Transcript of Abbot Clement=s Talk on Wednesday, April 13, 2005

God made us a rather powerful promise. He wants to give us a new heart. AI will take you away from among the nations and gather you from all the foreign lands and bring you back to your own land. I will sprinkle clean water upon you to cleanse you from all of your impurities and from all your idols I will cleanse you. I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you taking from your bodies your stone hearts and giving you natural hearts. I will put my spirit within you and make you live by my statutes careful to observe my decrees.@ From Ezekiel, I=m sure you recognize Chapter 36.

We all know that baptism plunges us into this promise expressed here by Ezekiel. This new life that=s in us is at once a call to discipleship, a call to maturity, a call to holiness, a call to community, a call to service, and a call to generosity through stewardship. But the fact is we are raised and live in a culture that opposes and attacks our way of life and much of the thinking and the ways of viewing life are really diminishing of life. Just ask any teacher who is teaching high school students knows he sees the changes in the culture as he teaches. If he doesn=t see it then he=s obviously not in touch with his students. Most of the students or a good many, percentage wise, are one parent students which already creates problems. But there are other issues as well. The other strong element is that those who are striving they look for psychological insight. So the net result is we have a society that is more and more immature. More and more needy personalities.

Just as on the physiological level when the great nuclear center in Ukraine blew up it created all kinds of sicknesses in people and for generations they=re going to be suffering from this.

The same thing has to be said about the spiritual domain. Much of the philosophy that dominates peoples life really makes them go astray and therefore people search. They look for models they look for things that make sense to them and their opportunity for what kind of menu they can really get from the spiritual domain is only going to leave them disappointed, defeated and may worse humiliated.

So the call to maturity that we receive in baptism really calls us to work to develop ourselves. That means to keep our selfishness, first and foremost, in check as I reminded you in the novitiate, at least in tenth place. Because if you don=t keep it that far down it easily surfaces.

It also means that we have to assume our proper roles of responsibilities and duties and also try to live more fully the life that=s available to us right where we are and in whatever we=re called to do. Now that requires, weather we like it or not, a kind of serenity. An ability to be patient. Because it is in that that we can have courage to accept reality just as it is without being discouraged, without criticizing negatively, which the Rule says, it=s called murmuring, but also the opposite side to be a cockeyed optimist. To have some kind of utopian fantasy that everything is fine, everything is going to be ok. Just keep going, it=s going to get better.

So it really means that we can learn to accept the realities around us in the sense of loving the life that=s ours. Loving the monastery, loving the situation, loving the brothers. That means more then just some kind of passivity and actions that are ok, it means also bringing salvation to these situations and these people. We are doing some of this already. We do have practices that should bring us to this kind of maturity. That is, I hope, we are faithful to our duties. I hope we are meditating faithfully. I hope we are doing spiritual reading. I hope you examine your conscience every day, I hope you have a certain amount of spiritual guidance in your life and especially I hope that you receive the sacrament of repentance regularly at least once a month. After all God is not playing games. He really wants us to become mature. And society needs our maturity.

With the knowledge and the reception of baptism we have real hope that we can fulfill this need because of the grace that=s given to us. But baptism is also a call to holiness. That means we have to have a serious commitment to become holy. Again our world is not much of a support for this. On the contrary, the world around us is very needy spiritually. Extremely needy. And it doesn’t=t take much insight to do this but just take some fundamental things.

The European union has basically rejected the fundamental truths of faith. Now that=s got to have a consequence. I already know some of them they are beginning to be power hungry and they don=t even consult the people that are in the union about some of their decisions because they don=t hold themselves responsible to anybody and that=s just one example, there are many I can give.

Most countries are focused on power and money like our nation, most of it. And if we look at any city and all these countless of people in the city who have no real contact with God and certainly very little with Christ . Yet the fact is that our baptism reminds us that we are not just vessels of grace but instruments of grace. That is, there is available to us a tremendous amount of life more than just for ourselves. God really wants to act in each of us. In our entire life and he wants to act with who he is, mainly, especially, his love and his mercy.

So our true lifelong commitment must be personal sanctification so that we become fit and really also efficacious. We become instruments that really do mediate grace to others.

Now someone suggested in the review that we get a book on saints and I got a rather good book, highly recommended, and we will be reading it during the noon office. Pay attention because some of those examples are rather very interesting and maybe even controversial but they are very provocative in terms of precisely being mature and contributing and holy people.

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