Prayer and Fighting for Marriage

One of the ways Mother Teresa of Calcutta fought poverty was she taught families to pray together.  Typically, she would teach the Rosary.   Getting parents to pray with each other and their children gave people hope where there seemed to be none and it helped married couples find love when love seemed most absent.   Ironically, she is said to have stated that the greatest poverty she ever encountered, she discovered here in America.  She was very disturbed to find people dying of loneliness and isolation in our most modern metropolises.  The recent efforts in many States to redefine marriage will only make this particular form of poverty more acute.  It is time for us to learn a lesson from Blessed Teresa and rediscover prayer in our family life.

Mother Teresa was wise to see prayer as something much more than a mere esoteric exercise.  It is vital to the affairs of this world, here and now.  That is why marriage needs prayer.  In fact, it is first of all in marriage that the art of prayer is supposed to be passed on.  If people are losing the fight for marriage in society, it is only because very few marriages are fighting for their love with prayer.  Can anyone adequately defend true love if he does not truly pray? Indeed, only prayer can address the deep seated lack of courage that seems to have taken hold of us in both the public square and our own homes.

So long as people of prayer do not engage the fray and make their voices heard, our families and our society will always be vulnerable to unchallenged and dehumanizing cultural and political forces.  Along these lines and contrary to contemporary prejudice, it is not compassionate to be tolerant of all forms of fornication, contraception, abortion, pornography, prostitution, and divorce.  The truth about the heartache and human carnage left in the wake of such practices must be made known.  Is it really mean-spirited or unenlightened to dare take a stand for what is truly human?  The truth is, even if we do not find sufficient charity in our hearts to do what our faith demands, simple justice requires that we speak up when something as sacred and beautiful as marriage is under attack.  This is true not only in society but also in our own homes.  As Blessed Teresa explains:  "There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives - the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have right in your own family.  Find them.  Love them."

If there is a failure in courage on our part, it is because, as Christians, we do not pray as we should.  When we do not pray, we do not encounter the Lord and without encountering the Lord, we will never find sufficient confidence to speak the truth in the face of power, or to love in the face of hatred.  Here again, the wisdom of Mother Teresa is helpful:  "Give yourself fully to God. He will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness."  As cited by EWTN.

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)

Christ's Real Presence and true Christian Life: never static, always dynamic

The Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is a living reality in the Christian life. His presence is dynamic. In perpetual thanksgiving, intercession and adoration of the Father, the Real Presence is permeated with prayers that reach into our hearts. The Blessed Sacrament evokes a response. By this prayerful presence, He truly comes to us and invites us to enter deep into His inexhaustible mystery. This remarkable presence is pure prayer surpassing all mere feeling and thought. It is His Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity.

The Body of Christ is perfect praise overflowing with the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. Under the veils of bread and wine, the power of Christ’s prayer issues forth into the hearts of those who partake of this mystical banquet and even flows into those who behold the Eucharist with faith. His Body offered for us and actually present to us is Bread for the final journey, the Medicine of Immortality, the Antidote for Death, the Pledge of Eternal Life. By this Real Presence, He truly takes into his heart all of our deepest needs, makes them sacred in the very Blood and Water which flowed from his side, and offers them to the Father.

An unseen force greater than any material gravitational pull at work in the visible world, Uncreated love is at work in the depths of the human heart whenever we avail ourselves to this overwhelming presence of Christ by faith. In this way, He is constantly drawing us and we discover Him to be the true center around which the whole Cosmos revolves. The loving gaze He bestows on us through the Blessed Sacrament leads us to gaze upon Him in return, even when his Presence is completely hidden by our own trials and difficulties. If we remain true to our faith believing in His love, it is especially in these moments where we cannot feel Him or understand his purpose that He is particularly close to us, truly at work in us, accomplishing more than we can ask or imagine. It is here that our lives become like his Real Presence, never static, always dynamic. Instead, we find ourselves not unlike the bread and wine of the Mass, by His prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit forged into love where love seems most absent.

Praying the Psalms

God has revealed to us how we are to praise Him -- and the right way to praise God is found in the psalms.  The Holy Father, Pope Benedict, explains that the Psalms teach us how to pray to God.  His catechesis has ancient roots.  St. Athanasius passes on this same teaching he learned from St. Antony of the Desert at the end of the 3rd Century.  The psalms teach us how to raise our hearts in prayer just as Jesus raised his heart in prayer.

The praying of the psalms, especially in the Liturgy of the Hours, is a school for the heart, providing words for interior movements so delicate and beautiful, the heart itself is scarcely aware of what they are and without divine help powerless to articulate them.  It is a matter of learning how to "feel" about God and all things in relation to God in a manner that truly renders fitting praise.  This perfection, the heart feeling what it ought to feel before God, lived in the heart of Christ informing every word and thought He offered the Father.  Conforming our hearts to the Heart of Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit to which the psalms dispose the soul.  In fact, the Word himself prayed the psalms -- and based on his own teaching on prayer, he must of prayed the psalms with complete attentiveness to every thought and emotion they disclose, complete confidence in how our heavenly Father would receive such prayer, and complete attention to who He was to be offering such prayer.

Earlier this year, Father Benedict Groeschel offered the annual retreat to our seminarians.  It was an honor to have an opportunity for a short conversation with him after the retreat while taking him to the airport.  Just before we left, one of the seminarians asked me to find out how Father Groeschel prays the psalms.  So I asked him.  He answered with one word, "Slowly."

This would seem to be the best way for us to allow the psalms to teach us the movements of the heart of Christ.  When we pray them slowly and consider what the psalms contain - that "range of human experience" the psalms convey, as Pope Benedict reminds us - it gives ours hearts the time they need to catch up and to appropriate the psalms to our lives. Even better, taking time to thoughtfully consider what we are offering the Lord in these revealed prayers affords the Holy Spirit the opportunity to appropriate our lives to the psalms.  In this kind of prayer, our lives become the praise we offer.

The Book of Life and Corpus Christi

16th Century Camaldolese Hermit, Paul Giustiniani, in his reflections on the role of study in the discipline of the Christian life, insists that for those who want to grow in prayer Christ Jesus must remain at the center of any study of the Sacred Page.  He does not say that all other study is without any merit whatsoever, and his words are mainly aimed at keeping hermits engaged in prayer.  He believes, however, in the primacy of contemplation in the life of the Church.  Thus, there is an important reminder here for all those who study theology:

Christ is the only master and the only book, the book that contains all divine wisdom.  My book should be Jesus Christ on the Cross: a book entirely written with His precious Blood that is the price of my soul and the redemption of the world.  The five chapters of this book are the five sacred wounds.  I want to study that one book alone, and other books only insofar as they comment on it... Jesus Christ is a book in which is summed up, for those who know how to read the writing, all doctrine, all discipline, all controversy, all treatises, all exhortations, which have been or will be done in conformity with God from the beginning to the end of the World.  Dom Jean Leclercq, Alone with God, Bloomingdale, OH: Ercam Editions (1961, 1989, rev. 2008) 73-74.

This passage speaks specifically to the contemplative intellectuality characteristic of our Christian faith, an intellectuality growing from an encounter with the Living God.  It is oriented to a kind of knowing that does not stop at the level of concept or even intuition.  It is a kind of knowing that is deeper than all feeling.  It is more like the kind of knowing that is shared between friends that love one another.  It is the wisdom of a heart to heart with the Living God.  This kind of knowing is essential for the Christian life.  Our faith is relational or it is dead. It is for union with God or it is nothing. We could interpret Giustiniani's words to apply to the exercise of our love informed faith in any study of sacred doctrine: this study is life giving to the degree that it deepens and extends our relationship with Christ.

As we approach the celebration of Corpus Christi -- I can think of no better way to study the Book of Life than through our participation at Mass, our communion with his Body and Blood and our adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.  The Word, who was in the beginning, waits to disclose his wisdom to us in the Eucharist.  When we participate in the liturgy with our hearts attentive to our Crucified God, when we receive in communion this Living Bread, when we adore the Risen Lord who promised to be with us until the end of time: we are studying the mystery of Christ not only with our intellects but with our hearts.