Happy Thanksgiving

Saying 'thank you' was perhaps never easy, which is probably why the Psalmist has to order it done: "Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!" It is, nevertheless, absolutely essential to living the truth as a human being.  We are all dependent creatures, very much at the mercy of accidents and evils, and there are many times in our lives that we cannot survive, much less flourish, without the help of others.  Thanksgiving is a way of acknowledging dependence, not merely a social convention designed to stave off hurt feelings of those we take advantage of.  For thanksgiving to be real, we must practice it regularly, and it must lead to a change of heart, to humility and ultimately, if we are Christians at least, to faith.

I am frequently asked about how to pray.  Again, this is not a new puzzle for those seeking God.  The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray as John taught his disciples.  Many of the Fathers wrote long treatises on prayer.  The one most influential to me is John Cassian's Conferences 9 & 10.  Conference 10 is the more famous, dealing as it does with apparent states of mystical prayer.  But Conference 9 offers four practical suggestions for praying based on St. Paul's First Letter to Timothy 2: 1.  (This sort of exegesis often appears capricious to us moderns, but I have found this one most helpful through experience)  We pray by acknolwedging our sins, second, by determining to amend our lives and make offerings to God in the future (what Cassian and Paul, following Old Testament usage, call 'vows').  Third, we ask God for what we need and intercede for others (the most common form of prayer, and what most people think of and do when they pray), and last but not least, we should thank God.  I find this last recommendation most helpful.  A few moments a day to recall the many blessings that God continually gives us, and to remember what he has promised us for eternity tends to dispel whatever gloomy prospects my cotidian existence portends.

A few weeks ago, I received an email with a somewhat anguished question regarding how frequently and for how long we can licitly ask God for something, before we become like whiney children.  As far as I can tell, we should constantly ask God for what we feel we need or even desire, with the important proviso that we accept his answer and give thanks for the fact that He always listens and answers, and always in a way that is to our benefit, whether we can understand that benefit immediately or not.  Indeed, start with thanksgiving, and you might decide that what you thought you needed isn't so important once you see what you have from God!

For His love endures forever!

Jesus Christ, Wordsmith

It is something of a commonplace in Pauline studies to point out that the gospel forced Paul to exercise a certain ingenuity when trying to express our participation in Christ. He invents a variety of words, often with the prefix sym to indicate our union with Christ.

I have not seen pointed out that Jesus Himself (or, others would say, the evangelists to recorded His teachings) also made use of words not found in Greek authors, either the classical authors or the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament.

"O ye of little faith" is a phrase that appears several times in Matthew's gospel and once in Luke's. The word behind it is one of these neologisms: oligopistos 'small faith'. Here are the uses of this word (and a closely related word oligopistia, smallness of faith) in the gospels (RSV translation):

"But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?" [Mt 6: 30; see parallel at Lk 12: 28]

"And he said to them, 'Why are you afraid, O men of little faith?' Then he rose and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm." [Mt 8: 26]

"Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, 'O man of little faith, why did you doubt?'" [Mt 14: 31]

"But Jesus, aware of this, said, 'O men of little faith, why do you discuss among yourselves the fact that you have no bread?'" [Mt 16: 8]

"Then the disciples came to Jesus privately and said, 'why could we not cast it out?' He said to them, 'Because of your little faith." [Mt 17: 19-20a]

***

A few things to note about this word. First of all, only Jesus uses it; Matthew and Luke do not use it as narrators, but only recounting something Jesus actually said. Aside from the first saying, which would belong to the putative 'Q' source, St. Matthew is the only author to quote Jesus using this word. In St. Mark's gospel in the parallel stories, we have similar, but not quite the same, phrasing: "Have you no faith," for instance (Luke has "Where is your faith?"). The story of Peter walking on the water is totally unique to Matthew.

The word makes a handy alternative to apistia, 'faithless', which Jesus also uses, but which obviously has darker connotations.

That faith is something that starts small and grows does seem to be something of a new teaching in the gospel. Faith has a central place in the Old Testament, but with the revelation of Jesus Christ, a whole new knowledge of the world is initiated, and it takes time to rediscover our bearings, once we have 'lost our lives' for the sake of the gospel and 'found them' through faith. There are two particularly well-known examples of partial faith (you might think of more). First, when Mark tells the story of Jesus healing a blind man, and at first his sight is only partly restored (people look like walking trees), commentators from early times tell us that this is a symbol of the ongoing process of enlightenment that begins at baptism and continues throughout our lives. Secondly, when Paul professes that we see now as in a mirror darkly, but then we shall see face to face, we glimpse again the process of belief, that the gift of faith in baptism is not the end but the beginning of salvation, which will only be completed in the next life.

With this in mind, the role of contemplatives in the Church gets some grounding: we are in need of those whose vision has penetrated further into the mysteries than is possible in the secular sphere.

In any case, if we are found 'small in faith', we should be properly chastised, but it should also be a spur to deeper prayer and seeking after God.

Ask the Prior: July 2008

I mentioned about a week ago that questions, all of them thought-provoking, were piling up in the comment boxes. Since I am not certain how many of you read them, and since I imagine that many questions that you have are shared, and that our combined insight is better than my own, I will try about once per month to catch up on answering such questions or highlighting particularly good insights from your comments. Thank you to all who provide them! They help me a great deal in preparing these posts.

A while back, amidst the posts on autonomy versus Christian freedom, Connie asked,

"When does a person begin to trust their own conscience? I ask because I think all too often we have become so accustomed to hearing our own voice (as opposed to God's) and so partial to our own ego that we can quite comfortably turn an evil into a good (a vice into a virtue) by playing a sort of justification by mental gymnastics. This lack of trust in ones own conscience could be a disaster for a person discerning the religious life, or any major decision, such as marriage, etc. because the person will never make a decision for fear of their own conscience.

"Perhaps it is as simple as spending time getting to know ourselves by getting to know God. It's a bit of a paradox though...kind of...because can we really KNOW God, not know OF Him but really KNOW Him, without knowing ourselves? And can we really know ourselves without knowing God? "

The Desert Father tradition as well as the Ignatian tradition acknowledge three sources of thoughts: our selves, God and the Evil One. Discernment of spirits is the skill of coming to know which thoughts are which. In this way, coming to separate out our thoughts from the thoughts that God places in us indeed demonstrates that we come to know God better by coming to know ourselves and vice versa. I would add only that we need to come to know the devices of our Enemy as well.

From this follows a provisional answer to your question about conscience. Cardinal Newman's teaching that the conscience is the voice of God has been much abused, since today it is so often divorced from the complementary teaching of the Venerable Cardinal, that the conscience must be formed properly. This means immersion in Christ's teaching, the Bible, the liturgy, the public disciplines of Church life and the private disciplines of asceticism.

If one is not sure about one's conscience, I hope that there would be spiritual mothers and fathers around who could hear you lay out your thoughts and then help you to see what God is asking. On the other hand, I think that today thoughtful Christians sometimes over-react to the cultural subjectivism and avoid listening to their thoughts altogether, hoping to receive some kind of outward sign. We should be confident that the Holy Spirit, Who is the real 'spiritual director', dwells in us and helps us to pray and act as we ought. So when in doubt, especially on lesser questions, we should pray for illumination and then proceed with faith in God's help. For bigger questions, or if we find ourselves unusually perplexed, then recourse to an external spiritual director can be of great help. But in the Benedictine tradition, the spiritual director should never be more than a crutch (said Columba Marmion), to assist the directee in learning discernment. Spiritual direction is not therapy, and so we should expect to outgrow it.

Above all, be bold in asking God's assistance! Don't wait to pray until you have it figured out--pray in order to figure it out!

Mystagogy Gamma

"For freedom Christ has set us free." This means freedom from the ultimate dominance of the 'powers and principalities' of the cosmos. Heady stuff. No wonder not many people dwell on this on an everyday basis.

I suggested yesterday that we often avoid dwelling on these apparently arcane passages of Scripture because when things go wrong, it is easier to blame the 'powers and principalities' ("I can't help it!") than to admit that we have been granted freedom and that we often use our freedom to choose the wrong thing. On the other hand, when by grace we recognize the path to freedom offered us in Jesus Christ, we should be honest about this tendency to 'pass the buck'. This implies that a first step to clarifying our experience is repentance: the decision to act according the God's law and to own up to our failure to do so. We 'admit (borrowing from AA now)...the exact nature of our wrongs,' with the intention 'to have God remove all these defects of character' by training in virtue. Cassian insists that spiritual knowledge is only available to those who have worked to acquire the virtues (who have attained 'practical knowledge'). The Old Testament attests to the same, though with different imagery and terminology. Enoch pleased God, he 'walked with God', that is, he followed God's commandments, and therefore, he was 'translated' directly to heaven to be with God. Similarly, there was no meeker man on earth than Moses, who was deemed worthy to see God as God is, and to speak to him 'mouth to mouth' as friends do. What an amazing gift, to have intimate knowledge as 'friends of God', and this is offered to us, if we are willing to repent and seek God.

This is why catechism stresses not only learning, but a change of life. We must consciously renounce the 'glamor of evil', the wiles and snares of the devil, the countless little pacts we have made with indifference and hatred. We must make the effort to bring our actions into line with the path of holiness. Only at that point will the mysteries begin to shine in our understanding. If we are seekers of mystical knowledge (and there are many such out there today), and if we find prayer boring, Scripture irrelevant or Church teaching on spirituality foreign to our experience, a first step is a humble admission that we need God's help, both in terms of learning where our behavior needs improvement, and in terms of God revealing himself to us.

If I may close this post with another comparison drawn from real life...do we not find that young men who fall in love for the first time often do so with little or no real knowledge of the woman behind the face or image that has so smitten them? Is it not the case that such young men will collect pictures of the beloved, will go out of their way to bump into them, will even begin to imagine that the object of their affection is ready to reciprocate this interest--all this while the young man has never had a serious conversation at even a superficial level with this young woman. If asked to name her favorite color, favorite band, TV show, movie or food, or if asked about her family, the young man could not pull this information from his imagination, the place where the relationship exists at that moment. No, that won't do...he will have to speak to her! When he tries, he discovers that in fact he is offensive to her in some way, perhaps because she feels him staring at her all the time! So if he really thinks that she is worth it, he will first have to change his behavior so that he can ask her about what she is really like. More problematic is the fact that he will probably have to abandon his preconceived ideas about what she is like in order not to offend her further once they do start talking. In other words, because of his imaginary relationship, he does not come to the real relationship with a clean slate. Some change of heart will have to accompany his effort to know this attractive young woman.

This is a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I believe that we often block ourselves from knowing God because preconceived imagined ideas about Him make the real God of Jesus Christ appear strange and perhaps even threatening. We need to convince ourselves that knowing the real God is the best thing for us, and that if this requires us to mature in our understanding of God and in our behavior, the benefits of this will make themselves known.

Now in making the analogy to our relationship with God, we should be aware that God wants us to change our behavior not out of discomfort with our behavior, that is, not for His own sake, but for ours. The sinful behavior that blocks our relationship with God also blocks our truthful understanding of ourselves and makes us unfree. Those who are not free are never able to enter fully into a relationship, because they are not able to give of themselves freely. In this sense, we are 'not at our own disposal'. We are less than we should be.

How can we be sure that repenting will be a change for the better? If we find ourselves wavering at this point, we have various proofs of God's goodness: the resurrection of Christ, the example of the saints, hopefully the overall witness of the Church herself.

I will end here with a challenge for those of us who are already persuaded that God's Law and conformity to Jesus Christ really do make us free to act out of love and not out of fear: do our lives provide convincing witness to these convictions?

Centering Prayer

People seeking advice on prayer frequently ask about Centering Prayer, and others frequently refer to it (or variations of it) without being aware of it. So it might be worth putting my opinion on line, as the whole question seems topical.

The general idea of Centering Prayer is becoming aware of God as the center of one's being, the principle of life in us. For the baptized, seeking God is not exclusively to be done outside oneself, after all. The awareness of God's sustaining life comes about from detachment from all thoughts. Generally speaking, one chooses a quiet time of day and sits for twenty minutes. As one becomes aware of thoughts or other stimuli, the pray-er notes them, but then allows the thoughts to pass on, uninspected, usually by use of a 'sacred word', itself not to be 'meditated' upon, but simply to help loose our attention from the thoughts that inevitably enter the mind.

First of all, we should be clear that Centering Prayer as taught especially by the Cistercians Thomas Keating and the late Basil Pennington, is fairly nuanced. When I wrote above of people referring to Centering Prayer without being aware of it, often they speak of trying to empty their minds of all thoughts. Strictly speaking, this is more Buddhist than Christian (in fact, it probably more closely related to the state of Nirvana than any normally acknowledged states of mind in most forms of Buddhism). Centering Prayer is perfectly comfortable with thoughts being present. It is normal for our brains to generate thoughts. The question is what we do with them. Monastic practice in Christianity has always had an acute interest in thoughts, and to examine one's thoughts first requires one to become aware of them. In this regard, I find Centering Prayer as potentially very helpful. But we should be clear that those who speak of emptying the mind are giving a distorted view of Centering Prayer.

A second thing that CP is not is a means of attaining high states of consciousness. Again, the sacred word is not meant to induce a trance or some kind of transport. CP is not even aimed at any particular affective result, which puts it in good company in terms of Christian prayer in general. We pray because we are human and need to pray, not because it feels good every day. God is not a drug, but it the Almighty and Infinite Creator. The Desert Fathers considered prayer to be a battle (as does the Catechism--see para. 2275). "War against us is proof that we are making war," taught St. John Climacus. By this he means that most of the time, when we start praying, demonic forces immediately attack us to get us to stop, normally by means of distractions. Centering Prayer assists us so that the one praying pays no particular attention to any thoughts, good or bad. This trains our minds to let go of thoughts when we need to and helps us in the battle against distractions.

So I've mentioned some good points about Centering Prayer. With those as a background, let me now say that I don't normally recommend CP except for those who are fairly advanced in the life of prayer. Why not? In my opinion, the principal missing factor in the writing of Fr Keating and Fr Pennington is asceticism. I don't fault them for the omission, but we as monks should perhaps be attentive to the fact that we tend to live a fairly ascetic life by default and take for granted such helpful givens as community recitaiton of Psalms, lectio divina, spiritual reading at table and elsewhere, fasting, customary works of charity (serving at table, doing dishes) and humility (sitting in statio), obedience, silence, and so on. As Metropolitan Anthony Bloom once wrote, there is no authentic contemplative prayer without asceticism. The Catechism says this:

"There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle [2015]."
"If we do not want to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ, neither can we pray habitually in his name. The 'spiritual battle' of the Christian's new life is inseparable from the battle of prayer [2725]."

Centering Prayer, it seems to me, risks losing sight of these realities. By contrast, in lectio divina, one is constantly confronted with challenges to reform one's life and live according to the gospel, often in disconcertingly direct ways. Fr Michael Casey writes, “We who pray ‘forgive us as we forgive’ cannot afford to live in a state of conflict with others.”

Secondly, I believe that one needs to have a very strong personal relationship with God before one can jump to the level of awareness of God as the Ground of Being. God is one who has love affairs with His people, who knows us intimately before we are even conceived in the womb. There is an infinite amount to know about God. Again, I find prayer centered on Scripture and Liturgy brings us closer to God as a Three-Personed divinity, not merely as The Divine Source.

This brings me to the last point about Centering Prayer, that it seems not to take the Trinity into account, particularly the Person of Jesus Christ. "There is no other way of Christian prayer than Christ [CCC 2664]." While I don't believe that it is the intention of Fr Keating and Fr Pennington to omit Christ, the technique involved does not sufficiently acknowledge His central place, that we pray in His name.

If there are these problems, do I ever recommend Centering Prayer? I do, in fact, and I even practice it from time to time myself. The reason for this relates to the aim of detachment mentioned above, as well as awareness of thoughts. Often times our minds are so busy that we simply are unaware of the fact that we are thinking. Thoughts go directly to being imperatives without our reflecting on it. As Mother Maria-Thomas Beil once taught me, monks should aim to 'put a deliberate distance between themselves and their thoughts'. We slow down so as to intercept thoughts before we act upon them. CP helps a great deal in this effort.

Secondly, detachment even from good thoughts is part of the Evagrian method of prayer, validated by Cassian. I mentioned above that we do not pray in order to receive spiritual favors from God. Noting our attraction to such favors can help dispose us toward detachment in this realm, prepaing us for potential dryness and even dark nights (though I personally think that genuine Dark Nights are much rarer than many think; usually periods of dryness are just that: the normal valleys that affect any long-term relationship, even a relationship with God, with dullness).

Finally, I only would recommend Centering Prayer as an element within a total discipline that includes more standard types of prayer. Often times, vocal prayer and meditation bring us to a place that seems to be a dead end. CP can help illuminate the way forward. On the other hand, the practice of detachment, assisted by CP, prepares us to re-enter traditional styles of prayer with a larger tool chest, more deeply grounded in the range of possibilities in prayer, more ready to respond to difficult challenges that God has prepared for us.