Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Talk on Monday, August 18, 2003
In the spiritual life we always want to be real or authentic. There are three virtues that keep us in this mode of being real: purity, humility and charity. It doesn’t seem that purity is that important for becoming real but if we just look at Revelation the Lord gave the Blessed Mother the Immaculate Conception so that she would be fully open to Jesus. We can look at the life of St. Benedict and in the tradition in which Gregory speaks, St. Benedict has to throw himself in the thorns to overcome his sensuality as a significant mark that he has really conquered illusion.
There’s a real powerful one in our day. We have the people who are pushing for same sex marriages. Here is a perversion that makes people blind to a natural truth namely marriage. Marriage existed before governments and before institutions. If we look at just our own common sense reason we know what marriage is. We don’t need Revelation to know what marriage is. You see that’s probably a negative way of getting at it but it shows the point. Purity and the degree of purity determines how real we are in the truth.
It’s easy to see the connection between humility and being real, true and authentic because we all know humility is precisely the pursuit and embrace of truth. To experience it is not so easy because we’re blind. I always think of the example of Fr. Stephen Shearer. He was a priest in Kansas. He was involved in a head on collision and was in a coma for a while. While he was in a coma all the parishes in this little town prayed for him. The Assembly of God, the Baptists, Episcopalians, and Catholics because he was a great priest they thought. Because everyone was praying he was healed. It surprised the doctors. When he came home and was saying Mass in his little church, he read a passage from Luke’s gospel about the gardener talking to the Master of the house, "chop this tree down" and the gardener says, "can’t we manure it?" As he’s reading this, the text lit up to him and he was shaken because he remembered what went on while he was in the coma. He went home after Mass and wrote out what he remembered. He was before God. No images just voices. God reveals to him his life and God says to him, "Do you know what this means?" He says, "Yes, I am going to hell." There was a great silence. Then he heard a woman’s voice, "Can’t we give him grace and help him?" "Can’t we manure the tree?" Jesus says, "Why should I he never did anything for me?" There was another great silence. Jesus’ voice came again and said, "Mary, he’s yours." Here he lived his life as a priest thinking he was doing things for God and he found out it wasn’t so.
One of our problems is precisely to really be humble. It’s not so easy to be humble. Takes radical honesty about our limitations, our faults, our shortcomings. We’ve done this in the community. We came to the community all gung-ho for Jesus, let’s go and we got through novitiate. Then all of a sudden we saw the community as we really are. Then we said, "Man, if this is it, forget it!" So we were enlightened with the truth. We are human beings with faults and shortcomings, we’re sinners like everybody else.
The third point is charity. Again, it should sound obvious because we all know that charity means that you get out of yourself to touch the other. But how many of us really do that? It’s again hard to die to self to be there for the other both toward God and toward each other. Yet these are the three virtues that keep us in the direction of being authentic and real. We need to practice them concretely daily and be radically honest about where we are in them.