Transcript of Abbot Clement’s talk on Monday, 22 July 2002

        Please keep Brother Alfred in your prayers. Brother Nicholas has been close to him and keeping in touch, and his cancer is spreading. The doctor gives him one week so please pray for him.

        I want to speak about prayer today and I especially want to share a particular text. Love can only happen through relationships. And one of the signs that we are getting in a good relationship with God, our prayer life becomes more simple. The reason is that theological virtues are direct virtues, they go right to the person. And since God is simplicity and unity and harmony itself then it simplifies our life. But if we are really going to have the kind of relationship that we should have as monks and as religious then it obviously implies that we have an intense spirit of prayer.

        Now prayer of course is a demand of love. Any lover wants to be with his beloved. But God wants to be present to us more than we want to be present to Him. So we really don’t have to work very hard at that part. And so to the degree that we open ourselves up to this God who’s pursuing us then we should allow Him to attract us to ever greater relationship. Now what are some of those things that should make us do this? One is we’re poor and wretched. We have no power to save ourselves. We are helpless so that’s certainly one. But that’s not the important one. The important one is that we’re baptized into Jesus and we have the Spirit. So the source and power of our prayer is in the presence of Christ and the Spirit in us already. You don’t have to make it. And what does that presence do? Well, in the presence of Christ it’s his filial relationship to the Father is already there and we participated so we move in Christ through the Spirit toward the Father. It’s already there. The question is are we open to it? This is teaching of the Scripture, Paul says, "and because we are children of God, he said, the Spirit of the Son who makes us cry out Father." And then we heard Sunday "we do not know how to pray" or as this translation has, how to ask for what is fitting. The Spirit comes to help in our weakness. So we need to come in touch with what we already are, we don’t have to make it. And move with it. So there’s the pull and the push of the presence of Christ and the Spirit in us to move us toward the Father. And so these are the real foundation of our prayer.

        So what is prayer? You ought to find your own definition of it that satisfies you. This is my satisfactory definition at this point in my life. Prayer is not a virtue, prayer is an act. It’s a direct personal communication with God. And of course God toward us. That means there’s communication, dialogue, mutual relation going on and it’s direct because again we said theological virtues make us have direct contact with God. It’s personal that is it’s person to person. We don’t have to see Him face to face but you know that’s already the condition for face to face. And that’s why it’s important to pray or read books when you pray or if you don’t use books when you do your Lextio that are in that mode; that are written this way. The book I translated is Jesus speaking to the priests. So it’s already in that dialogical mode or if you want to read the Imitation of Christ, it’s a book written in twenty years. It’s a rich book, it’s filled with the unfolding relationship of that monk with God so it’s dialogical of itself. It will help you move in that direction or the book of psalms but the point is, you have to enter this dialogue that’s already present in us. And of course this is a gift, but every time you say that people say, "well I can’t do anything about it." You already have the gift. You have the Spirit, you have the gift of Jesus. The question is to go with it. Now that means we should have a life of prayer because Jesus and the Spirit are with us and we have the graced life.

        The life of prayer means that we begin to have a flow from our prayer life into our life and our life flows into our prayer. And of course we should be souls of prayer, the worldly people, the people whose souls are involved in the world is precisely this their consciousness is on mundane things. It’s like going to a mall all these things you don’t need to live with. It’s worldly. Out and out worldly souls if you’re caught up in that stuff. Or you’re a businessman, you know, like you listen to some people all they think about is the bottom line. How much money they have, how much more they want to get and how much more they’re going to connive to get. So they’re obviously totally focused on that. While we’re supposed to be souls of prayer so obviously we should be immersed in prayer. So this is the text I really wanted to share with you. The Lord spoke to Conchita, "Drink so that you may pour yourself out. Pray that you may give yourself. Do you not see that you were born to pray, to live an interior life, and from there give yourself to others. In prayer you ought always hear me, always standing disposed with a clean heart and with a solitude of soul so as to understand Him who speaks to you. Because no one who is soiled and full of himself can hear me. Still when there are creatures in the soul, I myself deign to remove them. But when there is pride, self love, egoism, when that exists there, in the soul, then the Holy Spirit is not accustomed to communicate himself." So notice, "come to prayer." That means the office as well as personal prayer and drink in nothing else but God, "drink Him in." But to pray and to drink God in doesn’t mean now I hug God to myself, which is a dangerous thing of course. It means to "pour that God out now on others." It’s no different than the Dominican principle "contemplation in order to give it to others." The same truth.

        Also I would like to point out to you that this is a powerful synthesis statement about how prayer and life should go together. If I go to receive God and then give Him I put life and my prayer life together. So these are the two constitutive elements that have to be in our life as life of prayer. To go to prayer and to be filled with Jesus and then go give that Jesus out to others. There it is. Then you will be a soul of prayer. Now you can say the opposite. A person that goes to prayer and is filled with God and is all excited about God and never reaches out toward his neighbor you get to be suspicious about that prayer. Now notice the conditions. A clean heart, one of solitude of soul, two, absence of egoism and pride. Now we already know the first one, clean of heart, Jesus said in the sermon on the mount, "the pure of heart will see God." Besides Jesus says to Conchita in this text, "nobody who is soiled can hear me." It’s obvious that anybody who rejects God is not going to be drawn close to God or penetrate the mystery of God’s presence in his life. So we must really repent of our sinfulness. Interior solitude really means how much can I go to prayer and really focus on the presence of God and not be preoccupied with other presences? Distracted by these things to the point that I really don’t meet God. And of course THE obstacle is pride, egoism and selfishness. This is very important because prayer means I’m going to open myself up to the Other therefore I can’t be filled with myself. If I am, then I block the Holy Spirit who wants to communicate to me. Now I think this is a very important text because it puts in a nice context the whole of chapter 7: humility is the ability to stand in the truth. Stand in things as they are, and not just things, but God and everything else. And if you look at that chapter you see that that goal is expected in this life and if we live that then we will grow in the capacity to love God. And so I want to encourage you to understand that you don’t have to work hard at your prayer in the sense of making it happen. We already have Christ in us and the Spirit in us. The question is are we making the effort to really be in touch with the movements of Christ and the Spirit who move us in Christ through the Spirit to the Father?