Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Talk at Vespers, St. Benedict Day March 21, 2006

Bishop Pevec, Bishop Roger, my confrers, my fellow priests, fellow religious and deacons, welcome to all of you and thank you for coming to help us celebrate and say thank you to the Lord for the great gift of St. Benedict.

We have been kind of supported now with the present pope who backs our way of life rather strongly. But the truth is that the Benedictine tradition in the church is very old and church itself has sustained us because with Gregory the Great who was a monk himself, the significance of the Benedictine way of life impacted all of Europe to this day. But I want to reflect together on a gift that we have, that you can take home with you that has been preserved and enriched over the years which I hope many of you do. I would like to share with you some thoughts on Lexcio Divina. This is what we call today, in modern language, spiritual reading of the Bible, but of course the Latin terms are richer and deeper and fuller.

In order to do this we need a concrete example and since Sunday= s gospel was from John on Jesus cleansing the temple, and it= s recent in your minds, I think I could use that text to kind of help things out.

The strongest element we find is a generality through the whole Bible is that the God we believe in is a God who acts and speaks. If we follow Augustine we know that his actions are also a form of speaking. The first real action that we take when we pick up the Bible for Lexcio Divina, is to read but we are really placing ourselves in the presence of someone who speaks. If we look at the gospel of John and Jesus cleansing the temple, we may look at this text and say, A Lord you certainly are doing something totally out of character.@ Where have I ever read that you began to clean the house of the Father by forming a whip and beating people up? What happens when I begin to do that? When I see the text speak to me and I respond I= m already praying. So already in very simplicity without very complicated things, the person is moving to pray. We can go on, of course, because we can take any particular dimension of that scene and to continue the conversation.

It= s a very important step because Martin Luber, the Jewish philosopher, reminded us that we raise ourselves to personal living when we take someone= s speech to us seriously. He learned it the hard way. A student came to him and was in distress in the evening, he listened and responded and then when he got up in the morning, and read the local news he found that the student committed suicide. This deeply disturbed him because he wondered what did I do last night that I missed.

That was the beginning of his awareness that when people speak to us we have to meet them.

So the first thing that happens to us is that when we go to do Lexcio we meet the Lord and we become a praying person. But the second point is when we speak to each other we reveal ourselves. Just live in a house where people don= t talk to each other and you know this problem, you’ve got to read body language to find out what= s going on.

So when we pick up the text and we listen we are also beginning to hear how God reveals himself. In this particular text of John= s presentation of Jesus cleansing the temple, we see the zeal of Jesus cleaning the Father’s house. When he is asked for a sign of this Jesus says, "Destroy this body and in three days I will raise it up", we see how deeply committed Jesus is to cleansing the Father= s house. He’s fully aware it will cost him his life. When we do that and we receive that revelation, what are we becoming? We are becoming people of faith. We are discovering more deeply who Jesus is. Again we could go in that particular dimension through the whole text and develop it.

Thirdly, when we go through the text, Jesus always stands before us as a teacher. So there’s always something in the text that Jesus teaches us. In this particular text, obviously, Jesus wants his house to be a house of prayer. So it raises two questions to the reader namely, how is my gathering and community a place where we are praying? And how do I participate in that? Then one step further as an individual, how am I becoming a house of prayer? So again, you can go on and on through the text with the fact that when I pick up the text in faith and read it I meet Jesus, teacher and I become a disciple.

Then there= s the other one when people communicate again - when they don= t you know the difference - they want to give of themselves. Especially when the person is authentic and real like God is, he gives of himself when he speaks to us. In this particular text, we see how far Jesus is willing to give himself. What does that evoke in us? It evokes in us to want to give ourselves and become a gift to the great gift.

In a very simple way one of the strengths of the Benedictine spirituality is this simple approach to picking up the Scriptures and faithfully reading everyday. What does it do when we do this? We begin to absorb the world view of Jesus. We begin to think like him, act like him, see like him, experience like him, and we are transformed.

So you see why the popes have been stressing that the Benedictine way of life transformed Europe. That= s just one aspect of our spirituality that= s rich, and that> s available down through the centuries.