I really have been preparing this talk for a long time. Mainly because I had difficulty integrating it.

I think the foundation of our life in terms of praise and adoration and coming to Office four times a day and the Eucharist, etc., has really rooted our awareness and our growth in the awareness of God= s great gratuitousness. The word is a tough word it means that God is not simply good, he not only is diffusive of himself and his goodness, but he generously and freely gives all kinds of good things so that our life is really surrounded and sustained by gifts. Everything is gift. And the images that started me on this journey was the Serengeti. The area in Kenya and Tanzania in which every year the whole herd of wildebeests, which is a million and a half, when the dry season comes they start migrating north to get grasses, etc., when it rains in October then they come back down to the south. There= s zebras, antelopes and other animals too. In the process about 250 thousand wildebeest die because they= re either eaten by lions on the way up or on the way down or by crocodiles, but then they birth about 500,000 so there= s always more wildebeest for next year. This has been going on for centuries. Just seeing that on the DVD just hit me that God is just going to do good things and that= s it. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to see what an elephant looks like, he did it, etc. He just gave these things.

Of course you all know that one of my other places where I see the gratuitousness of God is the galaxies. Just this past month they had a shot of 100 degrees in the universe going south of our galaxy. In that picture there were 200 million galaxies. And these are all kinds. So again we see this. But what really struck me was Sunday= s gospel that= s why it all came together. Because it= s 10 lepers that come before Jesus. Not five, not two, not one, not fifteen, but ten. In the Bible ten means the universal. So all mankind is standing before Jesus the Savior of the world and what does Jesus do? He heals them. He tells them to go show themselves to the priests. The gratuitous attitude of God is there already in that particular act and he’s showing it to us.

So I began to reflect on this very important passages from the Book of Revelation, the last chapter in the book, Chapter 22, and the last vision the angel gives to John is this: The angel shows John the river of life, that= s crystal clear, that= s flowing from the throne and from the Lamb. It= s flowing into the city, which of course is Jerusalem is the church and on each side of the river are trees that blossom every month. In other words the river provides the fruitfulness of trees all the time. That image, that vision, is really the consequences of the work of Jesus= redemption. This is what redemption has won for us. The outpouring of the Spirit into our lives through the sacraments and through the mystical Body so that when we gather together and pray as a believing community we have this flow of graces and the presence of God= s gratuitousness in a very special way. We have to remember that we didn’t= t kill Jesus. Jesus said he laid down his life for us. What does that mean? It means he embraced all the evil that mankind could do to God and so there was no more left so then he gave himself over to the Father. Therefore the love could now flow because Jesus asked for the Spirit and the Father commands the Spirit and it flows into our world of believers and to those who don= t believe too, but they= re not open to it.

So we live under a tremendous gratuitousness. Our life is filled with giftedness. Our part of the job is to learn to open ourselves up to this tremendous goodness and to respond to it. We who are monks have the opportunity not only to the Word of God but the sacraments and the Eucharist and the prayers throughout the day so that our hearts can be open to this action of God that wants to bring us into the fullness of life.