Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Talk on Monday, June 20, 2005

The third element that keeps our retreat alive, or to live in the Spirit, is obedience. We are all very familiar with obedience and therefore we may dismiss it rather lightly.

It= s easy to see the opposite in pride in people that are power hungry and what happens with that kind of behavior. It doesn’t take much to see that Hitler or Stalin were destructive people. They killed anyone who was in opposition to them and did terrible damage to the whole country and endlessly. So pride is rather an extreme opposite of obedience.

Nevertheless, there is more obvious forms of pride that show up when we fail to realize that our obedience is an obedience of faith. So we see people claiming to be Catholic who are promoting alternate life styles, looking for women priests and doing all kinds of other things and yet claiming to be Catholic. It= s not possible for them to be Catholic because obedience is first of all obedience of faith.

But then, even further the opportunities of obedience are important to us, so much so, that Benedict tells us that this is the real way of our salvation. Religious life is kind of a guarantee that you have plenty of opportunities to obey so that you can run the way of God= s commandments in love.

There are explicit things that are clear as calls of God. The fact that we are in monastic routine of prayer and work and things assigned to us, etc., so that our whole day can be embraced in obedience. This is really to imitate Jesus. Jesus did always that which pleased his Father, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and he did it rather fully.

We have to remember that Jesus was truly human, that he entered the human condition and therefore he had to grow in obedience and he had to struggle with it. Just because he was the Son of God, and therefore he can= t sin, doesn’t mean that he didn’t experience in his human nature the struggle and the opportunities of obedience. If that= s not true then there= s nothing that makes much sense of the agony in the garden or the redemption that Jesus did for us.

And what do we see in Jesus? We see that he= s rather present, very present to his life. And in that presence he does all that he ought to do. All that is part of being an in-fleshed being and then all that he can do. So that means that he encounters the limitations, the sufferings, and he sees in all that the opportunity to love his Father. In fact he told, I think it was Sr. Josepha Menendez, I= m not sure, Jesus said: A I tried to love with my whole being and to make up for all those that did not love my Father.@ So Jesus pleased the Father in every moment.

So obedience is the opportunity to express your love and your surrender to the Lord. It= s hard for us because it requires faith. So someone asks the husband what do you attribute your sixty years of marriage to? He says two words: A Yes, dear!@

If you have Jesus with you twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and he asks you something, you= d say yes, yes, yes. But that= s really what it means to be obedient. It means that Jesus could walk through the day and see the Father= s will in every situation and say A yes@ to it. He not only said yes to it but he said it with full presence, love, eagerness and happiness. So it= s important for us to reflect, having had a beautiful retreat, and how is that retreat staying alive in us through the things we talked about so far? We talked about how is our charity growing? How is our prayer life going? And how now are we being obedient?