Continually Before the Face of God

Be mindful of God, so that in every moment he may be mindful of you. If he is mindful of you, he will give you salvation. Do not forget him, letting yourselves be seduced by vain distractions. Do you want him to forget you in your times of temptation? Stay near him and obey him in the days of your prosperity. You will be able to rely on his word in difficult days. Because prayer will keep you safe in his continuous presence you may constantly be before his face.Think of him, remember him in your heart. Otherwise, if you only meet him from time to time, you risk losing your close friendship with him.

ISAAC OF NINEVEH Philocalia

Denial of Desire

In general, the reason why many souls have no love or inclination towards virtue is that they harbor affections and desires which are neither innocent nor directed wholly towards God. He therefore who loves anything beside God renders his soul incapable of the divine union and transformation into God.

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS The Ascent of Mount Carmel

God is Love

Believe more and more intensely in God's love. Or, better, that God is Love: that, for Him, to be and to love are one and the same thing. Remember what Saint Augustine wrote on the text: "I am, Who am". Change the word being for loving and you will still be far from reaching the limits of that truth which is Love. Despite all the penetration of his genius Saint Augustine never reached those limits. No one ever will— there are no limits! The Love of God is boundless Light.

A CARTHUSIAN They Speak by Silences

Homily – Christ the King 34th Sunday in O.T.-C

Back in the late 1950s, in my early teenage years, just before Castro’s Revolution and his accession to mock-messianic power, I attended an all-boys’ school in provincial Cuba run by the Marist Brothers. First Fridays of the month were rigorously consecrated to devotion to the Sacred Heart, a focus of Catholic piety that at that time was inseparable from the veneration of Christ the King. On First Fridays the whole student body of about 200 would gather in the garth first thing in the morning, and we would rededicate ourselves to the enthralling mystery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. During the almost 70 years of living I’ve done since then, one phrase from the consecration prayer that we all recited in schoolboy unison—like the multiplication tables—has stuck firmly in my memory and gently haunted me: Tuyos somos y tuyos queremos ser: “Yours we are and yours do we want to be.” My mind stored away this formulation as a memorable puzzle, and its singsong rhythm and mystery have never loosened their grip on my heart.

In recent years I think I’ve begun to understand the deeper import of this generous public confession we made corporately, Yours we are and yours do we want to be, which at first may seem but typical religious rhetoric. However, all on its own it has gradually filtered down into my consciousness, to become the guiding light of my spiritual journey, a sort of standard against which to measure my movement. When you delve into it, you can see that the phrase actually conveys the invitation to a complete and profound spirituality because it puts on our lips two essential things: first, faith’s proclamation of God’s most sublime deed in creating us, and, second, our personal affirmation of that deed of God’s. To consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart of Jesus the King, I’ve come to see, means to embrace with every fiber of our being the magnificent truth that Jesus has already made us his own. As a matter of fact and not of vague imagining, we do belong by rights only to Jesus and not to ourselves or to the world or to anything or anyone in it! They sang a new hymn: Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth (Rev 5:9-10, NAB).

However, now comes the all-important practical question: Is this factual reality, this condition of gloriously belonging to Another, to our Creator and Redeemer who has given his all for us as expressed by the wound in his Heart—is this belonging what we really want? And do we, consequently, dedicate the bulk of our thoughts and time and energy to cultivating this central and unique reality of our lives? The fool-proof test that reveals the actual and central love-interest of our lives is the answer to two further questions: To what is it that I spontaneously dedicate the greater part of my waking hours? And toward what object do my thoughts and desires instinctually gravitate? One major practical reason for giving ourselves to contemplative prayer is to discover where exactly the deepest love of our heart really lies. 

In the article in the Catechism titled “The Battle of Prayer” in Part IV, we read these helpful words: “A distraction reveals to us what we are attached to, and this humble awareness before the Lord should awaken our preferential love for him and lead us resolutely to offer him our heart to be purified. Therein lies the battle, the choice of which master to serve” (no. 2729). There you have it: the choice of which master to serve. That crucial choice is what the kingship of Jesus is all about. As Bob Dylan used to sing with his gritty twang, “you gotta serve somebody. Now, it may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody”. It would be pure delusion for any of us to think that we are not in thrall to some “king” or other. Why not, then, deliberately choose the King of Love and Truth with all our hearts, to serve whom is synonymous with eternal freedom?

The reality of our already belonging objectively to God in Christ takes the form of a solemn hymn of praise in our second reading from Colossians today: All things were created through Christ and for Christ. Christ is before all things, and in Christ all things hold together. Whether we are aware of it or not, each of us, by being included in this all things, has already been swept up from the beginning of our existence into the spiraling process of divine transformation and glorification that constitutes the ongoing cosmic drama of redemption, which is also the true drama of our lives and the only one that ultimately matters. Yet, vast and all-inclusive though it is, such a universal drama is not at all abstract or impersonal because it is, in fact, the careful and love-guided joint work of the heavenly Father and his only-begotten Son, steered at each step in the process by the goodness and wisdom of their Holy Spirit. 

St Paul continues: The Father delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us to the Kingdom of his beloved Son. This is the Kingdom of Light and Life where Jesus alone is King, he in whom all the Fullness [of divinity] was pleased to dwell, through Christ to reconcile all things for God, making peace by the blood of his Cross. Jesus is no merely hereditary or man-made monarch. Here is a King who has earned his kingship over creation literally by the Blood of his brow and Heart, out of sheer love for his Father and for the creatures they co-created and co-redeemed with one generous accord. For us to dwell joyfully and permanently in this Kingdom of peace and love is what Jesus has gained for us by the shedding of his Precious Blood. This is our unassailable birthright as God’s children. 

And yet, as that childhood formula also ingrained in me, not only must we affirm Yours we are, but at the same time also and yours do we want to be. The thing we have first been made to be by the immense work of God’s mercy and generosity, that very thing we also need to embrace for ourselves and make our own through the ardent desire by our willing heart and the way we live our daily lives. God’s act of creating and redeeming us, to become complete and vital, has to be reciprocated by our act of desire, assent and conversion of life. Obviously I could not yet understand this in the 1950s when I was 10 and 11 years old, as every month we piously recited our act of consecration. But we human beings do actually possess at every moment the power of becoming forever something unsurpassably magnificent: the Children of the Light, the Children of the Living God in Christ. We must not remain indifferent to this invitation. The crucial thing for each of us in our Christian adulthood, as grace continues to mature us, is to embrace with all our heart and in our concrete lives what we have already been made to be at our creation through Christ, the eternal Word, and again at our redemption through Christ, the crucified and risen Savior. 

This urgency to make a radical decision and choose for ourselves what God has first chosen for us is dramatized in today’s Gospel text, from St Luke’s account of Jesus’ Passion and Death. Luke’s first message to the reader concerns the division that arises between the people and the leaders in the face of the crucified Jesus, over whose head was nailed an inscription that read This is the King of the Jews. People and leaders each chose to have a different reaction to the Jesus phenomenon. The people stood by and watched, while the leaders mocked Jesus. The attitude of the people is positive. Luke says that they “stood there”, that is, “they abided”, “stood with perseverance”. These are not people who, passing by, stopped out of mere morbid curiosity. Their being and standing there expresses a decision, a will, an interest, we might even say an involvement. The other aspect of the people’s attitude is expressed by the verb theoreîn, which here should be translated as “to observe reflectively” and not simply as “to see”. When an event is observed attentively, this is reflected inwardly on the observer and it will bring about a transformation. It is in fact from this careful observation, from this contemplation of the “spectacle” of a mocked and humiliated Messiah, that the repentance of the crowds in the face of the crucified Christ will arise. 

On the cross Jesus the King is so stripped of himself that he does not respond to insults but remains silent, with only his nakedness as royal robes of state. I would be tempted to say that he responds with silence; but I wonder if his inner freedom and his being now with the Father in the depths of his heart (vv. 34, 46) do not take him even deeper than that, take him to where he no longer even hears the insults, taunts, and provocations, but listens only to the words of truth and humility of the “other criminal”, to whom he spontaneously promises communion with himself that very day in his Kingdom. At the beginning of his public ministry Jesus responded, as any good rabbi would, with words from Scripture to the temptations of Satan, the Divider (Lk 4:1-13), thus expressing his closeness to the Father and oneness with him. Now on the cross Jesus dwells in silence, and this silence is the seal of his intimacy with the Father. Jesus’ silence of compassion and self-surrender is itself the throne of selfless love and peace from where Christ rules as King of all the universe and of all ages. In brief, King Jesus will renew his surrender of himself to us at this very altar. 

Finding God

We should find God in what we know, not in what we don't; not in outstanding problems but in those we have already solved…. We must not wait until we are at the end of our tether: he must be found at the center of life and not only in death; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in activity, and not only in sin.

DIETRICH BONHEOFFER Prison Letters

Eucharist

The “bodily” union of humanity with God made present to it has been, in a manner beyond all comprehension, presented to us in terms of eros, as the fulfillment of what the Song of Songs had celebrated long before: existence as a bridal state.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR A Theology of History 

Divine Love

The principal labor of the Christian is to believe that divine love is the breadth and length and height and depth, and that there is simply nothing above, below or beyond it. It is our home; it enfolds us and is our utmost security both in this life and in death and beyond.

RUTH BURROWS, OCD Essence of Prayer

Prayer and Duties

He prays unceasingly who combines prayer with necessary duties and duties with prayer. Only in this way can we find it practicable to fulfill the commandment to pray always. It consists in regarding the whole of Christian existence as a single great prayer. What we are accustomed to call prayer is only a part of it.

ORIGEN On Prayer, 12

God's Providence and Mercy.

As is a grain of sand weighed against a large amount of gold, so, in God, is the demand for equitable judgment weighed against his compassion. As a handful of sand in the boundless ocean, so are the sins of the flesh in comparison with God's providence and mercy. As a copious spring could not be stopped up with a handful of dust, so the Creator’s compassion cannot be conquered by the wickedness of creatures.

ISAAC OF NINEVEH Ascetic Treatises

Thinking and Contemplation

To progress in thinking about creatures is painful and worrisome. The contemplation of the Holy Trinity is ineffable peace and silence.

EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS Centuries, I,65

Homily — Dedication of the Church of Saint John Lateran

In the Gospel of John we always stand contemplatively before the figure of Jesus. We have seen him enter the Jerusalem the holy city riding on a donkey’s foal to begin his reign as humble king. And this morning we watch as he comes into the Temple. And when he discovers the confusion of buying and selling in this sacred place, he is outraged. “Take these out of here,” he says. “Stop making my Father’s house into a market.” These words and actions recall the prophecy of Zechariah who foretold what would happen when the Lord entered the holy city of Jerusalem: “On that day…there shall no longer be a trader in the house of the Lord.” And amidst the chaos of upturned tables, coins scattered and lambs and oxen scrambling, his disciples recall the words of Scripture, “Zeal for your house is eating me up.” 

“What right has he to do such a thing?” As king Jesus has “ultimate authority over the Temple,” and as such he is its “reformer and rebuilder.” His right is the “right of Truth to name flagrant infidelity and to demand righteousness.” “Destroy this temple,” he says. “And in three days I will raise it up.” We can imagine the indignation that this interruption of the temple business and its cult along with his talk of destruction engendered. Small wonder that the scene in today’s Gospel is viewed by most scholars as the act which precipitates the decision of the authorities to kill him. But Jesus does not “condemn the temple cult; he intervenes because he truly understands and loves it” and demands more for God. His action is directed against everything that does not correspond to the holiness of this Temple. 

Jesus predicts the destruction which will befall the Temple and the institution within a generation as God’s judgment on religious leaders who have corrupted Israel’s sacred traditions. They have made the Temple a political symbol of resistance to Rome, believing that scrupulously preserving cult and tradition will safeguard their identity vis-à-vis their Roman oppressors. And so the sacred place where the Most High comes to meet his people has been profaned. 

Religious leaders have lost sight of the mystery of the temple in all its gracious demands; and worst of all they have refused to acknowledge the living presence of this mystery in the person of Jesus - this is tragic blindness to the nearness of all Israel had longed for. Jesus embodies the love, grace and mercy of the God of Israel, at a time when these ideas have become particularly unpopular among the Jews. He proclaims the coming reign of God, a place he calls the kingdom, a place where no one gets excluded. They are threatened by his brand of compassion. Make no mistake, they are right to be concerned, Jesus is dangerous. The breadth of God’s compassion has been breaking through in all his signs and healings. He brings good news to the poor, sets free those oppressed and heavily burdened, and he is teaching the people how to hope again. Indeed it is in the person of Christ Jesus that the new Temple is being rebuilt, a Temple “gleaming with holiness, the Temple promised and longed for by the prophets.” 

Finally we hear this most beautiful phrase, whispered to us by the evangelist, “He was speaking of the temple of His Body.” The temple of His Body. It is in the Hour of his passion that Jesus will become most truly Temple. For it is most of all in that hour of great anguish and self-emptying love that he will truly become the place where we can encounter the most tender, self-emptying love of the Father for all creation. There on the cross Jesus’ body broken open, destroyed by the horror of his passion will become the leaky life-giving temple of Ezekiel’s vision, the temple from which living, life-giving waters flow out. Jesus’ crucified flesh is the Temple; all our grace, our hope, our life gush out of the sanctuary of his most sacred, pierced heart to recreate paradise in our midst. 

The Temple that will be destroyed and raised up is not the temple of stone but the temple of Jesus’ own body. Jesus is the new gift of God that replaces the former. Jesus is himself now and forever the meeting place between God and his people. “With Jesus’s Passover – with His body destroyed and restored to life – the new cult, the cult of love will begin in a new Temple – Jesus himself. Jesus’ resurrection is the key that will allow the disciples to finally understand.” 

My brothers and sisters, the Temple is no longer a place but a relationship with Christ Jesus our Lord.  Jesus makes his own “the least movements and deepest wounds of our humanity and even now fill(s) them with the life of his Father.” He makes us his growing living body, and so we participate in his life-giving power. It is he who leads us beyond ourselves, to cross and tomb and resurrected life and makes us Temple – a living, life-giving sacrament that we are becoming together when we dare to forgive over and over and allow our hearts to be stretched open in compassion. 

As we gaze contemplatively on the person of Jesus, we see who are meant to be and who we are becoming, his wounded body. And like those who fall in love, we become more and more like the beloved. And it is here at this table most of all that we become who we are; we become what we eat- Temple, Church, true Body of Christ, wounded, risen, present. 

God First Loves Us

If we are capable of loving, it is because we are responding to God's love: God first loves us. Love becomes incarnate and comes to us in Jesus. The Holy Spirit is this love that is poured out in our hearts. Thus we are loving God by means of God; the Spirit enables us to share in the love with which the Father loves the Son and the Son the Father. Love casts us into the Trinitarian realms; the Trinitarian realms are those of love.

OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism

One Who Truly Loves

The love for a person which results from a valid act of choice is concentrated on the value of the person as such and makes us feel emotional love for the person as he or she really is, not for the person of our imagination… The strength of such a love emerges most clearly when the beloved person stumbles, when his or her weaknesses or even sins come into the open. One who truly loves does not then withdraw his love, but loves all the more, loves in full consciousness of the others shortcomings and faults…. For the person as such never loses it's essential value.

ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II Love and Responsibility

Himself For Our Self

For God does not give us just something: he gives us himself, his heart, his word, his mind. And what he requires from us, in response, is not just something but the entire investment of our selves, our binding word, our heart.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR You Crown the Year With Your Goodness, 229

Homily – All souls Day

We just concluded our procession to the cemetery to pray for our deceased monks, family, friends, and benefactors. Now we offer on their behalf the expiatory sacrifice of the Most Holy Eucharist. This is a very excellent and noble thing to do. It is similar to what we heard in today’s first reading: “Judas made atonement for the dead that they might be absolved from their sin.” The Scriptures justify his actions by adding, “…inasmuch as (Judas) had the resurrection in mind; for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.” 

In our world today there are many who do not believe in the resurrection of the dead. Some would call us fools for thinking we can do anything to help the dead. They are incredulous at the simplicity of our faith that believes what the Church has handed down: that God raises the dead and hears our prayers on their behalf, which is precisely what we are doing today. They are like the Athenians in St. Paul’s day when, at his mention of the resurrection of Jesus, they scoffed and said, “We should like to hear you on this some other time.”

But we hold fast to our message: Death is not the final word. Those who belong to Christ, even if they need further purification after death, the Father will raise up with Jesus. We believe this, and we can help by our prayers. Our faith in the resurrection from the dead is the cause of our hope. We belong to Christ, and he will give us his own life which is indestructible and eternal. May our brothers, families, friends and benefactors who have died enjoy this life with us. We are truly doing a noble and excellent thing today.

Human Will and God’s Will

To join one's will to the will of God, so that the human will consents to whatever the divine will prescribes, and so that there is no other reason why it wills this thing or another except that it realizes God wills it: this surely is to love God. The will itself is nothing other than love, and good or bad will should not be called anything but good or bad love.

AELRED OF RIEVAULX The Mirror of Charity

The Love of the Heart

Let your love be strong and constant, neither yielding to fear nor cowering at hard work. Let us love affectionately, discreetly, intensely. We know that the love of the heart, which we have said is affectionate, is sweet indeed, but liable to be led astray if it lacks the love of the soul. And the love of the soul is wise indeed, but fragile without that love which is called the love of strength.

ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX On the Song of Songs

A Cloud That Lets Nothing Pass

If any soul yearns for the transcendent charity of Christ, then her first need is to have this law written in the very center of the heart, for this is the straight and royal road that leads to that royal eminence. In fact, if your heart is agitated with even the smallest dispute over some injury, whether you are enduring it yourself or making another endure it, then there is no room for prayer. No, a cloud presents itself, and let's nothing pass through it. But, on the other hand if you listen carefully, a voice sounds from the cloud: ‘ Make peace with your brother or sister’, and forgive whatever you have against them.

JOHN OF FORDE Sermon 91

Why the End Time is Unknown

Not to know when the end is, or the day of the end, is good for people, less knowing, they might become negligent of the time between, awaiting the days near the end. For then they would argue that they must only attend to themselves. Therefore, too, Christ has been silent about the time when each shall die, lest men, being elated because of this knowledge, should immediately neglect themselves for the greater part of their time. Both the end of all things and the end of each of us, then, has been concealed from us by the Word (for in the end of all is the end of each, and in the end of each the end of all is comprehended), so that since it is uncertain and always in the future, we may advance day by day as if summoned, reaching forward to the things in front of us and forgetting the things behind.

ST. ATHANASIUS Discourses Against the Arians

The Tempter

The devil… always tempts in order to hurt by urging man into sin. In this sense it is said to be his proper office to tempt…. The devil tempts in order to explore the inward disposition of man, so that he may tempt him to that vice to which he is most prone.

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS Summa Theologiae 

Devote Yourselves to Prayer

You must not break away from holy prayer for any reason except obedience or charity. For often during the time scheduled for prayer the devil comes with all sorts of struggles and annoyances—even more than when you are not at prayer. He does this to make you weary of holy prayer. Often he will say: "This sort of prayer is worthless to you. You should not think about or pay attention to anything except vocal prayer.” He makes it seem this way so that you will become weary and confused and abandon the exercise of prayer. But prayer is a weapon with which you can defend yourself against every enemy. If you hold it with love's hand and the arm of free choice, this weapon, with the light of most holy faith, will be your defense.

ST. CATHERINE OF SIENA The Dialogue

Homily – 29th Sunday in O.T.-C

ALL THE WAY TO SUNSET

Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it. This admonition of St Paul to his beloved Timothy provides a sturdy basis for our reflections this morning, which center on the theme of faith—and perseverance in faith—through prayer. From the outset we must realize how emphatically rooted our faith is in the living tradition that other faithful Christians have gifted us with! As the joyful heirs of others’ deepest treasures and heroism, we must exist in a state of perpetual thanksgiving. 

Our gospel selection from St Luke and the first reading (from the Book of Exodus) together offer us a solid catechesis on prayer: first, prayer as struggle; then prayer as intercession; and, finally, prayer as plain-old, dogged persistence. We should be greatly consoled by the fact that these texts do not present prayer as an activity of the sleek and strong but, rather, of the radically weak. 

In the Exodus passage, Moses has to be helped by Aaron and Hur to hold up his arms extended wide in prolonged intercession. In the gospel we see how a poor widow persists in clamoring for justice from a corrupt judge despite her indigence, her fragile age and her social insignificance. Both Moses and the widow are fortified only by their faith, which empowers them to persevere in prayer and never give up. Perseverance in prayer is, thus, proposed to us by Sacred Scripture at this Eucharist as confirming evidence of practicing a lively faith, against all purely human expectations. 

Our readings are very realistic and do not portray prayer as some kind of laid-back swoon. We witness an unforgettable example of the fatigue induced by insistent prayer in the drama of Moses up on a hill, extending his hands toward heaven in his passion to intercede with God on behalf of his people as they wage hard battle against their enemy, Amalek, down in the valley. Two men must hold up Moses’ arms when these grow ever heavier as the battle draws out interminably, all the way to sunset. Moses’ prayer is clearly presented as an intense and exhausting effort, a struggle even, an experience of prayer that sometimes appears in Scripture under the image of wrestling with God, as Jacob did throughout one crucial night with the mysterious angel, and he came out wounded. Moses’ wrestling with God in agonic prayer is indispensable because it shows how much the great Prophet cared: this was his way of participating decisively in his people’s battle, which Israel eventually won solely on account of Moses’ ardent intercession. 

Moses’ unremitting plea to God, then, shows that prayer is work, real labor, and like any labor it causes exhaustion to both body and spirit. Fatigue is proof of the genuineness of prayer. We spoiled moderns sometimes idealize prayer as a warm bath of consolation into which we immerse ourselves now and then when we’re so inclined, to derive from it a pleasurable, pious satisfaction. But this scene of a Moses exhausted by prayer should correct such naïve expectations. The sight of a cruciform Moses on this hill, struggling in prayer all the way to sunset, offers us, rather, a vivid prefiguration of Jesus with arms extended on the cross on Mount Golgotha, as mediator before the Father on behalf of all humanity. The cross remains forever the privileged locus of all Christian prayer, the place and stance where the disciple rendezvous with the Master to intercede together with him for the world.

In addition, the sight of Moses praying in this laborious way also points to the communitarian aspect of prayer. The Christian community is not only the place where we are called to pray for each other, but also the place where we must serve and sustain each other’s prayer, for instance, for us monks, by joining our brothers in choir when the bell calls us to the Work of God. Mutual support and encouragement in prayer is a task rightly expected from all believers within a Christian community, since we all together constitute the one Body of Christ and, together, are nourished by the one Eucharist. By our call to this community of Spencer, and by our response to that call, we are now seriously indebted to one another: yes, we owe one another our supporting presence and example at prayer. In other words, we are all appointed by Christ to play Aaron and Hur to one another’s Moses by our loyal presence at prayer.

One aspect of the difficulty imposed by prayer is that it must be practiced not whenever we happen to “feel like it” but on a daily basis and many times a day (as many as seven, as St Benedict prescribes), and this not in just any haphazard manner but in a persevering way, and not for a few days only but without ever giving up. The Lord Jesus stresses this specific difficulty in the parable he tells us. Jesus’ insistence on the need to pray always, without ever neglecting prayer, probably reveals the concrete situation of the Christian community that Luke is addressing in his gospel: apparently this community is suffering from a certain laxity in both the ardor of its faith and in its wobbly practice of prayer. Thus, only a few decades after Jesus’ Ascension, Luke’s community is already showing signs of worldliness by neglecting both faith and prayer. In this way it is sadly fulfilling a prediction Jesus’ had made in another parable, when he said: When they heard the word, they received it with joy. But they had no root; they believed for a while, and in time of testing fell away (cf Lk 8:13). 

This cyclical cooling down of faith is a universal Christian problem, and thus to be expected among us, too, because of the basic human difficulty with perseverance in love and fidelity in all situations and relationships that strive for fullness of love. Luke is here warning these Christians that to abandon prayer leads sooner or later to abandoning the faith itself. The passing of time proves to be the great test of both faith and prayer. But hearing the Gospel today always creates a time and a space of conversion. Insistent prayer renews faith daily and shows that the life of faith consists of an ongoing and ever-vibrant relationship with the Lord. The fatigue that comes from persevering in prayer is simply the exhaustion to be expected from devoting generous chunks of our time to prayer. The best “method” of prayer is quite simply to just do it, to plunge in whenever and however without any hesitation. Grace will take care of all the rest.

In this connection, let’s not forget that time is the very substance of our life! We’ll never get back the time we devote to another person. To pray faithfully, in this light, is nothing less than to give our whole life for the Lord. Consider also how prayer always includes, at least implicitly, an encounter with death. How so? Because when we pray we “do” nothing, we “produce” nothing, and we therefore experience ourselves as sterile and useless according to the world’s conventional norms, which we often internalize as our own. Precisely for this reason we can often find even the thought of prayer disagreeable, because we definitely do not like to confront our own futility and nothingness, something inevitable in genuine prayer. Then we find ourselves inventing nifty strategies to avoid actual prayer in real time, always, of course, with solid and credible excuses. (Here I can obviously only speak for myself, though perhaps some of you will empathize with such sneaky strategies to avoid looking into the Lord’s inviting eyes.) And yet, at the same time, we ought to be persuaded that the space and the time we devote to generous, silent prayer are precisely the most precious means at our disposal which we can choose to offer God in order that he might come and do something in us, make something of us. Paradoxically—both to our reason and our ego—our emptiness is the very choicest and most efficacious possession we have to offer God, if, that is, what we are truly seeking is union of heart and soul with him! 

Now, all prayer implicitly looks forward to the Second Coming in glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so Jesus’ words to us today also convey a teaching on the eschatological dimension of prayer. In the chapter previous to today’s reading from Luke, the Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come (Lk 17:20). Today Jesus completes his answer to them by firing back a question of his own: When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? The question is clearly rhetorical: Jesus’ point here, I suggest, is not to ask questions about his Second Coming but rather to help us prepare to welcome the Lord’s Second Coming as a question to us, a question that makes Christians examine their faith here and now. We often ask “Where is God?”, “Where is the promise of the Lord’s Coming?” (2 Pet 3:4). 

To these questions of ours the Lord replies by demanding that we give an account of our faith: Where is your faith? he asks us (Lk 8:25). The Lord’s Parousia is not a subject for abstract theological speculations but a reality of faith that has to be lived and experienced in prayer as expectation and desire. There is no better way of putting our petition Thy Kingdom come into practice than by giving ourselves generously to vigilant prayer, actually looking for the Kingdom as it arrives in our lives every day.

Finally, the prayer of the poor widow that demands justice, for its part, points to two other aspects of prayer: boldness and determination. Prayer is never ashamed to beg insistently, maybe even annoyingly. Christian prayer never hesitates to importune God: it doesn’t stop knocking; it’s not afraid of pestering God; it trusts that God can not only “take it” but that the Lord actually encourages such behavior and is even complimented by our determination as his children with inherited rights. Such parrhesía (‘legitimate boldness in speech’) manifests a faith that refuses to turn away from the one and only God to vain idols, for cheap satisfaction, a bold conviction that stakes everything on God’s fidelity and love whether or not God responds in the way and at the time we desire. Such bold prayer clearly requires courage.

No: Prayer and faith cannot be separated. Believing is, in fact, synonymous with praying. The two stand and fall together as the two sides of the same coin: the coin of God’s divine fatherhood of us in Christ. And if it’s true that we can pray only thanks to a lively faith, it’s also true that our faith remains alive only thanks to prayer. 

To put the Lord’s teaching on prayer today into practice, we now turn to the sacred action in which all praying culminates: the offering of the precious Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ at this altar, the Holy Sacrifice that is the sole source of eternal life.

Seeking by Day

He who seeks God while attending to his own ease and comfort seeks him by night, and therefore does not find him. But he who seeks him in the practice of virtue and good works, disregarding comforts, seeks him by day. Such a one shall find him, for what is invisible at night can be seen by daylight.

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS The Spiritual Canticle

Silent Attentiveness

We might say that contemplation is an act of silent attentiveness through which we immerse ourselves in reality, whereas the outward agitation of our souls keeps us on the surface of things. For reality is God's fullness, a fullness in which all things exist and suffice to themselves within Him, a fullness which is the life of the Trinity. By this I mean that the Father communicates Himself totally to the Son, giving Him the totality of what He possesses, thus exhausting in the Son the possibility of loving.

JEAN DANIELOU God’s Life In Us

Transgressions and Debts

Are you sometimes tormented by those transgressions which, whether grave or slight, have dug an abyss or cast a coldness between God and you? No amount of penances could renew the bonds of friendship, if Jesus Christ had not paid your debts in advance. Insist, like the apostle, on the intentionally personal nature of Christ’s mediation: you are not anonymous among the ranks of the redeemed.

AN ANONYMOUS MONK The Hermitage Within

The Really Real

Communion with God is true reality, and by comparison with it everything, no matter how massively it asserts itself, is a phantom, a nothing…. Communication with God is reality. It is true reality, the really real, more real, even, than death itself.

JOSEPH RATZINGER Eschatology, 89

Love in the Image of God

Humble love is perhaps the greatest of all evangelical virtues, much more rare than the frequent use of the word ‘love’ in contemporary literature would lead us to suspect. Love in the image of God – generous, patient, gentle love toward everyone, toward those nearest and those most distant, toward friend and enemy, toward just anyone who shows up. A Cistercian Abbott who lived in the 12th century, the blessed Guerric of Igny, said it this way: ‘It is the property of friendship to make itself small before its friends’.

ANDRÉ LOUF Tuning Into Grace

Trusting the Path God Chooses for Us

When God becomes our guide he insists that we trust him without reservations and put aside all nervousness about his guidance. We are sent along the path he has chosen for us, but we cannot see it, and nothing we have read is any help to us. Were we acting on our own we should have to rely on our experience. It would be too risky to do anything else. But it is very different when God acts with us. Divine action is always new and fresh, it never retraces it steps, but always finds new routes.

JEAN-PIERRE DE CAUSSADE Abandonment to Divine Providence

Homily — 27th Sunday in O.T.

And the apostles said to the Lord, “Increase our faith.”

Today’s Gospel begins with the apostles calling out to the Lord as one voice, “Increase our faith.” We all know that the Lord is often frustrated with the disciples for their lack of faith. For example, afraid that they were going sink in the storm on the lake he said to them, “Where is your faith?” On another occasion, counseling them against anxiety about meeting their daily needs, he tells them “If God so clothes the grass in the field that grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?” 

This is the first time the apostles have themselves petitioned the Lord to “increase their faith”.  What occasioned this appeal? If we look to the verses immediately preceding today’s Gospel, we hear the Lord address the disciples in this way: “Things that cause sin will inevitably occur, but woe to the person through whom they occur. It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.” “Be on your guard”, he warns them.

The next verses concern the challenge of bringing back into the community those who have gone astray: They are to rebuke those who sin and forgive those who repent. The Lord insists that even “if [someone] wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry,’ you should forgive him.”

If we go back one step further, we see that these verses immediately follow upon the parable of the rich man and Lazarus which we heard last week. The rich man has caused others to sin by his bad example of pursuing a life of comfort and pleasure while ignoring the poor man Lazarus at his doorstep. Now he wants to warn others of the consequences, and he cannot. He begs Abraham to send Lazarus as a witness to his five brothers to warn them, so that they do not “come to this place of torment.”

Confronted with these demands and challenges, the apostles respond, “Increase our faith.” 

Have faith and you will do great things, Jesus tells them. Just surrender, trust, let go, hand yourself over and all sorts of possibilities will open up. In me, you can do a lot, more than you ever thought. A mustard seed is very tiny, whereas a mulberry bush is large and has thick, deep and tenacious roots.  Yet, with this small faith, if you were to say to it “Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ … it would obey you.” 

This “obedience” on the part of the natural order is the fruit of taking on what St. Paul calls our “obedience of faith”. The obedience of faith has such powerful effects in Christ, that it puts the cosmos, the natural order, in our service. In the grace of Christ it obeys our command. Creation, instead of simply presenting us with things that potentially lead us astray, serve as a distraction and pull us in all directions, truly becomes a good placed at our service that works with us for the good in Christ. It cooperates with God and with us in forming good habits and virtues in us. In so far as  this happens the created order participates in the divine restoration and achieves its own end as being created good and striving toward the good, toward life, toward wholeness and integrity. All this occurs because of the new life that is given us with the act of faith.

Jesus uses these hyperboles to give his apostles a strong word of encouragement. As though to say, “Your mission will have its challenges, I will made big demands of you, but the faith I give you is sufficient for you to do to do great things. So give your assent, trust, surrender. For my yoke is easy, my burden is light.”  

In what follows he shows them the way forward, which will be to follow along his own path of humility, by putting on the mind of a servant, like him, who has come among them as one who serves, as he will tell them at the Last Supper. 

“When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”

To my mind it helps to get into what Jesus is after here if we look more closely at the imagery Jesus uses to describe the work of the servant. The servant plows the field, or tends the sheep, and serves at table. 

Earlier in the Gospels Jesus describes the disciples as those who have “put their hand to the plow”. In that context, Jesus tells them that no one who puts his hand to the plow who then “looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” They plow the field when they spread the Gospel. With this comes great responsibility for as Jesus warned them, woe to those who in their teaching become a stumbling block for others, causing them to sin.

The servant tends the sheep. The apostles tend the sheep when they act like the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine behind to go after the one who has gone astray. This corresponds to the command of the Lord to rebuke those who sin and to forgive again and again those who repent. 

But this is not the end or sum of the role of the servant of the Lord. There are also all the ordinary day-to-day tasks that must be performed. These are represented by serving at table. 

These three make up apostolic activity as faith working itself out in love. 

We find this pattern at work in the Gospel itself. Earlier, Jesus sends the Twelve out with the mission “to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal [the sick]. Upon their return they tell Jesus what they had done. Together, they all withdraw to Bethsaida. But the crowds followed, so Jesus spoke to them about the kingdom of God and healed those who needed to be cured. He plows the field and tends the sheep. When the Twelve advise Jesus at the end of the day to send the people away, he responds “give them some food yourselves.” They feed five thousand with twelve wicker baskets left over. They serve at table.

Again, when Jesus had completed his “field work” just before his passion, he instructed Peter and John to “Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover.” 

When they are gathered together for the meal he said to the apostles, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer…”

To my mind, the Lord’s demand that once the apostles have done all that is commanded they should consider themselves unprofitable servants who have done what they were obliged to do is best understood when seen as pointing to this eager desire of the Lord to eat this Passover with them. For here he opens up their service into a share in the paschal mystery. He will not only die for them but grant them a share in his suffering. 

For this to be full fruit he needs them to be humble servants who receive everything from their master. He needs them to be ready be put on his own mind, to be ready to be conformed to him in his own self-emptying love. To be able to say with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” 

The genuine humility that sincerely renounces all attribution of achievement to oneself and hands it over to God frees us up to share in the whole of Jesus’ own experience. It frees him to to lead us wherever and in whatever way he wishes, bestowing gifts as he sees fit, knowing that he will find in our hearts a fertile field in which to plow deep furrows with his teaching, sheep that will recognize his voice, who, when they falter, will heed his rebuke in sincere repentance and receive the joy of the forgiveness of sins.  In this rich dramatic action we find the increase of faith begged for by the apostles, a life that opens up into thanksgiving, joy and praise. This is a living participation in the eternal messianic banquet the Lord eagerly desires to share with his disciples.