant to connect, are built to connect: with one another, with the earth that’s been given to us as our home, with God.

In fact, it’s God who gives us this pattern of connectedness; as Christians we believe in a God who lives in intimate connection as Trinity, as a Center of both radical stillness and vibrant loving action. And that Reality lives within each of us. So, when spiritual writers talk about a “God-shaped hole” within, it’s precisely that longing for connection, for intimacy, for the spacious and gracious love that pulsates continually from God. Jesus has incarnated this love and taken it to its utmost length through the Mystery of his death and rising.

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Third Sunday of Easter

Third Sunday of Easter
April 18, 2011
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

Easter Dinner
Today’s Gospel is actually the sequel to the Emmaus story; the two disciples who met Jesus on the road and recognized him in the breaking of bread now bring the message back to Jerusalem. And even as they announce their amazing news, there’s Jesus, in their midst, with the simple greeting of “Peace be with you.” To address the doubt of the group, Jesus shows his wounds, and then takes a piece of baked fish and eats it. He explains the Scriptures and how he has fulfilled them, and then charges the disciples with the task of being his witnesses.

There’s another scene, in the Acts of the Apostles, where Jesus similarly tells the disciples that they are to be witnesses in Jerusalem, and out to the farthest reaches of the world. That means us. We are recipients of this message, but even more amazing: we too, wherever we are, are witnesses to that original stunning revelation that “He whom you seek has risen”.

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Second Sunday of Easter

Second Sunday of Easter
April 11, 2011
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

Easter Every Day
It’s ironic that, prior to the Vatican II renewal of the liturgy, this Sunday had come to be known as “Low Sunday” – to distinguish it from the ecstatic joy of Easter Sunday seven days before.

For the earliest Christians, there was nothing low about any Sunday. It was the day to celebrate the Resurrection throughout the year, because of Scriptural references to the Risen Lord being with his disciples on Easter Sunday, and then again one week later. How did the community celebrate? By hearing the Word proclaimed, and then by sharing at the Lord’s table every Sunday, just like those disciples on the road to Emmaus, on the first Easter evening.

Years ago, a Catholic publishing house offered as one of its Easter cards a close-up photo of a loaf of bread and a cup of wine. On the picture were the words “Easter Every Day”.

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Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday
April 4, 2021
Marlene Milasus, OSB, Benedictine Sisters of Elizabeth, NJ

Turning Points
When I do a talk on the liturgy, and especially on Eucharist or on the Church year, I usually begin by asking the participants to reflect silently for a few minutes on some significant turning point in their lives. I don’t ask them to share their turning points, but I do ask them to consider that a real turning point has three qualities: 1) it takes you irrevocably from an old life to a new life; 2) it grows as time passes, taking on new and deeper meaning; 3) it can be celebrated over and over, perhaps publicly, always personally, even if the celebration is simply the memory that “on this day…..(fill in the blank) happened.”

What we celebrate today, on Easter Sunday, is the culmination of the last four days, beginning with the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, continuing through the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday, moving quietly through the seeming emptiness of Holy Saturday, and finally climaxing at the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday celebrations.

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