The Holy Family and Contemplative Prayer

The Holy Family is the first school of contemplative prayer.  One way to know the truth of this is to visit the Holy Family in prayer. St. Francis brought the manger scene into the churches that he rebuilt precisely to build up such prayer. St. Ignatius also invites us to use our imagination to ponder this same mystery. Christmas carols also take us to this same contemplation if we let them.

This spiritual exercise best begins by visiting a manger scene, making the sign of the Cross and calling to mind the presence of God. Sometimes we can be too mechanical about this, taking too much for granted, and this is a mistake. His presence is remarkable. He is closer to us than we are to ourselves, holding us in existence, and at the same time, waiting for us to hold Him. Calling to mind His presence then is always in the form of a person encounter, a heart to heart, a mystery that deserves the complete attention of all the powers of our being. The Lord who relied on Joseph and Mary in His infancy also relies on us, entrusts Himself to us.

As we allow this truth to sanctify our minds, if we prayerfully turn to the Gospels, our imagination can begin to probe the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke. The power of our imagination can search for Mary and Joseph on their flight to Egypt. Or else, we can imagine them on their frantic search for Jesus in Jerusalem. The revealed drama that they endured puts Jesus at the center - everything is always in relation to Him, bringing them into a deeper relation to one another. We might take in the surroundings, sounds and smells that live in the silences of the Gospels; and then the search the faces of Mary and Joseph to discern the paradoxes of tension and peace, prayer and practicality, anxious concern and mutual confidence. When we carefully search the devotion of their hearts revealed in the Scriptures, without realizing how, our own heart can suddenly be revealed.

In the Biblical images, each verse invites us more deeply into the vast horizons of empathy born in contemplative prayer. Here, with the Holy Family, we discover and can even feel that this empathy has a poignantly familial tenderness to it and a fierce dedication driving it. Yet the Bible allows us to share this tenderness with them - their own fierce solicitude for Jesus and familial devotion is passed on to us through the Church.

Ripples on the surface of a deep mystery follow from this. If the concern that Joseph and Mary shared for the Christ-child can rouse our hearts to deeper devotion, then the drama of other hearts in relation to Jesus also belong to us in prayer in some way. And, the anxious concerns and peace that we ourselves know in prayer are also not meant to be carried by ourselves alone, but through the ministry of the Church, by the whole Family of God together in communion. This mystery of communion is why we must never forget the heart of the Church - that place were tenderness and dedication spring just as it sprung in the heart of Mary and Joseph as they drew ever closer to Emmanuel. The familial empathy that impacts contemplation of the Holy Family is ultimately ecclesial. What we behold in the Holy Family is what should live in our own domestic churches, our families, our parishes.

Beautiful silences in mental prayer and the mystery of communion in the Church coincide in the Holy Family. Mary and Joseph shared a devotion that was not individualistic but always in relation and bringing all things into relation in them and between them. The silences they knew were filled with this very fullness of encounter and recognition. If we consider their shared devotion to the Christ-child, they teach us how to protect the gentle awareness of God's presence that has begun in each other too. The concern-in-common that we ponder in the stillness of their hearts is meant to become the concern that lives in our hearts as we strive for a deeper communion in the Church. Such love implicates us in each other's life of faith with all the tension and concern that flows from this -- a mystery that defined the very life of the Holy Family.

Holy Innocents, the Sanctity of Life and Contemplation

The joy of Christmas unveils the abuse of power, disrespect for life and irrational fear of every age. The Christ-child always comes with blessings of peace, but governmental abuse of power plot against Him and our hatred toward life is continually unmasked. There have always been pharaohs and kings who have shed innocent blood. God is never indifferent. The violence that we neglect is the evil that He wages war against. Prayer cannot be indifferent to this spiritual reality: the innocents massacred by Herod speak to us through the innocents murdered in abortion - prayer helps us hear this voice.

As was the case with Herod, the blood on our hands reveals the extent of our resistance to the Lord of Life. Our own governments are no more righteous than was his.  Our fears and fury not any less than his. Our abuse of power no less grave than his. Our sin is greater because he only violated a village, we have desecrated motherhood itself, making pregnancy the most dangerous time of a baby's life in our society. If Herod made holy Bethlehem a place of wailing and oppression, our judiciaries and legislative bodies have made the life-bearing womb a place of death and political opportunism. How do we rediscover our humanity after we have indulged the inhumane?

In prayer's determination, it knows that we may drive the Lord of Righteousness into exile from our hearts, but He bides His time and waits to do battle on His timetable, not ours. We might cast around violently, but His saving presence returns at His own good pleasure. Prayer that does not give up hope knows how the Christ-child vanquishes our hostility and lays siege until we open the gates.

If our hearts are hardened and we do not know how to trust, prayer can be a school of trust and vulnerability before the Lord. In prayer's confidence, it knows by His purity, He returns to free us from our lust for power, pleasure and possessions. By His gentleness, He enters our hearts to liberate us from our gluttonous attachments to rancor and wrath. By His humility, He undoes our pride.

If bitterness and anxiety have robbed us of peace before God and our neighbors, prayer is the treasury of patient endurance that attains all things. In the patience of prayer, our secret mean-spirited judgments will be unmasked so that we might beg to be freed from them. The murder and adultery that live in our hearts will be unveiled so that we might repent. The greed and envy that we plow will be uncovered so that we might try another yoke and a lighter burden.

If anger, cruelty, and vengefulness imprison us, the patient kindness of the Lord works to liberate us in prayer. What social or psychological power can stop Him? Herod's massacre, the blood of abortion, and other crimes against humanity do not stop the saving mission of the Messiah. For the Anointed One of Israel and the Savior of the Nations is not thwarted by malice of any kind. Nothing can resist His power.

The Risen Lord knows the immensity of the love of the Father is an abyss much deeper and more powerful than the abyss of misery we have made. His saving presence communicates this conviction when we avail ourselves to its silent splendors. In personal and intimate ways, He speaks in silences to the humbled heart, piercing through our indifference and giving us real power and strength to begin again. In such prayer, the desire to do penance is born and pathways of restitution opened that were previously impossible to find. Peace and joy are born even when all seemed lifeless. In all this, prayer is amazed over how much more powerful is His love than the evil we have done. No matter the sin, whether personal or societal, His mercy heals -- if only we are determined, confident and patient with Him.

In the Beginning, the Word

The Gospel of John begins with a battle cry. Its declaration challenges nihilistic powers and impulses at work in our society and in our hearts.  It raises a meaningful standard around which human existence rallies. What is this standard, this challenge, this battle cry? At the very origin of all that is and of each one's own life resounds the Word of the Father - and the beauty that He unveils is the very hope we need in life.

Sovereign, generative and beautiful, the infinite fullness of this Eternal Word is manifest in the very multitude of created beings, bringing harmony where ever freely welcomed and even before being welcomed, already ordering everything so that the miracle of each free personal encounter might happen. And so the miracle of Christmas where God entered the world of humanity without absorbing or diminishing the meaning of man but instead unveiling its fuller truth, the truth about the human heart that the Father has pondered from before the foundation of the world.

This miracle has happened because of who God is. At once One in Three and Three in One, the Word made flesh reveals the mutually peaceful self-disclosure and jubilant recognition of truth and love that He shares with the Father from all Eternity. Such communion does not diminish, absorb or surmount but beholds, shares and delights in the Other. Out of His goodness and wisdom, God has freely chosen to raise humanity into this very communion of magnificent mutuality by a sheer gift of grace. And so the Word became flesh.  Embodied in our poverty, the Word does not overwhelm or absorb, but dwells with us. How can the Infinite dwell with what is finite? He arranges everything so that what has been summoned into existence might more fully become what it was meant to be.

In this present world as is true in the world that is yet to come, this is true first and foremost of His own Mother by whom He became flesh and made His dwelling among us. In being born in a particular moment of history through a particular woman of a particular people of all particular place, the Eternal Word sanctifies all space and time, transforming all of it into a place of encounter for every heart, of every time and place. In not overcoming particularity of human existence or surmounting the frail limits of manhood, his birth changed our very weakness and poverty into the dwelling place of the Almighty.   

So it is with us in the particularity of our lives. We fear that welcoming the Word will make us uncomfortable and inconvenience our lives -- and so it does, but for great purpose and the healing of our humanity. We are accustom to our sinfulness and familiar with the cycles of life and we suspect that He offers something that will shattered the prison we have built for ourselves.We would rather an impersonal absolute, abstract and far away from the concrete grit of our daily existence. Even if our dreams seem subject to futility, we resist the One who has come to free us from what is futile. Our fears betray us even as we are trapped in self-contradictions. There He is, as vulnerable as a newborn babe, waiting for us to lift Him into our arms. If the Light who was from the beginning is to evoke hope beyond a vague sense of nostalgia, if He is to illumine more than a what the limits of hubris can know, if He is to help us find ground firm enough to support the weight of human existence, He could never render meaningless the noble desires of our hearts - for what is good and true is what He has come to save. 

When He manifests the tender love of the Father, He does not wish to overthrow our freedom or to diminish our personal excellence. The obedience that welcomes the compassion that He manifests discovers a hidden capacity to believe in love though love seems so absent, to make a new beginning even as all things seem to be coming to an end, to set out with fresh hope in the very face of disaster, to fight with renewed purpose though the battle seem impossible to win, to endure all that passes with assured confidence in what will not pass away, to stand for what is right no matter the cost because the price has already been paid, to begin something beautiful for God because the Word has already begun something beautiful in all that He has begun for us.   

Contemplation of Christ's Poverty

While the world wonders over power and politics, the Church turns her gaze to the poverty of Christ. Wealth and influence evoke desire and disappointment, but the vulnerability of God is the sure ground of a meaningful existence. To contemplate Christ born of Mary plunges one's whole being into this vulnerability. Conversely, when being in control and making a name for oneself are no longer confine our gaze, the hunger and thirst of the Christ Child nourishes the heart and quenches the spirit.  So, the Church invites us to lower ourselves and enter into the silent stillness of Divine Love.

To enter such prayer, believe in His presence ... not as an idea, but a reality, an inexhaustible mystery entrusted to you in this very moment. Riches untold are found in this Divine poverty knocking on the door of your heart. Let Him in and He will let you in. Are you anxious about many things? Cast your cares on Him for He cares for you. Do you doubt that His mercy is offering you a second chance and a new beginning? Believe that He did not come to condemn but to save, and behold how He makes all things new.

With the eyes of her who is made holy and immaculate, lift your eyes to the visible Image of the Invisible God who took on our frail humanity with the undaunted resolve to accompany us through every sorrow, even humiliation and death.

With the mind of Mother Church, let our thoughts ponder this Word in swaddling clothes whose revelation of the Father begins and ends in a wordless cry of love.

As members of His Body, let our imaginations be drawn to the Bread of Angels in that manger in Bethlehem for He is come to be the spiritual food of humanity.

With the eagerness of Bride of Christ, let our ears listen for the silence of Creation's great joy in those bleating of sheep and mysterious anthems in the heavens.

With the Heavenly Hosts before the throne, let our prayers rise like incense as we take in those strong earthy smells that the Lord first knew until our knees find ground to kneel on.

As the privileged children of the People of God, let the affections of love in us be roused into action by the tears, smiles, dreams and songs of angels, shepherds, Joseph and Mary. 

Christian Prayer and the Incarnation

With the Word of the Father, the words of Christian prayer are born from the Virgin's Womb. Such was the mystery of prayer learned first by the One who Believed as she felt Him ready to enter the world. It is not seized by force or mastered by practice. The result always exceeds expectation but can never be calculated. This prayer can only be welcomed as a gift and requires that humble reverence without which no love is ever possible. There is no other prayer that the human heart can offer that is given to us as this prayer has been given.

Just as she carried the Lord in her womb before His birth, every prayer offered in Christian faith also carries Him. Since her "fiat", the Word of the Father has never stopped coming and with each advent, He prepares a new theophany whenever a heart says "yes" to Him. Each new word of prayer offered by faith in Him makes space for Him to be born, and opens unseen human poverties and miseries to Divine Peace and Glory.

As she waited for that first Christmas, filled with wonder, the humble Handmaid knew the mystery first conceived in her heart by obedience would soon be heard and seen in the shadow of the Almighty. She must have been amazed that the very vulnerability of His prayer, even when only an infant's cry, would pierce the heart of the Father and unveil the deep things of God. Her mind must have bathed in astonishment over how His prayer would echo at the center of human history and in every human heart. Did she guess by the way it drew her that His prayer had the power to draw all men back to all that is noble and true about humanity, and to all that is good and tender about God?

She must have wondered over that mysterious silent love by which He raised His Heart. If she felt this in her womb, could she see with her heart that His canticle of love would not be dimmed even when He suffered death? She nonetheless believed that the humble glory of his unvanquished petition would make powerful knees bend and haughty heads bow down. By the invincible hope of His cry, she still rejoices that the prayers of those who believe stand in the midst of hardship and shine bright against the darkness.

It is possible to learn such prayer in these finals days before Christmas. These are words that are learned by an obedience that suffers, progresses and dies in love just as He did.  The Man of Sorrows is the Way that prayer must walk if Christian faith is to attain what it seeks. The Just One is the Truth who makes true the desires of the Christian heart. The One Crucified by Love is the life for all those who, by prayer, die to themselves and live no more this earthly life. A wondrous gift is offered in the simple surrender that would turn again from sin, persevere in love and invoke His Name; and that prayer that amazed the Mother of God becomes also the prayer coming to birth in the heart.