Saints see Christ - Glory Truly Hidden

Someone once told me that the greatest tragedy in this life is not to become a saint.  But what does it mean to be holy?  The holy ones of God see his glory - not passively, but ardently and with initiative.  To this end, C.S. Lewis offers a beautiful reflection on the glory of the Lord which is a glory vere latitat, a glory truly hidden, accessible only to the life of faith, a heavenly glory that no earthly creature can see unaided or bear alone.  This glory is carried by our neighbor - a creature made in the image and likeness of God.  The implication of his reflection when we apply it to our question is that being a saint means to be devoted enough, humble enough, vulnerable enough and loving enough to help one's neighbor bear this burden, a burden never meant to be carried alone.  To be holy means trusting Christ and allowing the weight of my brother's glory to crush my own pride so that I too might finally learn what it means to be fully human, fully alive:

The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.  It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.  All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of theses destinations.   It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.  There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal... Our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.  Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses.  If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ is vere latitat -- the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. Weight of Glory, 15.

That Mysterious Presence of the Lord in Prayer

St. Bernard's sermons on the Song of Songs provide beautiful descriptions of the mysterious presence of the Lord in prayer.  Wishing to encourage Christians who find their hearts yearning for God, St. Bernard personally appropriates the words of the Bride from Chapter 2:17, "Return, my Beloved."

St. Bernard was aware that while the Lord is always present to the soul in some way there are also times when He chooses to visit souls that wait for Him with a special intimacy.  Those who taste this beautiful presence of God, like St. Bernard, long for it and wish it never to end.  At the same time, they also accept that God is sovereign in his love and learn to respect this sovereignty -- even though the absence of the Lord is a very painful reality to endure.  In other words, they know that prayer does not produce God's presence but that his mysterious visits produce all kinds of wonderful things in the soul, and so they find the confidence they need to wait for Him.

Does not such a view free us from that excessive and distracting preoccupation with our own psychological operations in prayer?  Precisely because God's presence is not the product of one's own fantasy, one does not need to try to produce it.  It is a matter of remaining vigilant, sober, alert, and patient: our hearts fixed on the One for whom we long, searching for Him. studying Him, imitating Him, and ready for Him.

This kind of presence of God is never to be mistaken for a psychic state, a feeling or a sensation or even the mere absence of such experiences - all of this is merely what can be produced by our own clever egos. The coming of the Living God into one's soul is not a product at all.   Instead, this inestimable gift is wholly other, an Other who is totally beyond and completely deeper than such things.  As such his mysterious visit does not admit of being manipulated by techniques and methods.  In Christian prayer, the best methods merely dispose and prepare for the coming of the One whose heart piercing love remains forever wild and free, and therefore, boundless.

This boundless moment of divine intimacy floods our hearts in the most wonderful ways without our even being aware of what has happened to us, and this even during the time we spend in prayer.   His heart moving company is so subtle neither our senses nor even our powers of intuition are capable of noticing that He is truly there.  Yet in spite of our inability to notice Him, this interior epiphany of divine love is so powerful it not only makes us aware of all kinds of different sins which darken our hearts, it gives us new light by which we can repent, that is rethink our way of life; and at the same time it also frees us from even the slightest attachment to anything which in any way threatens what is good, noble and true about who we really are before the Lord.

Overwhelming us with so many strong desires to take up all kinds great works, when He visits us with his presence our hearts are also moved with courage to endure every hardship for the sake of love.  We hope in Him because we sense that He hopes even more in us. Years after St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas would explore the cause and the purpose of this gift in terms as the spiritual missions of the Son and the Spirit through the Divine Indwelling of the Trinity by grace (Summa Theologica I, 43).  For his part, St. Bernard saw this gift of love in prayer as a transitory foretaste of the eternal life that awaits us in heaven, a glimpse of God which we hardly notice when it happens -- but a mysterious visit haunting us and leaving us yearning  afterward, even to the point of calling out like a Bride heartsick for her Bridegroom, "Return, my Beloved!"

"Only by the movement of my heart did I perceive his presence and I knew the power of his might because my faults have been revealed and made visible; at the very slightest amendment of my way of life I have experienced his goodness and mercy; in the renewal and remaking of the spirit of my mind, that is of my inmost being, I have perceived the excellence of his glorious beauty, and when I contemplate all these things I am filled with awe and wonder at his manifold greatness.  But when the Word has left me, all these spiritual powers become weak and faint and begin to grow cold, as though you had removed the fire from under a boiling pot, and this is the sign of his going.  Then my soul must needs be sorrowful until he returns, and my heart again kindles within me -- the sign of his returning.  When I have had such experience of the Word, is it any wonder that I take to myself the words of the Bride, calling him back when he has withdrawn?" Sermon 74, 6-7 translated by Irene Edmonds in Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs, vol. IV, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications (1980) 91-92.

Blessed John Paul II, Prayer and Evangelization

On Saturday we commemorated Blessed John Paul, an apostle of divine mercy for our time, a time filled with so much poignant suffering, a time when even a mother's womb has become a place of violence.  He well understood that only the loving goodness of God revealed in Jesus Christ could address such misery.  He generously engaged the fray in the battle for human dignity to which we are joined by our Catholic faith.  To win this battle, he well understood the primacy of prayer.  

Although prayerful throughout his life, in his final years he made prayer the special focus of his teaching.  In particular, he invited all the members of the Church to contemplate the face of Christ.  By this he meant that we should seek the face of Christ in our prayer, in our study, in our relationships with one another, in every situation.  

The face of Christ is revealed in so many beautiful ways in the Scriptures, in our tradition and in our daily life.  On this point, John Paul II was especially aware of the writings of John of the Cross who describes the loving eyes of Christ reflected on the propositions of our faith, eyes that are attentively fixed on us, eyes that wait to be discovered in the deep silence of prayer.  He was also very heedful of Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta who helped the whole Church discover the face of Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor, a face to which we must never allow ourselves to be indifferent.  The heart piercing gaze of Christ in prayer and in prayerful action melts the hardness of our hearts and helps us rediscover the warmth of God's love.  Indeed, Christ who understands the tender strength of humanity waits for us to discover his loving glance in every moment, in thousands of ways.   He hopes in us even more than we hope in Him.

Christ fully reveals man to himself by revealing the love of God the Father.  To contemplate the face of Christ is to see the mysterious truth about who we are and the even more mysterious truth about who the Father is.  Do not the atheist ideologies of the 20th Century witness that, without Christ, humanity is always at risk of forgetting itself in the most violent and dehumanizing of ways?   

Searching for the face of Christ and discovering in his loving gaze the truth of the mystery of man and the truth of the Father's merciful love is an urgent task that every Christian must take up.  When we see the extent to which God has gone for our sake, we find motivation to live by love for those entrusted to us.  Only those who seek an ongoing encounter with Christ are able to address the evil threats against human dignity so alive in our societies today, threats with which even those closest to us must deal.  Those who open wide the doors of their hearts to the Redeemer have a real word of life which counters the culture of death engulfing our civilization, engulfing those most relying on us.  That is why when he came to Denver in 1993 he directed the youth who were so alive with the love the Lord to bring the Good News of our faith to the modern metropolis, to shout the Gospel form the rooftops - to be proud of the Gospel of Christ.     

What is Contemplation?

Christian Contemplation or "mental prayer" is a loving gaze through the eyes of faith at the mystery of God revealed in Christ Jesus.  To say that this happens through faith means that this exchange of glances between men and God is transitory and imperfect, and yet a true anticipation of what is to be revealed to us in glory.  As if looking through a dark class or catching a reflection in a mirror, this kind of prayer provides a foretaste of the wisdom God yearns to share with us in heaven.

Such prayer is necessary because the heart is made to be captivated by the loving gaze of God who is captivated by humanity. This holy exchange of glances - between the eyes of the heart and the eyes of God - is at once the most human, tender, intimate, reciprocal, vulnerable and divine of self-disclosures.  So vast the unexplored horizons of this prayer, the greatest discoveries in this frontier of human existence still wait to be made.  Those who devote their whole lives to pursuing contemplation marvel at how much more immense the mystery they behold actually is than what they first imagined.

Progress in such prayer is through the mystery of the Cross.  Cross centered contemplation in fact transforms the inner man because it opens up the deepest recesses of the heart, the suffering abyss of human misery, to the loving goodness of God.  It is a prayer which allows God to continually question everything about one's manner of life.  It is an unfolding conversation with the Risen Lord which constantly gives one real confidence to persevere in faithfulness to Him and to more strongly cling to Him in one's own weakness.

Contemplative prayer yields a kind of knowing which changes the whole of one's life.  This movement of heart ignites a love stronger than death and illuminates the mind with the very splendors of God. Seeking the loving eyes of God reflected in - or carried on - the propositions of our faith, this prayer baptizes itself in sacred reading, and baths the imagination in the Scriptures through meditation.  

Study of the Sacred Page is called the soul of theology because prayerful reading and careful reflection on the Holy Bible is devoted to seeking this gaze of God.  For those who patiently seek it, His divine glance is marvelously revealed in the inspired and inerrant canon of Sacred Scripture. Such study never reaches prayer if it is only concerned with accumulating information and discerning difficult to interpret texts. For such sacred study to become contemplative, the mind must be knelt in prayer. In this posture of adoration and humility, all thought, imagination, memory, and affectivity can converge together in a humble glimpse into the Ineffable. Here one finds faith's perfection in a humble participation in God's own knowledge of Himself. Far beyond our natural means of knowing, when the mind is humble before the truth, the Holy Spirit raises the created capacities of the human intellect above themselves, and fills them with overflowing meaning and fullness.

Transcending all psychic states, our psychological faculties come to rest in this deep silence - because it is a kind of knowing which does not primarily involve our natural operations.  If this explanation is inadequate, the loving knowledge at stake confounds all psychological descriptions or attempts at explanation.  In the most subtle of moments, like lighting, eternal Truth flashes through all levels of consciousness and into depths of which we are not conscious. This delicate communication illuminates everything from within with such blinding brightness. Even the greatest saints remember little else than the most overwhelming love. What these saints do remember mere words cannot convey.

Essentially supernatural, a sheer grace, this wisdom is far above every other kind of knowledge.  The greatest mystics describe it as a knowing which is "not knowing."  Doctors of the faith identify this kind of love imbued knowledge with that of the Bride of the Canticle of Canticles who knows nothing but her Beloved.  St. Paul speaks of knowing nothing but Christ and Him Crucified.  This knowing is not darkened but puts on the mind of Christ which knows nothing but the loving goodness of the Father.  It is a renewal of the mind to such heavenly glory that it thinks thoughts no longer subject to sin or death.

Contemplation is the most humanizing of all the kinds of knowledge there is -- because men and women are made in the image and likeness of God, and the more they participate in God's knowledge, understanding and wisdom, the more they realize their true dignity and identity.  Most devout Christians do not know that they have been entrusted with this inestimable treasure. Even the devout remain only vaguely conscious of the gifts lavished on them in their prayer.

Yet it is not necessary to be aware that one is contemplating to enter deep into this wisdom from on high and at the same time many rob themselves of true understanding because they are too self aware.   Indeed, one finally begins to live by surrendering to this loving exchange called contemplation. As St. Irenaeus explained, "God's glory is man alive - and the life of man is the vision of God."

Prayer and Theology

There are some who believe prayer and theology are opposed undertakings or at least activities that have nothing in common.   Those who espouse such a view often reduce prayer to simply an impulse of the will towards God or else a psychic state or a strong feeling  produced by spiritual exercises.  They also look at theology as a kind of product derived from scholarly inquiry into arcane questions or even a chess game of sophisticated skepticism in which careful and clever observations are proposed without ever committing the pieces.  For those who espouse such an approach theology rarely gets to breath in the fresh air of heaven and prayer remains prisoner of the preoccupations of one's own psyche.

There is a different kind of theology which frees prayer so that it might walk with the Living God and there is a different kind of prayer that breaths life into theology so that it rises up into the very life God.  Such prayer and study are filled with the Holy Spirit.  They involve putting on the mind of Christ.  For both real prayer and true theology are meant to participate by grace won for us on the Cross in the reciprocal gaze of love shared by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit - that eternal act of knowing love and loving knowledge that knows no end.  The briefest moment of such contemplation in the midst of prayer imbued study or theologically purified prayer flashes with a loving Light, a burning Wisdom in which one can never live the same way again.  It is so intimate and personal, immense and cosmic all at the same time - because such is God.  When you meet Him in your prayer and study, a deeper conversion, a deeper love, a deeper kind of life opens up - and one simply cannot go back to the way things were before.

Prayer born of study is open to a foretaste of the wedding feast that awaits those who are faithful.  Study pregnant with prayer discovers that the deepest yearnings of the heart are raised up and ignited as the highest powers of the mind are captivated and renewed.  Such prayer and such study converge in a humble kind of knowing which exceeds all natural modes of knowledge, which is like not knowing - or rather a knowing nothing but Christ and Him crucified.