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Christian Prayer and the Incarnation

With the Word of the Father, the words of Christian prayer are born from the Virgin’s Womb. Such was the mystery of prayer learned first by the One who Believed as she felt Him ready to enter the world. It is not seized by force or mastered by practice. The result always exceeds expectation but can never be calculated. This prayer can only be welcomed as a gift and requires that humble reverence without which no love is ever possible. There is no other prayer that the human heart can offer that is given to us as this prayer has been given.

Just as she carried the Lord in her womb before His birth, every prayer offered in Christian faith also carries Him. Since her “fiat”, the Word of the Father has never stopped coming and with each advent, He prepares a new theophany whenever a heart says “yes” to Him. Each new word of prayer offered by faith in Him makes space for Him to be born, and opens unseen human poverties and miseries to Divine Peace and Glory.

As she waited for that first Christmas, filled with wonder, the humble Handmaid knew the mystery first conceived in her heart by obedience would soon be heard and seen in the shadow of the Almighty. She must have been amazed that the very vulnerability of His prayer, even when only an infant’s cry, would pierce the heart of the Father and unveil the deep things of God. Her mind must have bathed in astonishment over how His prayer would echo at the center of human history and in every human heart. Did she guess by the way it drew her that His prayer had the power to draw all men back to all that is noble and true about humanity, and to all that is good and tender about God?

She must have wondered over that mysterious silent love by which He raised His Heart. If she felt this in her womb, could she see with her heart that His canticle of love would not be dimmed even when He suffered death? She nonetheless believed that the humble glory of his unvanquished petition would make powerful knees bend and haughty heads bow down. By the invincible hope of His cry, she still rejoices that the prayers of those who believe stand in the midst of hardship and shine bright against the darkness.

It is possible to learn such prayer in these finals days before Christmas. These are words that are learned by an obedience that suffers, progresses and dies in love just as He did.  The Man of Sorrows is the Way that prayer must walk if Christian faith is to attain what it seeks. The Just One is the Truth who makes true the desires of the Christian heart. The One Crucified by Love is the life for all those who, by prayer, die to themselves and live no more this earthly life. A wondrous gift is offered in the simple surrender that would turn again from sin, persevere in love and invoke His Name; and that prayer that amazed the Mother of God becomes also the prayer coming to birth in the heart. 

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Hidden Glory: beautiful birthplace of prayer

The glory of God shines though hidden in both the fleeting joys and the difficult exigencies of this life.  Divine immensity disguises itself in what seems small and inconsequential: the haunting glance of a despised and marginalized neighbor — whether threatened by danger or death, whether in the public square or in the womb. Hidden here is God’s self-disclosure in my neighbor.

In a single moment this mysterious glory can shake the heart from slumbering indifference.  In an instant, we are moved away from the temptation to simply pass by and into the overwhelming need to be implicated and inconvenienced by the plight before us – whether a young person aching to find some reason for their existence or someone disenchanted by the unrelenting cycle of this world’s misery.

To know the warmth and radiance of heaven manifest in such heart breaking encounters is to discover a secret power breaking into our world. To be touched by the unfamiliar, subtle and delicate uncreated dynamism at work in these hidden moments tastes of the very purpose of life itself. Before this irrevocable dawning of Divine Glory onto our personal affairs, we see every other wonder, no matter how impressive or overwhelming, a passing shadow.

Even the slightest glimpse of this mystery fills the heart with such limitless fullness, nothing circumscribed by the merely visible and tangible can hold it.  Where we see and feel any lack of love, the light of this glory shines even now, in this very moment, with unperceived radiance, an aching paradox, a clashing of opposites. In the very face of fury and hostility, splendor concealed in mercy cries out always with love, to love, by love and for love. And this light shines unconquered everywhere and on everyone and in our own hearts, even as we attempt in vain to shut our eyes against it or with rage, to snuff it out.

If you want to put love where there is no love, unaided human industry is of no avail.  Whatever outcomes you attempt to control, the Living God cannot fit in these.   No method (no matter how difficult to master), no technique (regardless of how well practiced), and no program (how ever cleverly concocted) even begins to sound the depths of the inexhaustibly deep dug well of overflowing divine life and love.  No titanic exploit of human industry, whatever the dynamic psychic state or powerful social awareness it produces, even remotely attains the height of this divine humility. No purely natural evolution in human enlightenment will ever glimpse more than a vestige of the least shadow of this Uncreated Splendor.  We may rightly exhaust ourselves in our efforts to welcome Him in the distressing disguise of the poor, but the divine call to love is never exhausted and to ignore its unique claim over our hearts is to live nothing other than a diminished life.

To see this glory from above is to acknowledge at once that we are all beggars here below.  The glory of God is from above, completely beyond our power to grasp or manage. Before His overflowing torrents of life, the only proper response is surrendered vulnerability, humble obedience and selfless adoration.  From above, this eternal fire is sovereign over every matter, no matter how urgent, of this world and in our hearts. Nothing can force or prevent or impede this unquenchable river: it is over all and in all, sustaining everything and everyone in existence out of pure love, and all this inexhaustibly and unfathomably, for no other reason than for His own sake.  Even when ridiculed, rejected, despised and crucified – this glory rises again and abides forever, unconquered.

This is why, with the suddenness of lighting, this glory breaks forth in deepest darkness. When all seems most lost, an astonishing flash of divine gratuity discloses the limits of evil to eyes aching for truth. This is the fresh glory of an unanticipated new relation, of unexpected harmony in the heart and between hearts, of an unimagined joyed shared with God and with others, with expressions so tender and wonderful, this world’s time and space are too small for them. Yet every moment of this life is pregnant with this uncreated splendor, which is always beginning and still in progress.

Not dis-incarnate, but an enfleshed, this beautiful presence of the Living God can only be shared face to face and heart to heart. This inexhaustible divine self-disclosure can be found in the secrecy of one’s own home or in an anonymous encounter on the street, in a cup of water offered to a weary pilgrim or an ear that listens into the heart-ache of the distressed, in a kind smile of welcome for the stranger or a loving word of truth to a displaced soul searching for home.  This glory can even be the gentle glance at one’s very enemy – the one whose wounds of betrayal and hatred you still bear – that dares to echo with that primordial divine judgment, a judgment renewed in those eyes that conquered death: “yes, it is very good that you exist.”

This is the the hidden glory in which Christian prayer is born and by which such prayer reaches the very heart of God. For His part, God is always pleased to welcome this cry of the heart because He delights in how much this effort to embrace both sorrow and joy welcomes His glory — in all its exquisite hiddenness and distressing disguises.  The Almighty carefully implicates His glory in these simple movements hidden in depths too secret for anyone to understand about themselves. In His tender compassion, He has chosen the limitations, the inadequacy, and the voids in which this prayer resounds to be raised in an eternal chorus of unvanquished love.

As for me, in my efforts to be a loving father, or a good husband, or a half decent teacher – my sin is before me always.  When I am tired of raging against the One who alone can heal and free me, I realize it is time again to humbly acknowledge my sin and to begin my journey home into His merciful embrace. When I want to open my eyes to see His face, I must humble myself and ask for the gift to praise Him again. He is Lord even over the hostility of my own heart, and only He can quiet those raging waters — they cannot drown Him, for He has vanquished death itself.   Whenever I approach as His unworthy servant, His voice with unearthly jubilance echoes ‘my son.’ Here, I begin to learn to praise His glory.

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Living by the Pace of Prayer

Living at the pace of prayer disposes our lives to the beatitudes of Christ Himself. What I mean by “the pace of prayer” great Catholic thinkers call “being recollected.” A recollected life is the opposite of living dissipated or scattered by the many diversions that we can get sucked into.  It is also the opposite of being driven or obsessed.  Instead, it is the effort to be mindful of the presence of God, a mindfulness that requires a renewed act of faith in the Lord’s presence throughout the whole day, every day, and then to live accordingly.

When we pace our lives around our awareness of the many ways the Lord discloses Himself to our faith, we discover the capacity not to over-react or to get caught up in activities that are beneath our dignity. This capacity for interior freedom in regards exterior circumstances also inclines us to be ready to recognize and act on the truth at stake in any situation, and to do so with love.  To live life at a prayerful pace in this way lifts us above the work-a-day world and relativizes the absolute demands of a demanding situation. Not in dreamy escapism or emotional distance, a prayerful life renders us intensely aware of our unfolding relationship with the Lord and, like God Himself, vulnerable to the needs of all those whom He entrusts to us.

Life then takes on the flavor of a conversation.  Living at the pace of prayer, we are always listening and waiting to recognize the presence of the Word of the Father who constantly reveals Himself anew, in the most subtle and delicate ways. When the Word became flesh, eternity broke into every moment of our lives, and is beginning all around us, in every concrete situation, no matter how humble the circumstance.  In fact, the more humble, the more wonderful His self-disclosure: always revealing the inexhaustible love of the Father and the hidden mystery of who we truly are to ourselves with unanticipated freshness.

To live with such newness and fullness is to reject intellectualizing our existence or emotional self-occupation.  Confident faith in the presence of the Risen Lord not only grounds us in reality but questions us about our whole way of life, our whole approach to everything.  When we discover His gaze of love shining at us through the circumstances of the present moment, we are free to say “yes” with the depths of our being, to welcome His astonishing presence with wonder and joy in our hearts, even when He is disguised in poverty, distress and rejection.

In this way, living at the pace of prayer, living recollected, opens us to the mystery of the Beatitudes. To be ready to show hospitality to the poor, hungry, thirsty, and meek Christ puts us on a pathway of purification, of mercy, of peacemaking, of being rejected and persecuted, just as was He.  And there is no greater beatitude than to welcome this mystery into our lives, because in this mystery, the glory of the Father, His exquisite and unvanquished love, is revealed when it is most needed, and what is most true about ourselves is, in so many unfathomable ways, at once purified and intensified.

In the 20th Century, we were blessed with many wonderful men and women of faith knew this truth not only with their mind but with their lives, from the depths of their own hearts. They chose to live by the pace of prayer when everyone around them feared to do so. One of these is Dietrich von Hildebrand, a convert to the faith who had the courage to publicly criticize Nazism even at great personal cost.

In 1938, he secretly met with a group of young adults in Florence.  He provided them conferences on how to live a transformed Christian existence even as their faith and way of life were under attack by military, political and cultural forces. The notes from these conferences were published in 1940. In English, this work is called Transformation in Christ. 

I have found that his words to those Christians then apply for those who endeavor to follow Christ now. In particular, his chapter on Recollection and Contemplation (see Sophia Institute Press, 1990, pp.  138-144) provides counsels that have helped me live at the pace of prayer. They might be summarized as follows:

1. Consecrate every day by a certain space of time to inward prayer.  (I have found that the beginning and end of the day are good for this — I also like to take time before and after Mass, as well as a few minutes at 3:00pm – the Hour of Mercy.)

2. Interpolate free moments in the course of our day; moments in which we raise our eyes to God, forgetting everything for a second and experiencing his presence.

3. Resist being swallowed up by the immanent logic of our activities and of the diverse situations in which life places us. (Sometimes, the intensity of the workplace makes this more difficult, but this practice has helped me navigate difficult conversations.)

4. Shun everything that appeals to our craving for sensation.  We must guard against yielding to our idle curiosity, against cramming our mind with wanton things. (Today, our use of social media and other diversions technology makes available need to be carefully monitored and often renounced.)

5. Silence alone evokes inward calm.  Especially in important conversations, frequent intervals of silence allows “the things that have deeply impressed us” to “resound and grow in our soul, and strike root in our being.”

6. Solitude is requisite from time to time because “a moment saturated with meaning, a valid ‘now’ requires a period of calm relaxation for taking effect.” (This can be in the form of a periodic weekend retreat or even for longer periods as one’s responsibilities allow).

7. Mental alertness needed for prayer requires a certain amount of sleep and simple recreation.  (In other words, we need to take care of our basic human needs or we will simply not have the energy to respond to God.)

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Pilgrimage and Prayer

The Lord blessed me with a pilgrimage just at the end of the academic year.  About thirty pilgrims from the Shrine of Saint Anne in Arvada together with others from a couple different parts of the country joined together for two weeks of walking in the footsteps of the saints of Spain.  Together with them I am praying for our families and loved ones, for deeper conversion, for a deeper faith in the One who walks with us.

These journeys are filled with beautiful moments of prayer and fellowship.  They also involve discovering treasures of culture and history, and thinking about the presence of the Lord in the midst of the shadows and bright spots of the Church in the world, walking with those who need a word of hope. In all of this there are glimpses of holiness, and there is the provocative witness of the saints we meet along the way.

Today, I am at Saint Michael’s chapel above the Benedictine Monastery of Montserrat … Where a spiritual revival began about the time Columbus brought the Gospel to America.   After the reform of contemplation Cisneros initiated to reform this sacred place, Saint Ignatius came here and discovered the great grace that spiritual exercises offer the Church.  He would develop his own spiritual exercises not far away, at Manresa.

The Society of Jesus Saint Ignatius founded would also be enriched through the tireless dedication to prayer, preaching and conversion of figures like Saint John of Avila who preceded and then supported him. Like Ignatius, the encountered the Risen Lord and their lives were transformed with devotion and the burning desire to bring the Gospel to that ends of the world.  The Spanish Jesuits in turn supported the great Carmelite Reformer, Teresa of Avila.  And, it is Teresa of Jesus and the 500th anniversary of her birth that moved me to take up this journey.  
Together all these Spanish saints, and so many more, helped the Church discover her heart in the 16th Century.  The heart of the Church is prayer, an exchange of love between Christ and His bride.  Every Eucharist reveals this reality anew, every act of repentance returns to its living source, every effort to begin to pray is already taken deep into the greatness of this mystery.  

This kind of prayer animates the mission of the Church.  Through rediscovering prayer countless more men and women found the courage to take up the work of evangelizing a new continent.  Junipero Serra, soon to be canonized, was caught in the wake of this great movement of contemplative prayer, even centuries later.  Whether they went to the far West or East, the heartbeat of God’s love resounding in the heart of the Church at prayer moved them and strengthened them to face every trial.
The spiritual renewal continues in our day and propels us into mission too.  I do not doubt the indispensable role prayer must play in our new evangelization today.  True prayer is an encounter with Someone who awaits us with love.  He is waiting to entrust us with a exquisite work of love, to implicate us in His tender concern for families and marriages, for all those in need of a word of hope. In this way, prayer opens up new beginnings, a renewal of fidelity and joy that only an encounter with Christ can bring.

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The Risen Lord Waits for Us to Call on Him

Jesus, the Risen Lord, is truly present in this moment. In the midst of difficulty or rest, sorrow or joy, He is with us, fully alive, more real than all the rest of reality combined.  He is present with great humility and respect: asking as if He were a starving beggar, seeking as if He were the one who had lost something and knocking as if He had no right to enter.  He is here, in this moment and in every moment, above all space and time, over all circumstance and trial, waiting for us to open the door.

The Victor once and for all, He has been raised and set apart to judge the living and the dead, not in the distant future, but now in the present moment. Only those who are pierced to the heart by love can accept the judgment of His justice and truth, and how I long for my own heart to be pierced so that at last I might know that freedom of love that He alone can give.

Spiritual freedom flows from His touch and even now He holds out His hands towards us.  Those who believe in Him find forgiveness. Even as we confess our sins and repent of our rash judgments, He silences the voice of condemnation that cries against us.

He has suffered death and passed through hell to restore peace to our troubled consciences because He did not create us for self torment.  He has come Himself because He alone has the power and authority to liberate us from such a hellish burden.  In Him, we discover that the power of misery is not absolute and that evil does not have the last word.  Darkness vanishes before His light.  He reigns unconquered and invites us to join Him.

Who will separate us from His love?  Who can prevent us from living the life that He has come to give?  Worldly powers could not silence Him. Suffering could not diminish Him.  Death could not contain Him.  Every knee is bent before Him and every head is bowed in His presence.  He rules forever at the right hand of the Father.

Against all falsehood, he shines forth forever true. Though winds of false teachings and all kinds of myths seem to hold sway, He is a sure anchor, a safe-harbor in the storm.  In the midst of a changing sea of confusion, He stands as the sure reference point of life and every decision.  In the midst of rancor and contention, whether within our hearts or in our communities, He is the only true source of peace.

The Word of the Father is the Love that is stronger than death.  He is Truth unvanquiahed.  He is the living waters of the deep dug well of salvation. He calls in whispers that thunder in our hearts. He gazes on us with love though we have done nothing to deserve it. He hopes in us and rejoices when we raise our eyes to Him if only for a moment.  The Lord of Life longs for us to share our hearts with Him freely and to share His heart with us completely in that moment which will have no end. 

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Finding our Footing in Prayer

Today, many are concerned about confusion in the Church and a lack of confidence about how we are to live. Angry accusations fly back and forth like arrows poisoned and barbed. Violence rips at our communities and all kinds of aggression is unleashed in our homes. It is hard to bear with one another. We want peace but we lack the common ground we need to find it.  For all the technology and information at our fingertips, we lack, among other spiritual things, the gift of understanding.

Understanding is among the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, a characteristic of the Spirit of the Christ. The great Fathers and Doctors of the Church described this dynamic disposition of mind as perfecting the stand we take toward ultimate reality, God Himself.  The gift is a readiness to be grounded by the Holy Spirit, an interior receptivity to His promptings that we need if we are to find our footing in prayer.

The Gift of Understanding is a divinely inspired intellectual propensity to be purified concerning one’s judgments about God and who He is.  In ways that no mental gymnastics carried out under the impulse of reason can manage, this gift protects the soul against all kinds of idolatry by rooting it in the mystery of God’s presence in real life.  The Holy Spirit convinces us concerning sin and frees us to repent of it.

All kinds of self-contradiction are laid bare as the ear of the heart attends to the surprising freshness of the Holy Spirit’s secret judgments, especially about those things with which we would rather not have to deal.  But the mind raised in love can no longer put things off. Dissipation and dulness recede before this unfamiliar radiance.

This movement of the Holy Spirit leaves the soul speechless because it has rendered the mind vulnerable to splendors so wonderful no word can express them.  All at once, this mysterious rectification of the mind sobers and inebriates, humbles and exalts, bows down and lifts up.  The mind under the influence of this movement of the Holy Spirit penetrates the deep things of God even to the point that one’s whole life is intensified and a source of intensification for others.   Falling in adoration, one finds one’s proper footing for prayer.    

The Gift of Understanding is about standing in the shadow of our crucified God.  It is about seeing the invincibility of the Father’s love in the face of our sin at the foot of the Cross of Christ.   It is about drinking in the deep things of God flowing from the pierced heart of Christ.  This gift is about the freedom to be astonished and gripped by divine tenderness in all kinds of unexpected ways.   

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Faith Simplifies Prayer

Faith simplifies us, in the way we live, and even in our prayer.   During Lent, elaborate meditations involving our imagination, composition of place and attending to the movements of our hearts can all be helpful.  One should use these as long as one draws good fruit.  It can also be helpful to remember the beautiful ways that the Lord has visited us in the past whether in something that happened in prayer or in something that happened as a result of it – as long as we do so to thank Him and not out of some nostalgic impulse to live in the past.

We should, however, be aware of doctrine of teachers like Saint John of the Cross: the more we exercise our love and faith in prayer, the simpler our exercises become.  If we try to hold onto methods because we want to reproduce an experience, we have introduced a complexity into our prayer that can be an obstacle to the new things the Lord yearns to do in our lives.  So we surrender our prayer to what the Lord wants and we allow Him to draw us, even when sometimes He leads us into an unfamiliar darkness, the kind of prayer we do not understand and that does not seem to offer the same consolation we were once accustomed to.

This truth about prayer is echoed in the way we should live our Christian life – out of devotion to Christ and out of an effort to imitate Him in everything.  Since Christ lived to do the will of the Father, we should examine what we own and how we live.  If there is in our lives something (like a possession, a relationship or a habit) not purely for the glory of God, then we should renounce it.  Otherwise, clutching after things that have little to do with the Lord, our hands are not free to welcome Him and receive his gifts.  Here too possessions that were fine to acquire and own at one point in our journey of faith may now be an obstacle to the glory of God unfolding in our hearts – so we must give it to someone who needs it, or else sell it and give the money to those in need.

God who is Love is simple and when His presence is welcomed, He simplifies the soul, and the simpler our souls the more room there is for His love.  What we own visibly and how we conduct ourselves in this world below should mirror this invisible, spiritual reality from above.  Divine simplicity should inform human life, here and now.  This way, as we receive the love of God, we receive it not only in our good intentions and vague hopes, but also in the nitty gritty of the present moment, the complex challenges of the concrete circumstances of our life.

This kind of true devotion is a spiritual gift from above that can only be welcomed in grateful simplicity in the ambiguities and difficulties of this life.  It is sought and accepted only after arduous efforts at renunciation and perseverance.  At the same time, such devotion is not a personal accomplishment or the outcome of our own discipline in spiritual exercises.  Prayer is not reducible to hoped for outcomes.  Prayer is in the logic of a gift, a friendship, a love, and before the mystery of love, the more simply we open our hands in trust, the more the Lord can give.

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A New Beginning to Pray

Beginning to pray is the project of a lifetime.   The entry of the Word of the Father into human history makes this project possible.  This entry is not convenient or easy for God or man.   Love never is.  It demands taking up our freedom in the most difficult and most worthwhile of all human endeavors – the effort to attend to and respond to love.

Beginning to pray is learning to respond with love to the Living God who has called out for our love as if helpless and completely vulnerable.  The Creator of the whole Cosmos speaks to us in supreme humility allowing his His almighty voice to be contained in the hopeful cries of a hungry infant.

One does not always hear at first how His invincible will reverberates.  For those who persevere in listening for this voice, they hear its harmony resound in the gentle way the the Word made flesh allowed Himself to be encompassed by the frailty of human freedom: conceived and born of the “fiat” of a lowly handmaid, bound by her in swaddling clothes, placed by her in a manger in the cave in Bethlehem.  This is what we must attend to in our hearts and respond to with our lives — God’s still small voice is echoed in the plight of those entrusted to us, the poor, the vulnerable and the most needy in our midsts.

In this still darkness, “the Visible Image of the Invisible God” speaks into our reality, historical and personal, impatiently awaiting our response.  He believes in our liberty so much that He freely chose to enter into it and submit Himself to it.  He kisses human freedom with divine freedom – over two thousand years ago in history; today right now in mystery.   This kiss cost Him dearly and those who attempt to respond to Him also must renounce themselves, pick up their cross, and follow Him.  Yet those who pray pay this price gladly because human liberty raised by grace is capable of love — and one free thought filled with love of Him is worth more to Him than all the universe combined. 

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The Ascension and the Confidence of Christian Prayer

In the Gospel of Luke, as He prepares to ascend into Heaven, the Risen Christ leads his disciples out from Jerusalem as far as Bethany.   There He raises his hands and blesses them as His witnesses telling them to go back to Jerusalem to wait for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.   It is in this act of blessing that He departs from them and is taken up into heaven.  This passage invites us to reflect on the relationship of Bethany and Heaven.

Bethany is not far outside of Jerusalem.  It is the town where the close friends of Jesus lived: Lazarus, Mary and Martha.   About halfway between Bethany and the old walls of Jerusalem there stands the Church of the Pater Noster.  This is where it is believed that Jesus gave his teachings on prayer and it is where the ancient Christians commemorated Jesus’s ascension into heaven.  This suggests that the ancient Christians made associations between Bethany and Heaven, friendship with Jesus and prayer, the ascension of the Lord and the witness of the faith.  What does it mean?

One thing that it means is that Christian prayer is a profoundly theological reality.  That is, prayer is born of events of great theological meaning in the life of the Church.  Christian prayer finds in the ascension of the Lord the reason for its bold access into heaven.  If Christ taught we should pray with the bold confidence of sons and daughters, Christian prayer believes it can reach into the heart of the Father because it flows from faith in the Risen Lord whom the Father has raised up to Himself.  When Christ was raised up, frail humanity was lifted into the embrace of divinity so that all of the Lord’s prayers for us are answered.   Through the faith in Him who prays for us to the Father, the world becomes vulnerable to the power of Heaven.

But where do we find this faith and how do we know whether the faith we have in Christ is true?  How can we know whether our own prayer participates in this theological reality baptized in so much eternal meaning?   Such prayer can only be found by those who will freely bind themselves in faith to the Lord through the preaching and teaching of those whom the Lord has sent as His witnesses.  The Church, as a communion of witnesses to the Lord who is both departed from our sight but still at work in the world, is the conduit by which heaven’s spiritual gifts are brought to bear in the nitty gritty details of our personal lives.  It is in the Church that theology, prayer, real life and the friendship we know in the Lord converge with salvific meaning.

Although Christ has been raised from our sight, the Church helps us see how He is still at work in the world, coming to us in all kinds of hidden ways to draw us with Him into the bosom of the Trinity. Because Jesus ascended into heaven to send the Holy Spirit onto the communion of the believers, the communication of life and love in the unity of the Trinity lives by grace in the unity of the Body of Christ  On the basis of His faithfulness to us before the Father, the prayer of the Church claims bold access to the transforming power of heaven so that every Christian can pray with confidence in Him even though He has been taken from our sight.

The witnesses to Christ death, resurrection and ascension into heaven safeguarded their message through the teaching of the Church.  This sacred doctrine preserves for us today the saving truth by which our faith accesses the inexhaustible riches of God, treasures from the Father Christ yearns to share with us.   What a great obligation teachers and preachers of the Gospel have!   Entrusted to them is the witness by which the confidence of Christian prayer is discovered.  Yet to provide a reason for this hope, not only their teaching but also their lives must be true.  Such a task is impossible for alienated humanity.  They too must enter into the confidence of prayer if they are to pass on the witness to Christ the Church has entrusted to them.  

In these ways, the Ascension of Christ helps us see that prayer and sacred doctrine, the saving events and the communion of the Church are all bound together in our faith.  While many Catholics might approach prayer as a private and emotional exercise for rare moments instead of ecclesial and theological act we should make unceasingly, such spirituality risks being cut off from the source of confidence that lives in our tradition.  The greatness of Christian piety alive in the Church is glimpsed only as we accept the sacred doctrine the Church proposes in her witness to the Risen Lord.

Prayer, faith and friendship are joined in the Risen Christ who chose His Bride as His witness.   She knows He is departed for awhile but ever present in the Holy Spirit.  She reminds us that He is raised into heaven out of our sight yet His loving gaze never loses sight of us.   She helps us remember that even though He has gone to the Father, His blessing never leaves us.  It is when we make every effort to welcome and safeguard this treasury of truth that the prayer shared by those whom the Son of the Father bound together as his friends and witnesses becomes our prayer too.  

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