A QUIET SPACE

 

Sometimes, the much-maligned media can bring one something quietly and deeply good. On the first Sunday in Lent, the televised Mass came from a community I had never heard of: the Cenacolo in Lourdes. The Cenacolo community was created in Turin, Italy in 1983 by a nun, Sister Elvira, who wanted to help young drug addicts; it was recognised  by the Vatican in 2015, and there are now 60 residential communities in a number of countries, five of them in France. 

            It was deeply moving. There were about 20 young men and three or four young women, all clearly very much involved, and all with faces marked by grave experience. The priest condicting the mass was Italian, the preacher was a French Franciscan prison chaplain. He explained to us viewers the way Cenacolo works: when a new person arrives, (s)he is greeted with “Enfin, te voilà!” (At last – here you are!) Everything is done to make them instantly welcome. The purpose, and the effect, of their stay is to give them a quiet space of support in which they can rebuild themselves.

            Thinking about it afterwards, it occurred to me that the Cenacolo can be a valuable image for the experience of Lent. After all, most of us are dependent on a number of things or behaviours that do not help, or actively hinder, our relationship with God. If we imagine Lent, not so much as a breast-beating time of penitence but rather as a time/space where God welcomes us with “There you are -- at last!” and gives us 46 days of quiet and reflection to rebuild ourselves, we can see this moment – which always happens, with potential irony, in the beauty and enchantment of spring – as a kindness, as a blessing, as an expression of the love with which we are loved. 

"THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS"? OH, SURE

I am currently translating into English a book on prayer by a French Carthusian monk, and though it might be useful to share one or two things I have learnt from it. Today, a word about prayer of intercession. All of us who pray know what it is to pray for others, from the most intimate prayer for a loved one to the prière universelle that is part of every Mass and other church services. And all of us know, and grieve at, the fact that so many of those prayers seem to go unheard or at any rate unfulfilled. We know that our reaction must be “Thy will be done,” but we still wonder at that will and at what look like its vagaries. 

My Carthusian suggests we look at this differently. First, we should cease to imagine intercessory prayer as an attempt to influence, push or divert the Lord, to change His mind, to alter what He was originally going to do. All prayer, he says, is originally God’s initiative. St Paul says that it is the Spirit that prays in us; and so in the fact that at this moment I am praying for X I am aligning myself with God’s initiative. 

Secondly, just as the air around us is filled with waves of all kinds that we do not perceive unless we have a receiver and turn it on, so that same air is filled with prayers, a kind of quærosphere. God hears all prayer, but it must also be received by the beneficiary – a fact which, in the name of love and its necessary liberty, God cannot guarantee. 

Thirdly, as Huck Finn found and as I have mentioned several times in these posts, it is no use praying for fishhooks. God does not micromanage His creation. The extreme conclusion from this is that all we can truly pray for, concerning someone else, concerning X, is X’s salvation. And that prayer’s efficacy depends on whether X’s receiver for such prayers is turned on. If it is, the prayer will be granted. 

To add a point of my own: what about the prayers for healing and so on? Apart from the fact that God does not micromanage Creation, I am convinced that they are nevertheless effective in a certain way, especially if the beneficiaries know that they are prayed for. I believe that such prayer creates a small or large tidal flow of spiritual support that in itself helps the healing process.

I believe it was St Thomas Aquinas who wrote that the only way prayer can be effective is if it is a) for oneself, b) pious, and c) insistent. I see the point of this, and b) and c) are important; but a) should not be abandoned, even in the face of what sometimes seems to be a great and uncaring silence. Intercessory prayer, after all, is a genuine form of loving. Perhaps for a) we should substitute “with our eyes open,” clear-headedly, intelligently and without illusion. Then b) piously: we should put our whole hearts into it, in hope and trust; and c) insistently: like the widow in Jesus’ parable who importuned the unjust judge till he gave her what she wanted just to get rid of her, God smilingly allows us to bother him.