Mistakes at Prayer

What a mistake it is to be tormented and sad because you have no light or consolation in prayer, to strain your head seeking after sensible devotion at Holy Communion, and to neglect little faults, small observances, and occasions for mortifying your own will and desires, for conquering your human respect and for procuring your own humiliation before others! If we were reasonable, we should think only of these last and not make the slightest effort to succeed according to our own ideas; because, as a matter of fact, we never succeed better than when we humbly endure dryness and the privation of this false fervor that nature so loves and that the real love of God despises and even rejects as far as it is able.

ST. CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Letter 7

The Discipline of Contemplation

Contemplation should not be exaggerated, distorted, and made to seem great. It is essentially simple and humble. No one can enter into it except by the path of obscurity and self-forgetfulness. It implies also much discipline, but above all the normal discipline of everyday virtue. It implies justice to other people, truthfulness, hard work, unselfishness, devotion to the duties of one’s state in life, obedience, charity, self-sacrifice. No one should delude himself with contemplative aspirations if he is not willing to undertake, first of all, the ordinary labors and obligations of the moral life.

THOMAS MERTON The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation

Homily — 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Drama in the Desert

From the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and all the way to Golgotha, we see plainly that Christ Jesus did not come into this world to tread the broad and easy way. As his disciples, we should keep that fact foremost in mind. On the contrary, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit he goes without detours to the place where divine battles are fought: that is, to the depths of the human heart, symbolized in Matthew, first, by the depths of Jordan’s waters, where demonic monsters were thought to lurk, and, today, by the desert, where only the saint or the demon can survive. If Satan is the hero of the world—the lord of the earthly-minded, plotting the disruption of the divine order of unity and love at every step—Christ is the divine Hero who comes to confront Satan’s logic with clear-headedness, dogged determination and humility. In this forbidding wilderness two diametrically opposed solutions to the human plight are at loggerheads: on the one hand, capitulation to the comforts of the satanic suggestions; on the other, surrender to the mercy of God’s Providence. Either option requires listening and yielding to a voice from beyond ourselves, though resonating in the depths of our being. Who can doubt that such a tug of war is at the center of the human drama? And to which voice will I pledge my allegiance and devotion? 

The desert is the place of utter poverty and, therefore, an invitation to heroic trust in God. When we experience our own barrenness, when we are most in need, then it is that we are the most vulnerable and that the decisive crises arise. Will I accept quick fixes and adore their Pusher, thus betraying my identity as a person begotten of God, my Creator? Or will I agree to wait in silence and privation, fasting from all the world has to offer, for the perfect length of God’s pleasure, represented by the forty days and nights that recapitulate Israel’s historical wandering in the desert? 

The story of humanity’s Fall through sin is explained today in the tale of our first parents’ seduction through the temptation to become like God. Genesis shows us that God did not create the Human in a condition of alienation from itself but rather in a relationship of graciously bestowed friendship with the Creator. Harmony and not disruption is our origin. Because God creates us in the divine image, God gives us the highest of gifts, freedom—a gift that puts us squarely before the challenge of accountability: this single truth is the source both of our greatest difficulties and of our highest dignity as spiritual beings. A creature cast in unvarying moral uprightness as in a block of concrete would not be free at all. Goodness, like love, can never be the product of an automatic-response mechanism, but only the fruit of a free and personal act.

Now, this is where the plot of salvation-history thickens. God knows “in advance” that humans, enjoying such freedom of choice, will yield to the temptation to want to become like God.  This foreknowledge on God’s part, far from inducing a divine mistake, is rather a measure of how highly God regards the freedom he conferred on us. Yes, God is willing to risk the defeat of his wondrous design of friendship with man. It seems that for God everything hinges on our possessing by nature the privilege of freedom of choice. The reason must be that, without such freedom, there can be no authentic, reciprocal love, which is ultimately what God is after. God does not only wish to “make us happy” in a generic and static manner; God wants for us to enjoy forever the blissful intimacy of his love, and for this a reciprocal relationship is necessary which can be entered into only through the portal of total freedom. God always bestows his love, but we must actively embrace it and live accordingly. 

But God’s factual foreknowledge of humankind’s Fall is accompanied by an even deeper redemptive foreknowledge: namely, by the Father’s intention to send his Son into the world as the One who would face the very same temptation as Adam and Eve, but this time overcoming it. Today’s desert scene is, in fact, Paradise revisited: this is the scene of the unimaginable opportunity whereby the Lord Jesus undoes by his fidelity and obedience the evil that had been perpetrated there, and so re-establishes the innocence of our first condition. This is a victory that only a simultaneously divine and human Savior could accomplish for us. The decisive significance of today’s drama in the desert is that Christ does not triumph over temptation only for himself but for all humankind and each of us, for all who form his Body, so that every one of us can participate in his victory over proud rebellion and puffed-up self-aggrandizement and delusional phantasms of power and glory. Let’s be honest: We do not have to be princes, politicians or mega-CEO’s to be eminent practitioners of the dark arts of selfishness!

The Gospel today portrays Jesus’ victory as occurring after a 40-day fast, that is, at a moment when humanly speaking he is at his weakest and most vulnerable. Make no mistake about it: the temptations he undergoes are genuine temptations. They are not a show of pious make-believe enacted merely to teach us a moral lesson. Jesus may not have experienced the seduction of evil superficially, that is, as an enticement to crude sensual gratification. But surely for him it’s all the worse, because he is tested at a much deeper level of his being.  He suffers temptation in its pure state as a colossal gravitational pull to disobedience against his Father’s mission. What is here dramatized is nothing less than Satan instigating Jesus by every means available to his demonic know-how to abandon his divine Filiation and instead worship the Father of lies. In his well-aimed replies to each of Satan’s enticements, Jesus uses solely the words of Scripture. In this way he shows us that only total obedience to God, total interior identification with God’s Word, can transform mere freedom of choice into perfect freedom of heart and soul.  Indeed, we are most fully and gloriously ourselves only when God’s Word pervades and animates our whole being as the motivating source of all our thoughts, decisions and actions.  

In today’s encounter between God’s Incarnate Wisdom and the arch-Tempter we see that Satan, for all his angelic intelligence, did not understand the divine logic of salvation: namely, that obedient weakness is transmuted into spiritual power by the alchemy of the Father’s delight in the Son’s fidelity. Only faith can understand this, because only faith can understand the paradoxes of divine love. Satan juggles rationality and irony masterfully, but he is woefully ignorant of love’s readiness to embrace weakness for the sake of the beloved. When Satan gets his sharp teeth into Jesus’ flesh, his fangs crumble like sandstone grinding against steel. Sly, relentless, elemental Temptation then becomes elemental Overthrow of the Tempter. Satan thought he was testing the weakness of a generic holy man, yet all the while the Wisdom of God was, in fact, exposing, for all to see, the ultimate impotence of the Deceiver in the face of obedient fidelity and love. Satan is wholly ignorant of the power of fidelity out of love, and this is his Achilles’ heel. Loving fidelity to our Creator and Savior is thus our own strongest weapon in any temptation.

And behold angels approached and served him: I suggest that in these last seven words of today’s gospel text we have nothing less than the surprising fulfillment, by Jesus’ heavenly Father, of precisely the three offers Satan has just made to Jesus. As temptation leaves our Lord, fulfillment approaches. Instead of his (1) eating the bread Satan tempted him to create out of stones, angels now wait on him as at the heavenly banquet, where the sole nourishment is the Word of the Father. Instead of (2) casting himself down from the temple parapet, thus coercing the Father to send protecting angels to prove his love for him, now the Father, unbidden, sends a host of angels to take up, on earth, their jubilant task of waiting upon the eternal King of heaven. And, because the Incarnate Word plainly (3) refuses obeisance to anyone but the Father, Jesus himself receives the adoring service that Satan had tried to wrest for himself from him, the humble Son. 

Do we not ourselves experience—very palpably at times—God’s marvelous generosity with us when, after we have struggled to serve only him, God then overwhelms us with the very things we thought we had renounced forever, only now raised to an infinitely higher potency of truth, durability, and delight?

In conclusion then, brothers and sisters, let us embrace the freedom given us today by the power of the words of this Gospel and by the grace of this Holy Eucharist we are celebrating, and choose with a joyful heart to follow Christ more intimately step by step wherever he may lead us during this particular Lententide. And let us likewise allow Christ the freedom to fulfill our needs, desires and expectations beyond our most extravagant imaginings, for he can surely do it. Christ, I would say, is constitutionally incapable of leading us anywhere but to Paradise!

Heart on Fire

One who watches carefully over the heart will quickly see how the heart of its own nature is emitting light. As a coal catches fire, or as the fire lights a candle, so does God set our heart ablaze as it looks in contemplation at him who is dwelling in our heart.

HESYCHIUS OF BATOS On Vigilance, 104

Homily — Ash Wednesady

I would like to focus on one important grace of this Lenten season, that is, prayer. St. Paul said to the Corinthians, “Working together, then, we implore you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” Prayer – individual prayer and prayer in common – are two expressions of this very important grace, and each of them finds a place in today’s readings.

First, our prayer begins with God and goes to God. It is our exchange with God, our contact with God in faith, hope and love. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit but it is prone to attack from all that is against God. Jesus shows one way that prayer is under attack. It happens when our pride wants to take credit for prayer and boast before others. After all, prayer sets us apart from the majority of men. It elevates us, or seems to. We have something special, and we know it. This kills prayer, so Jesus immediately prescribes steps to remove this exaltation. He tells us to pray in secret, closing the door of our inner prayer room, and then simply to pray, not with many words. There is no praise of men to fuel our prayer at that point. All we have is the Father seeing us. We have to be satisfied with being seen by the Father, which of course, is the greatest gift we can receive. For the Father’s gaze is like healing radiation therapy on a cancer victim. It burns away whatever attacks our prayer. The only reason to pray is to be seen by our Father. But that is precisely the reward we most need, the Father’s gaze.

Next, God wants our prayer to be supported by a community, that is, the Church. St. Paul hints at this communal support for our prayer when he speaks on behalf of the Church, “Working together, then, we implore you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” Prayer is such a grace, and we need the help of others to hold fast to this grace. We cannot overcome the attacks against prayer without working together. In our case, that means working together with others in a community of prayer. Singing, listening, praying the way Jesus did with psalms and hymns and inspired songs allows us receive the grace of God worthily. The attacks against prayer are beaten back by the prayer of a community. For wherever two or three are gathered in imitation of Jesus’ prayer, there is Jesus himself. The surest way to receive the grace of prayer is to receive it in and through the Body of Christ. That is what our Lenten observance teaches us.

Finally, the attacks against prayer are often caused by our negligence. Negligence is a constant threat in monastic life. To some extent, this attack is related to a kind of individualism. Rather than enter into the inner room of our heart, we choose to create a DO NOT ENTER zone which subtly excludes even God from entering. It does not like God poking around in its business. Negligence has many other causes, but St. Paul’s admonition “Working together…” gives us communal protection and enables us to take advantage of all the graced moments of prayer. 

Lent is a time for us to wake up and simply pray, not with many words, but with purity of heart and the confidence that God is looking down upon us. This is the reward and gift that the Lord has prepared for those who love him.

Answering Love With Love

Faith is to know that we are loved. It is to answer love with love. ‘Love me with love, you who are loved.’ To love God is not a duty but a cry of recognition, when we understand that he has first loved us, even to the horror of the cross, of hell. Then our timid liberty is stirred, our heart is moved and all that matters henceforward is that wound by which life comes to us.

OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism, Ch. 3

Christ’s Blood and Words

We are said to drink the blood of Christ not only when we receive it according to the right of the mysteries, but also when we receive his words, in which life dwells, as he said himself ‘:The words that I have spoken to you are a spirit and life’ (John 6.63).

ORIGEN Homilies on Numbers, 16,9