The Mercies of God

I am in Bishop, CA giving a set of lectures on St. Paul, St. Therese and the Mercy of God. Tonight we will discuss the St. Therese. One important grace she recieved is called the Christmas grace. One Christmas after mass, she was very excited when the family returned home. She could not wait because of a family tradition – something like getting her stockings stuffed, only I think they used shoes. As she was headed upstairs, she heard her exhausted father sigh and say something along the lines of “I am glad this is the last year for this!”
Up until this moment of her life, Therese was very sensitive. Normally, a comment like this would have caused her to break down in tears. Didn’t her father care about her feelings? Didn’t he want to make her Christmas special? What he just said seemed so cold. But it was just at this moment she recieved a special grace. She felt the emotion to cry but she also felt the grace to make a decision. By Christ’s help she chose not to worry about her own Christmas, but to think of everyone else and make Christmas special for them. She chose to offer her feelings to Christ as a present, a gift, a little sacrifice. Rather than be ruled by her own sensitivity, she chose to be ruled by what Christ desired in that moment. So she re-entered the room with a great smile, hugged and kissed her father, and was a source of joy for the whole family. Later in her life, she would reflect how the spiritual life is all about responding to grace in these little moments. Rather than allowing any moment to be wasted on her own feelings, she saw every moment as an opportunity to offer her heart to Christ. She would call this strategy of living by love in each moment “the little way” or “the way of divine childhood.” It is a way of life whereby we live relying on the grace of Christ to provide us what we need in the little things that come up – so that we no longer live out of our own emotional neediness – but we live by love of God.

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Holy Spirit and the Gift of Prayer

Prayer is meant to be a heart to heart – my heart with the heart of Christ in the heart of the Church. It involves intense thinking and even more intense affectivity, at once very personal and extremely interpersonal. To enter the heart of God is a journey that takes us into our own hearts and the hearts of all those whom the Lord loves. In the beginning, imagination, thought, feeling and intuition are helpful aids. But as we go deeper, anything we can naturally do falls silent. In the stillness of our weakness, limits and imperfections, we discover a divine power at work. It is not the kind of thing we can generate by willing it. Rather, our job is to accept it as a gift. It is the unfolding of the greatest gift of all – the Gift of the Holy Spirit Jesus promises to lavish on those He loves.

Sometimes prayer is approached as an intellectual exercise – I try to force myself to think pious thoughts or at least those kinds of thoughts that people say I ought to think when I pray. I tried to do this and it is a very dry, disatisfying experience. It seems to me that many people give up on prayer because they think that this is all there is. While it is true that thinking can be important for prayer — thinking without heart is just cold.

On the other hand, emotive prayer not rooted in the truth is a betrayal of the heart. If prayer is just emotion stirred by prosaic associations, we have not really gone beyond ourselves and into the heart of God. Instead, however good we might feel, we are locked in the merely therapeutic. Yes, St. Bernard might concede that in such prayer we love ourselves for our own sakes and we might even be able to love God for our own sakes. But this prayer does not lead us to love God or ourselves for God’s own sake. It is not really a heart to heart.

The fact is that prayer is not a matter of simply thinking or feeling – it reaches out for something greater than these limited activities can achieve on their own. This is because the truth is more than mere thought and affection. But prayer can produce beautiful thoughts profoundly beyond the power of any natural intellect to comprehend and stir affections so deep that there are no words that can express them. This is what happens when prayer is a heart to heart with the Living God. He not only wants us to share our thoughts with Him, but He wants to share His divine thoughts with us. He not only suffers with us our own misery, but when we are ready He yearns to share that for which His Heart aches.

The psalms witness to this kind of prayer. Whenever they are prayed, they are a living testimony to the heart of God. St. Anthanasius insists that the psalms teach us how to feel in the same way the rest of the Scriptures teach us how to think. This is because God has chosen to reveal Himself: what He thinks, feels and lives. But he not only wants to share his affection and thoughts, He yearns that we let His divine thoughts and the movements of his heart to transform the way we see Him, ourselves and the whole world around us.

This is why prayer is so vital for the Christian life. As long as we are limited by merely human concerns and natural ways of seeing things, we lack the vision and strength to live out the will of God. But when we grow in prayer and familiarize ourselves with the priorities of God’s heart, a supernatural power is communicated to us and we participate in his very life through faith. This experience is described in so many beautiful ways by those who have plummeted the depths of prayer. John van Ruusbroeck describes this as “the divine impact”, John of the Cross describes a joyful discovery of the reflection of the Bridegroom, and Elisabeth of the Trinity speaks of a simple and loving movement. The source of such prayer is not our own creaturely activity – it is actually produced in us by the gift promised to us by Christ before He ascended into our heavenly homeland. Jesus constantly pours out his heart to the Father that we might recieve this the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Father never ceases to answer the prayer of His Son by sending the Holy Spirit always anew into the hearts of those who believe in Jesus. The divine counselor is come upon us who constantly teaches us all things, who St. Paul says actually prays inside our hearts with “sighs too deep for words” This Advocate ushers us into our true homeland: communion with the Holy Trinity available to us right now in this present moment which is eternity “begun and still in progress.”

The gift of this kind of prayer is what was lavished on the Church at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is constantly coming to us in new and unexpected ways – inebriating us in the love of God. He never ceases to reveal the depths of Christ heart to those who are open to his interior promptings. All that is required of us is what has always been required of those who want to know the living God – an open and obedient heart, ever ready to respond, “Let it be done to me according to your word.”

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The Great Secret of Christian Prayer? Make a Good Beginning!

When I was a teenager, I remember finding a book called Beginning to Pray by the late Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. There were two things about this book that helped me begin to pray. First, he used the Scriptures to explore our encounter with Christ.  Second, he did not present himself as a prayer “guru.” His approach was much more humble. He admitted that he could only write a book about beginning to pray because he himself was only a beginner. Indeed, he explained, he began to pray everyday.

The Word of God is so beautiful, the very food of prayer.  Sometime, I would like to post only on this.  But for now I will just mention in passing the great teaching of Athanasius and Antony of the Desert.  Namely, we find in the Sacred Scriptures not only what the Lord thinks but also what He feels.  The Holy Bible is a window, a threshold, a passage into the very heart of God and at the same time, a pathway into the deepest truth about what it means to be man.  Christ Jesus lived and breathed the Scriptures: He used them in his prayer to the Father and in all his discourses to those whom the Father sent to Him.  The Word of God makes conversation with the Lord possible.  This is why St. Patrick in his own prayer binds himself to “the Word of God who gives me speech.”

I knew this before I ever read Bloom.  But the way he explained the Holy Gospels in relation to prayer helped me see this even more.  As I began to pray, I began to love God’s word in a deeper way.  They fed my desire to know God and helped me to seek him.  But this desire could only grow if I stayed faithful to another important lesson I learned from the Metropolitan.  He also taught me the lesson of beginning.  And in this post, this is the point I would like to develop.

This lesson of making a good beginning is also part of the teaching of Athanasius and Antony of the Desert.  One of the earliest works on Christian prayer is written by St. Athanasius about his childhood hero, Antony of Egypt, a 3rd Century Egyptian hermit.  It is called The Life of Antony.  Using Antony’s life and sayings, Athanasius explained how it is good for Christians to encourage one another not only with the Scriptures, but also with their own words.  Every Christian, no matter how advanced, must begin anew each day. This discipline of beginning, of making prayer a life priority, is what deeply impressed me.  In fact, encouraging one another to make this beginning is the purpose of this blog.  Among Antony’s first encouagements recorded by Athasusius is, “Let us renew our devotion each day, as if beginning for just the first time.”

While this is true for everyone who wants to follow the Lord, not everyone relates to this 3rd Century Egyptian. In fact, very few of us are called to enter into the wilderness as a way of life.  But we are called to pray nonetheless.  We are made to pray and not to pray is inhuman.  That is, there is levels of human potential that are never realized when we fail to pursue the Lord in prayer.  St. Augustine’s Confessions begin with this insight.  Though we are but the humblest part of God’s great creation, God made us to know and love Him – not because He gets some advantage from this, but because He wanted us to share in his truth, goodness and beauty.  To praise someone or something is to participate in its goodness somehow.  The goodness of God is the unimpeded pouring forth of pure love.  The uncontainable joy of love is at the heart of all that is.  God made us to praise Him because He wanted us to share in his joyful happiness.  This divine desire is what drove Antony to seek the Lord in the Desert.  It is what moved Athanasius to spend his life teaching about Christ.  And God’s yearning desire for friendship with us is what moves us to begin to pray.

Most of us must find a way to pray in the midst of what John Paul II liked to call, “the modern metropolis.” Praying in the midst of the modern metropolis means among other things we must make a new beginning, today and everyday within the real life situations we find ourselves. In the midst of commuting and traffic, work and family life, malls and computers, we need those few minutes thourghout the day where we turn to the Lord so that He can remind us of his great love and who we really are in his eyes.  We also need longer periods of prayer.  In this love we discover the great purpose and mission He has entrusted to our care. Without the discipline of prayer, we are lost in a sea of anxieties and distractions that rob us of the fullness of life God desires us to have.  In the wild tides of the modern metropolis, prayer is how we keep our eyes fixed on the One who teaches us how to walk on water.

Every Christian is a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth, whom the Scriptures reveal as a man of prayer. To be a disciple means to follow the discipline of one’s teacher. Christ’s discipline begins and ends with prayer. His prayer revealed the deepest desires of his heart and only those who enter into his prayer really come to understand these desires. The most intimate of these was offered the night before he died, “Father, I will that where I am, those whom you have given me may be there with me so that they might contemplate the glory you have given me from before the creation of the world.”

This prayer of Jesus, uttered with full knowledge of his impending passion and death, assumes we understand what glory the Father gave and continues to give to Jesus. Glory is the radiance of personal greatness, and true glory is almost always hidden in this world. The one who sees someone in his glory really knows the truth about that person. To see the glory of the Lord is to know who he is. The glory of Christ is men and women living life to the full. It is for this very reason he came into the world.

Now this opens up one of the greatest truths about Christian prayer, and today I can only touch on it briefly as part of the conclusion of this rambling reflection.  Christian prayer is not primarily about techniques, even if techniques are used in it.  Even those who master a technique are not anymore holy because they have mastered it.  This is because Christian prayer is about a personal and ecclesial relationship with the Lord.  He alone reveals the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Holiness or friendship with God is primarily a gift that God gives when and how He wants.  A technique, at best, disposes our hearts for this gift.  But God may give the gift to a child just as much as to an old monk.  No great technique but the humble cry of a suffering heart moves God to grant the friendship He wants for us.

This is why there are no “gurus” in Christian spirituality but only childlike saints.   Other religions have their old men who live on mountains, carefully relating secret techniques to provide access to hidden powers which they have spent their whole lives trying to master.  The only Master of Christian prayer is a capenter’s son from a poor village in Galilee who was rejected, mocked, scourged and crucified at the age of 33.  All of our saints are those who, even in old age, humbly accepted nothing more than being a child of God.  Their prayer was more about learning to trust God in their weakness than the mastery of a technique by which they might access hidden power or some special knowledge.  Their only secret: to begin anew everyday with the determination to listen to God’s Word and obey it with all their heart.

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When I Can no Longer Pray

“When I can no longer pray, I play!” Bl. Elisabeth of the Trinity

Blessed Elisabeth was a Carmelite nun who died in 1906 at the age of 26. Although one of the first to read the Story of a Soul by her contemporary Therese of Lisieux, Elisabeth differed from her older sister in several ways – one of which was her career as a pianist and witness as a lay person in the world before her entrance into Carmel.

In a certain sense, this childhood exclamation about playing piano when she could not pray indicates that prayer is never really impossible, it just takes different forms. Sometimes we just are not able to gather ourselves together to put our hearts into formal times of prayer. Then we offer what we can. If all we can offer is playing the piano – or whatever else is good, beautiful and true – this is exactly what pleases the Lord.

Prayer, music and spiritual growth were all closely related for Elisabeth. As a teenager, she was a recognized pianist who loved Tchaikovsky, Chopin and many other great composers. Someone asked her how she was able to be so composed in front of audiences at such an early age. She explained that all she did was turn her mind to God and the music flowed through her. This contemplative approach would characterize her whole life. Indeed, her writings have a musical quality about them – it was as if she continued to let this music flow even when she was not at the piano. It just took a new form.

When she could no longer play piano after entering the Carmelite monastery in Dijon, she focused on interior music, the music of the heart. She imagined her emotions and thoughts are like the strings of a harp. It takes effort to keep one strings in tune, but when one does, the Holy Spirit plays the most beautiful melodies, melodies she considered a real song of praise. For her, the purpose of the spiritual life is to become the praise of God’s glory, praise that takes up what she calls the great song, “canticum magnum.”

She asserts that this song is what Christ sung in his heart as he suffered on the Cross. Elisabeth learning to sing this song means completely drinking in the Father’s will. This goes beyond merely doing something external. It refers to a complete surrender of heart. Precisely because it involves the fullness of the his humanity, the music of Christ’s heart is a sacrifice of praise pleasing to the Father and at the same time, these interior movements are redemptive, bringing men and women back to God. Now, without God, such a song of the heart is impossible. But because we are joined to Christ by faith, the Lord’s song is our song. He himself gives us the music. Elisabeth’s contemplation of this interior movement of Christ stands behind her own petition inviting Jesus to come into her heart as “Adorer, Restorer, and as Savior.”

This sort of identification with Christ has roots in the writings of St. Paul who believed that he no longer lived his own life, but that even now Christ lives within him. The life of Christ is a life filled with the Holy Spirit, a life driven by grace-filled motives, by that divinely inspired desire to fulfill with every once of humanity one has the will of the Father. In the theological current of Elisabeth’s time, theologians insisted that through faith and the Holy Spirit, deep affections in the heart of Christ can be communicated into the heart of the believer in such a way that the believer and Jesus become of one mind and one heart. The music which flowed from the very heart of Christ was the same music that Elisabeth wanted to flow through her heart as well.

This stands in the face of the tendency of some to reduce the Christian life to the mere observance of a moral code. Catholic saints and mystics have consistently taught that living faith is the true font of Christian Charity. For them, interior likeness to Christ by grace precedes any true imitation of His life through our actions. In fact, without the grace of Christ, imitating Him is impossible.

It can be so very difficult to remain faithful to our dedication to the Lord and in our love for one another. Any effort will fail if we are only concerned about the externals and think we can be self-reliant. Imitation of Christ and faithfulness to the love He has called us to demands that we rely on Him alone. The interior life He alone can give informs not only how we relate to God and ourselves, but also how we are to live with others. Elisabeth herself would beg the Lord to come into her especially at those moments she felt weak and vulnerable, incapable of going on.

St. Paul was a great teacher for her on this point. His conviction that the strength of the Lord was sufficient, that this strength reaches perfection in our weakness gave her great hope. In his teachings, we are conformed to the Crucified God, the One who loves unto the end. Since the Lord loves in the face of abandonment, betrayal, anguish, and great thirst, so too can we also love and believe in love.

Sometimes it does indeed feel like prayer is impossible – but it is always possible. We just need to offer it in a different way. In those more distressing moments when God seems most absent, when it is most difficult to lift our hearts to him, we can still act and live believing that the power of his love is mysteriously at work, making all things new – even when we cannot understand how. So when one kind of prayer seems impossible, when we just do not know what to say or what to ask for – we can always offer ourselves in silence and in faith to Holy Spirit and let him play on our heart strings. This is the music of Christ’s song echoing through us for the glory of God and for those whom he has entrusted to our hearts.

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The Spiritual Classics

This week I provided the final lecture for a class entitled the spiritual classics. This concludes a course that I have had the privilege of offering for the last ten years to men in their very first year at our seminary. We call this year “The Spirituality Year.” It is a year of prayer and community which prepares men for the six years of study required for the priesthood. The courses we offer in this context, including Spiritual Classics, are all non-academic in nature. This means these courses mainly introduce seminarians to the whole idea of making personal appropriations through a prayerful reading of the texts. During the year they also study the Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the same way.

The purpose of Spiritual Classics is to expose seminarians to the wisdom of the saints, especially those who wrote about prayer and growth in the spiritual life. Using the Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church as reference points, this year we surveyed selected writings from St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, Bl. Charles de Foucauld, St. John of the Cross, St. Therese of Lisieux, and Bl. Elisabeth of the Trinity. We concluded the course with brief reflections on Pope Benedict’s Spes Salvi and Deus Caritas Est.

A theme throughout the course is the unique importance of personal prayer and the greatness of vocations dedicated to helping people grow in prayer. In particular, I always want the men to understand that pursuing the priesthood is a great and noble enterprise because there is nothing more beautiful than to lead souls into union with God and into the communion of the Body of Christ. The writings of some of the saints and mystics, particularly of the 20th Century, draw our attention to this great task. Although all of us bear responsibility to one another to this end, priests have a special mission, an irreplaceable role. During the Year of the Priest which will start in June, I will post on this idea. For now, at the end of a semester, I am very proud of these students and what they endeavor. They are great and generous men. For them, this is not an end but a beginning. Indeed, they are all about to make a month long Ignatian retreat – so keep them in your prayers.

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Viva Cristo Rey!

The seminarians of St. John Vianney in Denver, Colorado provided a compelling performance of a very poignant story. It is the story of a thirty six year old Jesuit priest who loved his people more than his own life and the story of political authorities who hated God and godfearing people. It is the story of the family that loyally supported their courageous son and brother come what come may, and the story of a government which tried to destroy him. It is the story of the power of prayer over the power of violence. It is the story of the inhumanity of men when they turn away from God and how one man’s zeal for the Lord was able to help some of them find salvation and rediscover what it means to be human.

“Long live Christ the King” are the last words of a modern martyr. Padre Miguel Pro SJ’s witness shows the greatness of our religion and the irrational pettiness of a society that sets itself against God and religion. At the time, the Mexican leader Plutarco Calles enforced laws against the Catholic Church. Mass, confession and even praying the rosary were all punishable offenses. To protect the clergy as far as possible, bishops and religious communities developed plans to remove clergy, but some priests chose to stay and minister to the people. From 1926 – 1929, 160 priests were executed along with hundreds more lay men, women and children.

On the heels of the Russian revolution, there was a wide spread belief that religion was holding up progess. If only people could be liberated from God, the would be more devoted to improving their lot in this life. Even today, there is a popular belief that the real cause of war and misery is religion. Belief in God and practice of one’s own faith is presumed to be irrational by many. But such prejudice proved prosaic when throughout the 20th century godless regimes showed impious men were the most inhumane men of all. The persecution of the Church in Mexico and the martyrdom of Padre Pro is part of this larger political story.

Part of the reason things got so out of hand was the story of persecution was not really known. Only journalists sympathetic to the cause of Mexican socialism were permitted to report on positive achievements, and even these journalists highly monitored by the government. Irrationality often leads to rashness – and the rash decision of the Mexican authorities to publically execute a popular 36 year old priest to bring the populace in line would draw the attention of the world and encourage believers to stand up. The anti-clerical laws of Calles would come to an end.

There was a wonderful contrast of the playfulness and joy of Christian family life against the sober malicious emnity of godless officials. Padre Pro himself is shown to be an adventurous man who loves life – against fearful men who seem rather lifeless. Although he is the one who is martyred – he and his brothers are the ones who really live.

This is the historical backdrop for the play performed at St. John Vianny Theological Seminary last night and to be performed again this evening. Deacon Mauricio Bermudez (soon to be ordained priest) played Pro – shoot, he looked almost just like the saint! But there was something fitting, something proportionate, something beautiful in seeing seminarians play out this story. It was as if they were revealing to us why they have the courage to enter the priesthood today. True, priests and seminarians are not being shot – but their reputations often get murdered – especially by the very people they have given their lives to serve. So, they identify with Pro – a man despised by his own nation, but who was completely devoted to serving those who most needed the Lord.

For more on his life, I found a couple good websites :
http://puffin.creighton.edu/jesuit/pro/pro_links.html
http://catholicism.org/padre-pro.html

The play spoke to me about prayer – and its importance not only for the person who prays, but for the whole society in which he lives. Today, for many, prayer is a sort of therapeutic escapism. It is not really connected with apostolic fruitfulness. Programs, even religious programs, are more fruitful than wasting time with God – or so it is thought. But this play which our men performed so well tells a different story. If we really want to change the world and make it a more human place — prayer is the most important and most human means of all. Men who pray find courage to go where others would run. They see the human and find ways to speak directly to it, even when it is disguised in the inhumane. Such men are never oppressed – they are the one’s who are able to cry out, “Viva Christo Rey!

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Adoration, Silence and the Lamp of Fire

Hunger for silence is the sign of spiritual maturity. This saying is attributed to John Paul the Great and reminds me of the program he proposed to the Church after the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. He called the Church to gaze on the face of Christ. Learning to gaze on the face of Christ takes us into a mystery of great silence – not just the absence of noise, but a peaceful silence of heart that only the Lord himself can produce. The Carmelite mystics explain that it is in Christ’s adoring silence that a Lamp of Fire begins to burn within.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church #2628 identifies adoration as one of the forms of prayer encompassing an attitude primary to all authentic prayer, an attitude that blends humility and hope in our approach to God. Externally, adoration expresses itself when we kneel down, fold our hands, and close our eyes. But more important than these external gestures that dispose us to adore the Lord is the interior movement of heart, a movement that should inform everything we express in prayer.

When we glimpse the incomprehensible transcendance of the Lord, His holiness, over anything and everything else that is, especially over “self”, a certain awe grips our hearts and we fall humbly silent before Him. Those who surrender to this awe more and more through their faithfulness to prayer discover a deep yearning for this adoring silence. That is because this silence is not a mere therapeutic experience of non-activity. For the overworked and exhausted, such silence can be very important but it is not the adoring silence of Christian prayer. Rather the silence of adoration is a humble openess to the Lord’s super activity, an active receptivity to the overwhelming and unimaginable power of God. Those who embrace the mystery of the vigilant silence have a sense of exaltation in their hearts. They understand the words of Mary, “My spirit exalts in God my savior.”

When we are moved like this, it is such a personal experience that we are tempted to think we are the only ones who have ever had it. But then we notice others folding their hands and closing their eyes after a powerful homily or during a beautiful hymn. I have seen some people not move for hours, they are so enveloped in this prayer. Others, like the Carthusians, have accepted vocations in which their whole way of life is centered in this prayer. Very few are willing to share the movement of their hearts at these moments.

Those who begin to pray soon discover that adoring silence characterizes their conversations with the Lord. Elisabeth of the Trinity, a twenty six year old Carmelite nun, just weeks before her death in 1906, identifies this movement of prayer as an “ecstacy of love” and the “beautiful praise” that is “sung eternally in the bosom of the tranquil Trinity.”

Ecstacy is not merely an emotional trip but a spiritual journey. The word actually means “to go out from oneself.” Elisabeth well understood how adoration rescues us from self-preoccupation. It makes God the center of our hearts. At the same time, it involves us in a search for the face of Christ within us, within those painful places – memories, feelings – we would rather avoid. When we discover the face of Christ gazing on us in love in the midst of our own brokeness – the brokeness has no more power over us. Before Christ, human misery can no longer imprison us within ourselves. We discover real freedom when the Lord leads us out through this misery into the abyss of his mercy. For the Christian, true ecstacy in prayer is like the journey revealed in Psalm 23, “though I walk through the valley of death, I fear not for you are with me.”

If we consider adoration as a going out of self, we better understand what Elisabeth intends to convey when she attributes adoration to the inner life of the Trinity. In the bosom of the Trinity, that is in the very communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Elisabeth ‘hears’ adoration as a song of praise.

Notice that her vision of heaven is not something static or boring. I think anyone who actually believes God is like that will never learn to pray. Why should anyone pray if in the end we wind up with something lifeless? In us, there is a passion to thrive the rebels against the temptation of nihilism. Even under the shadow of the certainty of death, we do not want to perish, but to live. This passion was put there by God himself. God is himself the thriving happiness which is the source of all beatitude. He is so filled with life and love that only those with great passion can find Him. And yet He yearns for us to find Him and in Him to realize the perfection of all our noble human potential. We are talking about the total freedom to love – to give oneself to God and others in a communion of unending love. To live like this is completely opposed to anything boring or static.

Heaven is a place where nothing inhibits love. And we all know our finest moments in life are precisely those moments when we love without counting the cost, when we give everything for the sake of the beloved – whether a spouse, a child, a stranger or God. These moments of strength, courage and freedom are such gifts. They allow us to glimpse who we really are. Imagine yourself in your finest moment — only this time the moment never ends. It is with this kind of love the Jesus adores the Father from all eternity — it has all the force and power of great music, or rather, this is the source of all music. Flowing from the heart of the Trinity, Elisabeth ‘hears’ a symphony of love in which our own silent adoration somehow participates. Elisabeth understands this graced participation as Christ adoring the Father within us through our faith in Him.

Perhaps the most beautiful attempts to express this idea is contained in the writings of St. John of the Cross. Especially in Living Flame, the Spanish mystic describes an intimate experience of God in terms of “Lamps of Fire” (LF 3). Those who fully enter into the prayer of adoration discover that their journey into God has allowed God to journey into them – that is, has allowed God to be present in new ways. The warmth and light of God permeates their every action – this to such an extent their very presence strengthens and enlightens those around them. Elisabeth would say that even in their most weakest and human moments, the Lord’s eternal resounds through them.

How does silent adoration lead to a life filled with such love? Elisabeth and John of the Cross speak about a humble loving acceptance of persecutions, tribulations, nights, dryness, and other tests. By having the courage to continue to adore in the midst these great trials, joining his song of praise in those crucifying moments of our lives, we learn the secret of gazing on the face of Christ crucified by love. This allows us to be completely surrendered to God, because keeping our eyes fixed on Him, nothing can overwhelm us but His infinite love. And so the reason we come to yearn for adoring silence. When we catch, even for an instant, the look of love in his eyes, that powerful yearning for our happiness, nothing can separate us from Him and his warmth and light in us becomes, even in the most bitter cold darkness, a Lamp of Fire.

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Catherine of Siena – passion for truth

Tommorrow will be the feast of Catherine of Siena. Check out http://tiny.cc/cpJpt for a little on her history. She is an important figure for those who see a rediscovery of prayer as the force of renewal in the Church. Because she put her devotion to Christ first, she found herself with a spiritual mission to help restore the life and unity of Christ’s body. Some of her efforts met with a little success. But as she approached her death at the age of 33, her lifetime of effort in building up the Church seemed to be in vain. Corruption, scandal, cowardice – and most of all indifference – seemed to infect the Church even more. (For more on her life, go to http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03447a.htm.) Yet she never lost hope and she persevered in prayer. This is because she understood the love and mercy of God.

She was uneducated, but in 1377, by a miracle, she learned to write. Even so she retained secretaries to whom she dictated most of her thoughts. Her master work on the spiritual life is known as the Dialogues. These are conversations between her soul and God the Father. God the Father reveals his deep love for his Son and his plan to build up the Church. One of the beautiful aspects of this conversation is the Father’s explanation for how each soul can come to know Jesus.

Christ is the bridge to the Father and we cross this bridge by allowing our hearts to be pierced by what the Lord has done for us. The passion of Christ reveals at once the truth about who God is and who we are in his sight. For her, among the greatest blocks to the spiritual life is ignorance. Knowledge of God and knowledge of self go hand in hand in progressing toward spiritual maturity. But the knowing is not simply an intellectual trip. It as the kind of knowing informed by the loving affection of a real friendship. The friendship she describes in tender terms evokes the deepest joys and sorrows all at once.

The gift of tears, so central to early Dominican spirituality, is a beautiful part of this description. She presents those holy affections as the only proper response to the great love revealed in Christ crucified. These tears move us away from sin and into the very heart of God. She describes this as a journey that begins with kissing the feet of Jesus and entering into his wounded side. For her, intimacy with the Lord is always through the Cross and informed by a profound gratitude and humility.

One other beautiful feature of her spirituality is her understanding of virtue. This understanding is not quite classical in that she goes beyond the generic definition of a virtue as a good habit. Instead, she addresses a problem that is related to life in the Church. She notices that different Christians excel at different virtues. One might have a special aptitude for the art of getting on with others and is a special source of justice in the community. Another may be especially able to enter into the heart of someone enduring great difficulty and brings to the Church a particular awareness of mercy. Still another might have a profound gift of prayer. The question she takes up is why has the Father given different gifts to different members of the Body of Christ.

In the Dialogues, the Father explains to her that He has distributed his bountiful gifts in this way so that each member of the Body of Christ must rely on all the other members and at the same time each member bears a particular responsibility to support the Body of Christ commensurate to the gifts he has been given. In other words, his has distributed his gifts in a manner that disposes us to love one another. And the Father is counting on this mutual love, this genuine fellowship. It is part of His plan that as we cross Christ the Bridge we enter into communion with Him not merely individually, but together as a family.

The family of God requires a new kind of love, a love which only God can give us. A beautiful foundation is laid for what will later be understood as a “call within a call,” that particular mission each one is entrusted with in the eternal loving plan of God. On one hand, answering this call involves some suffering – just as Mother Theresa in our own time discovered. But those who endure this would not have it any other way. There is a certain joy and fullness of life that one discovers when one generously embraces the loving plan of the Father. The possibility of this joyful fulness makes Catherine’s message to the Church dynamically attractive.

For those beginning to pray, Catherine sheds light on the importance of truth, devotion to Christ and the life of the Church. These things organically hang together in her vision of the spiritual life so that growing in prayer goes beyond the merely therapeutic: it opens up the possibility of fully thriving, of living life to the full.

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Christ thirsts for our Love – an insight of St. Therese

There were two great contentemplative mystics from the 19th Century who continue to have an impact on the way the Church understands prayer and the spiriitual life. Therese of Lisieux and Elizabeth Catez were late 19th century contemporaries and Carmelites. They both plummeted the depths of prayer and reached the heights of sanctity. Their messages, while different, are complementary. This is due not only to their Carmelite spirituality, but also because Elisabeth was among the very first people to read Therese’s autobiography, Story of a Soul. Less than a year after the death of Therese, the Carmelites in Dijon shared this edited collection of texts with a local youth minister profoundly gifted with a life of prayer, thinking that it might encourage her own vocation. They could not have known that this work would blow wide open a new vision of prayer and spirituality for the future Elisabeth of the Trinity.

To shed light on what Elisabeth grasped in the writings of St. Therese, it is helpful to refer to a letter which in all likelihood Elisabeth never saw. Known as LT 196, Therese wrote to Sr. Marie of the Sacred Heart right around Sept. 13, 1896, trying to provide her with an explanation for her approach to the spiritual life. Therese helped form young women who came to the Carmelite Monastary in Lisieux – a small town west of Paris. To provide formation, she developed a body of teaching she called “The Little Way.”

Rather than drawing attention to great heroic acts of the faith performed in a way that others might notice, Therese proposed the ideal of spiritual childhood. In this ideal, all the emphasis was on trusting the loving goodness of God, the Father instead of one’s own accomplishments in religion and prayer. She considered this a new spiritual invention – not unlike the elevator. Instead of struggling up a stare case of trying to do things to please God, this “Little Way” focused on doing everything out of love for God. It provided a way of living the discipline Christian life through humble acts of love rooted in a prayerful awareness that the Lord was in control – the most important thing would be to trust in his merciful love. Therese of Lisieux went so far as to offer herself to God as an oblation to his merciful love – generously accepting all the graces God yearned to give but no one else would accept. She understood that by doing this, God would make her into an instrument of his love for others. The key insight to understanding her discipline of spiritual childhood, however, does not shed as much light on what someone is expected to do as a child of God as much as it illumines the intensity and extent of Christ’s love.

In this letter, Therese roots the ideal of being a little child as part of a response to Christ’s love for us. It is especially moving in its reference to the thirst with which Jesus suffers for our love. But leading up to this insight, Therese reflects on an ancient Christian truth and an image celebrated by John of the Cross. Namely, it is our love that makes us pleasing to the Lord and Saint John of the Cross describes this love as fire – an intense flame in this life and a blazing furnace in the next (LF 1, 16). Please forgive my poor translation of the text:

“I understand so well that only love can render us pleasing to God so that this love is the only good I strive for. Jesus is pleased to show me the only way which leads to this Divine Furnace, this road is the abandonment of a little child who sleeps without fear in the arms of the Father: ‘If anyone is little, let him come to me’ says the Holy Spirit through Solomon, and this same Spirit of Love has said that “mercy is granted to the small.”

The letter goes on to explain, “Offer to God sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving.” Behold everything which Jesus reclaims for us: there is no need for our works, but only our love … He thirsts for love. Ah, I feel it more than ever – Jesus is suffering thirst – he only meets ingratitude and indifference over and over among the disciples of the world. Among his own disciples he finds (This is so overwhelming!) so few hearts surrendering themselves to him without reserve, understanding the tenderness of his love.”

A Carmelite once explained to me that the Lord searches for us more than we search for him. This is so true. His heart yearns for to come to him without reserve, with complete trust. How can we be half-hearted when the Lord yearns for us so much? How can we be indifferent? Yet, not our great works, only our wholehearted love appeals to Christ.

It is this insight – or rather encounter with the thirsting heart of Christ – which Elisabeth of the Trinity came to share with Therese of the Child Jesus. To search for and accept this encounter seems to be the key to their teachings.

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Abandonment to Love and our Resurrection

A theme that runs through the great christian teachers of the spiritual life is abandonment to the love of God the Father. Our faith tells us that this is the supreme act of love Jesus offers on the Cross. Jesus also directs his disciples to make the same offering when he commands them take up their own cross and follow him. By following the Lord in this, we begin to experience the resurrection. Here I would like to explore this paradox – I ramble abit only because I do not have time to make it more concise – please forgive me.

At the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century, two Carmelite mystics have helped shape the way we understand this teaching in our era. Therese of Lisieux and Elisabeth of the Trinity help us understand how to begin to practice this total surrender to the love of God in daily life and prayer. Their lives witness to the fact that this act on our part is something that the Lord will invite us to make at the supreme moment of our lives, and at the same time, it is an act we practice every day. It is a desire of the Christian heart that needs to be fed and strengthened until it bears the fruit of a mature love.

The desire to completely surrender to God’s love is holy and all holy desires are produced by the Holy Spirit working within us. It is also true that already desiring something is to possess it to some degree. But in the beginning these holy desires are impeded by deep wounds in the heart – and the heart does not have the power to heal itself either from the harm others have caused it nor from the harm it has caused itself. Our hearts are not pure – at least, they do not start out that way. So eventhough we have holy desires, we might desire them with a mix of impure motives and without the courage such the Holy Spirit demands. Since this desire comes from the Holy Spirit, what can we do to help the Holy Spirit purify and strengthen it?

The first thing that strengthens a holy desire is to give it expression. Both Therese of Lisieux and Elisabeth of the Trinity are known for prayers centered around an act of complete surrender, total abandonment to the will of the Father. Therese wrote her “Act of Obedience to Merciful Love” in 1895 of which she also provides an explanation for in Manuscript B of her autobiography Story of a Soul. Elisabeth of the Trinity likewise authored a prayer Oh My God, Trinity whom I Adore in 1906. (Another similar prayer authored about the same time is Charles de Foucauld’s Act of Abandonment to God the Father or Into your Hands I Commend my Spirit.) When we begin to pray these prayers, we do not always feel like what we are actually doing with our lives correspond with the desires we are trying to express. But I do not think this is very important, at least not in the beginnning. The noble desire to completely surrender to God’s love is fragile in the beginning. Praying these prayers is like blowing on sparks to light a fire.

Closely associated with giving expression to our holy desires is the cultivation of a humble attitude. Elisabeth calls this simplicity – we must simply learn to rely on the Lord alone and not be distracted by anything that tries to draw us away from him. John of the Cross details a discipline of life in Ascent to Mt. Carmel, Book I, Chptr 13.

Key to his counsels is to practice only enjoying those things that are purely for the glory of God and renouncing the enjoyment of anything that does not give God glory. John of the Cross observes that Jesus acted in the same way and that we should imitate him because we love him. In truth, God is in all things, surrounds all things, sustains all things. Things of themselves never distract us from God when we enjoy them for His sake.

Our problem is that we tend to entertain ourselves for our own sake rather than for God’s. As long as we do this, we are living with disparate desires and to have desires at war with each other within the heart is very exhausting. This is why simplicity of heart is so important. The more simple the heart, the less the interior conflict, the greater our strength for the Lord. If we seek him in simplicity of heart, we will find him and have the strength to enjoy his presence.

God is also at work in us to strengthen and purify our desire to completely surrender to him. John of the Cross describes the dark contemplation where God seems absent in prayer as one of the most vital ways God is at work in us. When God seems absent in prayer it is like suffering from a spiritual poverty and a naked vulnerability twoards suffering. It is a very uncomfortable experience to endure. But when we persevere in being present to God when he does not seem present to us the Lord is able to transform our involuntary and unconscious motivations. Those who endure begin to experience an abiding peace in their spiritual life.

Before this dark night of prayer, we seek the Lord in a sort of anxious way – just like someone who in dating is trying too hard to find his spouse. Such anxiety does not instill confidence. But God looks passed this weakness because He always sees the love of which someone capable – and our love enchants Him. He yearns for the soul that begins to move towards Him and his desire is for that soul to thrive. Even when He seems to withdraw his presence for a little while, His purpose is always for a greater union, in this case one characterized not by anxiety, but by peace.

To be relatively free of mixed involuntary motives like anxiety is a great grace. To live a peaceful spiritual life of walking with the Lord is worth anything trial that one must endure. But the Lord is not satisfied with a peaceful desire. He wants a joyful desire. And to accomplish this, he must allow us to suffer even greater and more intense spiritual trials. These are never the punishment of an angry God but always the careful remedy of the Divine Physician. He yearns for us to be whole – which means to ceaselessly desire to love, peacefully and with joy.

Until now, our desire for abandonment into the merciful love of the Father has freed us from sin and from the involuntary inclinations to sin. Here our desire for abandonment has matured. But though we have matured in our holy desires, there are still deep abysses of the heart that rebel against the love of the Lord, that prevent us from abandoning ourselves completely. This is where John of the Cross explains there are still first movements of the soul. Original sin deeply wounded the first movements of our soul so that they are not disposed to God. This fundamental movement is such that only sheer grace can heal and restore it so that our souls become as innocent as those of Adam and Eve. Here, God begins to heal even that which causes our unconscious motivations. The very depths of our misery, the rejection of God that lives within us and is our hell, is embraced by the Lord. Free to offer God this misery, we discover his abiding joy – a love that is stronger than death, that can overcome even our deepest resistance to him.

Thus, insofar as our desire for abandonment disposes us to these experiences of the Dark Night, it helps to cause the night. As this same desire is purified through these difficult trials, a more perfect desire for abandoning ourselves into the hands of our merciful Father is also a fruit.
When the soul becomes perfect (in this life it is always a relative state of perfection), it is finally free to abandon itself in such wise that it becomes a complete and holy sacrifice of love to the Lord.

In the Oblation to Divine Mercy, Therese is celebrating this fruit. The heights of Christian mysticism do not culminate in being removed from messy humanity but being submerged in it with Christ. Nothing holds it back from completely trusting the Father and wholeheartedly doing everything for love of Him that his merciful love might be known. Such a soul fully realizes what it means to be an instrument of divine mercy for others. It is free to receive all the graces rejected by others and to become a conduit through which these gifts of love flow into the world, even into those places where the Lord is most absent.

This is what John of the Cross describes in Spiritual Canticle where he says that such souls become springs of living water for others. By desiring to be a spring for others, we already are to some extent. Yet it is of the very perfection of the Christian life to become a spring for others in a more perfect way – without anxiety, in peacefulness, and in joy. And today, so many thirst for peace and joy.

All of this is the experience of the great saints that everyone points to. But this path from glory to glory – from desire to peace to joy – is experienced as a smooth transition. It is lesser known that the mystics also testify to this more difficult and more human reality. All along the way, no matter how much we strive to edify others and love them as Christ has loved us, we know that this is not enough. We see what lies ahead, what the Lord really desires for us but it seems impossible. Elisabeth acknowleges in the face of such noble aspirations we become curiously aware of our weaknesses and deficiencies. For some this awareness is so great they are tempted to discouragement. She, however, turns to the Lord even more, begging him to achieve through her what she cannot possibly achieve by herself.

Elisabeth’s prayer is rooted in an insight from her older Sister in the Spirit, Therese. Therese in the midst of the same trial would think about the goodness of God in relation to her holy desires to give everything to him, to be completely surrendered to his love. She reckoned that God’s goodness and her desires must collide and she wanted to know how. Why would God fill her with such noble desires if He did not have a plan to realize them? Yes, God would realize her desires in his own time and by his own power.

She understood that her job was to trust him, to believe in love, to love unto the point of folly, just as He did not the Cross for those whom he loved. In this, a path was opened to her and she discovered a new way to draw her strength from the Lord. She would persevere in love, waiting for Him to lift her up. She called this kind of surrender, a surrendering to the Lord as his prey.

The image she used was that of a little bird yearning to fly to the sun without the wings to do so. How could God allow her, like that little bird, to suffer such great desires if he did not intend to satisfy them in another way? Christ would come like a great Eagle and lift her on high just like an Eagle might carry a small bird in its pinions. Her job was to wait on the Lord and to trust in his power. To him, would be all the glory for any good that she might do.

Her insight is rooted in a profound teaching on the Holy Spirit and the nature of Christian hope. The Holy Spirit lifts us up To surrender ourselves as his prey, to abandon ourselves to him as our Father – these are the same movements of heart produced by the Spirit of God that raise Jesus from the dead. God in his merciful love will raise us up to realize the perfection of these holy desires in us – the realization of the holy desires of our hearts, this is the beginning of our own resurrection.

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