Transcript of Abbot Clement=s Talk on Monday, August 22, 2005
It
=s important that every now and then I recall the connection between living the spiritual life and our sinfulness in form of encouragement. The Lord is one who loves us and he calls us to religious life and that was an act of tremendous love that he is more faithful than we are. So he is happy at our response and he is faithful to his side of loving us. So the call is to learn how to take his love seriously as we=ve been saying and listen to his guidance so that we can begin to more and more fulfil his wish.That we are imperfect, that we are weak, that we fall, is not an obstacle to the Lord. If it was then there would be no salvation for anybody because everybody is weak and falls. The real issue is to open ourselves up to how the Lord moves us. When we come to the question of our sinfulness we need to come to it with the realization that God himself is moving us to see what is an obstacle between us and the Lord and therefore to ask for the grace that he would show us our sinfulness and then when we do begin to recognize it, to be radically honest about it. First of all you should have no trouble to admit this because not only does Scripture remind us that we are sinners but David in psalm 51 reminds us that we are conceived in sin. Part of the growth in spiritual life is precisely to see that we are sinners and that we can do nothing of ourselves.
Once the awareness is there that I am weak, or I failed in this or that, instead of focusing on it we need to take it to the Lord. The first response should be asking the Lord for the grace to repent of it. Because we can
=t repent on our own strength. It is a question of coming to see God=s love and therefore coming to see the strength he wants to give us. So when we repent it=s actually out of the grace of his love and therefore we become freed from that particular sinful tendency. That=s what the Lord wants to show us. So this gives us a chance to praise and thank him especially to acknowledge him as our Saviour.Then there are the areas where we can see these things, that is, our attachments. What are the attachments in your life? What is causing a kind of competition between you and the Lord over something? Whatever it is the Lord is going to show it to you because he loves us. When we begin to realize that we are attached to our own will or to some kind of comfort or whatever, again, we need to take that to the Lord so that we begin to have right relationships to everything. Again the same process has to be made, that is, ask the Lord for the grace to be detached from it so that our detachment becomes a real freedom. Where we have the proper attachment to things we ought to have attachment to, for instance, service to others, our duties, etc., but at the same time not be pushed out of shape by disordered attachments.
One of the places where this shows up most frequently for all of us is our thoughts, therefore our distractions, especially our distractions in prayer. Those distractions come up again and again and they
=re strong then you know you have some kind of attachment to something. Again you have to take it to the Lord. It is precisely in this mode that the Lord guides us to become free. So our life begins to unfold and we instead of being discouraged by weakness and by our struggles and our nothingness, we actually begin to sense his strength and his power and we are filled with praise. So what amounts to a beginning of movement in us of what looks like negativity becomes the very opportunity to discover that God himself is moving us toward loving him seriously, that we take his love seriously and that we would begin to please him in all things.