Transcript of Abbot Clement=s New Year Homily on, January 1, 2005
The strong theme in today
=s readings is that we as a people of faith are a people who remember and recall. The Jewish community, the church of the Old Testament, remembered again and again the tremendous blessings of God. They remembered how the Lord lead them out of Egypt. They remembered the plagues, they remembered the actual event of the delivery out of Egypt, they remembered their desert existence and they remembered and recalled Mt. Sinai. The place where they kept it alive for them was in their own liturgy. So they celebrated the Passover, Pentecost, etc., to remind them of the presence of God=s blessings and the first reading summarizes the stance of God toward his people. God toward them was a God of blessings and guidance and hope and strength.We see in the text of the Gospel, the Blessed Mother remembers these things in her heart. She gathers up what has happened in her life regarding her motherhood and her whole relationship with Jesus and deeply, not just keeps them in her heart, but really is for her nurturing of her relationship to God and guidance and strength and everything else flows from it.
Then Paul tells us that if we really understand what has happened to us we should remember that we through Christ are now children of God. Being children of God we have the whole inheritance and the tremendous blessings that God has arranged to make happen.
Yet, our problem is we have amnesia. Even though we as a people, especially as Benedictines, recall the feast of the church year again and again, the shape of the remembrance remains not close enough, not impacting enough to effect change.
It
=s not surprising because the culture around us undercuts the impact of our faith and tries to make us to be tolerant of other views of life and world views that are not faith-filled and as a result we pick this up and before you know it we have amnesia. Maybe not a serious case but at least somewhat diminished. We know that our students have terrible amnesia because you teach them something on the Old Testament by the time the course is over with they forgot everything that you taught them.There
=s a difficulty of recalling of God=s actions in such a way that they are impacting our life. The reason is that we forget that behind these actions is not just recalling something that happened but that the action of the person is consistent and is impacting us today. The same God who delivered his people out of Egypt is the same God who sent his Son, is the same God who comes to us in the sacraments, is the same God who is pursuing us.This is the real issue of remembering and it
=s very powerful because in the first degree of humility St. Benedict tells us not to forget. He=s focused mostly on the wisdom attitude, which is a wisdom being to remember the commandments of God and be a good disciple, but it has a lot richer, broader, deeper implications. To remember really means to live in the presence of God as an active relationship in which God is impinging on us, pursuing us, pouring out graces upon us and loving us with an infinite love.If we want to really celebrate this feast we have to really look at this dimension of how we remember the Lord
=s mighty deeds in our life. Whether they become something concrete enough so that it impacts upon our daily life. It is very easy to forget this because of the culture and the culture is undermining all this again and again in many different ways. To me it=s just amazing just how much our American culture, has become de-christianized in the last fifty years. It=s not surprising that we, ourselves, are struggling with this question.We see in the life of the Blessed Mother someone who knew how to gather up the action of God in her life and it
=s a personal relationship that impacted her whole existence so that she was a person of praise and adoration and one who could save and mean all her life let it be done to me according your word.