Transcript of Abbot Clement’s talk, Monday, 24 June 2002
I want to use the story that I used for the faculty retreat at the end of the school year.
Yudina was an expert pianist in Russia under Stalin and her contemporary was Shostakovich who was a composer and conductor. Now Shostakovich was an atheist, not belligerent, but he just didn’t believe. Yudina was a practicing Christian. The first encounter between the two was Yudina complained to Shostakovich that she had this small apartment, it was noisy, she couldn’t practice, she couldn’t get her work done, get me an apartment. Well it was very hard to get an apartment at that time but Shostakovich had friends and people in high places, so he got people to petition and press people and so on and so she got her apartment. Two weeks later she’s knocking at his door, get me an apartment. He says, "Wow, what did you do with the one I gave you?" She said, "there was this poor widow, it’s winter, it’s cold outside, she was by herself no place to go so I gave it to her." Then of course Shostakovich got her another one.
The second encounter was, now that she’s in a new apartment the window’s busted and she says, "I need some money to get the window fixed." So they give her some money and when they came to her apartment to practice it’s colder inside the apartment then it is outside. And there’s a rag in the broken window. He says, "Yudina, what did you do with the money we gave you?" "I gave it to my church." But the real one that really manifests how deep Yudina is, was when Stalin asks the radio commission, which Shostakovich is involved, to have a recording of Yudina playing Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto. And of course it didn’t exist. And in those days if you didn’t do what Stalin wanted, he murdered people. So he gathers the orchestra late at night, everybody’s so nervous that he had to get three conductors to get the thing finished. But Yudina, she was cool as a cucumber. So they finish it, they gave it to Stalin, and two weeks later Yudina receives this envelope from Stalin, twenty thousand rubles. She writes a thank you note that went something like this: Dear Josif Vissarionvich, that’s his mother’s name, that’s a sign of respect and honor. "I thank you for your gift. I pray for you day and night that the Lord will forgive you the sins you committed against the people and our country, for God is merciful. The money you gave me, the twenty thousand rubles, I gave to the church I attend every week." Now that was a death warrant for sure and I’m sure she was written up, but nothing ever happened. But it said that in his dacha, in his vacation home, on his record player was Mozart’s 23rd concerto, with Yudina playing it when he died. So what do we learn from this? When Eudina came to the liturgy she met the risen Lord. And in the power of that experience, oh, I have to tell you what Shostakovich said. Shostakovich said, " For Yudina the ocean is only knee deep."
So if you meet the risen Lord when you come to the liturgy, you are meeting the source of all that is and we should be able to come to the same level of being able to say, for us the ocean is only knee deep. So what blocks us from deeper union with God? That’s the real question. Well, the first principle of spiritual life, the real obstacle is sin. You’ve got to remove the obstacle. So ok, let’s assume that you have overcome all mortal sin, well what keeps you blocking then is venial sin. Deliberate venial sin. Ok here’s a sister, you know, she’s a pack rat, she’s got so much stuff in her room, there’s hardly enough room to get to her bed or closet, or she’s in charge of the kitchen so she’s got stacks of stuff in the refrigerator and in the hallways and in the basement and everything. She gets mad when people criticize her but it’s all because she’s attached to things and she doesn’t want to correct it. That’s the deliberate venial sin. And that blocks the possibility of deeper union with God. Or you know you’re always angry, you never do anything about it. Or you’re lazy in your spiritual life and you excuse yourself all the time. Well that’s deliberate venial sin. And how do you go against this? Well you got to not only stop the sinning, you got to stop the affection for the sin. I remember one time in high school we brought some kids in from someplace to encourage them to drop drugs. These three kids witnessed how they were struggling with drugs and what problems they had and how they overcame it. One kid was honest he said, "I’m not cured cause I still loves the stuff." You see, you still love your venial sins and you’re going to go back to them. Your going to have to root out your affection for them. Is the center of your life still your stomach? See, and you’ve been in the monastery how long? So this is the key question: in a monastic tradition it’s called growing in purity of heart. But you have to see what it means. You have to get rid of venial sins so you have to look at your life and ask the Lord and Holy Spirit to help you and see where it is and begin to stop the venial sins and the affection for them root that out and then hopefully move to any semi-deliberate venial sins. You can’t control those sins that happen when something just happens and they shouldn’t be happening regularly anyway. That’s because we’re weak and we’re poor. But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about things that are in our life, day in and day out, we just excuse ourselves. And they’re really deliberate venial sins and we’re attached to them because they bring us our comfort. We’re in a lukewarmness. And that’s what blocks the deeper union with God. But on the other hand, since we are here before the Eucharist and Jesus comes to us then we should be able to be like Yudina and walk through life where the ocean is only knee deep.