Transcript of Abbot Clement’s Christmas Homily, December 24, 2007
On behalf of myself and my
community members I want to wish all of you a very blessed and peaceful
Christmas and I hope it extends completely into the whole next year. I thank you for coming to worship with us so
that we can really give the Lord honor due his name and the great gift of his
Son.
Christmas is a little tough time to
preach and the reason is the challenge really is that in our culture we have so
many things going on especially the whole commercialization and it really does
effect us. We are impacted by it. People feel obligated to buy all kinds of
presents. People feel they’ve got to get
everything done so they’re rushing about and the pull is that it really makes
us less recollected and less open to this great mystery. It dulls our interiorority. If we add to that some of the sentimental
stuff, I’ve been putting up the cards on the wall and I gave up because I don’t
have any time, but it’s interesting the kind of cards we get today and a lot of
it is superficial. So what does that
mean? It means that it’s hard for us to
really engage this feast and maybe even being blocked from letting this
stupendous event that we’re celebrating touch our lives.
Now you and I if we pick ourselves
up and I take you to
But the trouble is that means we
have to learn to celebrate this feast with real realism. Otherwise we have the temptation or the
occasion to be superficial and sentimental and the net result is we actually
are diminished, maybe even somewhat in our imaginations and so we have no real
ground when we leave this service and the net result of that is that the faith
and life that we have is not growing and it has no direction and purpose. In fact, I have a feeling that because
people don’t do these things they’re a bit depressed on Christmas. No one should be depressed on Christmas. No one, absolutely no one! If you listen to what Pope Leo the Great said
you can’t deny it.
So I want to focus a little bit on
being realistic about Christmas celebrations.
The first point I want to focus on is that God who is coming to us in
the mystery of this feast still remains the God of promises who is faithful to
his promises. You and I, whether we like
it or not, or admit it or not, we are an unfolding embodied spirit and the
process is to expand and to integrate. To
expand and to integrate. But that means
in practice just about when we think we have believed and come to some truths
and we begin to ground our life on it, it begins to shake and move and it shows
itself as merely a prelude to something further. So we must go forward. We must follow the beckoning and do it
again. Of course if we want to obtain
our life’s reward this is going to be the whole of our journey. Now if you decide not to do this then you are
going to diminish and die, and not just your human life will be less fruitful,
but you will even die in your soul.
You’ll be alive but dead inside.
So what this means is that each of
us is made for wholeness and for justice and we’re longing for it to be
fulfilled. So we must go through those
hours of counting anguish and come to a new integration. If we refuse to do this then our life will
become indifferent, we’ll be resigned to things as they are without any effort,
we will be insensitive, we may even loose our appetite, and may certainly loose
our spiritual nerve and in short we will be like a lot of people whose life
blood is out of their life and they simply are on the way to death.
This is the first real reason why we
want to look at Christmas. Because the
God who became man addresses this journey and unfolding in us. The indisputable, and incomprehensible fact
of this night when God became human is that he entered our homes, our lives,
our existence. Not just to be like us
but to be actually one of us. So this is
an unfathomable mystery but we do know some of its reality. The eternal Word of God is in fact absorbed
by history so that his fate, the fate of the Second Person of the Trinity
becomes part of history and history’s fate is his fate. So he continually is on the roads high and
wide, he’s in the deepest, darkest dungeons with those who are suffering
there. He’s in loneliness of prisons. He’s everywhere to remind us that he’s with
us to help us bear the circumstances and burden. That’s the first blessing we have from this
feast. You can be sure that God is
always with you. Not just general,
generic medicine, with you!
The second blessing that comes from
this great mystery is that we can learn to sense when he puts his shoulder
under our shoulder in a situation. And
we can sense that he relieves the weight.
The third is that when he came down
and brought his divine life to us by becoming human which after all in his
human nature he was showing us what it means to be human, we receive strength
that enables us to master our life. This
strength grows precisely from the upsurge of divine vitality in his human
existence and is reflected in the communities of faith where Jesus reveals himself. So that means we receive the new
spirit. And that it is extended to us
and we will not waiver in our belief and we will follow the star of his
promises. Let me give a concrete example because it’s probably a little tough
for you to follow.
Cardinal Von Tuan was a Vietnamese
bishop. He was made bishop in
The second thing I want to consider
and reflect with you is that the God we encounter in this feast is still the
same challenging God. God thinks big and
great! The problem then is the
difficulty, the obstacle to this feast is really centered on how people picture
God. Because of the externals of the
feast and because of the appearances of paintings, and carols, and cribs, which
can be consoling and comforting, etc., but they block the deeper question. This is
a breathtaking, awesome event. Because since the birth of the Lord we’re
confirmed in a hope that every time we turn to God, pray, we will receive
grace. God does not resist prayer. Now that means that if we look at this feast
properly it says that not only is God with you but he’s for you. He’s on your
side. He’s on my side. That’s very important. Now that doesn’t mean that our life is now
going to be a nice primrose path. That’s
not the point of it. Nor does it mean
that God quit being God. What it amounts
to is very important to me, of course, is that our being with God is a
relationship that unfolds and we learn to pray and we learn to hear his word
and we’re guided and in our prayer we discover not only his nearness, but we
begin to realize that his nearness makes me come home. When I pray I am most centered in who I am
meant to be. I am a child of God living
in the mystery of God’s embrace. So one
learns not only to pray but wants to pray and gets better at it and therefore
walks the commandments of God in his word and discovers evermore deeply, very
importantly, that every time we pray we meet this God who is obviously filled
with dynamic power. So the worshiper
then knows by the very state of his life how close or how far away he is from
God. When we really realize this, if we
grew on that grace as we should, you can bet your boots that we would realize
that something happened extremely, deeply, and commitedly on that midnight
2,000 years ago. And it continues down
through the ages and we would begin to see that God calls each of us to be
disciples of Jesus and therefore to remove from our life all the obstacles,
especially sin and we see that God wants to give that to us.
And so we are people who begin to
see the light and are more and more confident to face reality and to especially
face our own end. There are a couple of
passages in scripture that are very encouraging. One says that the person who follows the Word
of God has passed through judgment. The other passage is the person who has
truly learned to love his neighbor has passed through judgment. That means judgment will be total embrace of
God’s goodness and mercy, no debts. You
will be totally welcomed. But the
problem is our journey is not so simply lined up and we don’t know what the
Lord will ask me to do next. I didn’t
ask to be Abbot. So he says, “I want you
to do this” “OK”. So we are tested and sometimes very
strongly. Let me give you another
example.
St. Bakita is a woman from Dafur,
Sudaan, she lived in the 1800’s, I think.
When she was nine years old she was kidnapped and made a slave. Within a
four year period she had been sold to three different masters, each of which
beat her everyday to the point of blood.
Finally an Italian merchant purchased her to be the maid servant in his
home with his wife and they taught her the gospel. Then she discovered the super master was the
Lord and the Lord not only knew her but loved her. So once that happened she said: “I am
definitively loved and whatever happens to me I am awaited by this love and so
my life is good.”
When we journey with the Lord and follow his
path we discover not only his trustworthiness but we can surrender to him
because he is good. And his goodness
flows into our life. So this night that
we’re celebrating is no small night. It
is indeed a night in which things have become better. It’s a place in which things are more
beautiful and there are blessings.
One mystic said: “It’s not on
November 2 when we pray for the poor souls that they’re released from
Purgatory. More souls are released from
Purgatory on this feast than on November 2.”
That’s how much God loves us as human beings. So we grow in stature and we can say “yes”
to the Lord because God is always with us and for us.