First I just want to thank you for your condolences on the death of my sister. I know through the previous week she was ready. She really said A yes@ to what God had in store for her.

The monk is a person who lives in the presence of God. To live in the presence of God is not simply a passive reality. God is not a thing. God is the most active person in the universe and he= s rather intelligent and so he wants to deal with each of us directly. That presupposes that we have profited from good retreats, spiritual reading, scripture that is proclaimed in the liturgy, and that we begin to hear it. On the level of children, of course, children hear things too, but they hear them in terms of their own lives and so do adolescence. So they do grow. But the mature person is the one who begins to hear the Word of God and wants to understand what= s God asking of me now and then ask the question how am I responding to it? How do I handle it? How do I react to it?

Since the process of relationship to God is endless, the process should be a growth in the ability to hear what God is saying to me now. Of course, retreats are an opportunity to intensify those moments, which we had a very good presentation of how we look at the presence of God and because of that presence we stand in awe of his sheer goodness and try to pay attention to how he= s drawing us into his goodness.

So the real journey then is the work of living daily life with the capacity to hear what is God saying to me. Now that requires a purification. Take for example outside of our own experience mostly, we look at Al-Quida and see

terrorists attack us. One approach is they hit us, we hit them. It’s not exactly a gospel response. When Spain was attacked, they decided to pull out of Iraq, quit killing Muslims. Then they decided to legalize Moroccan immigrants, then they set up a dialogue between Islamic people in the country and the government. Then they set up another group that basically deals with cultural differences in people and how we can live together. The result has been quite different then our approach of bombing each other. So learning to listen presupposes also to hear different approaches to things and especially to hear the approach of what God is asking of us to do in order to renew the face of the earth.

Since God is dealing with us directly, whether we like it or not, admit it or not, because he= s good independent of us. So he does good to us even when we don= t deserve it, when we don= t even ask for it, we don= t even see the need for it, he acts on our behalf. He’s been doing it before we were born. This is a rather important step in the discovery of my relationship to God and living in the present moment to live in the presence of God is to realize that God really loves me personally. I’m in his heart. I have to learn to pay attention to what touches me in terms of how God is speaking to me. It’s not always a question of morals. He’s a God. He wants us to discover his goodness so therefore to rejoice. We also need to learn how to see how he moves us to greater freedom so that our hearts really can sing. We’re happy to know God.

This is the discipline of seeking God. It is not heaviness or dead seriousness its on the contrary. The ability to trust and to walk with confidence that the Lord speaks to me and what is he saying to me and I don’t need to hear voices. It= s clear enough when I have an opportunity to do some good and I see it and I refuse to do it I= m conscious of the fact that I missed an opportunity so I have to say, A I= m sorry@ and correct it.

So the Lord is really moving everyone here, everybody actually in the world, but not everybody even cares to listen, to greater communion with him. And the depth and the lavishness of it is incomprehensible. In Sunday= s gospel we had the proclamation of the multiplication of the loaves and each of those has that strange ending where they gather the fragments and it= s twelve baskets in one case and seven in the other showing that God does this lavishly. He’s not stingy. Which means he’s very patient with us and he’s generous in dealing with you and me as we are.

So we have no fear and we have no reason to distrust or think that he= s not considering doing anything for me and moving me. The movement will always be the same. It will be from sin to less sin, to virtue, to freedom, to love and to self-forgetfulness in total love. That’s the movement on anything and everything. So you have to listen to where you are on different things because you may overcome one thing then the Lord says, A we’re finished with that one, let= s go on to this.@ You say, A Oh!@ We don’t know how much the Lord wants to perfect us in this life so none of us can say A I made it!@ Perhaps one of the important things of this journey is, the fun of it is, we should be discovering how much God loves us. It’s incomprehensible and we should really realize that if he loves me this much, he really loves those around me the same way. I ought to join him in his work.