Exhaling at Home (Opus Gloriae)

I Follow - poetry for Prayer 101

When my heart is weak within me,

                it hears Another’s beating;

                within that burning pulse, a call: “I know

                                you are weary. This is the Way.

                Come!”

                                And I follow.

 

Kiss and Embrace - poetry for Prayer 101

What keeps you closed up

                in your cocoon, in fear,

is the very Life for which you long

                with all your life,

The Kiss and Embrace for which you ache

                and agonize ever.

Open! Open! Open now!

 

Praying always, again (more Prayer 101)

Enough of Kindergarten. Or, should I say, that even if we are all still in the Kindergarten of prayer, we can “sneak a peek” at the school of the big people. The big people who have learned how to be little in prayer.

In every moment, in any moment, whatever the activity or distraction, we can silently, wordlessly, almost thoughtlessly, embrace the Lord ever-present within our hearts, offering all to Him anew. In this way, we are with Him always, everywhere, just as He is present to us.

We must acknowledge this as a gift given to us if we will just put forth the little effort and desire to open ourselves to God's presence. Which. Is. Everywhere.

We seem convinced that our communication with God requires many pious thoughts and even more pious words. But what God wants is not COMMUNICATION but COMMUNION, not ideas and thoughts but LOVE. Words and ideas are necessary up to a point, but beyond that point they only clutter the path between earth and heaven, as it were. Because the most beautiful and moving thoughts and words are less than a shadow of God, and we are not made for shadows but for LIGHT and LOVE.

Light and Love ARE, beyond our reason and our chatter. We experience them instantly and all at once, not in the slow, plodding increments of a thought or a word. If we remain in the realm of our enworded thoughts, we will never reach the Goal! We must climb above our clattering noise, however pleasant and holy, and reach for Love with the fragile cord of the heart, and Love will not fail or refuse to catch this cord and draw us gently upward.

This reaching from the heart – a heart created, called, and prepared by God, and humbled and surrendered to Him –is like a spark rising up from the burning wood of our selfward humanity, being consumed by the Fire of Love. Ignited by love, our whole being reaches for God in little ashen sparks too fragile to reach Him except that they are carried by His own burning Love right to His Heart.

These sparks know only that Love made me, Love saved me, and Love calls me back to Love. This reaching of heart to Heart needs no word or reasoning, but only desire rising from love.

Sometimes, it seems these sparks rise singly and feebly from our hearts, distracted and weary, yet reaching in the right direction. At other times, it seems Love reaches down and opens our hearts toward Him to reveal a great furnace and a stream of eager fire is released.

How can we understand the great value of this wordless reaching for Love and Truth, for Christ Himself (because if we are reaching for some amorphous “god,” we are apt to find only ourselves!)? It is good to remember that just as we sometimes must pause our activity to rest and reconnoiter, we must also sometimes pause our “prayerful activity” – our words, recitations, reading – in order to “be still and know” that He is God. And sometimes, we can know nothing else. It is in this “knowing nothing” that we begin to KNOW ALL, though our intellect cannot grasp it; it is a “blind seeing,” a “deaf hearing.”

 
We give God permission and opportunity, silently acknowledging His sovereignty and Fatherhood and love, to transform us. We open our whole selves to Him and invite Him to enter in, surrendering all to Him so that He can transform us and make all new, inhabit us wholly, do with us what He chooses. We gaze with the spiritual gaze of the heart into the hidden Heart that loves us. And we entrust ourselves wholly to Love.

But in the moment of our true prayer, all these sentiments are not with us. We are empty, barren, reaching with no thought of ourselves. We do not pray for our own comfort or consolation or security. We pray because it is right and good to acknowledge what we are and what God IS. It is not by our efforts but by grace alone that our weak sparks or fiery torrents reach for Love. And when we find ourselves reaching upward with only raw desire, our desire does not even understand itself. This is prayer.

Because it is truly beyond us, beyond the natural powers of the soul. The desire comes from God, not us; we can only consent to it and allow ourselves to be carried away by it. It is spirit reaching for Spirit, love reaching for Love – the Spirit’s “inexpressible groaning” within us, which the mind cannot fully grasp or articulate, yet filling us with such profound peace and joy. This is God’s own life of Love, within us and beyond us.

And it is this very Life that continues beyond the grave. All our activity in this life – inward AND outward – will end, but the loving contemplation which peacefully joins us to God in deep bonds of love beyond our understanding, will continue beyond the confines of this life. Death is the final “tearing of the veil,” and the fulfillment of all our unknowing desire. What we reach toward with human feebleness now, we will possess entirely then. Our little human desire for love (which can lead us into all sorts of trouble here) will at last expand to the fullness for which it is made and what is opaque to our human sense will become transparent to our freed souls.

So. As we’ve said before, let’s begin to begin to be what we are created to be!

Let's begin to pray.

Multitude Monday... on a Tuesday :- /

Because Monday was just nuts....

I'll let these words draw their own pictures. In your own silence.

I am grateful for....

61. bare morning light in a still-silent house

62. steam rising silently from a mug of steaming chamomile

63. silent prayer from deep within

64. silent tears rising gently from that prayer

65. the utter power of the silent Word

66. the silent peace of leaning into Truth

67. the silent joy of allowing ourselves to be seen by Him... completely

68. the silent thrill of His glance

69. the silent strength of being oned with ALL

70. the silent determination to do all He asks of me this day

 

Prayer - a quote

Not keeping up with the "Prayer 101" blogging as I'd hoped, but this is right along with what we've been talking about:

We have been called to love the world. And God loved the world so much that he gave Jesus to it (Jn 3,16). Today, he loves the world so much that he gives you and me to the world to be his love, his compassion and his presence through our lives of prayer, sacrifice and self-surrender. The response that God is waiting for from you is to become a contemplative, to be a contemplative.

Let us take Jesus at his word and we will be contemplatives at the heart of the world, because if we have faith then we are his permanent presence. In contemplation the soul draws directly from God's heart the graces that the active life has been entrusted to distribute. Our very existence is to be intimately bound to the living Christ within us. If we do not live in God's presence, we cannot keep going.

What is contemplation? It is to live the life of Jesus. That is how I understand it. To love Jesus; living his life at the heart of our own; living our own at the heart of his... Contemplation has nothing to do with shutting oneself up in a dark cupboard but in allowing Jesus to live his Passion, his love and his humility in us, to pray with us, to be with us and to make holy through us. Our lives and our contemplation are one. It's not a question of doing but of being. In fact it is about the complete happiness of our spirit through the Holy Spirit who breathes God's fullness into us and send us out into all creation as his own, personal message of love (Mk 16,15).

~Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), founder of the Missionary Sisters of Charity 

No Greater Love

 

Praying - Quote of the Day (note to self)

“The basic theme is the one that you have noted: Do not become utterly absorbed in activism! There would be so much to do that one could be working on it constantly. And that is precisely the wrong thing. Not becoming totally absorbed in activism means maintaining consideratio -- discretion, deeper examination, contemplation, time for interior pondering, vision, and dealing with things, remaining with God and meditating about God. One should not feel obliged to work ceaselessly; this in itself is important for everyone, too, for instance, every manager, too, and even more so for a Pope. He has to leave many things to others so as to maintain his inner view of the whole, his interior recollection, from which the view of what is essential can proceed.”

--Pope Benedict XVI
Light of the World, with Peter Seewald

I'll get started on that "consideratio" just as soon as I dig out from under.... er... no, on second thought, let me start that RIGHT NOW.

 

Prayer 101, continued; prayer of the HEART

Levitations, visions, glowing things.

Let me say that this is what the prayer of contemplation is NOT:

 

It is NOT visions, manifestations, levitations, or glowing things. It is NOT some exotic practice reserved for hermits or hermit wannabes. It is NOT some Christianized transcendental meditation. And we CANNOT force it to happen because we want it to happen.

So then, what IS it? It is the prayer of our deepest selves encountering the deepest Truths. It is the expansion of our hearts to open itself to embrace all. It is the recognition of the truth that we are made in God’s image and likeness, that we are His true sons and daughters, that our hearts were created to become His dwelling place by grace, that His love should flow through our hearts.

There is nothing spectacular about deep prayer; it can be so subtle we are not even sure it is prayer. (My spiritual director once said, when I whined about the barrenness and apparent fruitlessness of my prayer, that there are a lot of souls in Heaven who thought they weren’t praying, but they were; so keep on keeping on!)

“We need no wings to go in search of Him, but have only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon Him present within us.” St. Teresa of Avila

So how does this work? Once more, it is worth reviewing those stages of prayer, so that we are very familiar with them and their effects on our soul, in our soul.

St. Teresa of Avila compares that “ladder of prayer” to the different ways of watering a garden:

We can draw water from a well via a bucket and rope and carry it to the garden. This is Vocal prayer, where we are doing all the work. It is somewhat cumbersome, but it gets the job done.

The water can be moved via a waterwheel and a trough. This is meditation, where we are still working and turning things, but it is less work because we are becoming recollected and more water is being moved with less work.

The garden might also be watered by a running stream. This calls for no effort on our part! This is contemplation, because God is doing the work, while our garden enjoys the refreshment.

The final way the garden might receive water is falling rain. This is completely mystical contemplation, and cannot be achieved by any human effort. God comes down to our garden and fills it.

Another way of looking at those three basic stages of prayer is the process of painting a picture; we might say that in vocal prayer we describe what we are planning to paint, in meditation is the activity that goes into painting the picture, and contemplation we gaze at the completed picture, seeing it as a whole, becoming aware of the reality it portrays. Vocal prayer would get us nowhere by itself, just as talking only about our painting would never achieve anything. Meditation is the necessary work, but it is still not accomplishing what is necessary. Contemplation is the goal, the end point, the achievement. Except when these stages apply to prayer, the end point is LOVE, and love is always growing. Contemplation moves us to greater and greater LOVE.

“The important thing in mental prayer is not to think much, but to love much. It is love alone that gives value to all things.” ~ St. Teresa of Avila

“In the end, we will be judged on love.” ~St. John of the Cross

How do we get there? Slowly, patiently, trustingly, faithfully. Love grows incrementally, and we encourage it to expand within us by being faithful to prayer and generous with ourselves outside of prayer (until there IS no “outside of prayer” because everything IS prayer). Begin with beautiful vocal prayers that inspire and lift your thoughts heavenward; and if your heart and head are lifted heavenward, pause to breathe that in and thank Him, with or without words. Meditate on the life of Christ and His Mother, and feel free to talk WITH them as you meditate; ask questions, muse to them, share your feelings, etc.

“Beginners,” says St. Teresa of Avila, “do well to form an appealing  image of Christ in His Sacred Humanity.  They should picture Him within themselves in some mystery of His life, for example, the Christ of the agony or the Risen Savior in His glorified Body.  Once they are conscious of Our Lord’s presence within their souls they need only look upon Him and conversation will follow.  This friendly conversation will not be much thinking but much loving, not a torrent of words, much less a strained prepared speech, but rather a relaxed conversation with moments of silence as there must be between friends.”

Gradually, this meditation expands to become contemplation, which is the call of all Christians because this is how we become united with God, Who is longing to be oned with us! Contemplation starts to happen when the prayer of our mouths and our minds finally filters down to our HEARTS. What the mind cannot grasp in meditation, the heart can discern in contemplation. Contemplation confronts and opens itself to MYSTERY. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing  says, “Though we cannot know Him, we can love Him. By love He may be touched and embraced; never by thought.” The classic Carmelite references come from the classic Carmelite saints (all 3 Doctors of the Church):

“Contemplation is nothing else but a secret, peaceful infusion of God, which, if admitted, will set the soul on fire with the Spirit of Love.” ~St. John of the Cross

"For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy."  ~St. Therese of Lisieux 

I am not asking you now to think of Him or to form numerous conceptions of Him, or to make long and subtle meditations with your understanding.  I am asking only to look at Him. “ ~St. Teresa of Avila

 It is as simple as that.

We will continue to look at different facets of prayer, but for today, let’s just commit to spending a certain amount of time actually praying EACH DAY? How much time?  Ask the Lord to help you set that amount of time. I leave you with more words of advice from St. Teresa of Avila:

“If you want to pray well, then pray much.  If you don’t pray much at least pray regularly and you will pray well.”

 

Climbing the ladder to God - the "stages" of prayer

St Paul says we must “pray always.” Do we even understand what prayer IS?

Here is the first layer of understanding that mysterious conversation with God (by way of review) -

There are three “stages” of prayer, in classical terminology, like a ladder we climb, except no matter how high we might climb, we always use the rungs below as well (in other words, we never “outgrow” the lower rungs!):

VOCAL – the prayer of the lips, the prayers we “recite,” that we know by heart. They can be beautiful and inspiring (I think of the Psalms) and part of the ritual prayer of the Church (the Liturgy of the Hours and the Mass) and part of the prayers we teach our children. They are the “lingua franca” of Christians (like the Lord’s Prayer or Grace before meals) and they are a necessary step to understanding WHAT to pray and HOW to pray. This is the beginning of prayer.

MEDITATIVE- the prayer of the mind, which takes input from reading or listening and then forms pictures and ideas to ponder and reflect upon, seeking insight and understanding. The lips are usually quiet (though when we pray the repetitive prayers of the Rosary, our lips may be active while our minds are meditating on the particular mysteries of Christ’s life), but the mind is active, busy about the things of God. This is growing in prayer, where vocal prayer can lead us to reflection and understanding.

CONTEMPLATIVE – the prayer of the heart and will, opening to God’s presence. The lips and mind are both at rest as the heart reaches out in wordless desire and the will seeks to be one with the will of God. There is a simple gazing at the Lord, wordless yearning, offering, receiving, loving. This is the beginning true union, and will lead to union with God if we persevere. “Knock in prayer,” says St. John of the Cross, “and it will be opened to you in contemplation.”

Now, to add to our “categories,” with the understanding that prayer cannot usually be neatly categorized, nor can we “plot our position” in relation to God or our stage of prayer with any unfailing accuracy, contemplative prayer is further divided into two stages, to differentiate between OUR work and GOD’S work:

ACQUIRED CONTEMPLATION – we can reach this by our own efforts, as it were (as if we can do anything “on our own”!), by quieting our inner thoughts and reaching out to God’s presence with faith, hope, and a longing love; we know in faith that He is truly present and we reach out with the heart to touch Him and allow ourselves to be touched by Him. Sometimes I tell people that a good sign of our truthfulness in prayer is when we not only want to see God, but when WE WANT HIM TO SEE US, all of us, as we are. We know that He loves us enough to embrace us even though we are still covered in the leprosy of sin!

INFUSED CONTEMPLATION – this is a pure gift of God, a grace that He gives freely, when and as He wills. We cannot “work our way” here, though we CAN prepare ourselves for it, open ourselves to it, give God the permission and opportunity to pour His spiritual gifts and fruits into our souls. It is a real awareness of God’s presence, a growing in His love and in union with Him. This is the goal: holiness is union with Him, in love.

St. John of the Cross says, “Pure contemplation lies in receiving.”

Blessed Lawrence called contemplative living “the practice of the presence of God.” St. Teresa of Avila called contemplation the prayer of “recollection.” Others have called it the “prayer of the heart” or “prayer of simplicity” or “prayer of silence.” All of these highlight some aspect of contemplative prayer.

And that is what these posts aim to hold out to all of you. The first step is to DESIRE it.

In the words of Brother Lawrence, “Let us begin; perhaps He is only waiting for a single generous resolution from us.”

Next time: what does contemplation look like?

Pray ALWAYS?! Prayer 101

We're practicing "Gratitude 101" on Mondays. Now for something more: Prayer 101.

 Some time ago, after praying for a friend’s very special intention, she emailed an appeal:

Teach us to pray…

I would love to learn to pray the way you do; with such reverence and humility and grace.  I pray every day before I leave the house. I first ask for forgiveness, then I praise, then I thank. I pray that’s the right way!

That IS the right way (there is the classic acronym to remember the four forms of prayer: ACTS, for Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, and Supplication/petitions). But there’s more. There is just BEING with God, looking at God, letting God look at us.

But we’re not sure how to get there. It seems too far beyond us, here on the planet when our minds are all absorbed in schedules and crumbs and the exigencies of the day. We’re not in monasteries, after all, so we can’t be expected to be glowing and levitating. Leave us to recite our Hail Marys and show up for Mass on Sunday and that will be enough.

Really? “Pray always,” says St. Paul. How in the world is THAT possible?

It IS possible to live contemplatively (to use the standard theological lingo, which sometimes gets in the way, but which I plan to use, at least intermittently, so that cross-references can be made if necessary). We are all CALLED to live contemplatively, to walk with Christ in every moment, so that He can walk this earth with us. Contemplative prayer isn’t inventing anything… It is just becoming more aware of what IS. God is already everywhere. Living contemplatively opens our awareness to this reality.

“God is always there, but He is hidden and He keeps silent.” ~ St Teresa Benedicta

Not only is this kind of prayerful living possible, I would argue that it is NECESSARY. Christ, we are told at least a dozen times in the Gospels, went off to the desert or some mountain to be alone in prayer, to commune with His Father. We all need that kind of mountaintop experience, at least at intervals, in order to live life fully and not just skim along the top, getting through the day, without much in the way of meaningfulness. Without deeply prayerful experiences (and they can surprise us in moments that are very much outside the realm of some “prayer method”!), our potential for genuine growth in understanding and love stagnates. We cannot be what we are created to be without the impact of God, without encountering MYSTERY.

So, to help my friends who are interested, I offer this little primer on what prayer can be and some ideas on how to get there.

There are a lot of books on prayer out there – old, new, good, bad – but the sheer volume only seems to add to the confusion. I pray these attempts to discuss something so deeply personal, so necessary, and so varied will not add to the confusion.

(And I will say here at the outset that my thoughts on these things are not my own original ideas; as a Secular Carmelite, they are drawn from my own experience and an amalgamation of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, St. Edith Stein, and Iain Matthew, a little booklet (OOP) by Fr. James Borst, and the wisdom of the Church. When I can remember a specific reference, I will try to include it!)

Next time: the "stages" of prayer.

 

We've named it "espresso", and it reminds me to pray

 
We've named the new laptop "espresso." Because we name hardware in this family for some reason I've not determined, and because it's not shiny black plastic like "cricket," my previous (and now in someone else's hands) laptop; it's a lovely deep brown brushed metal. It's too big to be called "espresso," but "grande" didn't have the same ring. Coffee makes me happy.

HP ProBook 4720s, for those of you who find that interesting; 17.3 inch HD screen (hey, my eyes are aging!), Core i3, 500GB.

It has taken over a week to get the new equipment working, and working with the old equipment. It takes time to reconfigure and download drivers and setup the desktop and transfer your files (well, the ones that can even be recovered...), and get everything working together and working for you again, as you well know. Hopefully, none of you have to be reminded of that too often.

We've got LoJack now, and a Kensington lock, and they've opaqued my windows in the office so no one can see in, and the locks are changed so they can't be kicked in. The pastor walked in the other day, saw the windows and the closed blinds on the door and asked, "Can you breathe in here?" I'm hermetically sealed in here. But the laptop is safe.

 I've got my very own Seagate external drive. I will back up. I will back up. I will not rely on the sync with the server to preserve my documents. I will back up. I DID learn how to backup my iPhone, restore it from the backup, and then sync it with my computer so that I did not lose all my Contacts and Calendar information. THAT was a relief.

The new laptop has been blessed and consecrated to God's service by the pastor. I say a quick prayer every time I open it on my desk.

And whoever took my laptop (and iPod :-( too!) is getting a LOT of prayers; every time I'm tempted to feel irritated by how much TIME this is taking, and how much work is not getting done, and the 18 months of work that have to be reinvented, I say a little prayer for those people. They need them.

I'm trying not to look at the mountain of work that is lost, and only deal with one shovelful at a time...I console myself somewhat by remembering that the Lord did most of the that work in the first place, and I trust that He can recreate what is necessary without any difficulty, if I'll just show up here with the willingness to put in the time and energy. And entrust all to Him.