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Contemplating the Triumph of Mercy

The resurrection is a mystery of the triumph of divine mercy over human misery.  When the Father raised Christ Jesus from the dead, humble humanity was not overcome, surmounted or diminished.  Instead all that is good, holy and true about this life was rescued from futility and death.   Christian contemplation beholds this victory and by faith allows the splendor of Easter morning to baptize the soul anew.   


Th prayer of faith sees the resurrection of Christ from the dead has the first fruits of an astonishing work of God.    The Risen Lord animates this work of new creation as a fountain of grace, a boundless source of divine love flowing into our parched hearts.   Those who drink from these living waters are no longer prisoners to the dying life we now live. Humble prayer drinks this in and discovers the hidden fruitfulness of God.



Just as Jesus rose from the dead, Christian prayer rises up in faith.  To believe that Jesus is risen from the dead, this is to lift up our hearts to the Lord and take our stand on the firm ground that knows evil is not the last word about our lives.  This faith may well be tested by our mediocrity and repeated failures, but if we do not deny Christ, He will not deny us – instead His faithfulness to us is being revealed in our struggles to be faithful.  


The Risen humanity of Christ is the very yeast of prayer so that even in the depths of our most bitter struggles, prayer rises to God.   By His passion and death, Christ sewed into the mystery of sin, the mystery of grace.  The mystery of grace makes all things new so that even when we fall short, turning to the mystery of Mercy we can always make a new beginning.  In this work of grace, it is God’s inexhaustible love and not our failures that defines who we are.  He continually lifts us up.


Prayer is all about grace, the grace that flows from the wounds of Christ.  This sheer gift entrusted to humanity can only be welcomed in humble faith.   It is the gift of the merciful love of God at work in us.  


Prayer ponders the dimensions of merciful love, a suffering love pierced to the heart over the plight of another.  God is pierced over the plight of each one of us.  This is why He could not bear that we should suffer alone.   To show us how much He has implicates Himself in our misery, He suffered death on the Cross for us.  So that we might know our dignity, our freedom, the saving truth about who He is and where we stand before Him, Christ drained to the dregs the cup of our misery, treasuring each drop because He treasures each of us even more.  Prayer is the response of a heart that is moved with gratitude for this inestimable gift and, in this gratitude, opens the heart to be like God’s – pierced by love.  


Christian contemplation takes all of this in by faith.  In the dawning of the Third Day, we come to know how no sin, no addiction, no shortcoming, no weakness, and no other burden of guilt can overpower or exhaust the love of God at work in those who believe.  This suffering love is the truth and this truth is what sets us free.   Even when believers allow themselves to fall back into the slavery of sin, the very thought of this new freedom stirs a longing to return to the life of faith.  This is a holy freedom filled with God’s ineffable freedom, a freedom to turn back, to reverse course, to rediscover the embrace of the Father.  It is a freedom that is expressed in conversion from sin and renunciation of anything that threatens our dignity as sons and daughters of God.  It is a freedom to seek the goodness and mercy of God yet again.  


To pray in this freedom is to keep vigilance with the eyes of the heart so that with every breath, in every moment, we might gaze on a love so much stronger than any form of slavery or even death.  A new life blood animates the spirits of those who live by such contemplative faith so that even when they suffer death, the life by which they live only becomes stronger.   Here, precisely because they are more fully alive, their praise becomes all the more beautiful.    Unfolding in all kinds of astonishing ways throughout space and time in the lives of those who put their trust in the Risen Lord, this illuminating work of love brings the only thing really new our old, tired existence has ever known.  Here, prayer that lets itself be captivated by the freshness of merciful love ponders a true word of hope for a discouraged world.  

Christian prayer extends through the vast horizons of love pioneered by Christ into human poverty.   The mysterious prayer of the Lord, a prayer that implicates the whole of his sacred humanity in merciful love, effects radical vulnerability and complete trust in the goodness and wisdom of the Father’s plan in every situation, no matter how difficult.  Here, the prayer of the Word made flesh is not merely an example for us to follow.  His prayer is a new principle that animates the cry of recognition and love that lives in the Church and resounds throughout the cosmos in every trial, suffering and joy.  
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The Mysterious Prayer of Gethsemane

There are stories about great saints who struggled to pray in the face of great difficulty.   This can be baffling until we try to enter into the Passion of Christ and consider the movements of His Heart before the merciful love of the Father.  Until we contemplate the prayer of the Word of the Father, this struggle to pray is often deemed to be merely a stage through which we pass.   Yet, in the Garden of Gethsemane (see Luke 22:35ff), the bloody sweat of the Son of God reveals this struggle as a supreme moment of Christian contemplation, a terrifying standard against which the truth of all our other prayers can be discerned.


The hymn of praise learned with the Suffering Servant on the Mount of Olives is shrouded in a mystery.  It is against this mystery that therapeutic approaches to prayer should be discerned.  Psychological or physical tantrums are silenced before the authentic cry of heart offered by the Son of Man.  His love for his disciples and devotion to the Father challenges any consumerist attitude toward the things of God.   His sorrow and spiritual poverty helps us feel the appropriate shame we ought to have over any gluttonous expectation for mental relief or euphoric experience.  Against the dark terror Jesus confronts in prayer, spiritual consumerism can only be seen as limiting the freedom that our conversation with the Lord requires.   



The Word made flesh baptized every moment of his earthly life in this kind of prayer.   Every heart beat and every breath was so filled with zeal for the Father and those the Father gave Him, divine love ever exploded in His sacred humanity with resounding silence, astonishing signs, heart-aching wonders and words of wisdom which even after two thousand years still give the world pause.  Each verse of the Gospels attempts to show us His self-emptying divinity boldly hurling His prayerful humanity with the invincible force of love to the Cross.  


In Gethsemane we glimpse how the Son of Man availed Himself to these mysterious promptings of the Father’s love, an unfathomable love that is not comfortable to our limited humanity.   Unaided human reason cannot penetrate the divine passion that compelled Him into the solitude hidden mountains and secret gardens.   His vigil on the Mount of Olives can only be understood as the culmination of the ongoing conversation to which He eagerly made His humanity vulnerable.   


If, in this culminating movement of heart, Christ sweat blood, we who have decided to follow in the footsteps of our Crucified Master should not be surprised by moments of great anguish in our own conversation with God.  In the face of this mystery, we must allow the Risen Lord to give us His courage.   What is revealed on the Mount of Olives helps us see why Christian prayer can mature into a beautiful surrender, a movement of love which gives glory to the Father and extends the redemptive work of the Redeemer in the world.   What Christian contemplation sees with the Son of God can involve very difficult struggle, through the strength that comes from the Savior even the terrifying moments of such prayer can resolve themselves in trustful surrender: “Not my will… Yours be done.”  

A vision of prayer that contemplates in the midst of terror and anguish is probably not a popular subject, but I think a very important one today.   For further reflection on this I refer you to “Blessings that are Difficult to Receive” on Dan Burke’s Roman Catholic Spiritual Direction blog.

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Lent – praying from the heart

During Lent, we dedicate ourselves to prayer, fasting and alms-giving.   These practices are simple ways of expressing our gratitude to Jesus for what He has done for us.  This in fact is the very nature of penance.  Penance is love which responds to mercy – and this love is not content with words, thoughts and feelings.  This love needs to express itself in a prayer that cries from the heart, in sacrifice that really costs, and in little hidden acts of kindness that comfort those who most need it.

Why do we allow God to implicate us in the plights of others, especially during Lent?  God’s love suffers the personal plight each of us.  He does this because He does not want us to suffer alone.  So He seeks us out in our suffering – the suffering that we have brought on ourselves and the suffering that others have brought on us.   He is concerned about our dignity and He is ready to do whatever it takes that we might be rectified and stand with Him who is Love Himself.  The extent to which He enters into our misery for this purpose is revealed on the Cross.  If we are to be His disciples, we must pick up our cross and follow Him.  This is how the Lord extends His saving mystery through space and time – He loves us so much He implicates us in this great work of His Love.

No matter how many times we fail, no matter how great our weaknesses, no matter how inadequate we are to the demands of love — He is there with us, loving us, providing exactly what we need in the moment, and this because He really loves us that much.   How can we not respond by offering Him food and drink when we recognize Him in the disguise of those who hunger and thirst?  How can we not respond by forgoing a little comfort and convenience when He has already suffered so much discomfort and inconvenience for us?  How can we not respond by praying for those who need the love of God when He has never forgotten us in His love for the Father?

When prayer, sacrifice and generosity come together in thanksgiving to God for His goodness to us, deep places of the heart are purified and we rediscover the joy humanity was meant to know from the beginning.  Lent is all about this joy – a joy God’s love allows us to know, the joy of being sons and daughters of God, the joy of heart so beautiful it would be wrong not to share it with those who need a little joy as well.

Would you like to hear this in audio file?  Click here. Courtesy of Kris McGregor of www.DiscerningHearts.com.

In an explanation of St. John of the Cross’s teaching, I have offered some more thoughts on praying from the heart at Dan Burke’s Roman Catholic Spiritual Direction.

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Living With Holy Desires

Today, as secular as we have become, we need prayer more than ever.  In the midst of a superabundance of material conveniences or else in their felt absence, we forget that we are spiritual beings at our own peril.  We must not define ourselves by the things we possess or do not possess.  We must not allow the pace and noise of the marketplace to suffocate us.  There are deeper and holier desires that haunt the human heart – desires that drive us beyond our limited accomplishments and compel us to look out onto those new frontiers where the mystery of humanity touches the creative force of God’s love.  We must order our lives so that these desires are not only protected and nourished, but also unleashed.  Such desires unleashed by prayer avail us to the fullness of life that the Lord longs for us to know.


From Pope Benedict XVI’s General Audience of November 7, 2012: 


We are pilgrims, heading for the heavenly homeland, toward that full and eternal good that nothing will be able to take away from us. This is not, then, about suffocating the longing that dwells in the heart of man, but about freeing it, so that it can reach its true height. When in desire one opens the window to God, this is already a sign of the presence of faith in the soul, faith that is a grace of God. St Augustine always says: “so God, by deferring our hope, stretched our desire; by the desiring, stretches the mind; by stretching, makes it more capacious” (Commentary on the First Letter of John, 4,6: PL 35, 2009).
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Hidden Movements of the Heart

In prayer, in deep prayer, there are hidden movements of the heart.  Like gravity, there is a pull to silence, a gentle impulse, hardly perceptible, yet exerting its influence all the time.   Love is the specific gravity of the soul and that to which we give our heart is a force in our lives.  If we give our hearts to good things, our lives feel the tug of what is good.  If to evil, evil things.  But if to God, not only do evil things lose their influence over us, but we come to possess all the good things we have ever hoped for in a more marvelous way.  This is because all that is good, holy, noble, beautiful and true is enveloped and established in the gentle mystery of His presence.  For God’s part, the Holy Trinity burns with all the warmth and light of perfect, uncreated and eternal friendship, a love never ceasing with the full force of divine passion to share all of this with us – and to give so much more – and this in a secret and tender exchange of hearts.  Who would know there was such power unfolding in spiritual movements so subtle we are scarcely aware of them?

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How the Saints Dealt with Unanswered Prayer

Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity, whose feast day is on November 8, had a landlord for whom she prayed and fasted, begging God for his conversion for years.  In many ways, those who prayed and fasted for the elections earlier this week would probably appreciate her experience.  For just as many had hoped that America would choose to be a little more open to God and to life, she too had cause for disappointment when M. Chapuit died without ever having shown any sign of returning to the faith.

When our intercession for those we love and for difficult situations seems unheeded, this is never because God does not hear our prayer.  In His abundant love, He stands ready to give always what is most needed in each situation.   However, what He knows is really needed and what we think we are asking for do not always coincide.  This means that sometimes we must come to terms with disappointed expectations in our prayer.

For some, this disappointment is so great, they determine to give up prayer altogether.  They walk away from their faith and assume that somehow it just does not work, at least not for them.   When this happens, they have allowed their disappointment to become despair.

There is another way.  Instead of succumbing to disappointment, Blessed Elisabeth learned from St. Paul that God’s power is sufficient. St. Paul asked the Lord three times to remove a thorn from his flesh, an allusion to some sort of spiritual trial (2 Cor. 12:7).   Despite the Apostles devotion and long perseverance in prayer, God would not remove the thorn.  Instead, the Lord answered Paul by explaining that His power was brought to perfection in our weakness.

St, Paul wanted God to deliver him from difficulty by making it magically go away.  He wanted a fairytale – but instead the Lord was leading him on an epic journey.  What he did not fully grasp was the deeper things God desires to address when we present Him our concerns.  He learned that the most powerful way God works is not despite but through our weaknesses.  It seems that to accomplish the great wonders He yearns for us to know, the Lord does not need our clever solutions, only our faithfulness in prayer.

St. Paul’s mentality toward prayer displays the transforming encounter that took place in his conversation with God.  And because he did not succumb to disappointment, he is a powerful witness to the remarkable ways God works in the world.  Rather than boast of his apostolic and spiritual achievements, St. Paul loved to boast about his weakness and helplessness so as to affirm that all things are possible with God who strengthens us.

What St. Paul is teaching us is that the providence of God is more manifest when we have been brought past the brink of our own limited resourcefulness.  The marvels of God begin at the breaking point where the natural capacity to cope has been completely exhausted.  This always takes us beyond our expectations.   In fact, as long as when try to limit God to the narrow scope of our expectations, we have little occasion to be filled with wonder over His surpassing greatness.   God loves to surpass all expectation because His love is unsurpassable.

For our part, radical openness to God and humility before the astonishing ways He chooses to answer our prayers allows us to give Him all the glory.  When all the glory goes to the Lord, we find even deeper and better reasons for gratitude than we would have had had our prayers been answered the way we thought they should. Those who seek God in intercessory prayer open themselves to this very same mystery – it is a mystery that provides us the opportunity to more radically avail ourselves to the hidden power by which God makes all things work for the good of those who love Him.

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Self-Denial – Surest Pathway

Contrary to those who insist that spiritual maturity is about mastering a technique or the successful completion of some elaborate program, St. John of the Cross sees the road to union with God as an easy and simple journey if we embrace radical self-denial:

The road leading to God does not entail a multiplicity of considerations, methods, manners, and experiences — though this may be a requirement for beginners — but demands only the one thing necessary: true self-denial, exterior and interior, through the surrender of both to the passion of Christ and by annihilation in all things. Ascent to Mount Carmel, book 2, chapter 7, Complete Works, translators Otilio Rodriguez and Kieran Kavanaugh, (Washington, D.C.: ICS, 1991)171. 

Self-denial is the practice of acting against the drive for comfort, security and satisfaction we seek in our relationships with people and in our relation to things.   As long as we worry about having influence over others or whether they esteem us, and as long as we only see anything else as a crutch with which to get through life, we are not vulnerable to the Lord and open to the wonders of His love at work in us and in the world.  This extends even to efforts to practice prayer merely as a program of mental hygiene.  The Lord did not die on the Cross so that we might find a little psychological relief from the stress of daily life. Thus, we turn our backs on these things, annihilate our disordered appetites, pick up our cross and follow in the steps of our Crucified Master.

Christ is our pattern.  We imitate Him out of devotion to Him.  He suffered the annihilation of all his earthly powers unto death out of love for the Father and for the sake of our salvation – because He loved us in the Father from all eternity.   Our love becomes eternal when we follow His example and allow His love for the Father to animate our lives and extend its hidden beauty into the world through us.

Some think these counsels regarding self-denial and annihilation mean that the spiritual life is suppose to be a joyless affair.   But really the more we renounce joys that are beneath our dignity, the more room we have for a deeper and more abiding joy.   There are some great joys that in fact give God glory when we share them.

If you have ever been captivated by the mountains in the early morning when they are suddenly crown in light or felt the reverberation of the surf crashing against the coastline —  you have probably felt drawn to silent adoration.   There is also a sweetness found in secretly bringing joy to others — those who have gone before us in the faith probably smile when we share this foretaste of our heavenly homeland.   We enjoy these wonderful works of God because, comfortable and pleasurable though they are in themselves, they raise us up out of self-pre-occupation to our true purpose, and in doing so they help us behold the splendor of the One in whose image we are made.

Such joys are not opposed to self-denial.  Instead, they foster it.  Somehow these joys give us the courage we need to embrace the beatitude of holy sorrow and open us  to the surest pathway.

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Prayer and the Great Divorce

“Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word.  And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell.  But Heaven is not a state of mind.  Heaven is reality itself.  All that is fully real is Heavenly.  For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains.” This is the insight attributed by C.S. Lewis to George MacDonald in The Great Divorce.

This notion that Heaven is real and Hell anything divorced from reality applies to prayer.  Prayer can be Heaven or Hell depending on whether we choose to pray by love filled faith in the Lord or else allow some enchanting form of self-occupation to swallow our attention.  Christian prayer is meant to be a heavenly dialogue even if it involves suffering some painful truths we would rather not face.  Prayer can also be a hellish monologue, a conversation turned on itself in which one never breaks free of his big fat ego.

Prayer in which one humbly converses with the Living God unlocks divine beauty and raises the eyes of our soul to inexhaustible splendors — wonders we could not have ever imagined existed.  Such prayer extends our vision so that we even come to see these wonders in everyone the Lord entrusts to us.  The second kind of prayer imprisons us in the merely subjective, and weighs us down in nostalgia, bitterness and regret.  With the eyes of our heart rolled back on themselves, we are unable to open them to the mystery of God uniquely revealed in the gaze of another.  There are many different techniques and methods for perfecting this second kind of prayer.  But in the prayer of faith, how ever helpful they might be in the beginning, every technique must bow and every method must bend before the power and sovereignty of Christ.

Even in the midst (especially in the midst?) of what the saints call the dark night, the prayer of faith is a foretaste of the fulfillment of all desire won for us by the Blood of the Lamb.  The second kind of prayer, even  in its most blissful ecstasies, is a pathway into a state of mind common to those swallowed in the self-occupation from which Christ yearns to deliver us.  However therapeutic and pleasant, exercises in mental hygiene can not lift one above himself.  For those whose prayer is but a monologue, unless they allow the silence of God to shatter their interior chatter, they will come to lose all memory of the true longing stirred in their hearts by simple joys and noble sorrows.  On the other hand, whatever the trials with which they must deal, those who persevere in the divine dialogue initiated by the Word made flesh journey across a threshold into their heavenly homeland: the household of the Father in which they are awaited by love.

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The Paradox of Holiness and Communion

To be holy is to be set apart.  To be in communion is to be in solidarity with one another.  Prayer both sets us apart and establishes us in a deeper communion.  It is a paradox.  Although this mystery is not completely solvable, one hint  is the relational dimension of prayer.  It is ordered to a real friendship with the all holy God.  
In asserting this, the paradox in question can never be simply an intellectual puzzle – it is existential and evokes a response.  This friendship ‘sets us a part’ in the sense that we make God the priority of our heart and allow Him who is not of this world to become the life-principle of our soul.   This means we are in a sense dead to the things of this life or at least not animated by them.  Here, this “out of this world” orientation of Christianity can be disconcerting.  Sometimes we struggle with a fear that if we really begin to pray, we might lose out on some beautiful things in this world.  But living by faith does not mean that Christians care any less about the affairs of this world nor do they enjoy life any less, and this is especially true when it comes to our friends including all those the Lord has solemnly entrusted to us and to whom we are likewise entrusted for this brief time we have together in this life.  
This is where the paradox comes in.  Even though God’s love orients us to a life beyond this world and sometimes away from some apparent forms of communion this world recognizes, the net effect of this new orientation is that Christians are free to be even more engaged in the lives of others.  This is because God is love – the deeper our communion with Him, the deeper our solidarity with those we love and the greater our ability to love.  Such love is not limited by our human frailty.  It is a divine gift and charged with the power of the Holy Spirit.  By continually entering into the love of God through prayer, Christians discover new capacities to love those they hold most dear, and they experience a deeper communion with one another. 
This paradox is taken up by Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity who often wrote to encouraged friends to love prayer.  One letter suggests that prayer should not be limited to any quantity of memorized formulas that one mindlessly races through.  It proposes a more authentic, a more personal, and a more consuming kind of prayer.  Elisabeth in fact envisions a form of prayer which permeates every moment of one’s life.  She explains it as a ceaseless occupation of the heart, “the raising of the soul to God through all things.”  In this same letter, she asserts that if we engage such ceaseless prayer it “establishes us in a kind of continual communion with the Holy Trinity.”  In this communion with the Trinity, we also find a spiritual solidarity with one another, a “meeting of our souls.”  By ceaselessly raising our soul to God, we enter “more deeply into ourselves” “where the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit dwell” and, she claims “in Them we will be One.” (L 252)
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The Prayer of Christ and the Gift of the Holy Spirit

In Christ Jesus, humanity has been received into its heavenly homeland, the spiritual reality wherein it is finally free to thrive to the full.   This paradise is reserved for all those who persevere until the end in loving one another out of obedience to Christ.  In fact, loving God and one another here and now anticipates the life God has in store for those who believe.  Therese of Lisieux calls this living by love.  Such a life alone is commensurate with God’s call to humanity.  For to love God with one’s whole being and love one’s neighbor as oneself – to be able to do this and never grow weary, to be constant with what is most noble in our humanity towards all that is good and holy – this is what it means to thrive as a human being, it is what we were made to be.  This is the divine image revealed in us – and in heaven that image shines in the perfect likeness of the One who has gone before us.

Whoever has endeavored this, that is, whoever has endeavored to really love unto the end, such a person has in one way or another tasted something of heaven.  Such a person knows deep inside the greatness for which we are made.  At the same time, everyone who strives to live by love knows that it is impossible without help from above.

That we might realize our true calling, Jesus ascended into heaven and makes intercession for us – his love which has no end is poured out before the heavenly Father on our behalf.  Jesus constantly pours out his heart to the Father that we might receive 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 ask in faith.

True prayer, mature Christian prayer, the kind by which we can live by love, is produced in us by the power of the Holy Spirit.  The Gift promised to us by Christ before He ascended into our heavenly homeland, the Holy Spirit is the animating principle of the Christian life, the Soul of the Christian soul.    The Divine Counselor is come upon us and envelops us with all the wisdom we need to love those entrusted to us, to be faithful in our love for the Lord.  In Him, possibilities present themselves in prayer we could have never imagined existed.  We may fail and fall short, accused in a thousand ways of our weakness: this Advocate testifies to the power of God at work in our frail humanity.  The Creator Spirit ushers us into our true homeland and establishes us into communion with the Holy Trinity – in this life we have Life itself, Life to live life to the full, to live by love.

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