Acts 1:12-14
Luke 1:46-55
Luke 1:26-38

"My Soul Is Magnified in the Lord"

"My soul magnifies." "My spirit rejoices." This is the air breathed on prayer's towering summit.

At the Hermitage we pray. We pray the prayers of the Church. We pray for others and hear of miracles. We pray for each other. We pray as we fall asleep giving thanks for the blessings of the day, and we pray upon waking that we fall into no sin nor any offense. We pray together as the day begins, and we sing Evensong each Vesper-evening. We are sustained by a special prayer every day, which is the source and summit of our lives, when Jesus becomes Present and feeds us with spiritual food. We pray Rosaries on morning walks, while driving the car, or at any time in the fields. (You see God has given us Rosary beads at birth as we look down at our hands and count the fingers.) And then there is the prayer-without-ceasing, which St. Teresa of Avila called mental prayer, the never-ending conversation with God that is ever alive as God is always present. We are a religious house of prayer. This is our Community's purpose. Yes, we volunteer all day at our non-profit Farm, but prayer comes first and last and sustains us in an unbroken conversation with God.

But why do we pray? What does prayer do? What is its outcome? It does not result in stacks of sorted, washed, and crated produce. It does not deliver fruit to Hilo. It does not mow the fields or prune the trees. It does not turn the compost piles or repair the fences.

You know, Franciscan sisters are a fiercely practical species: efficient, frugal, to-the-point. It is a marvel, therefore, to see how many hours these women devote to prayer and their single-minded commitment to it. And if morning Mass should be suspended, say, because their chaplain must leave before dawn for Hilo, well, yes, there is forgiveness, but the disappointment is palpable ... because for them prayer is consequential and now this day's offering of the Holy Mass will be lost forever. For them nothing is more important than prayer and especially this prayer before the Gate of Heaven.

But why? Why should prayer be so pressing, so urgent, so important? The Divine Office, whose origins can be traced to the earliest gatherings of Christians, is so-named — office deriving from the Latin officium, meaning obligation or duty — because it is work that must be completed. Our word liturgy, which signifies "any act of formal worship" comes from a Greek word λειτουργια (litourgia), meaning "works of the people" or even "public works." This is a practical matter on which the welfare of the community depends, not to be slighted and never postponed. But why? What does it do? Who is it really for?

Brother Roger, who founded the Taize Community, wrote that "God does not need our prayers. It is a mystery that he sets such store by them." And I have told young people, "Yes, God knows the content of your minds and from Him nothing is hid, but you must articulate your prayers, you must say your prayers if you wish to petition God." And I recall an elderly priest at seminary who told us in flinty words, "The Office is said, not read!" Certainly, God does not need our prayers. God is Almighty. He is self-sufficient. He made everything. In that sense everything already belongs to Him (as we read in the Psalms).

God made one creature on earth whom He made to pray. Our exemplar, sent to show us what a human ought to be, Jesus of Nazareth, was the "One Who prayed." He constantly sought private places to pray. He instructed us how to pray (in secret), and He taught us the perfect prayer, "Our Father, Who art in Heaven ..."

The crowning glory of God's Creation, His thinking, choosing, and free human creatures, have been set aside as different. They do not belong to God in the same way that everything else does. For in their freedom, they must choose for God. They must become spiritual creatures by their own choice in order to be His. Prayer is our umbilical cord to God through which His lifeforce reaches us. We pray at the Mass that each of us will be "a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto [Him]" — reasonable referring to a transformation of mind, to the mind of Jesus, "transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Romans 12:2), to a state where the soul is magnified to have ascendancy over the mind — a certain reverence, a certain God-mindfulness, a certain dignity-of-the-soul. Whenever I read the few things St. Francis wrote, I am in the presence of that luminous mind and spirit and dignity. — an awed deference, a reverence, a solemn respect. The soul of St. Francis was magnified. His outer person was diminished. He was called Il Poverello, the little, poor man in rags. What is it that magnifies the soul?

Has your soul ever been magnified? My soul has been magnified in like measure to my body being diminished. You might say I have become a little man in rags. I recall one occasion — it was upon the Eve of Christmas. I had a fever of 105.6 F. I was alone in a quiet room. And in that state characterized by a body and mind that had been quieted (for the material body is marvelously efficient shutting down operations in times of emergency). In that deep quiet, I became nearly all soul. I was exquisitely sensitive to the presence of God. I was aware of the state of my own soul; my faults, my past sins, but also my essentially divine nature with a clarity I had never known before. I could plainly see the souls of others, too — their winning ways, their challenges, and their goodness struggling in a world that is not good. And I felt a deep love toward each of them forgiving them as they had forgiven me. Most of all I was filled with wonder, a wonder at the world God had made, giving thanks for the love and forgiveness that God had shown me who was so unworthy of His love. And here on the night He was born, I thought of a little Child, holier than anything that had ever touched the earth, born among the dung of barnyard animals and outcast in an undeserving world. And I wept for the beauty of it.

I had experienced, by the grace of God, a perfection — a pure experience of loving God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength and of loving my neighbor as myself. My soul was magnified. And my mind durst not intrude upon this holy place.

Later, as a hospital chaplain I saw the same thing happening in others. I met gruff men at bedsides who (their wives' told me) were not given to emotion or intimate conversation, but who had become tender-hearted and wanted to talk about the details of their lives. I sat with women who had been distant and guarded but who now wanted to share their private thoughts. They had come to that place which I knew: where the body is so diminished that the soul might be magnified. You see, at the point where worldly things don't matter anymore, protecting one's image is seen as the childish game that it is.

When the busy mind is turned off and the desiring body is tamed, the soul's fullness and dignity is known. Yes, illness can teach us the principle, but that is only the act of discovery. It shows us that it is there, but we do not wish to be deathly ill in order to go there a second time. No, after that, we must undertake the process ourselves, for the mind is a busy fellow and will constantly push you off the path toward Heaven if you will let it. In the striving to be near to God, we must turn off the noise of this world.

During seminary I joined a group who gathered at dawn each day to pray. The leader, a monk from the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert, introduced us to "centering prayer," whose purpose was to magnify the soul, to give it pride of place at the center of your being .... where the mind wants always to be the center of attention. This was a new kind of prayer for me, and I had to learn its certain and definite rules. When arising each morning before light, you must not talk to anyone, but keep your eyes down and your feet moving. (I thought of Jesus' instruction to the sent Apostles, "Salute no one as you enter a town.") Everyone would gather at the oratory, a small, round stone building with a roof which was a dome. Chairs were placed around its dark perimeter. And you must quietly be seated, for the room is a natural amplifier. The first words of the day will be offered to God. So we waited in silence for the Leader to speak: "O Lord open Thou my lips." We replied, "and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise." The next hour would be spent in absolute quiet, but not just any quiet. You must focus your mind on a single, small point of concentration and hold it there for one hour — perhaps the name Jesus or maybe a silent repetition of the Jesus prayer: "Jesus Christ, Son of God" upon inhaling, "have mercy on me, a poor sinner," upon exhaling. But you cannot let your mind stray from this single point of focus.

It sounds easy enough, but that hour-long ascent up this mountain proved to be formidable. Almost immediately, the mind crowds in and commences its prattle: "Don't forget to buy bread on the way home." "Pick up that book at the library." "The inspection sticker on the truck is due at the end of the month." "You have an appointment with the dean at 4 p.m." Each time, you must pull your concentration back to the single point, but interruptions, you learn, will be constant, and you begin to realize just how noisy your mind is.

Over a course of days, centering slowly gains the upper hand, and the intervals between these interruptions grow longer and longer until you have mastered it, and you are able to pray the brief Jesus Prayer for one hour without thinking of anything else.

Is there an outcome? Do you become different inside? Yes, you do. Emptying your interior of clutter and learning how to turn off the noise in your head, you free up holy space. You begin to become much more like Father Francis, who distrusted "small talk" and who taught silence. You become keenly aware of the noise outside yourself as well — people who turn on the radio when they get in a car or reach for the television remote as soon as they enter a house. And you realize that the world, which is not God's domain, is dead set against your intimacy with God.

Freeing up holy space within, you also learn that your prayer with God is different. There is more signal and less noise, to borrow the physicist's words. Your prayers become clearer and more purposeful, and your company with God moves on from being a mere visit — an obligatory visit to visit Grandma on Sunday afternoons — to "quality time," time that you just can't wait for, time that you never want to end. You get into a state of being .... I can recall times in my life where I would be walking down the street and suddenly would scan for any nearby church, it didn't matter which one, so I could go in to pray and sit and speak with God for lengthy periods. For "the thoughts of youth are long long thoughts" (Longfellow), and the prayers of the magnified soul are long long prayers.

I suppose all Christians exchange the promise that they will pray for each other. But have you ever heard a wise and holy person ever say to you, "Thank you. But don't neglect yourself"? As a young man, I thought it virtuous never to pray for myself. And, certainly, God does not hear our prayers for Pixels, Teslas, or winning the lottery, remembering St. John Chrysostom's Prayer, "Fulfill now, O Lord, our desires and petitions as may be best for us." No, this wise and holy advice was to prepare ourselves to become stronger in prayer. We must quiet our minds of static before we can open a broad, clear channel to Heaven. And I realized, this is why people go to the holiest ones to pray on urgent matters, life-and-death matters — not because God will favor them for their goodness (though surely the good are closest to God), but also that clear and noiseless prayers, arising from authentic spiritual life, be present before the throne of God in their crystalline clarity and purity.

I wonder how often I prayed the Rosary before I realized what it was or why it repeats. The pairing of Mattheas with Mary, joined in prayer, related in our Gospel lesson this morning, helps us to understand something important, and that is that each of us is called to this holy level of prayer; each of us is called to breathe the air at the summit of prayer's towering peaks. Mattheas' name is uncannily similar to the Greek word for disciple. Just as Judas, whom he replaced, is a variant of Judah, which signifies "any Jew," so Mattheas calls to the mind mathetes, which means "any disciple" (for the Greek language was universal during the first century).

The Rosary quintessentially is Mary's prayer. I do not say that Mary led the Twelve in the Rosary on this occasion. I only say that praying with Mary was an instruction in quieting the mind and entering into deep prayer. Certainly, this was Jesus' instruction to Mary Magdalene, as her sister Martha stumbled because of her many distractions: "quiet the mind, empty the self, draw near to God ... this is the one thing that is needful." Our Blessed Mother was, and is, the Quiet Woman. She is the Woman Wrapped in Silence. And her prayer, with its circle of repeated, holy tones, quiets the mind and removes the clutter. It is "centering prayer" in its finest expression. For in quieting our mind, we empty ourselves of the world. In quieting the mind with the holy, we open ourselves to receive the holy, and within this sacred space arises a royal personage, your own soul revealed in its resplendent divinity: