Master, teach US to pray

Other people praying. Somehow, the sight always draws the eye, commands one's attention. We are fascinated.

Monks, books in hands, calmly singing the Divine Office in choir.
A nun, eyes cast down, contemplative, totally engaged.
Buddhist monks, eyes closed, motionless in saffron.
Jews in yarmulkes and prayer shawls, bowing by the Western Wall of Jerusalem's Temple.
Muslims in straight rows, bowing heads to the ground in unison.
A lone Hindu sannyasi, focused on a point a thousand miles away.

Ineluctably, one wonders: what are they experiencing?

Some of us recoil, discomfited. Why is that? Fear of the unknown in what we are seeing? The pray-ers' having and our not-having whatever-it-is puts a great gulf between them and us, between their worldview and ours. It makes some of us fearful and we flee, sometimes taking refuge in denigrating both prayer and pray-ers. It's comforting to tell ourselves that we do not need what they think they have, which anyway is a delusion.

But we do need what they have, though, and it is no delusion. People do not live long lives of discipline and deprivation and remain content in a mere delusion. The scales would fall from their eyes sooner or later and they would go, and try to make 'ordinary' lives with all the world has to offer.

Even in our ordinary lives we can share what these pray-ers have, in our bad times, our good times, our everyday, nothing-special times.

There are no atheists in foxholes, they say. Fear makes us pray, by instinct - an in-built faculty.

When our hearts suddenly burst with gratitude for one of life's loveliest, most awesome blessings suddenly apprehended... a love, recognised... sunlight in a quiet wood... sudden relief from great suffering... to whom are we grateful? We pray our gratitude, not knowing to whom.

Some of us yearn with inchoate hunger for what we recognise that these others, these praying others, seem to have, but we ourselves have not. One sometimes hears: 'I wish I had your faith.'

It is often taken for granted that prayer follows the dawning of faith but, counterintuitive though it sounds, sometimes it is the other way around: faith follows from prayer.

To have what the pray-ers have, with or without intellectual belief, one needs only to imitate the practice: to pray. Just to begin, knowing nothing about what we are doing. Just - pray. Not understanding to whom does not matter, in the beginning. Merely acknowledge the possibility of the existence of a personal entity infinitely greater than ourselves but who recognises us and our longing, One to whom we can present ourselves and our longing, just as we are, however blindly, as though into a darkness. But it is darkness only to our poor sight, because in that darkness, warm, bright Perfect Love lives.

That is enough, to begin to pray: 'Are you there? I think you may be, and if you are, well, here am I, just me, just as I am.'

There. You are praying.

And out of the darkness, Love will respond. Love can do no other but respond to a humble, openhearted, nakedly honest call. Heart speaks to heart. Mind-to-mind can come later. The heart knows.

The Apostles had been brought up praying in the Temple and the synagogues, like everybody they knew. They had thought that they knew what prayer was. But now, watching Jesus as He withdrew some distance from them and prayed alone for a long time, they realised that His prayer was entirely different from their familiar ritual which seemed, in comparison, to be little more than adherence to a formula, although a holy, beautiful and time-honoured formula, to be sure. But something was missing. They now saw that something, and they wanted it.

Watching the Master pray opened their eyes to their hunger, their need, their helplessness, their not knowing how to pray as He was praying.

When he returned, they pleaded with Him: 'Master, teach us to pray. We want to pray as you pray. Master, teach us to pray as you do.'

And He did. "When you pray, say: 'Our Father...' "

A letter from a weak soul

It is one of those days when the distance between my Lord and me suddenly seems so great that I cannot see Him, nor hear Him, nor sense Him. I begin to read Morning Prayer but the words blur before my eyes and lose all sense because I feel as though I am speaking into a void and cannot grasp their meaning. Without His sensed assistance to my small understanding, it is hard to think.

I start again, after telling Him that today I am writing a letter to Him instead of talking, because He seems too far away for my small voice to reach Him or for my weak ears to hear His voice. So I will, as it were, write to him, slowly and carefully, line by line, not thinking about the line before or the next line, just this line. He will receive my message in His own good time, which of course is always now. He knows. He knows all. It is I that do not know anything.

And thus I begin over again, concentrating very hard on each line, and slowly, slowly, the sense comes into focus. I carry on with my letter knowing that He will read it, that He is reading it even as I write it, because although I cannot sense His presence I know that I am present to Him. And thus He is present to me. And when my letter is done, I will know what I wrote.

Warmth begins to fill the lines of the psalms and then, ah, His own perfect prayer, the Our Father, says all that I ever need to say to Him.

It is not I that is praying but it is the Spirit praying within me.

Deo gratias.

It's hard, being a shepherd

Shepherds, the Lord says this: Trouble for the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Shepherds ought to feed their flock, yet you have fed on milk, you have dressed yourselves in wool, you have sacrificed the fattest sheep, but failed to feed the flock. You have failed to make weak sheep strong, or to care for the sick ones, or bandage the wounded ones. You have failed to bring back strays or look for the lost. On the contrary, you have ruled them cruelly and violently. For lack of a shepherd they have scattered, to become the prey of any wild animal; they have scattered far. Well then, shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. As I live, I swear it – it is the Lord who speaks – Since my flock has been looted and for lack of a shepherd is now the prey of any wild animal, since my shepherds have stopped bothering about my flock, since my shepherds feed themselves rather than my flock, in view of all this, shepherds, hear the word of the Lord. The Lord says this: I am going to call the shepherds to account. I am going to take my flock back from them and I shall not allow them to feed my flock. In this way the shepherds will stop feeding themselves. I shall rescue my sheep from their mouths; they will not prey on them any more. For the Lord says this: “I am going to look after my flock myself and keep all of it in view."

- Ezekiel Ch 24.

The Lord is coruscating in his contempt for shepherds who do not care for their flock...  His flock... as they are charged to do.

My first reaction is to think immediately of negligent clergy who ensure that they themselves live high on the hog but hold the flock in less than the love with which God loves them, for notice has surely been served upon them. But wait - what about me? Am I also a shepherd, even a part-time one? Am I asked to care for God's people? 

Yes. When I pray the I confess, I ask my brothers and sisters... the other members of the Church... to pray for me to the Lord our God, because I am a sinner, and I undertake also to pray for them, because they need my prayers just as I need theirs. We are shepherds of each other. This is what members of the Church are to each other, and must also be to His other sheep, those not of this fold.

We are not always able physically to come to the material aid of the Lord's sheep, spread all over the world and mostly unknown to us personally, but just as at Mass I ask for their prayers in my need, I am duty bound to pray to the Lord for them, in their need. Pray constantly.

But how can I see the Lord's lambs wounded, scattered, His baptised members lost, wandering, cast out to be the prey of any wild animal, and do nothing? How can I see His other sheep, not of this fold but whom He also loves, unshepherded, frightened, unfed and with no fold that is safe, in which they might find rest?

St Teresa of Avila writes:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours; 

no hands but yours; no feet but yours. 

Yours are the eyes through which 

Christ must look out on the world with compassion.

Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. 

Yours are the hands with which He is to bless people now.

So, on hearing the Lord say, “I am going to look after my flock myself and keep all of it in view," we recognise His mandate to us, to us who are His eyes, His feet, His hands, now, to be shepherds. 

'Love one another, as I have loved you.'

I begin by praying for those sheep who are of this fold but have been lost by inadequate shepherds whose hearts have grown cold and hard, or who lack mercy, or are blind, and pray to be allowed to help bring them home. I try to do nothing to alienate them from the loving Good Shepherd by my own lack of faith and fidelity to Him.

I look next for those not of this fold and try, by living as faithfully and closely as I can to the Lord, to give them some sense that the love of the Good Shepherd is caring for them even now.

I pray that I may be made merciful, as the Father is merciful, and that I may love both sheep and shepherds who have gone astray and cannot find their way home, but especially the shepherds who need rescuing. God love them. God help them. 

I bless those many good shepherds who, at the sacrifice of their private lives and loves and so much more, care as tenderly for His sheep as He would... because He asks it of them, because He has no hands on earth now but theirs. 

Babble: some remedies

The student brethren of our province are running a great series on popular piety over at their blog, Godzdogz.

I particularly like this from the post of 22 January 2014:

“When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words” (Matthew 6:7). 

[...] In moments when we can’t find words for ourselves (yes, even garrulous Dominicans find this happens sometimes!), we make our own these well-worn words [prayers like novenas and litanies] —with their repeated invocations and responses, tested in the crucible of centuries of Christian witness and endorsed by the Church. We insert ourselves into the community of saints whose names we invoke to pray with us and for us; we recognise that there are others who will say ‘amen’ to our prayers as we say ‘amen’ to theirs. So whilst I have to admit that there are times when I’ve neglected these traditional devotions—and it is certainly important to develop our friendship with Christ through mental prayer—it might be worth me pondering whether I’m more likely to babble like a pagan in my own extemporaneous prayers, or when I turn to these prayers recognised by the Church as a gift of Our Lord. 

Oh, yes, some days, I can babble like a pagan. Other days, I am reduced to a kind of mental silence. Well, no, not silence. Mental silence means you're dead. Dumbness, maybe? With inchoate mental rumblings signifying such a lot that I cannot pin down let alone find words for: needs, yearnings, certainty, doubt. No, definitely not silence! Cacophony.

But prayer is a two-way thing. It's not just me - Christ is the other half of the conversation. Sometimes I need to simply be in His presence. Just be. And listen. So I stop babbling and fumbling for coherence and just cling to the foot of the Cross.

But if I must have words in which to address the Lord, as we all do, and cannot find my own, I reach for the the old prayers and particularly the hymns I remember from childhood. And the Divine Office. In the Prayer of the Church, so many souls around the world are praying the same words alongside me, words provided to me by patriarchs and prophets and preachers of the Word, the great communion that is the Church through the ages. And we join the wonderful Communion of Saints, souls gone before us now enjoying eternal bliss in the vast love of the Almighty. All these people come to my rescue. When I cannot, they can!

And of course I run to Mother, 'The Lady of the house' as my old teacher used to call her. I grab my Rosary. 'If you really want a chap to do something for you,' she'd tell us, 'get his mother to ask him for you.' Well, it worked in Cana.

Above all, it comforts me to remember that 'the Spirit prays within me'. All that is needed is for me to plead my great need for His Grace, and He comes. I don't always feel it, but I do believe it, with all my heart. Deo gratias.