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He Came to His Senses – The Beginning of Prayer

The parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15:12ff stands out for those struggling in the life of prayer.  As we read the story, we find ourselves putting ourselves in the place of the different characters, measuring our actions against theirs: the merciful father, the prodigal son, the elder son, even the servants.  I also love to think about the father’s house and how it serves as a fitting image for the ultimate end of the divine economy, the fundamental purpose of our creation and salvation: that joyful communion of love, of perfect unity with one another in the bosom of the Holy Trinity.

Jesus tells this parable on his way to Jerusalem from Galilee.  He too is going to His Father’s House, the Temple where he was presented as a child and where he was found at the threshold of his teenage years.  He knows the Father of Mercy.  In the mystery of such exceeding love, how could His heart not be broken over the plight of His sons and daughters?  Where there was no hope, the Father sent His Son to be hope.  Christ, like the prodigal son, lost everything He had – except not in disobedience but obedience, not on destitute living but rather out of love for the destitute.  Spiritual poverty, misery, suffering- this is the horizon of our humanity that God has chosen to share with us.

Like a servant, a suffering servant, accomplishing the Father’s will with signs and wonders, the Son liberates those He encounters along the way.  He wants to help them come to their senses so that He might free them from serving the pigsty in which they are trapped.   This redemption is won at great price.  Like the Merciful Father, the Image of the invisible God is misunderstood, rejected, threatened, betrayed and denied by those He most relies on.  It is by passing through this misery that the Word made flesh enters into the heart of humanity, the Father’s House where the Chosen People worshipped God in the shadow of history – where we too can begin to worship Him now in mystery.

When we listen to the parable of the prodigal son, it is important to remember that Christ Himself is telling us this story.  The Word of the Father journeys through our hearts just as He journeyed through the misery of Galilee and Judah.  Everything He says and does has inexhaustible meaning in relation to His destination, the Father’s house to which He leads us.

When He tells us the prodigal son came to senses, this means something for our life of prayer.  To hear the voice of the Father’s Word in our hearts compels us to deny our false judgments about life and to make a new judgment about the Father: this is to come to our senses.  It is a moment of humility, a moment of trust, and a moment of compunction.  It is the moment in which the Father finds us.  If, in our righteous indignation, we play the elder brother and refuse this moment, how will we enter the Father’s House?  Embracing this moment with gratitude and allowing oneself to be embraced by the Father: this is what it means to begin to pray.

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Blessed are the Poor of Heart

What is the poverty of heart that Jesus deemed true happiness, the blessed way to be, a beatitude?  Our tradition teaches that poverty of heart is a healthy detatchment from things that do not lead us to God.  In other words, when we do not try to satisfy ourselves with frivolous pursuits, comfort, and pleasure, the Lord is saying we are very blessed.   There is space in our hearts for Him to come whenever we renounce anything that does not give him glory.  In my last post, we mentioned how Bernard believed that the soul that realized it was not at peace with itself, that something in its life needed to change, that it needed Jesus, such a soul experienced the blessedness Christ proclaimed for the poor of heart.  It is a painful kind of blessedness: only  in the middle of facing the real suffering eating at one’s soul can one find Jesus, Jesus comes in spiritual poverty.

Examples of those who have experienced this kind of blessedness include figures like St. Augustine.  In book 8 of the Confessions, we read how St. Augustine was attracted to living a life dedicated to the pursuit of the truth, which he realize was the pursuit of God himself.  His heart was drawn to this purer way of life.  Now in his thirties, he had recently given up his sex-partner, a woman who had lived with him since they were both teenagers.  Disgusted with his own selfish existence, he wanted to live for something beyond himself and his own pleasure.  At the same time, he was tempted to find another concubine, someone else he could use to satisfy his lust. He was so addicted to sexual pleasure he did not see how he himself could ever give this up.  In the face of this, God offered him chastity.  Chastity was like a beautiful woman calling to him while his lust cleaved to him and  tried to pull him back.   He describes how he wanted what God offered but was not confident that he would really be happy if he had real chastity, and if he could be happily chaste, he was not confident that the Lord would ever really give such chastity to him.  At the same time, he also knew the stories of men less educated and gifted than himself who found the strength to renounce sin and follow the Lord.  He was vexed, torn up inside, yearning for what was good and unable to let go of what was evil.  So in this poverty of heart, he called out to the Lord with tears and loud cries, and the Lord heard him, spoke to him through the Scriptures, and the light of God’s confidence flooded his soul.

Poverty of spirit, painful as it is, is a great gift from God because only with this poverty can he come to fill us.

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Radical Fraternity

On Saturday, I interviewed Fr. Conrad Osterhout of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal who is giving a retreat in Boulder, Colorado this week. He and Brother Simon stayed with us after completing another mission in Craig, Colorado. Father Conrad has had decades of experience as a Franciscan, first with the Third Order Regular and later as a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal. I first met Father Conrad at Steubenville. He oversaw the pre-theology program household of which I was a founding member. He later was involved in the pro-life movement and imprisoned in solitary confinement for protesting and counseling at abortion clinics. His stories about those experences are quite profound, and I hope someday to write about those. What I asked him about this time, however, was his spirituality. His answers, a small part are presented here, will be part of a book on prayer that I am preparing.

I have always been impressed with the joy, the prayerfulness, the discipline and the poverty of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. I once asked Father whether the reason community looked so attractive and was so effective in the ministry was its rediscovery of a more austere form of poverty. Simplicity of life is something they work on together as a community, and they do this in the spirit of Francis of Assisi who himself had a love affair with Lady Poverty. According to Francis’ ideal, whatever is not necessary for a friar’s apostolic work is renounced for the sake of the Kingdom of God. Following this, the Friars of the Renewal do not own much by way of personal property – basically, the clothes on their back (which mainly includes a very simple habit) and what can be held in a small hand bag, and a toothbrush, if necessary. I suspected that Franciscan joy was the freedom from the anxiety that owning a lot of material things can bring.

Father Conrad thought I only had a part of the picture. He explained that he was also first impressed with this freedom from things. He said there was a lot more fluidity and hospitality that living simply made possible. He gave as an example on of his first experiences as a Friar of the Renewal. In his previous religious experience, travel between houses had to be planned, and they were not really set up for taking guests on the spot. This was probably because each house felt responsible to provide proper hospitality to visiting Friars, and spontaneous visits did not help in preparing for this. But as a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal, while he was visiting one of the houses, his brothers asked him to stay the night. He complained that he had not prepared for an overnight stay and thought he should get back to the convent he had come from. His brother asked him simply, “God has provided everything. What else do you need, a toothbrush?”

Father Conrad was impressed by this experience. Because of the greater simplicity the Franciscan Friars lived out, he really did not need very much at all. He had all he needed, and he could trust God and his brothers to provide the rest. He discovered an aspect of Lady Poverty’s beauty which Francis himself must have also appreciated. Freedom from things allows for a greater freedom to be with one’s brothers.

This is where Father Conrad shared an important insight about his way of life. The recovery of the Francican Tradition, which the Friars of the Renewal have devoted themselves to, is really a rediscovery of genuine fellowship in the Lord. By placing their fraternity above material comforts, they are rediscovering how to live with one another as brothers in Christ. Father Conrad explaiend that it was not their radical poverty but their radical fraternity which was the true witness of their way of life. The real question their community was committed to answering together was not so much how they could live more simply but how could the simply build one another up in the Lord. By eliminating material distractions, they could begin to work on being more patient with each other. Father Conrad, reflecting on the richness of this experience, quote psalm 133: “Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.”

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