Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Talk on Monday, February 10, 2003
One form of prayer that has to be ours and perhaps renewed every now and then is how we understand and relate to God’s infinite love for us. The best example is to go to an actual life situation. Joyce Meyer at the age of nine was molested by her father and that continued until she was eighteen. Besides the sexual abuse he used his anger and his kindness to manipulate her and he beat up her mother in front of her to kind of remind her what could happen to her. And he got drunk quite often on the weekends. So this is the way she lived in turmoil and confusion. Then, not only that, at nine when she told her mother what was going on the mother sided with the husband. Then one time at fourteen when the mother came home and saw them in an embrace she walked out and didn’t come back until two or three hours later and acted as if nothing happened. So she was also betrayed by her mother. And so her whole life while at home was confusion, shame, struggle, all kinds of things and she had no way out.
Well at eighteen she just married the first guy that showed her attention. And it turned out that the guy was in more trouble than she was. He was irresponsible and he would just walk out on her for a week, and months and not communicate. So finally, after a divorce came through, in five years, she left. In the mean time she was praying. She asked the Lord to let someone come into her life who loved her and would take her to church. While she was praying that way, a young man, David, was praying, "Lord, show me the woman you want me to marry and make sure she needs help from me." And the Lord put them together. But that didn’t solve things because she had learned how to manipulate, how to survive, and therefore she couldn’t even accept the genuine love that David gave her.
Since she was praying and reading scripture, one day she was reading 2 Corinthians, 5:7, it says, "we live by faith, not by sight." When she read that she understood that we have to take the word of God and let it reshape our life. Not other things. And so the first thing she thought about was, what exactly do I believe is God’s relationship to me and mine to him. Do I really believe that God loves me unconditionally? She came to the conclusion that she believed that God loved her, conditionally, despite the fact that she knew passages in scripture that said the opposite. So she took out 1 John, 4, and of course there’s many parts in 4 that can focus on especially verse 8 that says, "God is love." Not His occupation, not His past time, He is love. So just as you and I are breathing in the air, we have no trouble breathing it in, we are surrounded and sustained by God’s constant love. The problem is, we know how to breath in air, do we know how to breath in God’s love for us? And so one of the things we have to do is to read passages of scripture that express God’s love for us and make them our own and pray over them. One, of course, would be 1 John 4, but you could also use Romans 8, especially the passage "that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus" or you can take actually the one everybody uses for weddings, 1 Corinthians 13. But don’t read it as a moral standard. It says, "Love is patient, etc." everybody puts a standard on this stuff - No. If God is love then God is patient toward me, He’s kind, He’s this way. That’s one of the things we have to do. The second thing we have to do is to recognize that this is happening in our lives and therefore to pay attention to moments in which God enlightened us, strengthened us, walked us through something, helped us overcome a difficulty, so we begin to see that this is true. God is loving me unconditionally.
The third, and the most important one is - is to realize that we’ve been given the Holy Spirit. At Baptism, Confirmation especially, and then in our vowed life, when we profess our vows we receive increased gift of the Spirit, priesthood another one. And if we really understand that we’ve been given the gift of the Spirit then we have to understand what Paul says, "we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit is in us urging us." The Spirit is in us. Wants to be in us, moves us. And therefore, this prayer is a guarenteed successful endeavor. Because of the power of the Spirit and you reflect over the text of scripture that reveals God’s love for us individually and communally, you are going to be here and be moved by the Spirit itself. This is a key question because just because she did this and learned this it didn’t mean everything went away right away. It took twenty-four years of faithful prayer and taking in God’s love and seeing it happening in her life before she really became whole. And so we’ve been given many, many, many good things. We have the Eucharist. We have the word of God. We have our Lextio. But we have to learn how to receive and open ourselves up to the love that God has for us. Only then can we have the love that we need for each other and for the mission that God gives us.