Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Talk on Monday, 12 August 2002
The Lord made us a different kind of flower in His spiritual garden, we’re Benedictine. And the characteristic of the imitation of Christ is usually manifested by the arrangement of the kind of virtues that a particular kind of charism has, and for us it’s humility. And we all know that if we’ve paid attention to the Rule, humility has the characteristic of obedience, silence, actual humility, and love of God. And so if we are going to be pleasing to God obviously then out of this garden we got to send up perfume of humility everyday out of this area of Cleveland. And we said last time that the first sentence of the first degree of humility tells us how things begin. We have to live in the "Fear of the Lord" which we said really means to take God seriously. But if you read the rest of that first degree you realize that really what it amounts to is to "awaken the conscience." Or to put it another way, to live before the Lord. Be aware of God’s presence, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at the altar, in the john, aware of God’s presence. And in the consciousness of God’s presence we become aware of our thoughts, of our will and our desires. At anytime these are off-centered, then of course, we repent and we stay in union with God although it may be a very little union at this point since we’re talking about the first degree of humility but it is union. So let me give you a contrasting negative example, this is a real situation. I know the person, he gets up in the morning, he goes to a coffee shop, has his coffee and toast and usually he’s bitching and complaining, and angry. When he comes home he puts on the TV set and he sleeps and pretty much spends his time before the TV set maybe he’ll do something in the yard for about an hour or so. But basically that’s his life, day in, day out. Now the psychologist would say, of course, "he’s depressed, yes, he’s depressed, there’s no doubt about it", it doesn’t take much intelligence to see he’s depressed. But why is he depressed? Depression is a response to reality. Well I happen to know this person. He’s depressed because he’s 70 years old and he doesn’t have the kind of money that he thinks he should have and people who are his age around him have. Because he thinks if you have this kind of money then you are somebody. And since he doesn’t have it he’s depressed and he’s mad at the family because they’re the ones that were the cause of spending all his money that he did make. Which he made a sufficient amount of money because he had a lot of children. Now what does that do to him? He has no appreciation of his children. He’s always angry. Always negative towards them. And yet if you look at those children any decent parent would be proud of them. Happy. So he isn’t opened. He doesn’t pray. He may once in a while go to Mass but he doesn’t really pray. And you know what happens when we’re in this mode, the older we get the worse it gets because we have done nothing to open ourselves up. And so the first degree of humility is the key question of opening ourselves up to God. And so we have to take seriously what surges in our consciousness when we are walking in the presence of God. Our thoughts, whatever we desire, whatever our will aims at and see whether or not it is conformed to what God wants. Because if you put the first degree of humility in the context of God’s action on us, the God of the universe called you and me to this place to become Benedictines. Now you and I know how to give gifts that fit people, in other words you have a friend and you know they really like this book and you know it’s good for them so you buy it for them. You know how to fit their need. Now don’t tell me that God who is intelligent didn’t know what he was doing when he gave his Son for our redemption. And so we have in our daily life the solution to any particular problem when it comes to the question of being open and relating to God. So if we were to take those areas that block us from opening up to Jesus or to God and bring them to the altar and bring them to the confessional then we can be sure that the Lord will give us the grace to transform us, to make us more obedient, more truly interior silent, more truly capable of facing reality as it is, the truth of things, and above all loving, learn how to give the self away. Someone just gave me a book, Sr. Lucia the last of the Fatima children finally wrote a book and it’s interesting that one of her first statements of spiritual insight is, "we’re all on the journey to eternity whether you know it or not or admit or not." But she said something else which I haven’t come to yet, I read somewhere else, once she had the experience of the vision of the Blessed Mother from that day on eternity awoke in her heart. Which means her focal consciousness was always aware of the presence of God. And so as a result it was easy for her to evaluate and to see what moved her in the right direction. If God calls us to be Benedictines He also gives us the grace to be so. And a key characteristic of the Benedictine is precisely humility.