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What Is at Stake in Prayer - Chapter I from - Thirsting for Prayer

  • FATHER JACQUES PHILIPPE

Our lives are worth what our prayer is worth.


thirstingforprayer

Our lives are worth what our prayer is worth. — Marthe Robin

Faithfulness and perseverance in prayer (the fundamental points to establish and the main objective of our fight in prayer) demand powerful motivation.  We need to be firmly convinced that even though the path is not always easy, it is worthwhile starting out on it, and the positive aspects of this faithfulness are out of all proportion to the efforts we make and the difficulties we will inevitably encounter.  In this first chapter, I want to talk about the main reasons why we "ought always to pray and not lose heart," as Jesus invites us to do in the Gospel (cf. Lk 18:1).

To begin with, here is a quotation from St. Peter of Alcantara, a sixteenth-century Franciscan who was a great support to St. Teresa of Avila in her reform.  It is taken from his Treatise on Prayer and Meditation, and he in turn attributes it to St. Lawrence Justinian, In Signo Vitae:

In prayer the soul is purified from sin, charity is nurtured, faith takes root, hope is strengthened, the spirit gladdened.  In prayer the soul melts into tenderness, the heart is purified, the truth reveals itself, temptation is overcome, sadness is put to flight.  In prayer, the senses are renewed, lukewarmness vanishes, failing virtue is reinvigorated, the rust of vices is scoured away; and in this exchange, there come forth living sparks, blazing desires of heaven, in which the flame of divine love burns.

I don't want to comment on this passage, but just offer it as a stimulating testimony to an experience in which we can put our full trust.  Perhaps we will not find the same thing perceptibly every day, but if we are faithful, little by little we will experience that everything promised in this beautiful passage is absolutely true.

Now I turn to a more recent witness, our blessed Pope John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte.  This letter was addressed to all the faithful and published on January 6, 2001, at the end of the Jubilee Year by which the Pope wished to prepare the Church to enter the third millennium, exhorting us to "put out into deep water" (Lk 5:4).

In this letter, the Pope reviewed the Jubilee Year and then invited us to contemplate the face of Christ, "treasure and joy of the Church," offering an inspiring meditation on the mystery of Jesus, which should light up the journey of each of the faithful.  In the third part of the letter he exhorted us to "start afresh from Christ" to face the challenges of the third millennium.  While leaving it up to each local church to set out its own pastoral goals, he suggested certain basic points valid for the whole Church.  He recalled that every pastoral program should essentially enable each Christian to respond to the call to holiness that comes with our baptismal calling, quoting the words of Vatican II:

All the Christian faithful, of whatever state or rank, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity (Lumen Gentium, 40).

The first thing needed in order to put a genuine "training in holiness" in place in the life of the Church must be training in prayer.  As John Paul II tells us:

This training in holiness calls for a Christian life distinguished above all in the art of prayer.  The Jubilee Year has been a year of more intense prayer, both personal and communal.  But we well know that prayer cannot be taken for granted.  We have to learn to pray: as it were learning this art ever anew from the lips of the Divine Master himself, like the first disciples: "Lord, teach us to pray!" (Lk 11:1).  Prayer develops that conversation with Christ which makes us his intimate friends: "Abide in me and I in you" (Jn 15:4).  This reciprocity is the very substance and soul of the Christian life, and the condition of all true pastoral life.  Wrought in us by the Holy Spirit, this reciprocity opens us, through Christ and in Christ, to contemplation of the Father's face.  Learning this Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy, the summit and source of the Church's life, but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity, which has no reason to fear the future, because it returns continually to the sources and finds in them new life.[2] 

In this beautiful passage, John Paul II reminds us of some essential points: prayer is the soul of Christian life, and the pre-condition for all genuine pastoral activity.  Prayer makes us into friends of God, introduces us into intimacy with him and draws us into the richness of his life, bringing us to live in him, and bringing him to live in us.  Without that reciprocal exchange of love which prayer brings about, the Christian religion is merely empty formalism, the announcing of the Gospel is just propaganda, and charitable commitment is just social work that does not make any fundamental change in the condition of mankind.

Another statement of the Pope's which I find very true and very important is that prayer is "the secret of a truly vital Christianity, which has no reason to fear the future." Prayer enables us to draw from God a life that is ever new, to let ourselves be continually reborn and renewed.  Whatever our trials and disappointments, harsh situations, failures, and faults, prayer makes us rediscover enough strength and hope to take up our lives again with total confidence in the future.  This is something that is really necessary today!

A little further on, John Paul II refers to the thirst for spirituality so much in evidence in today's world; a thirst that is often ambiguous, but that is also an opportunity; and he shows how the Church's tradition offers a genuine response to this thirst:

The great mystical tradition of the Church of both East and West has much to say in this regard.  It shows how prayer can progress, as a genuine dialogue of love, to the point of rendering the person wholly possessed by the divine Beloved, vibrating at the Spirit's touch, resting filially within the Father's heart.  This is the lived experience of Christ's promise: "He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him" (Jn 14:21).

He goes on to say how important it is for every Christian community (family, parish, charismatic group, Catholic Action group, etc.) to be above all a place of educating in prayer:

Yes, dear brothers and sisters, our Christian communities must become genuine "schools" of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed not just in imploring help but also in thanksgiving, praise, adoration, contemplation, listening, and ardent devotion, until the heart truly "falls in love." Intense prayer, yes, but it does not distract us from our commitment to history: by opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God's plan. 

This call to prayer is addressed to everyone, including lay people.  If lay people do not pray, or are content with merely superficial prayer, they are in danger.

It would be wrong to think that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life.  Especially in the face of the many trials to which today's world subjects faith, they would be not only mediocre Christians but "Christians at risk." They would run the insidious risk of seeing their faith progressively undermined, and would perhaps end up succumbing to the allure of "substitutes," accepting alternative religious proposals and even indulging in far-fetched superstitions.

And, accordingly, he concludes:

It is therefore essential that education in prayer should become in some way a key point of all pastoral planning.

1.  Prayer as a response to a call

The first thing that should motivate us and encourage us to enter into a life of prayer is that God himself is inviting us to do it.  Man searches for God, but God seeks out man even more actively.  God calls us to pray to him, because right from the start, and far more than we can imagine, he ardently desires to enter into communion with us.

The firmest base for our prayer life is not our seeking, or our personal initiative, or our desire (these things are valuable, but they may sometimes be lacking).  The firmest foundation is God's call: "Pray without ceasing!" (see 1 Thes 5:17), "Watch and pray!" (Mt 26:41), "Pray at all times!" (Eph 6:18).

We do not pray because we desire God or because we expect valuable gifts from our prayer life, but first and foremost because it is God who asks us to.

We do not pray because we desire God or because we expect valuable gifts from our prayer life, but first and foremost because it is God who asks us to.  And in asking us to pray, he knows what he is doing.  His plans are infinitely beyond anything we can glimpse, desire or imagine.  In prayer there is a mystery that absolutely surpasses our understanding.  What drives a prayer life is faith — faith as trusting obedience to God's proposal.  And we cannot even imagine the immense positive repercussions of this humble, trusting response to God's call; just like Abraham, who set out without knowing where he was going, and so became the father of a whole nation.

If we pray for the sake of the benefits we hope to obtain from prayer, we risk becoming discouraged at some stage.  The benefits are neither instantaneous nor measurable.  If we pray in an attitude of humble submission to God's word, we will always have the grace to persevere.  This is what Marthe Robin said:

I want to be faithful, very faithful to prayer every day, in spite of all the dryness, boredom, or distaste that I may encounter .  .  .  in spite of the unpleasant, discouraging, threatening things the devil may tell me! .  .  .  On days of trouble and torment, I will tell myself: God wants this, my vocation requires this, and that's enough for me! I will do the prayer, I will keep at it for the whole time I have been told to, I will do the prayer as well as I can, and when it is time to stop, I will say to God boldly: "My God, I haven't prayed, I haven't worked, I've done nothing, but I've obeyed you.  I've suffered a lot, but I've shown you that I love you and want to love you."

This attitude of loving, trusting obedience is the most fruitful thing of all.  Our prayer life will be rich and beneficial to the degree that it is inspired, not by a desire to obtain anything, but by this approach of a confident, obedient response to God's call.  God knows what is good for us, and that should be enough for us.  We ought not to take a utilitarian view of prayer, reducing it to questions of results and profits; that would distort it completely.  We don't have to justify to anyone else the time we spend on prayer.  God invites us, so to speak, to "waste time" on him, and that is enough.

It will be a "fruitful waste," in the words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.[3] There is an aspect of gratuitousness which is absolutely essential in any prayer life.  Paradoxically, the more our prayer is gratuitous — done freely, not to get something out of it — the more it will bear fruit.  What we need to do is entrust ourselves to God to the extent of doing whatever he asks of us, without feeling any need for further reasons.  "Do whatever he tells you" (Jn 2:5), Mary says to the servants at the wedding feast at Cana.

Always keeping in mind this principle of gratuitousness, I now nevertheless want to talk about a number of reasons that do justify the time we dedicate to prayer.  St. John of the Cross says, "The person who flees prayer is fleeing everything that is good."[4] Let's look at why.

2.  God comes first in our lives

Human life only finds its full balance and beauty when God is at its center.  "Serve God first!" said St. Joan of Arc.  Faithfulness to prayer is what effectively ensures that we can give this central place to God in specific ways.  Without faithfulness to prayer, giving priority to God risks being nothing more than a good intention, or even an illusion.  If we do not pray, we will subtly but surely put our own egos at the center of our lives, instead of the living God.  We will be distracted by a huge number of different desires, demands, and fears.  By contrast, if we do pray, even though we have to fight against the weight of our own egos and our habits of self-centeredness and selfishness, we will find that we are working in the direction of detachment from ourselves and re-centering on God that little by little gives him (or restores him to) the right place — the first place — in our lives.  And in this way we discover the unity and consistency of our lives.  "He who does not gather with me scatters" (Lk 11:23).  When God is at the center, everything else falls into place.

Giving God absolute first place in relation to every other reality (work, relationships, etc.) is the only way of establishing a right relationship to things that involves a genuine investment and a healthy detachment enabling us to safeguard our inner freedom and the unity of our lives.  Otherwise we fall into indifference and carelessness or, just the opposite, into dependency, invasiveness, distraction, and needless anguish.

The link between God and ourselves established when we pray is also a basic element of stability in our lives.  God is the Rock, whose love is unshakable, "the Father of lights with whom there is no shadow or variation due to change" (Jas 1:17).  In a world as unstable as ours, with its rapid rate of change that renders electronic devices obsolete in barely a year, it is all the more important to find our inner support in God.  Prayer teaches us to put down our roots in God, to "abide in his love" (Jn 15:9), to find strength and security in him, thus empowering us in turn to become stable supports for others.

What is more, God is the only source of inexhaustible energy.  By prayer, "though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is renewed every day," as St. Paul says (2 Cor 4:16).  We can also remember the words of the prophet Isaiah:

Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint (Is 40:30–31).

Of course we will have times of trial and weariness in our lives, since we need to experience our weakness and know that we are poor and small.  Nevertheless, it is still true that in prayer God is able to give us the energy, sometimes including physical energy, that we need to serve him and love him.

3.  Loving freely, not for what we get out of it

Faithfulness to prayer is extremely valuable because it helps us preserve the element of gratuitousness in our lives.  As I said earlier, praying means wasting our time for God.  Basically this is an attitude of loving freely, and not for our own benefit.  This idea of gratuitousness is endangered today, when everything is evaluated by profitability, results, and performance.  That ends up by being destructive for human life.

True love cannot be reduced to the category of what is useful.  In telling of our Lord's instituting the twelve Apostles, the Gospel of Mark says Jesus chose them first of all "to be with him" (Mk 3:14).  And only after that, to share his work: to preach, cast out devils, etc.  We are not merely servants, we are called to be friends, sharing his life and being close to him, over and above any question of usefulness.  This takes us right back to the beginning, when, in the cool of the day, God wanted to walk in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve (cf. Gn 3:8).  I love one of the things God said to Sister Marie of the Trinity,[5] calling her to a life of totally gratuitous prayer, of adoration and pure receptivity.  He told her, "It's easier to find laborers to work, than children to play."[6]

To pray is to spend time freely with God just for the joy of being together.  It is to love, because giving our time means giving our lives.  Love does not mean primarily to do something for the other person, it means being there with them.  Prayer trains us to be there with God, in a simple act of loving attention.

The marvel of it is that as we learn to be there with God alone, we learn by that very fact to be there for other people.  People with a long-established prayer life possess a noticeable quality of attention, presence, listening, and availability, which people whose whole lives are given over to activity are often incapable of.  Prayer gives rise to sensitivity, respect, and attention, precious gifts for those whom we encounter on our way.

There is no more beautiful and effective school of attention to our neighbor than perseverance in prayer.  It would make no sense to set prayer in opposition to or in conflict with love of neighbor.

4.  A foretaste of the Kingdom

Prayer gives us a foretaste of heaven.  It makes us glimpse and savor a happiness that is not of this world, and that nothing here below can give us: the happiness in God for which we are destined, for which we were created.  Yes, we do encounter struggles, sufferings, and aridity in our prayer lives — and I'll come back to this.  But if we persevere faithfully in prayer, we taste from time to time an inexpressible happiness: a degree of peace and fulfillment that are a real foretaste of paradise.  "You will see heaven opened," Jesus has promised us (Jn 1:51).

The first rule of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, founded in the Holy Land in the twelfth century, invites them to "meditate day and night on the law of the Lord," with this aim: "To taste in a certain manner in our hearts, to experience in our minds the strength of the divine presence and the sweetness of the glory on high, not only after death but even in this mortal life."[7] St. Teresa of Avila takes up the same idea in The Interior Castle:

Since some foretaste of heaven may be enjoyed by us on earth, let us beg our Lord earnestly to help us with his grace so that we do not forgo it through our own fault.  Let us beg Him to show us the path to it, and to give us the strength of soul to uncover this hidden treasure, since it truly lies within us.[8]

Prayer gives us access to the realities proclaimed by St. Paul:

No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him (1 Cor 2:9).

This also means that in prayer we learn here on earth what our activity and delight will be for all eternity: to rejoice totally in the beauty of God and the glory of the Kingdom.  We learn to do what we were created for.

This also means that in prayer we learn here on earth what our activity and delight will be for all eternity: to rejoice totally in the beauty of God and the glory of the Kingdom.  We learn to do what we were created for.  We bring into play the best and deepest faculties with which we are endowed as human beings and which all too often remain underused: our powers of adoration, wonder, praise, and thanksgiving.  We recover the heart and eyes of a child, to wonder at the Beauty beyond all beauty, the Love that surpasses all love.

Praying, then, also means fulfilling ourselves as human beings, in accordance with the deepest powers of our nature and the most secret desires of our hearts.  We will not experience this in a perceptible way every day, of course, but all those who commit themselves, with fidelity and good will, to the path of prayer, will experience something of it, at least at certain times of grace.  This is especially true today.  There is so much ugliness, evil, and sadness in our world that God, who is faithful and wants to reawaken our hope, does not fail to reveal to his children the treasures of his Kingdom.  St. John of the Cross said in the sixteenth century:

God has always revealed to mortals the treasures of his wisdom and his spirit, but now that malice is showing its face more, God is revealing these treasures much more.[9]

What would he say today!

Personally, I am astonished at some of the graces of prayer being received today by many people, including very simple lay people during weekly Eucharistic adoration in their local churches.  It does not get into the newspapers, but there is genuine mystical life in the People of God, especially in the poor and the little ones.

Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to babes; yea, Father, for such was thy gracious will" (Lk 10:21).

Observe this beautiful fact: By bringing us into communion with God, prayer makes us share in God's creativity.  Contemplation nourishes our creative faculties and our inventiveness, particularly in the realm of beauty.  Contemporary art is cruelly lacking in inspiration and very often produces nothing but painful ugliness, when people are so thirsty for beauty.  Only a renewal of faith and prayer will enable artists to rediscover the sources of true creativity, so that they will once again be able to provide people with the beauty they so badly need, as was done by Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, or Johann Sebastian Bach.

5.  Knowing God and knowing ourselves

One of the fruits of prayer is that it gives us a progressively deeper knowledge of God and ourselves.  There is much that could be said about this, and a rich spiritual tradition on this subject does indeed exist among spiritual writers.  I can only speak about it briefly here.

Prayer introduces us little by little into a real knowledge of God.  Not an abstract, distant God, Voltaire's "watchmaker," or the god of the learned men and sages.  Not even the God who is the product of a particular type of cold, cerebral theologizing.  The God we come to know in prayer is the personal God, the living and true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; the God who speaks to the heart, as Pascal expressed it.  Not a God regarding whom we can content ourselves with some ideas received from our education or inherited from our culture, nor yet a God who is the product of our own psychological projections, but the true God.

Prayer enables us to go beyond our ideas about God, beyond the ways in which we represent him to ourselves (which are always wrong or too narrow), to arrive at an experience of God.  That is something very different.  In the book of Job we find this beautiful sentence:

I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee! (Jb 42:5).

The main aim of this personal revelation of God, the essential fruit of prayer, is to know him as Father.  Through Christ, in the light of the Holy Spirit, God reveals himself as Father.  The passage from St. Luke, quoted earlier, in which Jesus rejoices at the revelation hidden from the wise and understanding and shown to the little ones, continues in these words:

All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (Lk 10:22).

These words show clearly that the object of this revelation is the mystery of God as Father.  God as inexhaustible source of life, as Origin, as never-failing gift, as generosity, and God as goodness, tenderness, and infinite mercy.  The very beautiful passage in the book of Jeremiah, chapter 31, which announces the New Covenant, ends with these words:

This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.  And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more (Jer 31:33–34).

This passage beautifully combines the granting of the knowledge of God to everyone with the outpouring of his mercy, his forgiveness.

God is known in his greatness, his transcendence, his majesty, and his infinite power, but at the same time in his tenderness, his nearness, his gentleness, his endless mercy.  This knowledge is not confined to the intellect but is a living experience of the whole of our being.

The giving of the knowledge of God to everyone in the messianic times is also announced in very evocative terms by the prophet Isaiah:

The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Is 11:9).

Knowledge of God also gives us access to true knowledge of ourselves.  We human beings can only know ourselves truly in the light of God.  Everything we may learn about ourselves by human means (experience of life, psychology, human sciences) is not to be despised, obviously.  But that provides only a limited and partial knowledge of our being.  We have access to our deepest identity only in the light of God, as we appear to the eyes of our heavenly Father.

This knowledge has two aspects: one is initially negative but leads directly into something extremely positive.  I shall speak of this more fully later on, but here I want to say just a few words.

The negative aspect has to do with our sin, our deep-seated wretchedness.  We only know these things truthfully in the light of God.  Face to face with him, there is no longer any possible room for lies; no evasion, no excuse, no mask.  We are compelled to recognize who we are, with our wounds, our weaknesses, our inconsistencies, selfishness, hard-heartedness, secret complicity with evil, and all the rest.

It is no small thing to be exposed to the Word of God:

The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.  And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do (Heb 4:12–13).

Happily, God is tender and merciful, and this laying bare only takes place gradually, as we become progressively more able to endure it.  God only shows us our sin while revealing his forgiveness and mercy at the same time.  We discover the sadness of our sinful condition, but also our absolute poverty as creatures: we have nothing except what we have received from God, and if we have received it, it is by pure grace, so that we can attribute nothing at all to ourselves nor take glory in anything whatever.

This stage of truthfulness is necessary.  There can be no healing unless the sickness is known.  Only the truth sets us free.  Fortunately, however, the process does not stop there.  It goes on to something still deeper and infinitely more beautiful: Over and above our sins and failings, we discover that we are God's children.  God loves us as we are, with an absolutely unconditional love, and it is this love that gives us our deepest identity.

At a deeper and still more essential level than our human limitations and the evil that affects us, there is, as it were, an untouched core: our identity as children of God.  Each of us is a being who is soiled with sin, in urgent need of purification and conversion.  And yet there is something within each of us that is absolutely pure and intact: the love that God has for us personally, as our Creator and Father.  This is the whole basis of our identity, the inalienable fact that each is a beloved child of God.  Reaching this point by means of faith is precisely what opens up and guarantees the possibility of the path of conversion and purification, which we cannot afford not to find.

All men and all women are in search of their identity, their personality at the deepest level.  "Who am I?" Sometimes we ask ourselves that question in anguish halfway through our lives.  We have tried to construct a personality for ourselves, to fulfill ourselves, following our personal aspirations and also in line with the criteria of success offered by the cultural context we live in.  We have put ourselves into our work, family, relationships, all sorts of responsibilities, and so on, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.  .  .  .  And yet a part of us is still empty, unsatisfied, perplexed: Who am I really? Does what I have lived through up till now really express what I am?

There is a whole aspect of our identity derived from our history, heredity, what we have experienced and the decisions we have made, but that is not the deepest part of ourselves.  That deepest part comes to light only in the encounter with God, which strips us of everything artificial in our identity to bring us to what we really are, at the heart of our personhood.  Our true identity is not so much a reality to be constructed as a gift to be received.  It is not about achieving, but letting ourselves be begotten.  "You are my son, today I have begotten you" (Ps 2:7); and "You are my beloved son" (Lk 3:22).  In St. Luke's Gospel, these last words are said by God the Father to Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan, but we can make them fully our own by virtue of our own baptism.

The essence of our personality consists of two realities that we are called to discover progressively.  Simple, but containing inexhaustible richness, they are the unique love that God has for each of us, individually, and the unique love we can have for him.

Prayer and the meeting with God make us discover God's unique love for us.  It is a deep aspiration of every man (and, still more, every woman!) to feel uniquely loved.  Not loved in a general way, as one of a large group, but appreciated in our uniqueness.  The experience of being in love is so fascinating because it gives a glimpse of that: someone takes on, for us, a value that nobody else has, and we in our turn have a unique worth in their eyes.

This is what the Father's love brings about.  Each of us can experience that in his eyes we are loved, chosen by God, in an extremely personal way.  We often have the feeling that God loves in a general way: he loves all men, I'm one of them, so he must take a bit of interest in me.  But being loved in a "global" way, as one item in a collection, cannot satisfy us.  And it is absolutely different from the reality of the particular, unique love that God the Father has for each of his children.  God's love is personal and individual.  Each of us has every right to say: "God loves me as he loves nobody else in the world!" God does not love two people in the same way because it is actually his love that creates our personality, a different personality for each.  There is a much greater difference between people's souls than between their faces, says St. Teresa of Avila.  This unique personality is symbolized by the "new name" that Scripture speaks of.  We read in the book of Isaiah:

You shall be called by a new name which the mouth of the Lord will give (Is 62:2).

And in the book of the Apocalypse:

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.  To him who conquers I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it (Rev 2:17).

God's unique love for each of us includes the gift of a unique response in return.  From many of the saints, and especially the women saints, we hear things like this: "Jesus, I want to love you as no one has ever loved you yet! I'd like to do crazier things for you than anyone has ever done before!"

Thinking of words like these, realizing that we will never outdo all those who have gone before us in love, we feel how poor we are.  Yet such desires are not in vain but can be fulfilled in every individual's life.  Even though we are not Teresa of Avila or Francis of Assisi, we can give God (and also give our brothers and sisters, the Church, and the world) a love that nobody has ever yet given them.  We can give them the love that belongs to us, in accordance with our own personality, in response to the love that God has for us and with the grace we receive from him.  In God's heart, in the mystery of the Church, each of us has a unique place, a unique and irreplaceable role, a fruitfulness that is all our own and cannot be taken on by anyone else.

Receiving this double certainty as the fruit of prayer — the certainty of being uniquely loved and the certainty of being able (in spite of our weakness and limitations) to love uniquely — is a very precious gift indeed.  It is this that constitutes the deepest, most solid core of our identity.

Of course, this reality remains a mystery that cannot be fully grasped and cannot be properly put into words.  It is not something one can claim as one's own or claim the glory for; it is to be lived out in great humility and poverty.  It is the object of faith and hope rather than a possession that one could take pride in.  However, it is real enough and sure enough to give us the inner freedom and security we need to face life confidently.

Because of what we have just said, and for many other reasons besides, the discovery of God as Father, which is the essential fruit of fidelity to prayer, is the most precious thing in the world, the greatest of all the gifts of the Spirit.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship.  When we cry, "Abba! Father!" it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom 8:15–16).

God's fatherhood in regard to us is the deepest reality there is, the richest and most inexpressible, an inconceivable abyss of life and mercy.  There is no greater source of happiness than being a son or daughter, living in the movement of this fatherhood, receiving oneself and receiving everything from God's goodness and generosity; confidently expecting everything, at every moment of our lives, from God's gift.  "How sweet it is to call God our father," said Thérèse of Lisieux, shedding tears of happiness.[10]

Notes

  1. Time for God (New York; Scepter Publishers, 2008).
  2. Novo Millennio Ineunte, no.  32.
  3. Poems, 17.
  4. Maxim 110 (or 169), Sayings of Light and Love.
  5. A Dominican religious (1903–1980) who was favored with great graces of mysticism, but who suffered from deep, serious depression before recovering her balance and peace of mind, and ended her days as a hermit.  See Christiane Sanson, Marie de la Trinité, de l'angoisse à la paix (Paris: Cerf, 2005).
  6. Marie de la Trinité, Entre dans ma Gloire (Paris: Arfuyen, 2003), 74.
  7. Quoted by E.  Renault, Ste Thérèse d'Avila et l'expérience mystique (Paris: Seuil, 1970), (Spiritual Masters series), 126.
  8. The Interior Castle, "The Fifth Mansions," chapter 1.
  9. Maxim 6 (or 1), Sayings of Light and Love.
  10. Recorded by her sister Celine in: Conseils et souvenirs, recueillis par Soeur Geneviève de la Sainte-Face, soeur et novice de sainte Thérèse de l'Enfant-Jésus (Paris: Cerf, 1979).

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Acknowledgement

philippeFather Jacques Philippe. "What Is at Stake in Prayer." from Thirsting for Prayer (New York, NY: Scepter Press, 2014): 1-25.

Reprinted with permission of Scepter Press.

The Author

philippe

Father Philippe is a French priest, a member of the Community of the Beatitudes, and a renowned spiritual director. He is author of many books, including Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart. Discover more here.

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