To Be At Prayer

"I tell you, he will see that justice is done for them speedily." In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Holy Spirit has brought us to an extended retreat on the subject of prayer. The feast day yesterday commemmorating St. Teresa of Avila and our Sunday lections make God's will for us unmistakable over this weekend. Teresa of Avila, the first woman Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church, gave us our tradition of Mental Prayer. She had been surrounded by a sixteenth-century culture whose spiritual life was rooted in rote prayer: the Lord's Prayer, the Credo, the Rosary, the Angelus, the Salve Maria, to name a few. To be sure, these prayers may be held reverently in our minds and souls as sacred talismans, as starting points for deep and holy contemplation. But that is not the way most parish communities have prayed them. St. Teresa wanted something deeper, something truly holy; she yearned for a true experience of God Himself. As a child this desire burned so brightly that she had formed a plan to journey into Muslim territories to the south of her home in Spain. Here she surely would be martyred and come into God's presence instantly ... until her uncle spied her going off on this holy mission. Yet, that same holy fire continued to burn bright in her breast and would lead her on an inward journey that has produced some of the spiritual monuments of the inner life, The Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. This path of prayer also revealed to her a method of praying that has been a turning point for countless souls over the centuries, Mental Prayer. It consists in three simple steps: first, to seek God truly and earnestly as if journeying to be reunited with your life's one true love; second, to ensure that you are alone with Him, to "pray in secret to your Father Who hears you in secret," as Jesus had commanded us to; third, to gaze upon Him with eyes of true devotion and love, to speak with Him from your heart, to share all your cares and hopes, your regrets and your peace, your sorrows and your joys. We might call this "silent prayer" if that term did not mislead, for it is the deepest honoring of silence that understands God dwells within and which honors this profound truth. And we think here on a corollary: to crowd our lives with distraction is to reject God, even to blaspheme Him.

What is it about silence that makes so many human hearts uneasy? They start the car and then immediately turn on the radio. They walk into their homes after work and immediately turn on the television, even though it might blare in the background with no one watching it. They "make conversation" as if manufactured words and sentences could be a blessing to anyone. Above all, they fear silence. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his classic Walden, "I have three chairs on my porch -- one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society. I would revise this: "one for God." The solitude with God that St. Teresa counsels does not consist in the quest for nothingness in the spirit of centering prayer or Eastern meditations. It is a focused contemplation of definite thoughts with one leading to another. It is a dialogue of words with new discoveries and insights being made as we might expect in sincere conversation.

The great mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Robert Penrose wrote an important book thirty or so years ago titled, The Emperor's New Mind. In it he asked the question how could so much computing power possibly be compact within the human cranium. And the answer he proposed was couched in quantum physics. He said that all electrons that make up the human brain were in all states simultaneously, representing a vast potential of computing paths and that only when we locked onto a particular thought did the proximate electrons click into a particular state. If we are honest with ourselves, I think we will admit that this exactly our experience of our thoughts. Our minds are a jumble of so many things, not in orderly outlines of analyzed thoughts, but more like piles of paper scattered across a broad desk .... with many thoughts covered in dust and cobwebs. One thought reminds us of another ... or we might have changed our mind about this or that .... or I'll come back to that later .... How many college students discover that they only think they know their beliefs about this that or the other. They are so confident. They are willing to passionately defends their "beliefs" even to the point of shouting. Yet, when they begin to express those beliefs in a sustained, systematic way they discover, sometimes sheepishly, that they did not really know their firmly held beliefs at all. What they really had were broad impressions .... many of which, in slow examination under a bright light, were not even compatible with each other. This is simply the way our brains work.

How many people have said smugly, "Oh, I don't need to pray. God knows my thoughts well enough." "Your thoughts?!" a good pastor wants to reply. "Why you don't know your real thoughts any more than anyone does, not until you really sit down and pray through it carefully, reverently, and continuously, perhaps over weeks and months. Even then the desires of the human heart constantly are shifting. In our Gospel lesson this morning, Jesus enjoins us to pray repeatedly and over a long span of time. The long waiting for a reply to our prayers does not signify that God is deaf to us, but rather that He will grant only "just prayers," "our true prayers," and that speedily. This waiting period is not for Him or because He is busy! It is for us. For we really don't know our own minds, and He does not want us to waste our time going down dead ends in our spiritual journeys to Him. How often do we find that ardent desire in prayer is often hiding something else, something we need to see in ourselves. But we cannot overcome our blind spots until we begin an orderly conversation with Him, Who alone knows the whole truth about us. This goes to the heart of Mental Prayer's genius.

Am I speaking about Catholic prayer this morning? But let me broaden the question to include our nominal identity. People reading our website ask me from time to time, "What is an ecumenical Catholic community?" To some this seems an impossibility. Doesn't Catholic only mean Roman Catholic? Such questions, sadly, proceed from expectations of exclusion and restriction and fine points of law, never having tasted the freedom of Heaven and divine love. In fact, the words ecumenical and Catholic, far from being contradictory, are redundant. One repeats the other. Ecumenical points to union, to all parts being combined to make the most complete whole. Catholic comes from two Greek words: κατα (kata) and 'ολον (holon) meaning "according to the greatest whole."

A particularly beautiful instance of this prismatic fullness and unity is the Taize Community in France -- a monastic religious order made up of celibate men from thirty countries from both Catholic and Protestant traditions. This community, highly favored by Pope St. John XXIII, Pope St. John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI, has been blessed with the highest regard by religious leaders from every tradition. Its founder, Brother Roger, though not Roman Catholic, received the Blessed Sacrament at the Requiem Mass for John Paul II. The celebrant who placed it on his tongue was Benedict XVI. And why are these monks so highly favored without a hint of controversy? Because they pray. They pray alone in secret in the intimate friendship of God. They pray as a community writing reverent music, speaking and chanting, with candles, with darknesses and colored lights, with silence and with sound, in myriad languages, ancient and modern. In mysterious repetition, in the gyres of incense and color and light with circles of chanted orisons rising to Heaven, they become prayer. For while prayer begins as an act, its true nature is revealed through repetition until, to borrow the words of W.B. Yeats, "who can tell the dancer from the dance?" Prayer ultimately is not doing; it is being. Our lives become a prayer, an unending conversation with the Lord. And the destination of this journey for each and every one of us, people of prayer, is the same. Our lives and our homes become sanctuaries; our conversation becomes a holy place; our faces begin to radiate light; our words mingle with God's Who dwells easily within us.

In the end, the spiritual life is simplicity itself: love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Honor the silences that He has given you so that you will meet with Him. Simple. Another saint of Spain, St. Jose-Maria Escriva, asked a related question in his classic, The Way. It is so hard, he wrote, to become a scholar. One must devote, perhaps, twelve years to university study, master two or three languages, and then write a book under the scrutiny of harsh critics while living in penury. And it is so easy to become a saint. Why then are there so many scholars and so few saints?

God will grant our just prayers, our true prayers, the ones that lead to Him. And He will do it speedily. Pray brethren! Pray sisters! This journey of prayer is God's gift of love to us. And our response to this invitation is nothing less than our faithfulness to Him. "God does not need our prayers," Brother Roger said. "It is a mystery that He sets such store by them." Amen.