6 October 2021 - Wednesday of the 27th week in Ordinary Time - feast day of St Bruno - Jonah 4:1-11

      Our first reading today is from the middle of the book of Jonah. Jonah had gone to Nineveh to preach God’s message of repentance, having great success. The people of Nineveh had a change of heart.  They put on sack cloth and ashes as a sign of repentance.  The king of Nineveh led his people in showing God how sorry they were.  Yet, Jonah was not happy at all at the positive way this message was received.  He was very distraught over this development, since Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, the bitter enemy of Israel.  Jonah wanted his enemy destroyed and punished.  He didn’t want to see them forgiven by God; he did not want to see them prospering.  I think of how we want mercy for ourselves, for our family, for our friends, for those we love, but sometimes we want punishment and revenge on those who are not our friends.  We see some as deserving of punishment for their past bad deeds, don’t we? 

       We hear this reading from Jonah as we commemorate St Bruno of Cologne today.  Born in the early part of the 11th century in Cologne, Germany, Bruno is the founder of the Carthusian monastic order, a group of monks very much centered upon solitude, silence, and austerity.  The word Carthusian is unusual, isn’t it, so I looked up its origins.  It means “from the Chartreuse,” since the original monastery was located in the Chartreuse mountains of France, near the town of Grenoble.  The mountainous terrain and isolated location granted Bruno and his friends the silence and poverty that they desired in setting up a community.  They built an oratory at this location with small individual cells at a distance from each other. They met for morning prayer and evening prayer each day, but spent the rest of the day in solitude, eating together only on great feasts. Their chief work was copying manuscripts.  There are 25 communities of Carthusians throughout the world today, which includes both monks and nuns.  While most are in Europe, two are in South America, two are in Korea, and one is in the United States in the state of Vermont.  We unite our prayers with the prayers of St Bruno today.