Transcript of Abbot Clement= s Talk on Monday, May 1, 2006

One of the effects of Easter= s mystery is that Christ is alive but also we are also more alive. So the measure of our spiritual life can be focused on the question of how freer am I and how much more alive am I this year than last year?

Let= s take an example, let= s call her Mrs. Smith. She is in her forties, not bad looking, has two children, a loving husband and she has a good career as an artist. Basically her life is not there, even though she’s an intelligent person. Her life is really focused around the fact that when she was nine years old her father abused her and in the process over the years began to hate men and become a feminist and basically had a constant anger toward the world and especially toward men.

So her interior life is really focused on these issues. Until she woke up and with the help of counseling and a good priest she was able to forgive her father and to begin to live and say A yes@ to her life that she already had with her children and with her loving husband. So her freedom was expanded and her life became more central and integrated. We can= t say anything further in terms of her relationship to Christ but because we know she was a Catholic and she went to Mass, etc., that she connected and also was enriched.

Or you can take the case of Mr. Jones. He was a very good hockey player when he was young. He had great aspirations to be a hockey player. For some reason he heard a sports announcers saying:

A He shoots and it scores!@ And it kind of got him all excited so as he grew up he became fascinated with hockey and became pretty good in his little town in Canada. As time went on he was sought after by colleges. He went to college and was very good there. Then he received some professional calls and responded but was eventually cut because he just wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t tall enough or strong enough.

But the rest of his life he spent basically living in his home town in a kind of grocery store and always excited about champions, especially hockey champions, and would go to all kind of extremes to get their signatures. Then he would talk about them all the time. But now at 45 he began to realize that his life was kind of strange. Here he is all excited about autographs and sharing that when he had four good boys and a loving wife and a solid job and he didn’t really live there. Plus he was a little over weight as well.

When he woke up, again he was a Catholic, he began to say: A I have to learn to let go of my dreams, they= ll never take place.@ He began to be accepting of his beautiful sons and wife and began to integrate and center his life again. We can= t say too much about where his life is now in terms of relationship to Jesus but because he was Catholic, and because he went to church chances are that everything else began to slowly focus and become integrated.

So if we are going to focus on life and on freedom as the measure of how we celebrate Easter every year, then we ought to ask ourselves how much closer am I to the Lord? I have to be grafted on the Lord to be alive. We all know that we= re baptized so we are indeed grafted. But the question is where is our interior life really focused? Is it really focused on him? And does it show in terms of conduct and thinking and in terms of service in the community? Well we could even go one step further because if you really ask Jesus, right up front, what is his life, he would say: A The Father@ . Jesus is occupied with the agenda of the Father, the will of the Father, the joy of the Father, he can= t do enough for his Father. So we can always grow and deepen in our freedom and our life to the degree that we become like Jesus, really focused and centered on the Father in our life.