Posts

Prayer and Living in the Presence of Christ

Benedict Groeschel, in I am with You Always (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010) tells the story of a young Russian atheist named Andre Borisovich Bloom who set out to prove the Christian faith false by reading the Gospel of Mark.  Instead, as he came into the first chapters of the Gospel, he noticed a spiritual presence in the room with him.  He connected that intensely personal presence with the Risen Christ to whom the Gospel bore witness.  This mysterious and spiritual presence, far from condemning him, invited him to live by love, awaited him with love.  He knew that the whole meaning of his life was to be found in remaining in that presence, and it was chiefly to this task that he dedicated the rest of his life.  He took the name Anthony at his baptism and later, after being made Archbishop in the Orthodox Church, he wrote about this experience and his life of prayer in Beginning to Pray, the book that inspired this present web log.
I came across Beginning to Pray as a youth at a summer camp.  His reflections validated my own experience of prayer and encouraged me to go deeper and be more disciplined.  He especially helped me to see that the Scriptures not only gave an account of what Jesus said and did in history, they also shed light on his risen presence in our lives right here and now in faith’s mystery.  When we look at prayer this way, it dispels the myth (a myth of satanic origins) that God is some sort of oppressive force bent on preventing us from thriving.  Instead, this mysterious presence of Christ makes living by love a beautiful possibility for our lives.
The experience of Christ in prayer is not emotional or sentimental, although feelings of devotion and tears of compunction help us cling to Him with greater resolve and determination.  His presence is not conceptual or an intellectual idea, although holy thoughts and profound insights often bind us to him with greater intensity, and at the same time, lead to a peaceful inner freedom.   The presence of the Lord is deeper than the powers of our imagination and even intuition: it is a presence at the very core of our own being and existence – more present to us than we are to ourselves.  
St. Augustine describes Him as the Light, the Life and the Love through whom we live and move and have our being.   His presence makes possible a life of love.  This being the case, the presence of the Lord in prayer is above all performative, a life of love I must live out not only for his sake, but even for my own sake, if I am to be true to my deepest self.  This means, if we are not to betray the Lord or ourselves or abandon the One who awaits us with love, we must act on what we know the desires of Christ to be.  Through prayer and study over the Sacred Scriptures, through holy conversations and faithfulness to our life commitments, through persevering in love through all kinds of trials and sacrifices, through the sacraments: in all these experiences, the Lord constantly speaks to our hearts, helping us to see what we must do in the present moment, helping us to see how we are to live by love.
Anthony Bloom focused the importance of living out the Will of God Christ’s presence in our lives makes known.  His life is a testimony to this effort.  In particular, he understood the words of the Holy Bible to be addressed to us personally, sometimes so directly that they can make our heart burn within us:  “These words tell us what we already know from our experience of life, and those are absolute commandments.  Those words we must never forget.  Whenever we fail to do so, we break our relationship with Christ, we turn away, we refuse the burden, the yoke of his discipleship.”  Meditations, A Spiritual Journey (Denville, N.J: Dimension Books, 1971) 18. 
/1 Comment/by

Listening for the Voice of God

Oftentimes someone will question what God’s will is and how to go about listening to God.  God has chosen to speak through humanity – this is the meaning of the incarnation.  God reveals himself in a human way.  This continues in the Body of Christ.  The Church is where Christ continues to speak to each of us: through the teaching handed on to us, the Bible, the Liturgy, Sacraments and in our relating to one another in his Body.   But to hear his voice, we must learn to listen.  How do we really listen?  St. Benedict precieved the connection between obedience and listening – which are related words in Latin.  Yet to really obey, to really listen, we must go pass the words of a command we think we understand and attend with our whole being to everything being communicated.  This is especially true when we are attending to the Lord in our neighbor (who could be as much a complete stranger as spouse, child, parent or friend).  Anthony Bloom, in Meditations in his reflection on the Pharisee and the Publican sheds some light.

“How different Christ’s way is to our own horrible gift of seeing through layers of transparency, of translucence and of light, the equivocal twilight of human imperfection or the darkness of a still unenelightened but rich internal chaos.  WE are not content to judge actions without giving people the benefit of the doubt; we question their very motives, suspect their intentions, instead of ‘believing all things, hoping all things.’

“We must act ruthlessly against this tendency we have to judge everything from the viewpoint of our little self.  The first step on the way into the Kingdom is defined by Christ as ‘deny thyself.’  We could put it in harsher terms: when we see that once again, instead of seeing or hearing somone, we are wrapped up in ourselves, we must round this obstrusive ‘I’ and cry out in anger:’Get behind me, Satan.  You think not of the things of God.  Out of my way, I am tired of seeing your face!'”

Those who in beginning to pray learn to listen to God in their neighbor by renouncing the propensity to judge from the view point of ‘self” discover God speaking through the hearts of all those He has entrusted to us.  It is a matter of surrendering our pride and embracing Christ’s own humility.  He is the One who yearns to speak to our hearts – He is also the One who delights in listening for our voice.  In this humble listening, we hear the resurrected voice of Christ with His own resurrected ears.  This is how we come to know the will of God.

/0 Comments/by

Spiritual Trials

Today is the feast of St. Jerome – a saint noted for his hot temper.  For those of us who struggle with a more or less sanguine emotional life, it is always consoling to discover that we are not alone, that even great saints had to deal with irrascibility.  Self-control and gentleness are fruits of the Holy Spirit in our lives.  I think it provides extra glory to God when He is able to produce this fruit even though our personalities seem to fight against it.  The witness of the saints is that only through prayer do we learn to surrender ourselves so that the power of the Holy Spirit is manifest in our weakness.

Anthony Bloom wrote a book called Beginning to Pray and this book has some great advice about how to start a life of prayer.  At one point, he relates a story about one of my favorite saints, Philip Neri.  This youth minister who renewed the Church of Rome by starting a prayer group in the 16th Century was given a great grace as a young man.    He noticed that he had a very hot temper, especially when provoked by some of his brothers.  So he prayed for an intense length of time, asking the Lord to help him overcome his anger.  Immediately after his prayer, he ran into the one brother with whom he never fought and this brother insulted him out of no where.  They got into a horrible fight.  Then, after this exchange, a similar thing happened with another brother.  Philip was dismayed and returned to prayer to complain, “Lord, didn’t I ask you to free me from anger?”  The Lord patiently responded, “Yes, that is why I am multiplying the opportunities for you to learn.”

Anthony Bloom explains why this is not an uncommon experience in prayer.  We do not have the space to explore his explanation further.  For today, we will simply note the Lord answers us when we ask for good things the right way.   His answers, however, are always different from what we anticipate.  We do not always recognize the gifts He floods us with because our vision is limited by our own expectations.  For those of us a little hot blooded, coming to appreciate how wonderful it is that God does not allow himself to be confined to our expectations is a first step to true spiritual freedom.

/0 Comments/by

Prayer and the Absence of God

In his work, Beginning to Pray, Anthony Bloom reflects on the experience of the Absence of God. Not only do ordinary Christians struggle with this, but even ministers of the Gospel, even priests are not exempt from this haunting experience of faith. This experience as suffered in the priesthood is explored in fiction in, among many other works, Endo Shusako’s Silence, Miguel de Unamuno’s St. Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, and Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. In the world of non-fiction, this same experience is a striking feature of Jean Bernard’s autobiographical reflections in Priestblock 25487: A memoir of Dachua and Cardinal Nguyen van Thuan thoughts about his own imprisonment in Testimony of Hope. Anthony Bloom’s insights into prayer and the absence of God provide a reference point for interpreting and dealing with what these authors describe as part of the experience of priests – and this is very consistent with the Carmelite Spiritual tradition.

Only when we really begin to pray, begin to deal with the seeming absence of God in our lives, are we ready for the gift of prayer. Along these lines, Anthony Bloom explains that prayer is a free, personal relationship, and at the same time, a moment of judgment – a crisis in which the truth about ourselves is revealed to us. This means prayer involves both freedom and suffering.

In terms of freedom, this means prayer begins as something I must freely choose as a priority of my heart. If it is not a true priority, there is simply not the freedom of heart that prayer requires. Real freedom is the ability to choose something with passionate determination rather than merely a resigned sense of duty. We can only make something a priority by love. Real freedom is rooted in love, purposeful surrender to the promptings of love within us.

Compared to the loving desires of God, we must be careful to bear in mind that human freedom is only a small part of the equation. It is a drop of water thrown upon the rushing wave of Divine Freedom. This means true prayer precludes all conscious and unconscious attempts to manipulate God. He is free and sovereign to relate to us as He wills, when He wills, for his own purposes. We must learn to go to Him in humble trust, with empty hands, wholly vigilant for his Coming.

This does not mean to refrain from presenting the Lord heartfelt anxieties and concerns. In each of the works above, profound anxieties drive priests in their search for God, even in the case of Unamuno’s anti-hero who has an aversion to prayer. Some assert that God allows us to suffer some trials because He knows that we will not remember Him when we are too comfortable. Crisis, anxiety, stress – these are things that drive us to God. But giving primacy to God’s freedom sometimes means patiently dealing with what feels like his absence.

Respecting the primacy of God’s freedom in prayer means trust in his love even when He does not seem to respond to our concerns. Sometimes, we want the comfort of his presence, but it seems absent. Those who have experienced this know what the absence of God means. John of the Cross calls it a dark night. This night is so important to true Christian prayer he also calls it “sheer grace.” It is a very vulnerable place to be when we come before the Lord with our anxieties and concerns while attempting to trust Him and his plan for us.

Anthony Bloom gets to this same aspect of prayer when he calls it a moment of judgment, of crisis. The mask needs to come off. The prosaic myths we have surrounded ourselves with must fall to the wayside. We need to suffer the truth about who we really are before the face of God.

The characters in the works by Shusako and Unamuno do not deal with this dramatic moment of prayer. In different ways, the anti-heroes of these works judge God and the faith of the Church, but they do not have a personal encounter with the Lord that goes beyond the prosaic. Instead, they avoid or desert what could be a profound encounter as what is merely prosaic in their lives is stripped away from them.

Bernanos on the other hand allows his character to drink in such an experience, even to what seems to be its absurd last drop. This is also what happens in the real life experiences of Bernard and van Thuan. Unlike Shusako and Unamuno, these authors are able to get to something of the truth of human greatness, of the heroic precisely because they enter more deeply into what seems to be the absurdity of faith in the face of the absence of God.
John of the Cross has much better images for what we have explored here as the absence of God and the absurdity of faith. We have already glimpsed at “the dark night.” In Spiritual Canticle, he speaks of God and faith as “hidden.”

This poem begins with an anxious search for the bridegroom who has awaken his beloved from slumber but then ran off into hiding. She must find him who waits for her in their secret trysting place. But to find someone who is in hiding requires that one enter into hidden places. What St. John of the Cross is describing is the search for the Lord who can only be discovered in faith. Faith goes beyond prosaic myths we have produced in our own imaginations about the Lord. We all have these, and for most of our lives, they go unquestioned. But then there is an awakening and we find ourselves searching for something which no myth can satisfy. We soon discover that this something is really a Someone who is waiting for us, yearning for us to find Him. St. John of the Cross explains that when our hearts are awakened in this way, we find ourselves calling out, “Where have you hidden?”

Now on this point, we reach a beautiful convergence in the teaching of Anthony Bloom and St. John of the Cross. Both of them deny that the experience of the absence of God is really an experience of God not being present. He is always present, but in a hidden way, a way that requires us to seek him in faith. Where is he present? St. John of the Cross says that he is present in our own heart.

“Come, then, O beautiful soul! Since you know now that your desired Beloved lives hidden within your heart, strive to be really hidden with him, and you will embrace him within you and experience him with loving affection.” Spiritual Canticle, 1.10

/0 Comments/by

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.

/4 Comments/by