TEACH US TO PRAY
© Peter G. van Breemen SJ
(…) When I pray I must leave the trivialities of life behind; they do not have a place in my prayer. On the other hand, what really touches my heart should touch my prayer. Prayer has no point, no reality, unless it is firmly rooted in life. Some people have a "praying coat" which they put on when they begin to pray. Then, after an hour or so, they remove the coat and return to reality. This is a nice escape from life but it is not prayer. Why? Because it is not real. When I receive word that someone dear to me is seriously ill, I cannot and should not dismiss this from my prayer. But there are two ways of handling this: I can worry about it and let my imagination run wild, or I can bring it to the level of prayer: "Cast your worries on the Lord" ( 1 Pet 5:7). I can commend my friend to God. I can trust that God holds him in his hands. Now I can pray about what is important to me and pray in a very real way. How do I begin to pray?
There is a difference between concentration on the object I place before me which concentration requires much will power, and recollectedness (Sammlung in German) which is simply "to let go," an immediate oneness or union with the object I contemplate. Concentration is tiring and, therefore, short-lived. Recollected ness requires no strain and can last a long time. I have to begin my prayer with a few minutes of concentration in order to pull myself together, but then I "let go." I identify with the object of my contemplation, e.g., God the Father, Jesus Christ, or any other person from the Gospel. My whole being is tranquil and quiet. God is there. He has been waiting for me.
Maybe I am willing to pray and I pray well, but I have another difficulty. I do not feel that God answers my prayer. This is turning things upside down. God is not the one who is answering. God is first. I am but a word spoken by God. I am the one who answers:
You have first loved us, o God. We speak of it in terms of history, as if you have only loved us first but a single time, rather than that without ceasing you have loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through. When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul to you … You are the first … You have loved us first; if I rise at dawn and at the same time turn my soul towards you in prayer, You are there ahead of me; You have loved me first. When I withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn my soul in thought towards You, you are the first and thus forever. And yet we always speak ungratefully as if You have loved us first only once (P.D. Lefevre, The Prayers of Kierkegaard, Chicago 1969, p. 14).
I try to listen to God. I listen not just to the message I want to hear but, with complete openness, to what God wants to tell me:
Contemplation is essentially a listening in silence, an expectancy. And yet in a certain sense, we must truly begin to hear God when we have ceased to listen. Because there is a higher kind of listening, which is not a receptivity to a certain kind of message only. The true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear; but he remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness to light.
This silence is not a kind of 'blacking out' which one does of set purpose, as a conclusion to practical reasoning on the subject, a sort of artificial darkness of one's own making. Such a person is not alone with God, but alone with himself. He is not in the presence of the Transcendent One, but of an idol: his own complacent identity. He becomes immersed and lost in himself, in a state of inert, primitive and infantile narcissism (Th. Merton, Contemplatwe Prayer, New York 1969, p. 113).
Again, some people say that they do not like to pray because they cannot tolerate introspection. However, prayer is not facing myself; it is facing God. To pray means to turn the spotlight on Christ. What I should do is gradually revealed to me. It happens to me. I discover it without self-analysis. On the contrary, the desire to examine myself or to see myself grow is a degeneration and a set-back in the life of prayer. Slowly and peacefully, in coming to know Christ, I come to know myself.
What follows is a plausible scheme which may be helpful for growth in prayer. It is not intended to stifle our prayer as a harness but rather to clarify our concepts of prayer so that the experience becomes more lucid and free. The scheme has five levels and, surprisingly, we begin at the top!
1. Prayer begins with the realization that I am loved by God as I am. His love is based on nothing and, therefore, is the most basic and secure fact in my life. I simply let myself be loved by God. This is not so much an activity of mine but a passivity in which I let God's love soak in and permeate my whole being. It is the most restful attitude a person can take and the most fruitful as well. I should remain on this level as long as I can, neither a longer nor a shorter time. Why not shorter? Because even if I should spend all my time on this level, it would be more valuable than anything I could do! Why not longer than I feel I can? Because I would be forcing myself and that is always wrong. When I sense that I am satisfied, I move on to the next level.
2. My response to God's love is an activity of mine, and in this instance, it is the highest and most intense act of which I am capable; namely, adoration. To adore is to abandon myself completely into the loving hands of God. God may dispose of me – "Your will be done …". I can pray this without any tension or apprehension because I am convinced that God is no threat to me, that he is the source of life and fulfillment. This prayer of adoration can be made with or without words, in my own words or in the words of another. Again I stay in this adoration as long as I can without pressure to either shorten or prolong the moment.
3. Next, I refer to a particular episode in Scripture (or of a book which helps me to pray) but in such a way that I try to identify with Christ or with a person with whom Christ is dealing. This means that I contemplate a Gospel event not as an onlooker from the sidelines but as a participant – as one deeply in-volved. This is not a matter of the imagination which conjures up a vivid scene but a matter of the heart (in the biblical sense) which knows itself related to Christ. It is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me – who speaks in me or touches me or heals me. This can be a very prayerful experience. Again I remain there no longer nor shorter a time than I can.
4. Then comes the prayer of petition. The prayer becomes more and more active as I go down the steps of the scheme. From what I have considered thus far, many petitions will suggest themselves. I may ask to know Christ better, to have greater faith in him, more courage and generosity to follow him, more love for the people who come into my life, or any other grace. Here, again, I can express my prayer in my own words, or in the words of the psalms, or in any other prayer which I find helpful.
5. The last step is meditation in the technical sense of the word. I open Scripture or another book which I want to use for my prayer, and I consider a verse or a passage. This is a kind of intellectual process. It includes thinking, analysis, investigation, the effort to understand what is meant by these words. Hopefully, this thinking will lead me to the prayer of petition or to a renewed identification with Christ, perhaps to a period of adoration or even to a passive abiding in God's love. From the level of meditation in the strict sense I may ascend to higher levels of prayer. Prayer is like a mountain landscape in which I am led by the Spirit to pause at various stages along the way.
To conclude: there is a dictum which relativizes the above scheme – "Pray as you can and don't try to pray as you can't" (Dom Chapman).