+PRAYER AS THE PATH TO KNOWING OUR DEEPEST SELVES  LCG Lenten Presentation 02

In an effort to share with you on prayer and how this relates to each of your lives let me draw on a couple different sources. As I began preparing these thoughts I am reminded of something said to me a long time ago. Often enough it is not a matter of not knowing how to pray but just a question of exercising it. If there is anything that I would like most to come about from this conference, it would be simply to encourage you to faithfully engage in prayer the way each of you finds helpful.

In the book I have been reading for Lent which is called What I Am Living For, edited by Jon M. Sweeney, there is one chapter by a Daniel p. Horan, O.F.M. He writes the following:

In the dearly decades of Merton’s religious life, the 1940s and 1950s, his contribution to Catholic spirituality was distinctive in that he extended an invitation to all women and men to develop a life of prayer and faith… Merton suggested that “[t]he ever-changing reality in the midst of which we live should awaken us to the possibility of an uninterrupted dialogue with God.” In contrast to the belief that prayer is something that operates according to our terms or requires of us a commitment to consecrated religious life, Merton invited all people to consider that God seeks us first and that we can cultivate practices of attunement to that loving presence of God always near us. “We must learn,” Merton wrote, “to realize that the love of God seeks us in every situation, and seeks our good. His inscrutable love seeks our awakening.” (p.73)

There is no situation, none whatever in which you find yourselves as members of the LCG when God is not seeking you out, seeking to share with you his/her own divine life. What is asked of any of us is tuning into God with the whole of our lives so that this movement of divine love penetrates the whole of our lives, vibrates through every cell of our bodies, in every movement of our spirits. God leaves no stone unturned as I am learning from more and more of my own experience. Perhaps this is why we all too easily turn away when we realize how penetrating and revealing this divine light can be in our lives.

Let me draw on Daniel Horan’s words again:

The difficulty of this dialogue with God is what Merton calls the contemplative awakening; that is, we must be open and attuned to the invitation of relationship that God extends to us at all times. When we awaken to the mystery of God’s presence in our lives, this is at once the beginning of dialogue with God and the inauguration of our discovery of our true self. For Merton, dialogue with God is both a discovery of who God really is and the discovery of who we really are: “The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.” Though modern societies and popular cultures tell us that we need to construct our identities and shape our personal futures, Merton insists that who we really are is known to God alone, for God loved each of us into existence individually and in our particularity. We cannot merely happen upon or discover our true selves by ourselves. “For although I can know something of God’s existence and nature by my own reason, there is no human and rational way in which I can arrive at this contact, that possession of Him, which will be the discovery of Who He really is and Who I am in Him.” (p.75)

The fundamental search going on in any one of our lives is that of knowing God and who each of us is as a person uniquely created and brought into being by this loving God. For many years this can be going on unacknowledged by us but there comes a point when we can no longer ignore its urgency. Whether touched early on or late in life, we know it carries a lasting effect, even an everlasting meaning.

Dan Horan, drawing on Merton again, shows how critical this search is for us by pointing out that:

“Merton summarizes what a dialogue with God looks like and leads to: “Prayer is not only the ‘lifting up of the mind and heart to God,’ but it is also the response to God within us, the discovery of God within us; it leads ultimately to the discovery and fulfillment of our own true being in God.” This effort is not only for a few and the religious elite but also for every member of the human family..” (p.75)

As I typed this, I cannot help but think the Pope’s recent visit to Iraq is precisely a recognition of the fact that whether Christian or Muslim, we are all called to commune with God so as to come to a mutual understanding and appreciation of one another as to what is common in our respective religious traditions.

What initially inspired me to give a talk on prayer to my monastic community was reading  a book by a Fr Luigi Gioia, a Benedictine monk called Say It To God on prayer, so let me draw on a few of his reflections as the means of getting in touch with our deepest longings. This book has been a selection by one of our LCG groups as the main source for reflection during their monthly meetings.

In one of the chapters he speaks of “A Presence We Discover in Us’ (p.23) and writes of how “the Lord himself opens a space for prayer in our hearts. He invites us there, to be alone with him, to find rest in him: ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ He awakes in us a longing to see our life centered on him.” (p.23)

So much of prayer is really about coming to know ourselves as made for God, how restless we are, as St Augustine told us long ago, until we rest in God. Most of us live daily with a paradox for “there is something in us that feels uneasy with prayer and shies away from it, that repeatedly finds excuses for putting it off to another day.” One cannot help but wonder why this is the case, what it is that makes us, called as we are to be truly Christian, to run from what is true to our own deepest longing?

Many of you are familiar with psalm 138/139 depending on the numbering you us. It is a psalm I have always loved as it reminds me and all of us that God is never far from any of us. The psalmist asks:

Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from you presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the furthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. (ps 138/9:7-12)

Jesus tells us, as you well remember from John’s gospel, how “the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.”(Jn 4:23) Prayer is meant to be the hub of our lives, something we are called to do all day long as though the most natural thing in the world. Gioia goes so far as to say “prayer is.. not only the thing our soul desires but also that which all humanity, indeed the whole of creation, desperately need.”

Many of us in our world today have become increasingly aware of how much humanity and all creation groans “in travail” as we face the spread of the virus, have been given fresh awareness of the effects of racism in our society, the growing consequences of climate change that seems to threaten the future of human life on our planet. More than ever, we are experiencing the wisdom of St Paul that “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God… in the hope that it will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (8:20-21)  We are all we want to be when we live in continual and loving relationship with God.

Prayer in this sense, is the most natural thing in the world, what our God wants and expects from us more than anything else in life. Continual prayer is the gift of our heavenly Father. The constant longing that arises from deep down within, is this pull coming from our heavenly Father. Jesus reminded us long ago that no one comes to him “unless the Father draws him.” This is as Gioia points out, “the living water that Jesus promised will rise in the hearts of those who believe in him… It is the deepest voice of our heart that coincides with the voice of the Spirit within us that cries out Abba, Father.” (p.25)

God looks to those who worship in spirit and in truth. To have access, however to this deepest part of our hearts may have surprising results. When faced with it, we all too easily become rebellious, closed or resistant when God draws near to open our deeper selves so as to free us from all forms of self-centeredness or inner resistance. Gioia would have us venture to the root of our inner struggle with prayer, have us look at what may be difficult to face in our prayer life. For him, to plumb the depths of our hearts takes a lot of nerve. As he puts it:

“The tragedy is that our heart is at odds with ourselves too, it blames us too; as John says in his letter: our heart condemns us.” (1 Jn 3:20)

This means that trying to penetrate our heart, trying to get in touch with the deepest part of our soul, with our spirit, can be rather unappealing. It is like going back into a prison, a gloomy space closed and bolted in which we have shut ourselves, prisoners of a voice that accuses and blames us. We are locked in our hearts exactly as were the trembling disciples, who stayed huddled behind closed doors before the resurrection of Jesus: ‘the doors of the place where they had met were locked for fear of the Jewish leaders.’ (Jn 20:19) Fear was the key that locked their door, the same fear that keeps us hidden today behind our inner walls.”

Gioia goes on to point out, how religiosity is of no help when we find ourselves behind these inner walls and it only makes them thicker. “There is a certain familiarity,” he says, “with Scripture, with prayers, in short, with religion, that can make us impervious to the action of the Lord.” While reading the scriptures, it does not take us long to realize that, while his first disciples surrounded him and walked with him day after day, they had an awful time comprehending what he was trying to bring home to them.

The Scribes and Pharisees often quoted scripture to him but completely missed the good news he was trying to share with them. His disciples “could live side by side with Jesus and yet remain fearful and of little faith.” At such times we may begin to believe that God is powerless, distant or has abandoned us.

Strangely enough it is exactly at such times as these that we learn to truly become persons of prayer. Faced with our utter poverty and inadequacy, our faith opens the door to God’s own generous gift of the Spirit. Through a humble and simple trust in the living God, who knows our weakness and inner struggle far better than we do, our spirit becomes united with God’s own. It is then that our spirit becomes one with the Holy Spirit who prays within us with sighs too deep for words.

So, if there is anything I wish most for each of you during this time of Lent, it is that you be faithful in your practice of prayer, that it may enable you to face those deep fears that arise in your hearts and allow them to become the very means of transformation. Then you will know the living God who is not only at your side but lives within you.