Let us pray. Lord Jesus, font of wisdom and source of blessing, you became one with us in suffering and in death. Lead us through our own experience of the paschal mystery that we may one day know your glory. You are Lord forever and ever. Well, brothers, this conference is entitled The Paschal Mystery and the Grace of Failure. How bleak, how heavy for the end of the day. Spare us. But the title sounds a bit foreboding and dismal and grim, but I can say it to you somewhat lightheartedly, because from the outset I believe the opposite is true. From my own experience of disappointment and failure, or better, apparent failure, I've come to see the loving and redemptive hand of God

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leading me in new directions, filled with grace and hope, salvation and blessing, redemption and peace. So this evening we'd like to reflect on that mystery. In my estimation, the prophet Jeremiah is one of the great heroes of the Bible. While most of the prophets give us God's word in its pure and untainted form, Jeremiah gives us something in addition to that. He gives us insight into his own journey through personal suffering to eventual liberation, through demoralizing rejection to full acceptance. From the prophets, we hear God speaking in strong and clear language. But in Jeremiah, we also hear about the impact of preaching and living God's Word, and the personal struggles which it brought into the life of this rather tortured man.

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These short but potent passages in Jeremiah are called the Confessions. and rightly named because they contain expressions of both struggle and redemption, both anger before God and acknowledgement of God's omnipotence, both deep wounds and the scars which manifest also the healing process. These paradoxical but graced experience come from Jeremiah's encounters with God. But what I find most inviting about the confessions of Jeremiah is how the prophet discovered both God and himself, his deepest self, in the midst of a paschal mystery. In the suffering, he somehow was able to see redemption. In the wound, he could even begin to feel the healing process starting.

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In the experience of disappointment and personal failure, he saw beyond it to the belief that God was acting and saving him in some mysterious and unknown way. Briefly, I'd like to consider one passage with you, which I think brings together several of these points just made. From chapter 20 of the Prophet Jeremiah, the text reads, You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped. You were too strong for me, and you triumphed. All the day I am an object of laughter. Everyone mocks me. Whenever I speak, I must cry out. Violence and outrage is my message. The word of the Lord has brought me derision and reproach all the day. I say to myself, I will not mention God.

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I will not speak in his name anymore. But then it becomes like a fire burning within my heart, imprisoned within my bones. I grow weary holding it in. I cannot endure it. But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion. My persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked. In this passage, the prophet begins with an intimate description of his relationship with God. And here, in the Hebrew, he uses a verb of sexual seduction. The prophet describes his feelings in a way that sound, at first hearing, certainly rebellious, but even blasphemous to us.

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Jeremiah describes God as brute force, as deceptive, beyond any conventional norm. Having earlier thought that God had called him into a relationship of mutual trust and responsibility, Jeremiah now perceives that God has tricked him, has made sport of him beyond all comparison. Jeremiah then describes his experience of rejection, mockery, and disgrace whenever he follows what God asks of him. And because of this, he comes and says, I've had enough. No more for me. I can't endure it. I will not proclaim God's word anymore. But then he describes his negative response to God. It becomes like a fire burning within me, like something imprisoned in my bones.

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I can't hold it in. I can't endure it. He's back where he started. He is a prophet called by God and impelled, driven to live out that calling, whatever the challenge, whatever the pain. The prophet then goes on to express with faith who God is for him and his belief that in the end, justice will prevail. And finally, Jeremiah praises the God whom he first called deceiver. He thanks the God who led him through suffering to a knowledge of something bigger than himself. What Jeremiah describes is a spiritual journey from struggle to freedom, from woundedness to healing, from death to life.

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And tied up with that whole experience is the prophet's movement to self-knowledge before God. Whether we see it or not, whether we accept it or not, Jeremiah is each of us, and his journey is our journey. For all of us, this is a very important spiritual journey. For all of us, this is an essential journey, if we are to grow and to change to a level which lies at the very heart of the Christian message, the Paschal Mystery. But there's something very important to remember in our consideration of Jeremiah and this passage about him. Jeremiah appeared to fail, at least to himself. He never saw what later generations would call the success of his preaching. Only later would his word and his experience be seen and appreciated for what they truly were, a revelation of God's salvation and redemption.

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In some mysterious way, the people who created the canon of the scriptures found in his outrageous blasphemy a word that future generations would need to hear, because they believed it came from God. What Jeremiah had set out to do, he accomplished, and he did not even know it. As he saw and felt his inadequacy to the mission given him, he could only do his best and expect that God would have to provide the rest. Jeremiah suffered the death of a failed prophet, and yet his word survives to this day. His example of fidelity is at the heart of the paschal mystery as a lived experience. And he continues to teach us today by word and example the way to deep and abiding communion with God.

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So what does all of this say to us on a practical, personal level? If you have ever been dismally disappointed by the crumbling of some enterprise into which you have put your best effort, you have been caught up into the communion of Christ's death and resurrection. If you have ever seen a hoped-for relationship end in bitterness and misunderstanding, you have been caught up into the communion of Christ's death and resurrection. If you have ever been given the impossible task of which Saint Benedict speaks and found yourself to have missed the mark and disappointed others, you have been caught up into the communion of Christ's death and resurrection. If you have lived in the uncertainty of knowing that your work has touched the lives of others or that your efforts have made any difference at all to others, you have been caught up into the communion of Christ's death and resurrection.

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Whether or not you have thought of this experience in that way, You have entered into the mysterious call of our ancestors of the exodus experience, enduring personal slavery, darkness, and even death. But what is so important for us to realize is that God has dealt with human failure by himself becoming a failure in Jesus Christ, and so healing human failure from the inside out. And that is why we are able to meet Jesus Christ in our experience of passing over. Jesus took on our personal slavery, our darkness, and even human death, so that God might know the manner of paschal living firsthand. Our struggles and failures are the sure place for finding Christ, because he has claimed them as his own and transformed them.

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In our life as Benedictines, the experience of the Paschal Mystery lies at the very heart of our tradition. The prologue to the Holy Rule, so rich in its spirituality, actually climaxes, and its final verse is centered on that passing over of the individual monk in this earthly life. From verse 50 of the prologue, the text reads, never swerving from this instruction then, but faithfully observing his teaching in the monastery until death, we shall, through patience, share in the sufferings of Christ, that we may then also deserve to one day share in his kingdom. Amen. The idea here of patiencia, of patience, enduring, suffering with, is something very important to Saint Benedict.

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And we notice here, it stands at the very conclusion, as a kind of climax of the prologue, where he connects our own patience with the patience of Jesus and the sufferings of Christ. And that is significant spiritually, because what it does is it lifts patience out of the realm of a kind of stoic determinism, which gives us the image of a stiff upper lip kind of mentality. And what it does is to sanctify patience by uniting it to the very life of the Savior. It's not merely a humanitarian gesture. It's Christian, and Saint Benedict tells us it is at the heart of the monastic experience. For us, patience is practiced more often than not in the day-to-day experiences of community, the very bowels of our common life together.

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As Saint Benedict highlighted patience by climaxing the prologue with a final word about it, he then brings it at the close of the rule in chapter 72, where he urges the monks to support the physical and moral defects of one another with the greatest patience. And notice here how Saint Benedict actually talks about the weaknesses of the brothers as being that uniting factor of a community. It is in their mutual help and their forbearance of one another that they then together imitate the suffering of Jesus. It's always an interesting thing to visit another community. We often see one another in the monks who are there. There's our Brother Luke.

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There's our Father Conrad. Ah, there's our Father Placid. And especially as a newly elected abbot, did I notice things in four monasteries that I had visited in the English Benedictine congregation when I was in England in that summer of 1997. And one thing connected with this idea of patience is that I thought to myself when I was coming home, if I think we have characters at Conception Abbey, they put us to shame. They are notorious, and we are tame compared to them. But there's one major difference, I think, that I noticed. While we get annoyed at the idiosyncrasies of one another in my community, they seem to delight in them. While we get bent out of shape, they always seem to have a good laugh out of them.

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And I'd like to suggest, and I suggest to myself also, that we reflect seriously on how redemptive it is for us to bear patiently with one another, and patiently to offer one another that kind of fraternal concern or correction in imitation of Jesus' own suffering. I think if we can do that, we can build a more loving community, and it is precisely that love for one another in patience that will attract new members, because there is no stronger force in our world than genuine and simple love, and such love is really the fruit of patience. A tremendous amount of faith is called forth from us when we march headlong into what we know is going to be a sharing in the paschal mystery.

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A strong spirit of hope must be centered within us when we find ourselves in the midst of a struggle or a particular situation of pain that we did not plan on experiencing. The third chapter of St. Luke's letter to the Philippians brings to light the hope and the faith which the apostle experienced by his own entry into the paschal mystery. And I quote here from chapter three of the letter to the Philippians. Whatever gains I had, these I have come to consider a loss because of Christ. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and consider them so much rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having any righteousness of my own based on the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ Jesus. To know him and the power of his resurrection and sharing in his suffering by being conformed to his death

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so that I may one day then attain to the resurrection of the dead." It sounds very lofty, but Paul is talking to us about something very practical here. Practical yet demanding. Being faithful in the midst of struggle and apparent failure. And there is no one who demonstrates this more potently to us than Jesus himself. in his passion, being true to what he knew the Father was calling him to do, and not swerving in any way, but remaining faithful to the end. This notion of faith in the experience of failure calls for a tremendous amount of self-knowledge, a security of who we are before God, and who we are in our own eyes. Not too long ago, I was reading a book that was a collection of Peanuts cartoons.

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And there was one that touched rather poignantly on this topic. Sally was sitting at a table with two pieces of paper in front of her, one large and one small. And as she was writing on the large piece of paper, she says to Charlie Brown, I'm making a list of all the things I've learned in life. Well, actually I'm making two lists. And Charlie Brown asks her, why is one list longer than the other? And holding up the long list, Sally says, these are the things I've had to learn the hard way. I think that cartoon bears some truth in it. Sometimes we can be slow learners in the school of life. But I think it is also true that we learn things the hard way because often that's the way life is. It can be tough. It's not an easy road to traverse.

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And perhaps we are then more attentive when life is hard and challenging. When we are open and vulnerable, the Spirit can more easily lead us forth to a fuller expression of wisdom, compassion, and love, the very heart of our God-given humanity, to the image of God in which we were first created. Yet, how hard it is to open, to stretch our spirit, worn and fragile often from the pain of disappointment and failure, so that we can receive an even greater measure of God's love and comfort. Like most other experiences in life, we won't learn from failure if we don't encounter it, embrace it, love through it openheartedly, reflectively, intentionally, and expectantly.

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Yes, expectantly, because we believe that in the midst of all that pain, somehow God is doing something, and he is doing something wonderful within us. God is emptying us out in order to fill us with an experience of new life that will liberate us from our often own self-inflicted slavery. And therein lies the blessing, the hope and the peace which come with self-knowledge before God and before oneself. Experiences of pain and struggle, failure and sin, all become opportunities to look at some of the most important and fundamental questions that come before any one of us. Who am I? Who am I as a Benedictine monk? What are my God-given talents?

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How do I choose to live my life as a Benedictine monk? We wrestle with our uniqueness and we wrestle with the promises made to God and to the community. And this can be a bewildering experience when we lose confidence in ourselves and in our gifts. When we wonder about our ability to be able to give to others or find that our gifts are not always valued by others, especially those close to us, including ourselves. But by entering into my struggles and failures through reflection and prayer, I can learn some basic things about living well, both as a monk and as a human being. When I admit that I am not perfect and never will be, I see myself in right relationship with God and I begin to free myself.

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This freedom can allow for new creativity and generativity to emerge from within me. When I realize my own imperfections, I become less judgmental, more compassionate, and more encouraging of others because I can freely and willingly embrace my own clay feet. The gift of new life I have received in the experience of the Paschal Mystery should then encourage me to help others, to be more compassionate, more understanding, more forgiving, especially of my brothers in community in their time of need, because I know and embrace my own weakness. In concluding, I want to go back to the beginning where I emphasized that such a topic as the grace of failure is not bleak, really filled with hope.

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There's a line in Psalm 147 which is good instruction for us in this way. The Lord's delight is not in horses, nor his pleasure in a warrior's strength. The Lord delights in those who revere him, in those who wait, who wait for his love. Isn't that the truth? When we have had a hard time finding our way out of a situation that is tough, all we can do is wait for the Lord to be God. But when we do, we discover that God is to be found everywhere, in every place, and especially in the midst of the pain and struggle, because it is there that we are most willing to allow God to be God. When we experience healing from within, we know that we have been touched by God in a way that defies explanation, precisely because it is so sacred.

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Our life has been touched by the Almighty God. Such healings and blessings in this present life are pledges and firstfruits of divine favor toward us. like the healings that Jesus wrought in his earthly life. All these things point us toward God and toward God's success in us, toward the completion of a work that he is patiently pursuing in each of us. In her experiences of divine revelations, Julian of Norwich hears God saying to her, See, I am God. See, I am in all things. See, I never lift my hand off my work, nor ever shall without end." God's loving hand works in the midst of our passing over, our painful conflicts,

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our apparent failures and our sinfulness, only to transform them into new life and vitality. When we see and believe that our struggles and pains are the doors to new life, which must be passed through, we are on the way. Within our very failures, God's plan of love is going forward. and it will not fail. Christ our Lord, you have both taught us how to pray and how to live in communion with God our Father. May we never cease striving for deeper communion with the Father through you, to whom be all praise and glory forever and ever. Amen. In our life as Benedictines, we are daily nourished with the prayer of the Church, the Liturgy of the Hours.

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And St. Benedict reminds us that the opus Dei, as the work of God, is to be preferred to nothing else. There is a tremendous power of grace at work in those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours. And yet such grace is not easily perceived for it is not tangible or audible. It cannot be necessarily evaluated by the beauty in which the Liturgy of the Hours is rendered, for a community can, day in and day out, sing flat and yet be a powerhouse of charity and faith. It cannot be measured in the precision of the ritual accompanying the office. For a community can have even the simplest ritual which can lead it to the heights of devotion, which when it is done from the heart. Say what you will, the liturgy of the hours shapes a community to the extent that the members keep focused on what they are doing.

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And the grace of God, more potent than any human effort, shapes a community even when our minds and our hearts can be a thousand miles away. When we gather each day to be nourished by the Word of God and come ready to praise and thank Him for everything that comes into our lives, we can be transformed by that very action and by the prayer that accompanies it. Our prayer in common is essential to our way of life as monks. But our prayer in common is only one part of our total life of prayer. Our public prayer is balanced by what we might best call contemplative prayer, the prayer engaged in alone and often in silence. And contemplative prayer plays an essential role in our common prayer. Only four decades ago, our Liturgy of the Hours had little space for any silence in which reflection on the psalmody or the proclaimed word would lead us to lift up our own prayer to God in response to what God had first spoken to us.

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But the renewal of the liturgy has simplified our prayer so that we do not miss that essential element of true communion with God in the midst of our common prayer. The contemplative dimension of our common prayer demands that outside of common prayer, we are reflecting daily on the Word. hearing the voice of God therein and responding to it. And this is the heart of what I would like to talk about in this conference. And it's not so much how to look at contemplative prayer, but rather to look at the mystery of contemplative prayer, a mystery which is wonderfully transformative in our lives if we open ourselves to its power. I'd like to begin with a basic premise, and it's a premise that you may not have often thought of, but it is this.

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Contemplative prayer is an experience of the death and resurrection of Christ. Contemplative prayer is an experience of the death and resurrection of Christ. Now, what do I mean by that? In contemplative prayer, we seek communion with God, intimate union with Christ. Communion with Christ takes for granted the experience of passing over and entering into the paschal mystery. A Christian who accepts the invitation to prayer follows Jesus. For prayer is a process of being led by the spirit into the paschal mystery. And the scriptures themselves tell us of this. In a somewhat roundabout way, the evangelists have described Jesus' own experience of prayer.

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Recall with me how the synoptics tell of that experience, where following upon his baptism, Jesus goes out to the desert. Remember, biblically speaking, to go to the desert was to enter into communion with God. The desert was the place to be totally alone before the living God. Each of the evangelists says this in a distinct way. The evangelist Mark says with a more literal translation, straight away the spirit threw Jesus out into the desert, the Greek ekbalo. Less literally, the spirit drove Jesus out into the desert. The movement to the desert was led by the spirit and there Jesus encountered temptation.

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He entered into the mystery of suffering. Paschal mystery. Jesus took on the passing over of his ancestors whom God had once led out of Egypt and into the desert because it would be then in that desert that God would speak to their hearts and call them to relationship with himself. Saint Luke says, full of the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert in order to be tempted for 40 days. And notice once again, it is the Holy Spirit who leads Jesus to that place of communion where testing will take place. And finally, St. Matthew is even different from these two, where he says, Jesus was taken up by the Spirit, anekthe in Greek, giving the idea of some kind of a vision whereby Jesus, following on his baptism, was led into this experience of paschal prayer.

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The point is consistent throughout. Communion with God draws us into the very experience of Jesus, into his paschal mystery. And such was the experience of Jesus, and such will be the experience of us as his followers. In the desert, Jesus entered into the mysterious life of God. And this is what happens to us in contemplative prayer. We are drawn into a mystery that will only slowly and without order open for us. A tremendous experience takes place there because what happens is we move from knowing about God to knowing God. And think about that for a moment. When you know about something or someone, you have facts, you have information, you have data.

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And there is something clear and intelligible about the information that you have. But when you really come to know someone or something, something else happens. There is a complexity that enters in because we are now dealing with something or someone who is unique and with something that has a life of its own. So when you cross that line from knowing about to knowing, what was clear often becomes now opaque and what was sure can become uncertain. And what was calm and composed all of a sudden can become quite disconcerting. It can be quite bewildering to have the rug pulled out from under you by what someone says or does when we thought what we knew was coming next.

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We think we have things nailed down and understood and all of a sudden the tables have been turned upside down. This will be especially true in contemplative prayer when we, like Jesus, go out figuratively to the desert in the power of the Spirit. The unexpected will surely happen as the scriptures record so matter-of-factly. Moses, who went out to the desert, who was slow of speech, now is told to go and be God's spokesman before Pharaoh. Mary, who was a virgin, is told that she is going to bear a son, God's son. In such experiences, only trust and love can lead us to go forward. And at first that sounds very simple, simplistic, but it is exactly the point that is essential. Trust and love enable us to move forward toward God.

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The Christian tradition talks often about the Paschal Mystery at the heart of contemplative prayer. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and other mystics expound upon it for pages. And we all know the imagery. The dark night, the desert, the void, the cloud of unknowing, emptiness, abandonment, bearing the cross. But what we have to do in our own day and age is take those images and translate them into a language and experience that is ours today. How often do we hear ourselves saying things like this? I can never seem to balance work and prayer in my life. I struggle to maintain a state of inner silence. I really don't trust God enough to let go.

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And just when I think that I have, I find myself back where I had started. Or when God invites me to launch out into the deep, I find that I'm always keeping one foot on the ground, on the bottom, and wanting to swim back to shore. There's a line in Psalm 106, verse 24, which is filled with so much utter human frustration, but I think it sums up that struggle. Speaking of the people in the desert, it says, they scorned the land of promise. They had no faith in God's word. God had given Israel what he had promised, But not only did they spurn that gift, but they lost faith in the word of promise that had already been fulfilled before them.

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What a dark image of having lost faith. Yet strangely enough, when we find ourselves here, we are on the right road. The common experience of spiritual failure can often be the means that the Lord uses to wean us from our own limited ideas about the way our life and our prayer ought to go. We are forced to pray from a position of disillusionment and bafflement, and this can lead us then into the heart of the Paschal Mystery. The real cross we are asked to accept is to believe that Jesus is Lord of every situation in our lives. And in particular, he is also Lord of our prayer, as much as he is Lord of our chaos. From within our situation, in the pain and mire of it all,

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we have to listen to his words. And perhaps it may sound something like this. Do you think, Gregory, that my arm is too short to save you? Do you really think that your circumstances are going to thwart my plans for you? If Jesus is Lord of our prayer, then we are called to surrender in ways that we would have never dreamed. Ways that will empty us, but only to fill us with a peace that we would not have imagined. Part of the mystery of encountering Christ in prayer can be somewhat likened to those wonderful post-resurrection passages in the Gospels. And there, in those passages, we find a rare blend of familiarity and mystery. Jesus is simultaneously tender and mysterious.

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He is near and loving and yet not immediately recognized. He's playful and even awe-inspiring. He is with them, he eats with them, but to one he says, put your finger into my side, and to the other he says, do not touch me, do not cling to me. He comes behind close, closed doors, and in another scene, as soon as he is recognized, he disappears. Perhaps the most evocative scene is found in that last chapter of John's Gospel, with the miraculous catch of fish. Jesus calls out to the disciples from the shore, and it's only the beloved disciple who recognizes him and calls out, it is the Lord. Then after Peter swims to shore, Jesus invites him and the apostles to the breakfast that he cooks for them.

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And the text goes on to read, now none of the disciples dared to ask, who are you? For they knew that it was the Lord. Is that not the strangest logic you've ever heard? They knew and therefore they did not ask. But see, Jesus was not like Lazarus or the son of the widow. He was so different, so very different. And though he bore the wounds of his suffering and his death, Jesus was more alive than he ever had been before. And that's the way it is with Christ when there is a true union of prayer. Take it for granted that he is more alive to us than we are to ourselves. With a brotherly love, he keeps saying to us, your plans are too small.

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Let go of them. Let me take the lead. And that is when prayer takes on a new level of trust. It is a new uncharted path, often walked in darkness and uncertainty. But what we need to keep hearing is, your plans are too small. Let go of them. Let me take the lead. One of the areas that is adjacent to personal struggle in prayer is what the monastic tradition calls achchediya, not at all common, uncommon in the monastic life. It refers to weariness, boredom, disgust, and inner emptiness in the experience of prayer. And it can sound incongruous that those who devote themselves to prayer would come to a point where prayer is almost meaningless to them.

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But it's true. And some of the most significant of the early monastic figures, like Avagrius and Cassian, write extensively on Akshadia, which tells us that it's been around for a long, long time and probably will be to any of those who are devoted to a life of prayer. But as the experience of suffering is a noble place to enter into communion with Christ in prayer, equally so is that stooped posture of Akshadiya. Yet the Christian tradition of prayer tells us that boredom and disgust with prayer is really a graced place to be. Because what it does is to inaugurate the purifying process which is so necessary for genuine prayer. The purifying process is our apparent inability to get ourselves out of this state and into something more satisfying.

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But just being there has its purifying effects, if we are willing to wrestle with it, to see it as it is, a time of perfection, to wait upon God's mercy and redemptive liberation. What seems so hard, when in the experience of weariness and emptiness, is to know the difference between sin and suffering. Because part of suffering is often the experience of sinfulness. This sinfulness is more a state than it is an act. And some of the monastic writers speak of Achaedia as a desert experience, drawing on that imagery of the exodus experience in the scriptures. Think of it. That exodus experience, that time in the desert, what was it?

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It was thirst. It was rebellion. It was failure. It was sinfulness. And all of those are part of that same experience of Akchadiya. We thirst for an enriching relationship with God, where we are filled with peace and coming to a sense of communion with God. There's a sense of inner rebellion and failure mixed together because we can't seem to muster up enough strength to carry out our part of that relationship with God. And finally, sinfulness carries with it a natural guilt when we are not doing what is expected of us when it comes to prayer. That is the experience of the desert, and it is an essential experience. I'm not sure how many of you have experienced a desert, a real desert, in all its vastness, its emptiness, and its symbols of an absence of life.

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But in relation to prayer, the desert is not the desert unless it is too big for us. Wandering aimlessly for a time is essential to then be able to know the other side, which is the blessed oasis. Purification would cease to be a pain and would not purify if we could clearly know that it was merely purification. Life is not truly life unless in some way it is menaced by death or by loss, and we somehow have come through victorious. On the octave day of Easter each year, we hear the same Johannine Gospel. And it tells of the apostles being behind locked doors in fear. And Jesus comes to them, and the first word he says to them is peace, that is, healing and forgiveness.

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Jesus breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit, as the Father has sent me, so now do I send you. Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven. And those who are held bound, are held bound. How they would be able now to forgive, because they had known such powerful forgiveness. On that Easter night, the gift of the Holy Spirit's peace enabled the disciples to live joyfully in the memory of their failure. That was because Jesus's forgiveness made them into a new creation, greater and far more wonderful than his first creation. The apostles were overwhelmed by their sin of betrayal, the foundation of all sin, and they could only hide in fear.

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But when Jesus came among them, he just pushed aside their weakness and their sin and their infidelity, and he gave to them the depth of God's mercy. What they needed most, Jesus gave them, forgiveness. They had hit rock bottom and there was even a certain security there, the security of the truth of their infidelity. And that is important for all of us to find our true and real relationship before God, which is being a beggar at his door, holding out an empty bowl, a sinner who has an indisputable claim on the one who is called Jesus, because he alone can save us from our sins. And since I can pray only from this posture of a forgiven sinner, it becomes very clear what Christ meant when he said that willingness to forgive others for everything they have ever done to hurt us is a condition for prayer.

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My brothers, we are all bankrupt together. Forgiveness of all and everything becomes a condition for true prayer. To have attained fellowship and communion with the tax collector, whose prayer is, Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner, was certified as genuine by the highest authority, the author of the new commandment of love. In conclusion, I want to leave us with this simple reminder. True communion with God in prayer draws us into the Paschal Mystery. It will open up doors we did not expect. It will open wounds that we thought were healed. But in the end, it promises us the peace and strength we so desire and so need. And really, what better position for us to be in?

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A beggar at God's door, holding out an empty bowl, claiming Jesus alone as the one who can save us from our sins. At the end?

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Our true communion with God in prayer will draw us into the paschal mystery. One before that. Willingness to forgive others. Is the condition for which we ourselves will be forgiven. We hear it in the Our Father. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us. I mean, did you correct me the way he said it when Jesus walks in the room and says, we've seen the future, you know? He's not the least. He's in the bowels. They're bowels. In the bowels. I never thought of it.

[57:00]

He's the people that betrayed him. He sent him back. Yes. Well, he's beginning then. Yes. His first word to them is peace. It's healing. It's forgiveness. I don't even know him. And sometimes, you know, that can really be for us a way of being able to see what it is that has held us bound in a situation.

[58:10]

Maybe we're angry, angry as can be about something, and we can't seem to get out of that anger. Try as we might, but what we need to do is to forgive, sometimes even forgive ourselves. as well as forgiving another. What happened was, after he had shot the four monks, he went into the back pew of our church and took his own life. Well, and you know, that was one of the most powerful experiences, you know, in terms of, you know, a sense of that quiet voice within you.

[59:19]

Because I just kept telling the community, we have to forgive this man. We have no choice. If we don't, if we don't really forgive him from our hearts, We will be crippled. We will be crippled. And, you know, one of the things that was very helpful to us in the midst of that whole thing, when the sheriff had gone in to investigate this man's apartment where he lived, he was elderly, he was 71 years old, retired from the postal service, they found a large amount of antidepressant medication. But when they did the toxology report on his body, there was no trace of any medication. So he was a guy who was off his meds, probably bipolar. And that gave us a way to be able to at least understand that he was not in control of his mind and his actions.

[60:31]

Does anyone have a Bible with them here? To just kind of show you the impact, I'd like to just read something briefly to you. But again, it builds on just exactly what I've been talking about here, and an extremely powerful experience for our community, and it was right at that time. Okay, so what you have to imagine here at conception was this man had taken his life in our church, which was consecrated, so we had to re-consecrate the church.

[61:52]

Literally, his blood had run from the back of the church down to the steps of the sanctuary. The bishop had delegated me to be able to do that. But the next night, the first time we were back in our abbey church to pray, this was the reading that we heard. And I want to emphasize to you, this was just the Lectio Continua. This was not a reading chosen, but this is what we heard from Romans. Bless your persecutors. Never curse them. Bless them. Rejoice with others when they rejoice, and be glad with those in sorrow. Give the same consideration to all. Pay no regard to social standing, but meet humble people on their own terms.

[62:54]

Never pay back evil with evil. but bear in mind the ideals that all regard with respect. Be at peace with everyone. Never try to take revenge. Leave that to the retribution. As scripture says, vengeance is mine and I will repay. If your enemy is hungry, give him something to eat. If thirsty, something to drink. be not mastered by evil, but master evil with good. We heard God speak to us that night. So that sense of forgiveness was very potent, very powerful for us.

[63:55]

It's easy to have just a verbal thing, you know. Yes. But I take it from the old days, with the fields, we used to go out every spring with a flat thing, run it down and put rocks on some places like that. We'd get it every spring. It was the same box or somebody would bring it in the back or what, but they would just eat the help from below. And it's true, people tell you so often. So, you've forgiven someone, and you really have. Yes, and unforgiveness is right there, where it was in the first place. Yeah, we'll do it again, and have the doctor come back. Yeah, again, all set. All set, I figured it. It's hard to believe it, but I mean, that did lead up to a lot of forgiving. You know, Father Martin, one experience that I had, and this was a number of years ago, with a man in the context of spiritual direction, where he had to forgive someone, and the other party did not

[65:37]

see the need for forgiveness. And so it had to be a kind of a unilateral, a one-way sort of forgiveness. And this fellow really worked through this and thought he had, over a period of time, come to a resolution of this. And then, out of the clear blue, he was with someone else that was a mutual friend of this other person. And he heard the name mentioned, and he said, it was like a fist in my stomach. So, you know, I have said to people who have come to me and have said, you know, I need to forgive, but I can't. I just say, don't put it off. Don't put it off. It doesn't always come easy. And when you're ready for it, it may take a lot longer than you think if you haven't released yourself or striven to release yourself from that. How do you know you're not forgiven? How do you know?

[66:38]

Well, I think you come to know over a period of time. The more you find yourself at peace with the situation, you've been released. It's a grace, I think, that God gives to us. Say, I want to forgive myself. Yes. How do I know that I am forgiven, or that I have forgiven? Well, I think it takes time for you to be able to see if it has happened. It's not going to come to you like that, huh? But I think the more that you can have an experience of peace with regard to a situation, you'll know that you have been released. You have let it go, and it's gone. That's the way you experience it. Is it correct now? Yes, I think so. I think so. You know, it's very interesting, though, too, that the one or two people who came to me to tell me that they have struggled the most with the whole element of forgiveness in that murder situation there are the people who also have had physiological effects as a result of that.

[67:57]

What do you mean by that? It means that they have also had difficulties with things like one of them, who is very healthy, suffered a stroke. Another one, who had never been before, just finds himself very angry with high blood pressure. So there's physiological effects from that inability to be able to let go of it. It started when we were in Pennsylvania, where there were lots of tanks in the school. Yes. And many people were nearly cremated. Yes. Isn't that striking? The contrary.

[69:05]

Right now, in Iraq, they want to sign these executions. How are they dealing with that? Some are rejoicing, some are still cruising. Some are angry, and some are angry. And you know... Yes. Yes. Yeah, that becomes an important and powerful tool. The thing with ourselves, I think, honestly, we want to turn the century in this country, but we're very difficult to forgive ourselves.

[70:07]

And he said, as a matter of fact, you can. You just have to go old and barred. You were born in a settlement, you're broken, so there's no possible repair. But you can't be seated. Hmm, that's sad. That's so meaningful, but a lot of people also need the God, and people have taken, there's some awful God's wrath, some of the things are unbelievable, God's forgiveness. Read them, think of the context that you read it, I think that has to, that we can't forgive ourselves for not trying, that God forgives us. That's what He wants to do. We have to want to receive Him. We should be praying for it, we want to receive it. But we can't. In some certain things, folks think we can't. A lot of people can't. I was just reading an article here in one of your journals. And the author was speaking about the experience of being on a panel that was working with Palestinians and Jews to try to establish reconciliation, and seeing how deeply rooted hatreds are for centuries, to bring people beyond that.

[71:44]

Anyway, the author just said that that was just an experience that as she had never imagined, you know, what that could mean. I'm going to talk more about forgiveness tonight. Forgiveness and reconciliation. This was more about prayer and paschal mystery. You know, to follow on Brother Gabriel's question there, too, We came to discover within a short period of time, literally hours after the shooting, that the man who had shot our monks was alienated from his family.

[73:05]

He had been divorced and had not seen his daughter in over twenty years. He had not seen his sole brother in over ten years. And so He had literally no family to bury him. So we asked to give him a Christian burial ourselves, but the brother intervened and just said that he wanted the body cremated. He had more power, obviously, than we did in that situation. And I tried twice to invite the man to come to the abbey, or if he wanted need to come and meet him in Kansas City, but he did not want it. It was all just too painful for him.

[73:53]

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