Transcript of abbot Clement's talk on Monday, 21 January 2002
I owe a thanks to the community for the opportunity to go and visit Epiphany House which is the new presentation Father Van Kaams Institute of Spirituality. It was very profitable and it was also the first for him and I participated in that in the sense that they just put the building up and had all the equipment in it. We had the first class in it.
Everybody was talking about the movie the Beautiful Mind, so naturally I went and saw it. So I want to talk about these things. All living of faith really follow the monastic schedule in the sense that if you're going to live by faith you have to have a rhythm of prayer and work. And the quality of that rhythm will determine how you grow and how you unfold. Its possible to live that rhythm in an ego-functional way. That is, simply do the things you're supposed to do without really taking out the time to quiet down and encounter the Lord. And so it's extremely important. In our society this is a rather real issue.
When I was in a parish, for instance, almost every divorce that came to me was a wife complaining that the husband was always working and doing all these things and they never had time for the family and so on. And so I would give them a book to give to the husband, but he never had time to read the dumb thing. So it didn't do much good. And so our society is very much focused on my abilities and what I can do. It's important to have competence and to do things. We're not saying it's bad, but you have to have a balance between prayer and work, competence and the ability to be receptive to God's grace. So if you get a chance to see this movie before it's gets pushed aside Brother Richard can show it to the community but by then it won't have the impact but it's worthwhile because Mr. John Nash is a extremely brilliant person who has a schizophrenic problems that you don't realize until it happens in the movie. What's really interesting is that he wakes up to this. That he has illusions and they're actualized illusions, that is, he sees actual people that represent his problems.
You know this is the same teaching of the desert fathers about how we deal with our thoughts. But the difference is for him its so bad they were out there realized, for us it's struggling in here. And how does he begin to overcome those things? He begins to ignore them and focus on being for others and loving his wife. Fortunately she was presented as a person who was dedicated and committed to him. And as he does this the illusions don't totally disappear for him but they get further away and there's no longer a dialogue between them. So he's free of them to some degree. Now, of course, this is produced by Hollywood, so we don't get a catholic, Christian theology as such. But the drama is extremely powerful and it is very forcefully presented. I haven't cried at movies in years, I really cried at this one. So what we're dealing with here, we are called to live this rhythm of work and prayer in which we encounter God. And someone who loves us totally. God's whole creation is not for any other purpose but move us all together into the Son. Therefore, everything that happens to us of all that's going on has no other purpose but for our good. And God's presence is constant and faithful as Romans says, "Everything is promoted for the good." So God remains in our presence as one who is actively drawing us into the kingdom. If we focus on him as other texts say in scripture Jesus says when he came down from the Ascension, "Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus."
If we do that then what happens to us we begin to be more real and God penetrates our lives and we get first awakened. That is we begin to see reality more clearly and we see therefore our need for purification and our need for transformation. And then we begin to follow it and we begin to become reformed. OK, suppose you wake up to the fact that you grew up in such a way that you have an over attachment to you mother and she still dominates your life. It's a grace to see that. And now you put it in order, you begin to keep your mother over there and you start to make your own decisions. But you still haven't really been transformed yet. You have to let yourself meet Jesus and let Jesus take over your life. And so you have work to do. Well, you have every reason to believe that this will take place because of the fact that we have been given the Spirit. So you can begin to hear and respond. Well what happens in the monastery? If you go to your room and you turn the radio on or you have TV then you spend all the time, your silence is not there and silence is the mother of truth in our life. The silence and solitude. So if this rhythm of prayer and work is going to have effect it presupposes that I allow myself to have moments of silence and solitude so that I can hear the truths that God wants to tell me about myself, about the world, about himself. And in the process begin to wake up in this way begin to see where I need to be transformed. Of course once I do that then what happens if all of us are doing this, which we are doing to some degree, then what happens? What happens is the more intensified response is, what we get in the monastery namely, people come and say this is a beautiful place, it's filled with peace, it's a place that radiates God's presence. Well that can be intensified so great that people will start coming to the monastery then of course we'll be obliged to help them live the spiritual life more deeply because they see it in us. And that's what we are, we're monks. Monks are like shepherds of the sacred. Like philosophers are shepherds of the philosophical truths of being, so monks are shepherds of the sacred. That means we not only know how to cultivate and dispose ourselves to be open to God, it also means we know how to encounter him. And therefore we allow him into our life to transform us.