The Abbot’s Notebook for May 18, 2016
Blessings to you! Plants are beginning to grow once more and trees are putting out their leaves. The lawn in the cloister looks green once more. Even though we have just finished Easter Season, the joy of new life remains with us.
Brother Leander continue to improve in health and is now able to participate in Holy Mass and Vespers with the community regularly once again. Keep praying for him because his health is still a bit weak!
Mother Benedicta from Our Lady of the Desert had to have surgery this past Sunday on a blood clot in one of her legs. She also needs your prayers.
Brother Francis has returned from visiting his mother in Peru and we are happy to have him home once more.
As I was reflecting on the spiritual life this week, it came to me that many people need to hear over and over again: God loves you even when you are a sinner. For some reason, many of us find it difficult that God can love us when we find ourselves in sin or living lives that are not yet completely given to God. No matter how often we read in the Gospel that God loves us, we find it difficult to believe that. Quite often the problem is that we do not love ourselves in good ways and cannot imagine how God could love us.
At one point in my early monastic life, a monk-priest gave a series of homilies on God’s love for us. At that point in my own life, I realized that I did not believe that God could possibly love me. It was not even that I was involved in some sinful situation. It was just that I was aware of my own lack of loveableness and clearly knew that God could not love me. The homilies of this monk-priest touched right on this part of my being. So I began to sit in front of my cell and simply try to believe: He loves me. God loves me. No matter what I have done in my life, God loves me.
I spent many months in this “spiritual exercise,” and eventually I even came to believe that God does love me—and God invites me to deepen my relationship with Him. Just because He loves me does not make me sinless, but instead, so I discovered, His love invites me to engage in the spiritual combat against sin and against all within me that prefers anything else other than His will.
My point, of course, is that knowing that I am loved does not make me a saint! Instead, it gives me confidence that God is with me and that God loves me so that I can engage in the spiritual combat and know the strength of God supporting me in the combat against sin and evil. Without that knowledge, it is sort of like I am struggling to make myself be faithful and it is a matter of my own will. Instead, the spiritual combat is not so much a matter of my strength of will power, but instead a matter of allowing God to work within me.
It was in a book by C.S. Lewis, Pilgrim’s Regress, that I first realized that for many people, pride is not so much of a problem as a lack of self-esteem. At first I thought that this was just a modern argument against dealing with pride. But as I reflected on it, I began to see that it was true. That lack of self-esteem often arises from a lack of awareness that God loves us just as we are right now, even as God invites us to repentance and to a deeper love. It is also true that pride can hide itself as a lack of self-esteem. The real challenge is to be ourselves before God and to know that He loves us.
When I was in high school, my spiritual director would often tell me: “You have a lot to be proud about.” I never believed him and I often that that he was a kind old man who had not much to say. Only after his death and after many years did I come to realize that he was seeking to help me understand that I was all right. Often I would tell him how bad I was and how incapable of having a spiritual life. When I think back, I realize how difficult I must have made the work of that monk, my first spiritual director ever.
On the other hand, I began a spiritual journey at an early age and continue on that journey. Part of the journey is to discover that God loves me, no matter what. What a freedom there is in that knowledge! With God’s love, I am capable of fighting sin and defects of character because God does the fighting and I try to cooperate.
My own family was not well formed in Christian or Catholic thought. Instead, it was a typical family of poor people with poor educational backgrounds and yet a fairly rock-solid faith in God. My father came from a Protestant family and my mother from a Catholic family. They were married in a civil ceremony in 1938 and only married in the Church in 1953—and most of us children sat in the car outside while they were married in the sacristy of a Catholic Church.
Only God knows why I went to the seminary at a young age. I was not interested in the seminary at all. But when I saw a monastery for the first time, I felt called. God has His ways of getting us on the road. And although I have not always been a good monk, I continue to try to be a good monk and to seek God. This is the most important goal of life: seek the Lord.
As always, I ask your prayers for me and for the women and men of our communities. Ask God to keep us on the path, to strengthen us in the spiritual combat. I will offer Holy Mass for you and for your intentions again this week, as I try to do every week. I send you my love and prayers.
Your brother in the Lord,
Abbot Philip
