Transcript of Abbot Clement
=s Talk on Monday, May 3, 2004One of the rich themes of the Easter Season is that the Lord has won for us everlasting life. It
=s not the same thing as life. We need to see the contrast and think about what everlasting life is.When a young child has a chance to have a ice cream cone and enjoys it. When a young person decides to go water skiing he really enjoys it. In the life of Picasso, he was getting crippled and would shuffle in the morning and would sit at the piano and start playing. As he was playing he was totally reverberated. He was revitalized. Then he would take a walk on the beach, come home, and have an animated discussion with his wife. So he had a lot of life coming from his piano playing. Having life and being vibrant doesn
=t necessarily mean you are living out of everlasting life. It=s not the same thing. It=s important, it=s good to be alive and it=s good to be relating and not half dead.One way to understand everlasting life is to reflect on a suggestion by St. Ignatius in the exercises. Paragraph 75, if you want to look it up, says that the retreatant should before he prays take two steps backward and consider how God is looking at you. That doesn
=t mean that you should have God being angry and mad at you, but there are many ways to reflect on that statement. But what does that do? That makes you exercise faith, place yourself in the presence of God as there and then he says in the period of one Our Father do that reflection and when you finish make an act of humility or reverence. Not only does he move you from your mind to your heart but he engages you in the action.St. Faustina did that when it came to the Eucharist and one of her images for meeting the Lord in the Eucharist was the Lord is standing before me as my king. She would reflect on that for the period of an Our Father and began to realize that she is really going to meet the Lord of lords and King of kings when she goes to Communion and it began to fill her consciousness so that when she actually went to Communion she had a deep experience of the presence of Jesus and the Lord said to her,
AThat everlasting life has to start now, not when you die.@I think from this reflection we can see that everlasting life means some kind of different approach to life then simply relating. It means that you are growing in the capacity to become a loving presence, to give yourself away, so that you are a life giving presence. That has to start now, not when we die! What
=s nice about this is that the Lord also told St. Faustina at that moment that the source and strength for this comes precisely from the Eucharist. Every time you receive the Eucharist worthily you increase the capacity in you to become a life giving presence. Then once we do that then we can put it into practice and grow by our actions. This is really the whole meaning of our journey. To be a people that is growing in the capacity to become a loving, life-giving presence. To the degree that we succeed and fulfill it that=s our accomplishment, glory, and reward.