Transcript of Abbot Clement= s Talk on Monday, August 21, 2006

All of us know that the spiritual life is unending and that we always have opportunities to stretch. We know that if we= re not going forward we= re going backwards. You can put this in many kinds of tensions. How are we growing in charity? How am I becoming more Christ like? You can take any particular virtue and see how you= re practicing it, is it really perfect? Anyone of these paths if embraced will make you practice quite a bit of virtue and of course cooperate with God.

Also, we know that Jesus is not passive. That the resurrected Lord that comes to us in the Eucharist is an active presence. So he unites himself to us and he embraces us and tries to move us and give us grace to get out of ourselves toward God and toward our neighbor. In order for that grace to blossom we have to cooperate with it. So I want to take one possibility and not because we= re there, we’ve made it, but because we need concrete things to think about.

One of our central elements is to praise, to praise God. How perfect is it? So there’s a journey here, right? We look at the life of Jesus and he has according to St. Paul he didn’t cling to the fact that he was God but humbled himself and became obedient even unto death. So Jesus does not put himself first and he walks humbly. There are other passages that show that he= s meek and humble of heart. He gives praise to the Father when something works right. Jesus is not focused on himself. He has a kind of solitude about his behavior, he is not bragging, he is not arrogant in his behaviors, and he= s spiritually modest. He doesn’t have people coming to admire him and praise him, etc. He gives full praise to God. The same can be said about the Blessed Mother who prayed many times the Magnificat, that the Lord was mighty and has done great things to me. So it’s not a question of not recognizing God= s action and gifts but rather to give that glory to God alone.

Then in the lives of Saints we see the Lord, himself instructing people. So since I stay close to Conchita de Adameda I give the example of her life. She learned to really not look for or seek the praise of people. But like every person in life people admire certain things you do so she experienced being praised. Well, she managed by prayer and cooperation with God not to really rejoice in that but she found that in her heart she did and the Lord pointed it out to her. Then she began to see that the Lord wanted true acknowledgment of the truth that the good in us comes from God and that= s to give him pure praise. So the thing we do most frequently is praise God we have to move to the point of really consciously giving God the glory. So she practiced this. She would spend a month just repeating and try to articulate and make, happen, the statement A all praise and honor to you, O Lord.@

Of course this is not strange to us as Benedictines we have in the Rule that we shouldn’t want to be called holy before we are holy. We have the statement, not to us, but to God, give all the glory for the good in us and to acknowledge the evil in us as coming from ourselves.

So my point is not so much just the praise question but whole dynamic that the Lord is moving us to closer union with him especially in the Eucharist, he actively does this. In order for that grace to blossom we have to cooperate. So each of us are different so I don= t know what the Lord is pushing you on, but you have to listen and then you have to go with it, so that the Lord may unite himself more deeply to you. So you can really show Jesus to the world.