Praying Our Way into Life
My family was very serious about being Catholic. I bought into the program. One of the early problems I had in this commitment was in our parish church.
There was an arch over the sanctuary. On this arch was a large painting of a bar-b-que pit. Our patron saint, the martyr, St. Laurence, was the bar-b-que. This really spooked me out since I was taught St. Laurence truly was a good Catholic.
At the age of eighteen I entered the Carmelites. A year later I began the novitiate where the chapel held another challenge. On the walls were little sayings of how wonderful it was to suffer. One in particular shook me up: it is better to suffer than to die! Then there was a picture of St. Teresa with a burning arrow piercing her heart. This led me to long for the baseball game after lunch.
These two images were characteristic of the spirituality of my pre-Vatican II upbringing. We were being called out of life to the spiritual. We separated God from life. This was a disastrous division. Life was one thing. The need to be spiritual and prayerful was truly an invitation into the otherworldly. It seemed as if the goal of our prayer was to withdraw from life.
Over time and with the insights of Vatican II I learned this approach of otherworldliness was totally contradictory to Teresa’s message. Teresa’s message is: Get Real! We are, in fact, called to pray our way into life. Our problem is to discover what the true life is.
Most often this call to reality is expressed in Teresa’s reoccurring theme of the utter importance of humility and self-knowledge.
In the Carmelite tradition personal transformation and union with God are central. They express the destiny of every human being. A major part of this transformation is the elimination of the false consciousness that clouds and deceives all human experience. God’s grace particularly, in Jesus, is calling us out of this darkness into a new light. For Teresa this is the journey from the unreal to the real.
Take the example of a fish and water. It is impossible for the fish to see how water dominates its reality. In the human situation the same is true of the false values created by the world, our culture and the ego. Prayer gives us a platform to withdraw from enclosed world of our misconceptions. Prayer beckons us to humility and self-knowledge that set us off on the passage from the bondage of the false consciousness, like the engulfing water for the fish, to the real world that places God at the center. Prayer calls us to freedom and light in our transformation in the image of Jesus. Prayer is the passage to liberation.
The Gospel stories and parables are an invitation to see our reality in a new light, a fresh vantage point. It is all the more so with our encounter with the person of Jesus. This is an opportunity to cast aside our distorted worldview and enter into the real world. This is what Teresa means by praying our way into life. This is how we get real.
I have completed twenty two presentations for this blog. Here is a selected list of statements that deal with the theme: Get Real! For me it means we are not moving out of life in our spirituality but moving into life. We are freeing our mind and heart of illusions and deceptions that twist reality to make ourselves the center. Getting real is simply facing the truth: God is the creator and we need to see the consequences of that in what is truly our reality.
This is the goal of prayer: to slowly but surely create a new heart in the image of Jesus Christ. It is a gradual passage from self-absorption to self-giving.
The simple acceptance of the fact that one cannot change another person comes slowly and with personal sacrifice. The change in attitude, however, is life-giving. This is the sort of thing that God is always surfacing in our prayer: movement from death to life, from illusion to reality. It is an invitation to accept the Gospel values going beyond the word to authenticity.
What happens when we pray regularly?
For Teresa the “practice of prayer” was the serious pursuit of God. This involves all of our life. Teresa’s deliverance from mediocrity was the simple acceptance of reality. This acceptance involved herself, her world and God. This led her to highlight the importance of humility, detachment, and charity. These three virtues were fundamental to her program.
The road from the understanding of God’s word and knowledge of God’s will to the capacity to hear and obey is filled with an obstacle course called self-knowledge. The purpose of prayer is to draw us out of a world of self-deception, illusions and a sense of self-grandiosity that places us at the center of our consciousness. The slow, lifetime process of growing in self-knowledge is a gradual sequence of personal passages in transformation called conversion. It is repeated at several levels. The journey to refocus and recognize God at the center is only possible when we acknowledge our sinfulness and pettiness. Generally it is not a joyful part of our passage. Another name for it is getting real.
What do I need to do to pray more deeply?
“The heart is the deepest truth about us. It is where we live when we are most authentic…The heart is our way to discover what is truly real.”
In humility we accept ourselves in both our lovableness and brokenness. We put all things in perspective. We get real. God is God and we are the creature. This is the truth.
Difficulties in Prayer
Much of our spirituality is rooted in a distorted view that God is more here and less there and not at all in another place. The fact is that the foundation of any authentic and integrated spirituality has to flow from Merton’s insight that God is the ground of our being and all creatures exist because of this presence. The distortion is when we separate God from his creatures in our divided and isolated spirituality.
Life is the Greatest Grace
The Carmelites describe contemplation in their Constitutions #17: “Contemplation is a transforming experience of the overpowering love of God. This love empties us of our limited and imperfect human ways of thinking, loving, and behaving, transforming them into divine ways.”In his New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton says,
“Contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real.”
Teresa’s prayer is an invitation to get real, to be open to life in all its brokenness and limits as well as its beauty and wonder. This is where we encounter God not in the illusions and deceptions of our self-centered heart.
Contemplation
“Merton’s insight into God as the ground of our being was expressed in many of his books including The Hidden Ground of Love. All of life happens in this hidden ground of love. All of our being is embedded in this presence of God to us. Therefore all of life is sacred. The problem is we divide and isolate our understanding of how God is present to us. There is a Zen saying that can help us here. It states that if we understand, things are as they are. If we do not understand, things are as they are.”
Life is the Greatest Grace
“In the context of this integrated spirituality we often say only God matters. This comes off as unreal and life-denying. It is not. We need to realize that all that is good, all that is beautiful and life-giving in our relationships, in our responsibilities, in the deepest love in our heart, are powerful and meaningful because they flow from God. This goodness and beauty which are so significant for us in our ordinary experience are a reflection of their rootedness in God. Watching children grow up or the peaceful death of a long-suffering parent or grandparent simply exposes the reality of God’s presence. …The total spectrum of our experiences emerges from the sacredness in life that is the Hidden Ground of Love.”
“The journey to the center is growing in awareness that lets us grasp the disparity of the false self and the true self. This is the gift of self-knowledge. It is the repeated Gospel call to choose the true self over the false self: to lose our life to save it, to be he servant and not the one served, to be the last not first. This journey of transformation of consciousness is the goal of contemplative prayer which simply clears the way for us to see what already is. Thus, the goal of prayer is to grow in awareness of God’s presence and to constantly deepen and clarify that awareness. We are invited to embrace God within, in our mind and heart. We are called to get real. The pathways of love beckon us to transform our life.”
These insights from Teresa’s message expose the reality that:
1) We are locked into a false consciousness.
2) This false consciousness creates a world view that is a gross distortion of reality but a world view we embrace as true.
3) Part of this world view is based on the power of a society that defines us as a consumer.
4) We are bound by the deep and hidden prejudices aimed at protecting our economic, political, cultural, gender, social and racial privileges to the exclusion and deprivation of others.
5) The power of the ego is in a relentless struggle to avoid any diminishment of its control of our false consciousness. The Third Dwelling Places of Teresa is especially forceful on the deceiving power of the ego. This is what we mean by self-absorption.
Teresa’s message focuses all our energy on this call to be one with God. If it fits, keep it. If it does not, get rid of it. Prayer is the measure to judge the authenticity of the human experience. Prayer is our response to God’s self-disclosure. Prayer draws us into the life of God who dwells in our deepest center. What pulls us into the life of God we lock into. What does not, we discard.
This is the process of transformation. This is first of all God’s program. God loves us first with a love that is always seeking us. We need to be open to the appeal.
On this journey to God there comes a point of dramatic change. John of the Cross describes in this way:
Contemplation is nothing else than a secret, peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered fires the soul in the spirit of love… (Dark Night.1.10.6)
Teresa is emphatic that we cannot reach our true self with our own efforts. Only this new activity of God in contemplation makes this final part of the journey possible.
Contemplation slowly opens up the reality of the overwhelming love that summons us into the real, the mystery that is God. Soon enough we learn life is of a piece. Real life and spiritual life are one. Earthly life is simply a reality that opens up into eternal life. This is why John of the Cross said so profoundly, in the twilight of life only love matters.
What Teresa means when she tells us to get real is the process of personal transformation. Love is what we seek. We need to be purified to experience love in its truest expression. When it comes to love, only God can offer the real deal.
We need to change a lot of things to accept the consequences of this call to transformation and union. Jesus is God’s invitation into this wonder. Teresa insists that we place our eyes on Jesus who is the symbol of God’s passionate love for each of us. He is God’s continuing invitation to loving intimacy. In this context we learn that all of life is of concern for us. There is no separation of the holy and the ordinary. Everything that happens can help us or hurt us on this quest for the real that is union with God. Life is the greatest grace.
