TRIUMPH OF THE WILL?

 

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer we say – with one of those mysterious optatives – “Thy will be done, in earth as it is in Heaven.” So that with each recital of the most famous Christian prayer, we brush up against one of faith’s most stubborn mysteries: the Will of God. We know that we ought to do God’s will; we know that our will ought to be aligned with God’s; but how do we know what God wills?

            When we are dealing with our own choices, the subject is not terribly hard. God the Father may be silent to our clumsy ears, but we know that “he who has seen me has seen the Father” and so, when faced with a choice or a decision, we can ask ourselves some version of the question WWJD --  What Would Jesus Do? The answer to that is not always simple, as there are many situations in an average life that did not present themselves to Yeshua when He walked the earth, or that the chroniclers of the Gospels did not see fit to include in their accounts. But still, we can often have an idea of the way we might usefully follow. 

            Where it get much more difficult is when it comes to distinguishing God’s will in the life and the world around us. Yeshua was not clear on the topic. He points out that when the tower of Siloam fell and killed a number of bystanders, those who died were not greater sinners that others (Luke 13:4-5); but he does not say whether or not God willed the tower’s fall or the people’s death. He says that not a sparrow falls “without your Father” (Matthew 10:29) but the Greek áneu “without” does not decide whether it is without the Father’s knowledge or without His will. And in both cases, the point he is making is different.

            Does God “will” all that occurs? There might be a case to be made to that effect: He is, after all, supposed to both all-knowing (omnisciens) and all-powerful (omnipotens); does it not follow that nothing occurs without His willing it? Thomas Aquinas, in the twelve articles on the Will of God in his Summa theologica, comes uncomfortably close to this position. And I say “uncomfortably” because when we consider such an explanation, we almost universally rebel. If (to take a recent happening in France) a madwoman tortures and murders a 12-year-old girl, did God will that? Does God will the suffering and death of the Ukrainian civilians in Boucha? Does God will the death of 600 people in a tsunami in Indonesia?

            This very proper revolt on our part leads some people to dismiss any idea of God’s existence: if such a God existed, they say, He would be a monster. But for those of us whose faith, though put to a severe test by this, subsists, it does so perhaps because of a third attribute we ascribe to God: not only all-powerful and all-knowing but all-good. This raises two questions: 1) how, then, do the events I described relate to His will? and 2) how, in view of a world in which such things occur, should we align our wills to His?

            I have previously written about the first question: the fact that His nature is love implies that He must of necessity allow us free will. Love’s very nature means that its reciprocity can never be forced or commanded. This, then, explains the occasional flourishing of human evil. He cannot command us to return His love: it is the only limit to omnipotence. The horrifying effects of natural phenomena, on the other hand, resist explanation. One can only assume that He, for reasons of His own, has decided not to micromanage His creation. (It is interesting that, even if we accept this, we still have an instinct for spontaneously giving thanks when we have a narrow escape.)

            The second question is the real purpose of this post. It assumes that we do not, and cannot, know whether anything that happens to us does so with, or because of, God’s will; and that He is much more concerned with our reaction to the happening than with the event itself. The point Yeshua was making about the sparrow was not whether the Father intended it to fall or not, but that if it falls, it does not do so at random and anonymously. And you, he said, are worth a lot more than a sparrow: hence, he did not say but did not need to, at the moment of any occurrence that involves you, you are surrounded by your Father’s loving attention. And hence, we may conclude, it is at that moment that we may or may not do His will. Where His infinite care for us operates, but cannot command us because of love and free will, is in relation to our reaction to the, to any, event. 

            He does not will that we shall win four million dollars in a lottery; but He pays close attention to what we think, feel, and do when we have won it. He did not will that such-and-such a young woman should die of breast cancer; but He surrounded her with His loving spirit during the ordeal (whether or not she recognised that spirit’s origin) and He attends with love and hope to the reactions of her family and friends. 

            At no time is discerning and/or doing His will easy. The crusaders who in 1096 AD went into battle shouting “Deus lo volt! Deus lo volt!” (“God wills it!” in Romance Latin) were perhaps, to our modern minds, rash if not painfully misguided; but are we sure we would feel as strongly if that phrase accompanied a Ukrainian counterattack? A special degree of caution is perhaps needed when trying to discern God’s will for human beings in the plural and collective; it would appear wise to practice humility in discernment and limit ourselves, as much as possible, to individual matters.

            Finally, we should not forget that Yeshua both taught and showed us the overwhelming and permanent need for prayer. Aligning our will to God’s can only be done after, and in, prayer. Perhaps this is a secondary meaning of the optative. We are not simply told “Do God’s will”; we are invited into a process that involves much more than our individual selves. “God’s will be done.” Amen.   

SOME ARE BORN LENTEN, SOME ACHIEVE LENT....

And yes, some have Lent thrust upon them. I have never been good at fasting and generally at self-denial and other outward and visible signs of penitence. The only time I remember having renounced something successfully for Lent, what I had decided to give up was anger. Prayer and sharing come somewhat more easily. But each year the beginning of Lent is a moment of crisis and difficulty. One is told that it must not be like New Year’s resolutions; that the hope of “making a good Lent” is a form of pride; and so what one is left with is a mess of confusing, and confused, thoughts and prayers and the hope that somehow it will all come out right.

This year, though, the general feeling of vernal well-being and bouncing energy that always used to feel so contradictory to a season of penitence and introspection was providentially removed. In the first place I was recovering from surgery, having had a knee replaced and still learning to walk. I can assure those friends who haven’t had this done that the verse “At the name of Jesus, every knee will bow” takes on a whole new, and conflicted, meaning. Then, as walking was going better, off on a 3-day birthday trip to Barcelona, I tripped over a suitcase on a station platform, measured my length and broke two ribs. This ensured discomfort if not actual pain for another four weeks. And when that was finally settled, on a conference trip to North America, I contracted what I thought was a particularly vile cold but what turned out (as diagnosed in a New York hospital) to be authentic flu. 

My medical experiences are of no interest; what is curious is the coincidence with Lent. It truly did feel as if one was having Lent thrust upon one. And yes, it made me read more, pray more, and meditate more – most particularly as, returning home, I found among the held-over mail, a present from my daughter that blazingly illuminates each remaing Lenten day: Malcolm Guité’s Words in the Wilderness, a daily companion to Lent and Easter by way of poetry, ranging from his own (remarkable) poems to those of C.S. Lewis, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Tennyson, Donne, and of course the indispensable and durably glorious St George Herbert (as I have heard him invoked in an Anglican litany). With Guité and Benedict XVI’s magnificent Jesus of Nazareth vol. 2 Holy Week, my Lent is moving toward a deeply satisfying close, for which I can only give continuing thanks. Mind you, the fast is still slow……  

JOYS WE FORGET

Rereading an old hymn the other day – humming it, remembering boyhood chapel services – I was suddenly struck by one line that leapt out at me. As Henry Francis Lyte wrote: “Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven,/ To his feet thy tribute bring;/ Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,/ Who like me his praise should sing?”

And those past participle adjectives have been haunting me ever since.

            “Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven.” How many of us manage to remember that, and/or live as if it were true? What, in any case, does it mean, exactly? 

            Let’s begin with “Ransomed”. It’s a simpler way of saying “redeemed”, and much more understandable. We humans are all sinners. True, when we’re 16 we resent that thought, but as we grow older we realise that it’s perfectly true. If we were not we should live daily in perfect union with God. Obviously, we don’t. Some people are close; but we all sin, in the sense that we do not perfectly return God’s love. In so far as we sin, we give IOUs to Old Nick, who loves lending us opportunities to sin, as he collects paper from all of us in return. But: what happened, one unique time in Israel? Meshiach came, and bought all our debts, making Old Nick an offer he couldn’t refuse (much as he wanted to). What did he buy them with? His life, no less. So he, the Anointed one, the Son of God, risen from the dead, tore up our IOUs – and still does so, for all who entrust themselves to him. Hence we are bought back: Ransomed.We were hostages; we are free.

            “Healed.” A character in a Charles Morgan novel says to another, “The world is very sick, Mr Flower, but you will not cure the patient by kicking him out of bed.” We are sick, many if not all of us: sick unto death. Some of us know it, and awake each morning with a little less vigor, a little less taste for life, a little more gray sadness. Some of us don’t, and live feverish lives “distracted from distraction by distraction”, as Eliot put it. But do we remember that we were baptized? Alternatively, do we realise that we can be baptized? And that that very process heals us, at least begins a cure? A cure that, admittedly, needs to be completed by a daily life of practical thanksgiving, but a cure nonetheless. We are, we really are, Healed.

            “Restored.” Restored to what? Well, if we are both ransomed and healed, we are restored to freedom and health. Anyone who has spent any considerable time deprived of either of these knows what it means to be restored to them. It is the day you walk out of prison and know you can go anywhere in the morning sunshine. It is the day you walk out of hospital, or your sick-room, take a deep breath, listen to the birds, and walk and walk, because you can. Restored indeed.

            And finally perhaps the greatest, or at least the most moving. “Forgiven.” The hardest to remember, because we have been taught that, sinning as we do constantly, we keep needing to ask for forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses.” It seems utterly presumptuous to behave as if we had beenforgiven. And yet. We have been told, have we not, that if we sincerely repent and pray wewillbe forgiven. So we need to remind ourselves that even if the process will likely reoccur, we have beenforgiven. And someone who has been forgiven feels as if a huge weight is removed from bowed and lacerated shoulders. Stretches, curls, sighs, smiles, and leaps. Forgiven. What joy. 

            If we could believe all this, really. If we could live, one, or two, or three days a week as if all four of those adjectives were true and applied to us; would there not be a noticeable change in our behavior? Surely there would. Who, we might say, like us His praise should sing? I we were young enough, we might tattoo on the four fingers of one hand, R H R F . As it is, let us tattoo it in our consciousness.                      

BON APPETIT

On a Friday night as Yeshua, head of the family, was preparing to bless the bread -- baruch atta Adonai Eluhenu --, he looked at the pile of inviting, freshly-made blond loaves and thought: Yes, that too has its place in the prayer I'm building. We harvest the wheat, we thresh it, we mill the grain, we bake the flour; but without the wheat, and the millet, and the rest, what should we do? It was you, Father, who brought forth lechem min ha'aretz, bread from the earth. Nothing is so basic: it is 'bread', but sometimes we use it to mean simply 'food'. It is your gift, not our right.  And sometimes You withhold it, or seem to; sometimes rains or drought spoil the  harvest, and we go hungry. You have not given, but You have allowed, great famines. It would be proper to ask for it: "Give us today today's bread, today's food." Only today's, he thought; it would be wrong to demand tomorrow's, too like hoarding, control, security. Abba, you have taught us to care and not to care, to live lightly, loving only you so that we may the better love all else. Give us, just for today, the lechem we need.

And, he reflected, as every thing here below is itself but also an image, how true this is of the lechem! It is the warm bread we eat and enjoy this Shabbat, but at the same time it is the unleavened bread that reminds us of our flight from Egypt; it is the food that God provided for Israel in the desert -- and remember, they were told to gather only each day for that day (except for Shabbat). And the food God gives is not only that of ha'aretz, is it? 

As he meditated, walking in the fields that day, the subject opened out and out in his mind. What feeds us? What feeds our bodies? What feeds our souls? `What has fed my mind, that now I can access so many treasures of thought? And the Word of God swam into his mind: all those riches of Torah, Tanakh, all the words of the prophets, all the overflowing beauty of the Psalms -- what a banquet!

The Psalms brought him to the Meshiach, that supreme gift from God that we are promised. Meshiach, who will repair the great Ill and heal Israel of its wounds. Will not Meshiach be like bread also, not today's but eternity's?

THINKING IT THROUGH (2): ADORATION

This is something we aren’t used to. Prayer, most of us instinctively believe, is asking for something: either simple petition (for ourselves) or intercession (for someone else). But adoration? It conjures up images of people from another age kneeling for hours before a monstrance, a crucifix, or an icon, with a kind of rapt attention that could not be further from our own tendency to the quick coffee-break tweet or text. There seems to be a huge distance between them and us. 

In what way is it accessible to us? If we are contemplative monks or nuns, it is part of our world quite naturally – though it may still be hard to achieve. If we are among the very devout – I know a woman who was a Carmelite novice for 6 years, and even after that went to Mass daily for at least 5 more – the liturgical and devotional rhythm of the Church will at the least suggest it on certain occasions, such as the Feast of the Sacred Heart, and somewhere in our ecclesiastical world there will be introductions to it .

But for the rest of us, devout without always inhaling, stumbling along what is often a rocky path, busy with countless details of what a friend of mine calls the Humdrumlies – what of us? The Prayer of Adoration seems almost like an unattainable luxury. “If we had time….” we murmur. And even those of us who have learnt from time to time to take an hour for Francis de Sales’ meditation find the thought of Adoration as a form of prayer, well, extreme. 

Perhaps one way in is the prayer of thanksgiving. This at least releases us from the asking mode, and is still something we intuitively understand. The other day I – well into my seventies, far from willowy and reasonably arthritic – slipped and fell in the shower. As I got up with no more than a slightly bruised feeling, I instinctively said, “Wow, thank you, Lord – this is how many of us wrinklies die.” Whatever we intelligently believe about the way God does or does not micromanage the world, when we have a narrow escape or win the lottery or find that someone we have adored from afar actually returns our feelings, it is a common human reaction to give thanks. 

If we think about this, and go beyond the immediate, we feel thankful about so many things; and going to a level deeper than that, we can relate our thanksgiving to the fact that we have faith, that we believe, that we have been baptised, that we feel fulfilled about going to church; and if our discernment is very sharpened, we can give thanks for the gift given to us on the Cross. 

Now think of the Eucharist. It moves from penitence (housecleaning, as our priest says: wiping the mud off your shoes as you come in) to glorifying the God that pardons us, to learning Scripture in readings, to being helped to understand what we’ve learnt, in a homily, to summing it up in a Creed. Then it moves on to prayer. First the prayer of intercession, moving us out of ourselves in asking God’s mercy on the world; then the prayer of consecration.

And it is within that – at the moment of consecration, when one can at least imagine (as a Zwinglian might) and at most know (as a Catholic does) that the Son of God (and thus the Trinity) is truly, really and actually present here in front of us – that we can perhaps glimpse the Prayer of Adoration. As the priest lifts up the consecrated Elements, we kneel (or some of us do) and fix them with our gaze, and feel in a new and very specific and present way the Presence of Christ – and thus the here-and-now reality of the gift of God’s love. And so, for a brief moment (because modern Eucharists are much too fast), we sense something beyond thanksgiving: the Prayer of Adoration. Just being there and worshipping that Presence, that cosmic Glory which makes itself small enough to fit into the palm of my crossed hands. 

After that, there are further stages, other elements to Adore. If you were brought up Protestant, the Sacred Heart is harder; but when you learn to think in symbols, not to translate them but to let their physicality continue to be even as you understand and feel the inward meaning (which is, after all, what you do with the Eucharist: a sacrament is “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” but the point is, it’s both) – well, then you’ve at least set a wobbly foot on the path of Adoration. A long road, but we know where it ends: read Revelations.

THINKING IT THROUGH

This is a long post on prayer – a subject that gets more mysterious and more fascinating the longer you study and practice it. The nature of its power is what interested me here, as well as the extent and nature of its denial.

In the first place, what is the “power” of prayer? It is a form of spiritual energy. As energy, it has potential power but it also has laws: you cannot, for example, usefully power a computer with coal. For those who accept its laws, it is as accessible as wind-power to a sailboat; more, in fact, because unlike the wind, the energy prayer taps into is there 24/7. Much depends on the person praying, just as much depends on the person sailing the boat. 

What are the laws? First, no fishhooks. Praying for things is on the whole useless: not because God deliberately refuses them, but because the energy doesn’t normally work that way. Second, prayer is always answered, but the time-lapse and the modality of the response are to us unpredictable. God answers in His own time and manner, which are by definition mysterious to us. Third, prayer is a spiritual energy that works on, and in, a spiritual dimension.  This is where it gets difficult, not to understand but, for many, to accept. God does not micromanage the world. He sees, it is true, every sparrow that falls, but He does not stop it falling. Deists got it half right: God created the world and set it going, and He does not normally interfere with the process. Only half, though: because He is present in the world at every moment, He does care for his human creatures, and He does try to guide them toward Him and toward His love. 

This leaves two problems: catastrophes and hatred. Why does God not stop an earthquake that will kill 500 people? Answer: because it is part of the physical creation, and that creation’s processes He does not interfere with. Why does God not stop massacres and other loathsome deeds? Answer: because God’s nature is love, and the one limit to His omnipotence is that He cannot be untrue to His own nature. Since that is love, He is bound by love’s law, which holds that one cannot command reciprocity: if one could, it would kill love instantly. The nature of love is that it can only be returned freely or not at all. And when it is not, when it is trodden in the dirt, the lover may weep, but he cannot command. There are times when one feels the earth must be drenched in the tears of God. 

How does the power of prayer, this extraordinary energy, work? Much of it, it must be said, remains mysterious. The eighteenth century was skilled in the ways, and in the use, of wind for locomotion, but its understanding of the physics was more rudimentary than ours. One thing that can be said is that casual prayer is no more effective than renting a sophisticated sailboat for an afternoon without even the minimum knowledge of its operation: the inevitable failure may even have a negative effect. 

Further, prayer for specifically spiritual goals is likely to be more effective. If I pray to be enabled to give up smoking, it may or may not be granted: the objective is still very much anchored to the physical world. But if I pray, long and steadfastly, for the power to become a more generous person, this may well, gradually and over time, be granted. 

Moreover, experience has found that petitionary prayer of that kind is augmented in its power if it is liberally combined with the other kind of prayer: thanksgiving. One cannot always be asking. Cultivating a keen sense for things that are gifts to be thankful for is in itself a form of healing. 

All prayer is subject to God’s Will. In fact, one might say that the one purpose and effect of all good prayer is to align our being with His will, so that the former may become the unresisting instrument of the latter. As Dante put it, in la sua volantade e nostra pace: in His will is our peace.

Much of this is illustrated by Christ’s Passion. As it looms, in Gethsemane, Jesus prays for this cup (understood: this bitter cup, this cup of hemlock) to be taken from him: he is human enough to quail at the prospect. Yet at once he continues: “But not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” But, we say, did God will this? Does God will – intend, want, and cause – the nailing of an innocent to a cross? If so, He would be a malignant God, a God who could will the extermination of millions of Jews and of Russian farmers, the massacre of thousands of Syrians, and the torture of prisoners everywhere. If, in the face of catastrophe or atrocity, we say “Thy will be done” what we mean is that we pray for the strength and the grace to undergo such things in the manner that His will intends us to and hopes we will. His will is not that we be nailed to a cross; His will is that if we are we will undergo it as Jesus did. 

All prayer for ourselves is contained in the Lord’s Prayer. What about prayer for others? This is an area much more difficult to understand than prayer for ourselves, if only because prayer for others is always already by definition generous and altruistic; this being so, we cannot understand why it is so often not (or not in any obvious way) granted. If my beloved, or my child, has cancer, or Parkinson’s, or Alzheimer’s, or motor neurone disease, and I pray eight hours a day for that person to be healed, and that person is not healed, it is understandable if I feel rebellious. What, I ask myself, or God, is the point?

This problem is made worse, in some ways, by what appear to be occasional exceptions that look like miraculous healings. My own belief is that these are probably “sports”: oddities in the process which are sometimes enabled by a particularly powerful spirit. We cannot, and should not, expect these to occur and be offended or cast down when they do not. 

Prayer for others, I believe, is a way of adding to their store of spiritual energy, the energy that emerges in their own prayer. If it is directed to a specific situation, it augments their own prayer energy for undergoing, or dealing with, such a situation. True to the laws of prayer energy, we may pray for their increase in discernment, in wisdom, in charity, in patience, in love. A multitude of such prayers may, and probably does, create an energy field of great force that the beneficiary may tap into. 

Nevertheless, the laws of prayer hold. My friend with motor neurone disease will not be healed by my prayers, i.e. his disease will not go away. The prayers of Mary and John and the others present did not make the Cross go away or allow Jesus to come down from it. But their power very certainly helped him, in this most human of his hours, to bear what had to be borne. 

Another law of prayer appears to be that the prayers of a community are more powerful and effective than those of an individual. I can see that this might be so: six generators connected in sequence will produce more energy that one solitary one. Moreover, it means that a whole community with its energy is advancing God’s hope and plan for the world. This should not, however, prevent the individual from praying, and the longer and deeper the better. 

Given all this, I find it very curious to see how many people who do not deny climate change and its roots in human activity are quite comfortable with denying the power, the efficacy, and even the interest, of prayer. Climate-change denial is rightfully decried; God-denial is accepted without a blink. It must, one feels, come from a fundamental misprision as to the nature of the energy. It is not electricity: you cannot get a bunch of experts to produce it in a form that lets a small child press a switch and light a room. It is more like the power of the wind to a sailboat, or the power of growth to a farmer: it has its own laws and rhythms that must be attended to and cannot be forced. Yet why that should call into question its existence is peculiar. Perhaps it is because many do not want it to be true. Why? Do they think it would limit their liberty? Ten thousand things already do so, from traffic regulations to polio. You can get from London to Athens quickly, by spending a great deal of money, using vast amounts of petroleum, and causing a fair mount of pollution, by taking an aeroplane. Or you can get from London to Athens by using a skill you have patiently learned, working with the wind (which, we know, bloweth where it listeth), in silence and cleanly, by taking a sailboat. 

Finally, what are the rewards of prayer? If it does not normally change the physical progress of things; if it does not bring Huckleberry Finn his fish-hooks; if it does not make my friend’s cancer go away; what does it bring me? You can read the answer in a hundred books written by experts. Experts such as Augustine of Hippo, Juliana of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Juan de la Cruz, George Herbert, John Donne, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton. Very simply: it brings you (into) the company of God. The God who is Love.  The lone sailor crossing the Pacific had to spend many years learning the ways of the wind and the water; but he would tell you that it was all worth it. Prayer also takes time to learn; to adapt a proverb, God’s will often moves slowly, but it moves exceeding well.   

THE PRAYER OF ADORATION

"Ecce Panis Angelorum" (Behold the Bread of Angels), engraving by F.M.S. (probably Swiss) 1887.

This is something we aren’t used to. Prayer, most of us instinctively believe, is asking for something: either simple petition (for ourselves) or intercession (for someone else). But adoration? It conjures up images of people from another age kneeling for hours before a monstrance, a crucifix, or an icon, with a kind of rapt attention that could not be further from our own tendency to the quick coffee-break tweet or text. There seems to be a huge distance between them and us.

In what way is it accessible to us? If we are contemplative monks or nuns, it is part of our world quite naturally – though it may still be hard to achieve. If we are among the very devout – I know a woman who was a Carmelite novice for 6 years, and even after that went to Mass daily for at least 5 more – the liturgical and devotional rhythm of the Church will at the least suggest it on certain occasions, such as yesterday’s Feast of the Sacred Heart, and somewhere in our ecclesiastical world there will be introductions to it .

But for the rest of us, devout without always inhaling, stumbling along what is often a rocky path, busy with countless details of what a friend of mine calls the Humdrumlies – what of us? The Prayer of Adoration seems almost like an unattainable luxury. “If we had time….” we murmur. And even those of us who have learnt from time to time to take an hour for Francis de Sales’ meditation find the thought of Adoration as a form of prayer, well, extreme.

Perhaps one way in is the prayer of thanksgiving. This at least releases us from the asking mode, and is still something we intuitively understand. The other day I – well into my seventies, far from willowy and reasonably arthritic – slipped and fell in the shower. As I got up with no more than a slightly bruised feeling, I instinctively said, “Wow, thank you, Lord – this is how many of us wrinklies die.” Whatever we intelligently believe about the way God does or does not micromanage the world, when we have a narrow escape or win the lottery or find that someone we have adored from afar actually returns our feelings, it is a common human reaction to give thanks.

If we think about this, and go beyond the immediate, we feel thankful about so many things; and going to a level deeper than that, we can relate our thanksgiving to the fact that we have faith, that we believe, that we have been baptised, that we feel fulfilled about going to church; and if our discernment is very sharpened, we can give thanks for the gift given to us on the Cross.

Now think of the Eucharist. It moves from penitence (housecleaning, as our priest says: wiping the mud off your shoes as you come in) to glorifying the God that forgives us, to learning Scripture in readings, to being helped to understand what we’ve learnt, in a homily, to summing it up in a Creed. Then it moves on to prayer. First the prayer of intercession, moving us out of ourselves in asking God’a mercy on the world; then the prayer of consecration.

And it is within that – at the moment of consecration, when one can at least imagine (as a Zwinglian might) and at most know (as a Catholic does) that the Son of God (and thus the Trinity) is truly, really and actually present here in front of us – that we can perhaps glimpse the Prayer of Adoration. As the priest lifts up the consecrated Elements, we kneel (or some of us do) and fix them with our gaze, and feel in a new and very specific and present way the Presence of Christ – and thus the here-and-now reality of the gift of God’s love. And so, for a brief moment (because modern Eucharists are much too fast), we sense something beyond thanksgiving: the Prayer of Adoration. Just being there and worshipping that Presence, that cosmic Glory making itself small enough to fit into the palm of my crossed hands.

After that, there are further stages, other elements to Adore. If you were brought up Protestant, the Sacred Heart is harder; but when you learn to think in symbols, not to translate them but to let their physicality continue to be even as you understand and feel the inward meaning (which is, after all, what you do with the Eucharist: a sacrament is “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” but the point is, it’s both) – well, then you’ve at least set a wobbly foot on the path of Adoration. A long road, but we know where it ends: read Revelations. It ends in Joy.

Hat Tip: Ian Jackson reminds me that F.M.S. was the usual signature of the Marist Fathers: Fratres Maristae a Scholis. And this engraving, like others in the same style that can be found on the Web, came (I believe) from a Swiss Marist Missal. 

JOYS OF LENT

I used to think it a painful paradox that gloomy old Lent happened just as the almond trees came into bloom, followed by the forsythias, the daffodils, the plum tree, the daisies, the buttercups and all the whole décor of spring. Just as we were all getting over winter and feeling sort of festive, we were told to repent, spiritually at least to put on sackcloth and ashes, to abstain from anything pleasurable or tasty, for forty bloody long days until Easter. One put up with it, one did one’s best, but it was hard to go along with it with any real enthusiasm.

To my surprise, this year is different. Perhaps because of a change of tone in the Church’s teachings on the subject, perhaps because I’ve gone more deeply into the spiritual aspects of it, and perhaps also because I’ve decided to do for, and in, Lent what I would previously have done separately: take care of Brother Ass, as St Francis called our bothersome physical body, at the same time as increasing reading and prayer. As our local priest put it, a thorough spring cleaning.

And to my surprise, as I said, it has so far made for a different Lent. I feel in no way out of tune with Nature; doing (or omitting) some of the things one should have seen to ages ago is cheering; as every old-fashioned housewife knew and knows, spring cleaning is not only useful, it gives a lift to the spirit. I don’t think I’m up to serious fasting, but doing without alcohol and meat is, for an old whisky-dramming carnivore, a real change of speed. It turns out not be particularly hard, and has some pleasant if in no way spiritual side-effects.

I write this here because it may help someone who still thinks of Lent as a gloomy guilt-trip. I do have to remind myself daily of the Cross, and to make some kind of act of contrition, but that fits in perfectly because it was always already there and makes sense. Meanwhile, I glory in the spring around me, in the Southern French countryside where it is the most perfect season of the year; I give thanks for so much beauty, and I praise God for suggesting a spring cleaning to put me into better harmony with His creation.

TRIANGLE: SECOND SIDE

Further to “An Anatomy of Prayer” (22 December 2016):

In my last long post on prayer I tried to discern the nature and the modalities of that curious form of energy. The main form I considered there was petitionary prayer, both for oneself and for others: it is, after all, the most intuitive and (thus) the most common form of prayer. “Please, God, let . . .” I did, however, touch on another form of prayer: prayer of thanksgiving. One cannot, I said, always be asking.

            Thanksgiving has its own peculiarities. The first is that if one recognises that petitionary prayer cannot and should not concern Huck Finn’s fish-hooks, it is illogical to give thanks when fish-hooks come one’s way. One cannot have it both ways, our reason tells us. If God does not micro-manage creation; if whether or not we get something specific or have something specific happen to us is not “God’s will”; then logically we should neither pray for it nor give thanks for it. And yet those of us who have grown used to addressing the Father (and/or the Son, and/or the Holy Ghost) as we are encouraged to do, do often utter such brief and illogical prayers of thanksgiving. Should we stop? I don’t think so; and the reason is that while pointless and thus unfulfilled petitions tend to plunge us into depression, illogical thanksgivings will make us better human beings by connecting our joy to our Creator. Who is, if only in the second degree, its Creator: not that He gave us the fish-hooks, but that He is the source of joy.

            The second peculiarity of thanksgiving prayer is that it rarely concerns the real and proper objects. This derives from the nature of petitionary prayer. If we pray for the things that we may    properly expect to be granted; if we pray to be nearer to God and to become His more faithful children; if we pray for more discernment, for more generosity; then if and when such things are granted us, we will probably not give thanks for them, because to do so would make us resemble the Pharisee in the temple who thanked God that he was not as other men. “Thank you, God, for making me such a generous person” sounds repellent, and is. The solution here, I believe, is one of nuance. In the first place, if we have asked for a more discerning spirit and we realise after a certain lapse of time that we are indeed able to understand better God’s nature and will, then we may properly give thanks, if we do so very quietly and in private, and if we recognise that we still have a long way to go. The same goes for increases in generosity, humility, et cetera.

            All this said, thanksgiving is a good and joyous state of mind and soul, and should be encouraged wherever possible. It increases mental health, humility, and faith. And it is an indispensable complement to petitionary prayer. Together, these forms of prayer form two sides of a triangle or trinity; my next post will concern the third.