From Season to Season

Paul chose Silas and departed after being commended by the brothers to the Lord. He traveled through Syria and Cilicia bringing strength to the churches. — Acts 15:40-41 I didn’t always have the name “Silas.” In fact, for the first 25 years of my life, I wasn’t even aware that there was a saint by the name of Silas. The only Silases I knew of were George Elliot’s Silas Marner and Dan Brown’s menacing monk in the DaVinci Code . However, as I was preparing to make my first vows as a Benedictine monk in 2004, I was faced with the challenge of discerning three names to present to the abbot, one of which he would choose to be my religious name. I had settled on my first choice, but was completely undecided about choices two and three. A week or so before I had to present my selections, I came across the website of an Anglican parish in London: Saint Silas the Martyr. I was struck by two things. First, I’d never heard of Saint Silas and, second, I really liked the name. And so I...

When I made my first vows as a Benedictine monk in 2004, I was very excited about the prospect of receiving a new (religious) name. The custom of the community of which I was a member is that the soon-to-be professed monk submits three preferred names to the abbot. The abbot, as head of the community, would then either pick one of the three names or select one of his own choosing. I spent weeks researching names. The only real considerations were that it had to be the name of a saint or beati and that there couldn’t be anyone else in the community with that name. In a community of more than 100 members, options were limited pretty quickly. But, I know a lot of saints and wasn’t put off by the prospect of having a name that was a bit out of the ordinary.    And so, I settled on my three choices: Leander , Silas, and Nicholas . Although the community had had Leanders and Nicholases in the past, Silas would be a first. And, after a few days of waiting, Silas was ...

The Second Letter to the Thessalonians, which is among the source texts used for the Readings of the Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time (Cycle C) is something of a problematic biblical text. Although it has traditionally been attributed to Saint Paul, writing with Saint Barnabas and Saint Silvanus/Silas (cf. 2 Thess 1:1 ), most modern scholars believe that this text (among others) was written several years after Paul’s martyrdom. Whether this letter was written by Paul or by those who had been formed by the Apostle is, however, in many ways irrelevant to the meaning of the text for the Church today. The text itself, which was certainly known to Marcion and Saint Polycarp (in the mid-second century), describes a local community that was experiencing persecution or dangers from heretical (i.e. gnostic) movements and which was at danger of losing its focus on the Faith that Paul and his collaborators had handed over to the community by their preaching and witness (cf. Raymond Brown,...