THE PRAYER OF THE HEART

I have been moved by, and reflecting on, a passage from the Carthusian miscellany The Wound of Love on the subject of the Prayer of the Heart. The author (anonymous as are all Carthusian authors) writes that in order to attain the Prayer of the Heart, we must confront all our own weaknesses: not to attempt to conquer them but to acknowledge and live them completely in our relation to God. Then God can enter into them and transform them. Is this last, he wonders, a kind of second thought on God’s part, or is it a fundamental dimension of the divine order?

“Even in the natural order, all true love is a victory of weakness. Love does not consist in dominating, possessing, or imposing one’s will on someone. Rather love is to welcome without defences the other as he or she comes to meet me. In return, one is sure of being welcomed unreservedly by the other without being judged or condemned, and without invidious comparisons. There are no contests of strength between two people who love each other. There is a kind of mutual understanding from within which a reciprocal trust emerges.

            Such an experience, even if inevitably imperfect, is already a very compelling one. Yet it is but a reflection of a divine reality. Once we really begin to believe in the infinite tenderness of the Father, we are, as it were, obliged to descend ever more fully and joyfully into a realm in which we neither possess nor understand nor control anything.

xxx

Thus, almost without being aware of it, we enter into communion with the divine life. The relation between Father and Son in the Spirit is at a level completely beyond our comprehension, a perfect embodiment of weakness transformed into communion.

            In a way closer to ourselves, this intimate tenderness of the thrice-holy God is revealed in the relationship between the incarnate Son and his Father. We cannothelp but be struck by the serenity and sense of infinite security with which Jesus quietly proclaims that he has nothing of his own, and that he can do nothing but what he sees the Father doing. What man would accept such powerlessness? Nevertheless, this is the path we must follow if we wish to live in the depths of our heart as God has made it, and as he transfigures it through the death and Resurrection of his Son.” (86-7)

I find this remarkable, both in its depth and in its conceptual simplicity. It goes well beyond the monastic life: indeed it may be more accessible in some ways to those living in the world and, perhaps, in relationships of human love.

            A perennial difficulty for us in these latter times is that we do not seem to have the direct access to the Father that Jesus had. And yet – if we think we do not, is that not because of us? Do we not, perhaps, try too hard to do everything ourselves, try to be better persons, try to do this better and to refrain from that more consistently? I think there is perhaps a two-stage development we need to learn to follow. The first stage is “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.” That takes care of our compulsive need to fight our own battles and confront our inner and outer Amalekites all on our own. The second stage goes further and says “First let the Kingdom of God seek you, and find you, and all these things will turn up” – at least in so far as they are (as the Prayer Book says) “requisite and necessary as well for the body as the soul”.

            A final subject is that last sentence of the quotation: God’s transfiguration of our heart through the death and Resurrection of his Son. That needs a lot more thought: I’ll try to get back to it at a later stage.  

The Wound of Love: A Carthusian Miscellany (Leominster: Gracewing, 1994,2006). Readily available through Amazon.

WHEN SHUTTERS CREAK AND WINDOWS STICK

                                            

The theme of this week, in both Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, seems to be openness to the loving approach of God. I find this particularly opportune, as it has been cropping up in my own meditation for some time now. An analogy occurs to me which, like all analogies, is fallible but still apt and instructive. Even as a child, I always found wonderful the fact that we are surrounded by invisible radio waves and that we have but to turn on a radio for all these programmes to become real, audible and (usually) intelligible. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is like this. Perhaps we are surrounded by Him at all times and have but to turn on (it's instructive that in French the word for "to turn on" is "to open") something in our heart to receive Him: His programme, His teaching, His support, His love. Completely different from "seeking God".

Spiritus Sanctus has always been my instinctive favourite person of the Trinity. But it is curious to see how He is spoken of in the New Testament. In both the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is somewhere between a He and an It, not quite a person, rather a force: very specific, circumscribed, almost concrete. Yeshua or one of the Apostles breathes on you and you receive the spiritus -- which, after all, is pneuma, ruach: breath, wind, or spirit. And receiving that spirit, that force, enables you to do things impossible before: preach the Word to hostile and sometimes lethal audiences, tread on serpents and drink poison without coming to harm. May the Force be with you -- in you, indeed.

For the true understanding of the Holy Ghost as a person we have Athanasius and the Cappdocian Fathers -- Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianze -- to thank. I used to think that the Athanasian Creed, as printed in the Book of Common Prayer, was a rebarbative and most unattractive text; later I discovered how much serious and magnificent thought and devotion it contains. And the three Cappadocians richly repay far more attention that we are wont to give them. Here is a typically gorgeous passage from Gregory of Nazianzus:

Look at these facts: Christ is born, the Holy Spirit is His Forerunner. Christ is baptized, the Spirit bears witness to this ... Christ works miracles, the Spirit accompanies them. Christ ascends, the Spirit takes His place. What great things are there in the idea of God which are not in His power? What titles appertaining to God do not apply also to Him, except for Unbegotten and Begotten? I tremble when I think of such an abundance of titles, and how many Names they blaspheme, those who revolt against the Spirit!

I have always found it difficult -- and have written so here before -- to assimilate the currently-common idea that the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. It is a tempting thought in some ways, but a love that is a relationship cannot, surely, be a Person? The idea stems, I imagine, from the Filioque clause, which holds that "the Spirit proceedeth from the Father and the Son" and not, as in Orthodox Christianity, from the Father alone. The Orthodox consider that as a result Western Christianity underestimates the Spirit; and I wonder if they may not be right. 

If it is the Holy Spirit that surrounds us and seeks us, we should do well to ask Him to open our shutters, our windows and our doors so that we may receive Him -- a paradox, but such opening is not something we can do by ourselves. And there is no contradiction there with, say, Holman Hunt's painting of Jesus standing at the door and knocking, for the Spirit and the Son, and the Father, are one God, and when one knocks, the Trinity knocks. Let us open: a little chink will do. Give the Spirit an inch, He will take a mile. Maranatha!

HATE SPEECH?

Cosimo Rosselli, 'The Sermon on the Mount' 

`If any one doth come unto me, and doth not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brothers, and sisters, and yet even his own life, he is not able to be my disciple;  and whoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, is not able to be my disciple.’ (Luke 14:26-7; today's Gospel.)

There is no way around it: J.B. Phillips, in his modern New Testament translation, put quotation marks around ‘hate’, but the Greek verb is uncompromising. This is one of Jesus’ more rebarbative sayings, one of those we would rather forget; the more as the current Church insists that every believer should be a mathètès, a disciple. So, we say, what about the man and wife who are to be one flesh? We are to love the little ones, the children – just not our children? We are to honour our parents, yet hate them?

The saying goes, of course, with Jesus’ snarky reaction to his mother and brothers’ coming to visit him: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers? . . . These are mother and my brothers’, pointing to the disciples (Mt 12:46-7); and Matthew 19:29, where anyone who leaves everything (home, father, mother, sisters, brothers, wife, and property) to follow him will receive a hundredfold return and eternal life. Extreme, also: still, giving up is less than hating.

How do we deal with such a saying? One way is to say that Jesus, in his humanity, was truly human (in all things, we are told, except sin), and that thus he was capable of impatience and irritation as he was of exhaustion and depression. In that sense, the saying Luke reports comes from a simple, indeed a simplistic, binary ‘love’ and ‘hate’. He does not, in other words, mean the verb literally. (Hence Phillips’ quotation marks.)

Another way of dealing with it is to remember that ‘Matthew’ was part of the early Church, and that his Gospel, like the other Synoptics, doesn’t want only to recount Jesus’s sayings and doings in great accuracy but is engaged, as part of the Church, in building an edifice for those who have not been there, and future generations, to live in. The extreme terms, then, are those of a community that has to deal with members who regularly privilege their private affairs over those of the ecclesia.

Leaving history aside, though, we need to know how we are to deal with these words.  And there, I think, another passage from Matthew comes to our aid. This comes in the discourse on the lilies of the field that toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore take no thought for the morrow, says Jesus: but ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’ (Matthew 6:33)

Here, I think, may be the key to our passage of hate. Hyperbole aside, we need to concentrate on the kingdom (basileia, perhaps better translated the ‘kingship’, the reign) of God: both on recognising it in Jesus, who is the Kingdom, and in bringing it about in the world where he is no longer physically present. ‘Seeking first’ is beginning the day with the prayer that we may do His will that day, and that we may not forget that by lunchtime. (The noontime Angelus is a good reminder.) It’s not a matter of hating A, but of going all out to pursue B – in which case, if A gets in the way, you brush A aside impatiently – which, to A, may feel like hate but isn’t. (And in any case, it only happens if A gets in the way.) 

And, he says, if we do so; if all we consciously care about is doing His will, is living His kingship; why, then our parents, our spouse, our children, our property, ‘will be added unto us’, will be there, but as gifts, not earnings, and thus all the more precious. Not only will we find what we seek, i.e. the kingdom of God, but we will find ourselves showered with all those other good things that we thought we had but didn’t really until now, when we receive them all over again, as God’s gifts. And eternal life as well. 

One final thought: on the way to the kingdom of God, on the way of our pursuit, there may well be a cross. And that we cannot, must not brush aside: for He is the kingdom, and it is from the Cross that He reigns. At the very least there is death, for all of us; for some there is great suffering. But among the gifts we receive there is Resurrection -- Zoèn aionion, eternal life.

BEST WISHES?

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.”

Huck Finn’s predicament is both more general and more subtle than Twain makes it seem. Most prayer is beseeching. We ask for something. Usually, we are grown-up enough not to ask for fish hooks, or a video game, or a Corvette. But we have no problem asking to be allowed to get the job we are applying for, or a better grade on the exam, or for the person we are in love with to agree to have dinner. More importantly, we feel encouraged to pray for others: for our best friend’s mother to be healed of her cancer, for a 40-year-old acquaintance to recover mentally from being raped at 16, for an elderly lady’s arthritis to cease torturing her, for a friend’s husband in the last stages of Parkinson’s to be allowed a swift and not too painful end. Beyond that, moreover, we are encouraged to pray for peace in the Middle East, for reconciliation in the Ukraine, and for the end of murderous civil wars in a number of faraway countries.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Really? The answer to all of the above prayers seems utterly arbitrary. Sometimes it’s yes, more often it’s no. Why? No one can tell us. Those who say that it is God’s Will are not only wrong, they are obscenely wrong. It is not God’s will that men torture and slaughter one another. But then, what is the answer to the enigma? It is difficult not to conclude that all those prayers are for fish hooks. That we are all Huck Finns, in church or out. As the French would say, our problem remains entire.

Thanksgiving – the impulse, not the festival – complicates matters. Most of us feel the need to give thanks when good things happen to us. But if the good things come from God, does that not mean that the bad ones do, too? Which would lead us to either a micro-managing but arbitrary Deity or to a kind of theistic fatalism that says that whatever is, is God’s will and therefore good, whatever we think it is.

After many years of pondering this, my provisional conclusion is that the answer was given by Jesus on that serenely beautiful hill above the Sea of Galilee which I had the privilege of visiting when my daughter was married in Nazareth. Having told people to stop worrying all the time about what will happen tomorrow, about having enough to eat, about having decent clothes, so forth, He said “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

If we apply this to prayer, it will show us – as, alas, it did not show Huck – what Miss Watson meant. “Ask, and you shall receive” is not a test to see if you know the password. It is the description of a law of God that works like a law of nature: a law of God’s nature, if you will. If we seek first the Kingdom of God; if we ask to know and love Him better; if we yearn to be filled with the Holy Spirit, whatever the cost; if we do that constantly, and go on doing so; then we shall  receive what we ask for, because the receiving is always already inherent in the constant asking.

And if we want to pray for others, once again we should ask for the same thing: that they may come to know and love Him better. For there is no good that we can ask for that is better or more important than that.

I cannot believe that God micromanages Creation. Microbes do their work just as mosquitoes do. Things live, things die. We live, we die. The difference is that we have a consciousness of love, which means that we have free will, which means that we are free to refuse love, i.e. to sin. So we have the capacity to add sin to death, which is horrible. On the other hand, if we seek the Kingdom of God – His reign, in us and elsewhere – and his righteousness, the integrity that is its hallmark, then all kinds of good attend us, because we will have become a certain kind of person, the kind that attracts good things like a magnet. It’s not a reward, it’s a consequence.

All the rest is fish hooks.