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PRAYER AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE V

The Importance of Self-knowledge in Prayer

I

When we pray regularly, we develop the habit of deep personal prayer. This sets us on the road to serious personal change. This personal transformation, however, comes at a price. God always wants more. This is the why we come up with so many reasons we cannot pray. At the top of the list is time in one way or another: need to work, need to relax, need to be present to loved ones, need to…. And also watch TV, football, shopping, politics etc. There are other reasons like being just too tired, sick and other heavy responsibilities. It all comes down to a question of determining what is important for us.

Since God is so insistent, regular prayer will always bring us to the challenge of changing our lives. Prayer points out what God wants in a way that confronts our blind spots. The nature of deep personal prayer is to draw us out of comfortable deceptions. The journey to the center and its encounter with our loving God in prayer is not the easy way. The issue of time and the other excuses hindering our prayer are rooted in a fear of moving away from our comfort zone, a personal space rooted in the selfishness inherited from or original parents. True self-knowledge is the necessary and demanding path rescuing us from these hidden and disruptive undercurrents within us. In the normal flow of events, blindness is the norm when it comes to self-awareness. Prayer is the path to enlightenment.

II

Merton’s definition of prayer is yearning to be aware of the presence of God, knowledge of God’s Word and personal understanding of God’s will and the capacity to hear and obey. It is that last phrase “to hear and obey” that invites us out of our self-satisfaction in a movement from our head to our heart to our life. Authentic prayer is always necessary in the quest for honest pursuit of God. Self-knowledge is a decisive component in this development.

Here are a few examples of this inward transformation. Many families are caught in the trap of a destructively addicted member. Everyone suffers. AL ANON offers relief but it comes at a price of self-knowledge. One needs to lose the illusion of control, a mindset that assumes one can alter the addictive person’s behavior. It also challenges the pattern of denial or being a victim. The simple acceptance 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 and go beyond the superficial allegiance.

In the early 80’s, already a priest for twenty years, I was confronted about my blatant prejudice against homosexuals. I fought it. I rejected it. I became angry but I prayed and eventually began a journey to acceptance and repentance.

What is common in both of these issues, one personal and the other social or cultural, is that often in prayer a matter is brought to our awareness but we resist it. However, it is now in play in our consciousness and if we pray regularly we have to work hard to avoid it. The change evolving from our “hearing and obeying” sometimes is a matter of days or often months or even years. God is patient but never stops calling us out of the darkness to the light. This always involves in a growth in self-knowledge.

The “hear and obey” of Merton’s definition of prayer is the encounter of our total being with God’s word and will. This openness and acceptance of God’s call leads to personal transformation. The message of the gospel is sown in our heart. These seeds of new life are always looking for the opportunity to blossom.

This is the goal of prayer: to slowly but surely to create a new heart in the image of Jesus Christ. It is a gradual passage from self-absorption to self-giving that enriches self-knowledge.

III

Any serious commitment to deep personal prayer begins a movement assaulting our inherited disorder that make us fragile and damaged. This prayer, when consistent and faithful, attacks the limiting boundaries of our self-knowledge. We are slowly challenged with a steady stream of new insights about ourselves. Compassion and gentleness, flowing from regular prayer, begin to replace a harsh and judgmental attitude. We gradually pull away from the hunger to “look good”. Now it is easier to accept our faults and limits. Prayer generates a sense of trust that begins to identify and diminish our hidden fears. With regular prayer, we begin to see the true importance of forgiving. Even more, we start to open new horizons to expand our call to love our neighbor. There are many other healing factors, all directed to our original brokenness, all expanding our self-awareness. This new self-knowledge is an influential part of prayer that brings us back to the road toward original innocence leading to God.

This the fourth of a series of blogs on the Christian life prayer and self-knowledge.

I

Prayer plays a vital role on the Christian journey. This is especially true as we come face to face with the demands of gospel integrity. However, in the end, prayer only identifies and clarifies God’s presence in our life. Life is where we encounter God. Life is the greatest grace. Prayer enlightens, enables and draws us into this true mystery and goal of our existence, to be one with God.

One of the primary tasks of prayer is to enlighten us through the Word of God. This process slowly lets us see that our grasp of Jesus’ message in the Gospels is quite shallow. A few personal examples will help make this concrete. As a young teenager I thought it was an outrageous sacrilege for girls to play sports. Likewise, I believed that the African Americans were perfectly happy in their neighborhood. There was absolutely no understanding of the intensity of the overcrowding, the poor and decrepit housing stock, the underfunding of the segregated schools, the lack of medical services and a multitude of other expressions of racial injustice.

Faithfulness to prayer slowly expanded my awareness of my captivity to a culture that was intensely sexist and racist. That journey continues full speed into the present. This is one of numerous ways prayer enhances our self-knowledge by attacking our false consciousness.

II

Most often when people pray, they have a plan. They want God to respond to their strategy for happiness. But God also has a plan. God wants us to respond to that plan. Here is the conflict: the two plans, God’s and ours. This is a significant problem with prayer. Growth in self-knowledge is a major factor in resolving this apparent discord.

For most people, a good part of their spiritual journey involves this transition from one’s personal plan for happiness to God’s plan for our happiness. We are clear with what we want and what we think we need. Most often it is dominated by the deceitful values of the false self. However, through the experience of life’s many trials, we gradually see the need to ease off of our agenda and let go. We gradually come to see and embrace the need to let God! Our growth in a more righteous self-knowledge is a major contributor to this positive experience.

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church there are several definitions of prayer. One from St. John Damascene states: Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God.”

Our “good things” often conflict with God’s “good things”. A significant part of the Christian life is learning to discern the difference and importance of our self-perceived “good things” and the “good things” of God. More often than not, our “good things” are rooted in the false values of our materialistic and consumer driven culture rather than the values of the gospel. As we begin to break loose of the restraints

of the false self, the light of gospel shines more brightly in our heart. This is always a shift towards a more genuine self-knowledge.

In the early stages of Christian growth, we are praying for the “good things” we feel are necessary for us. Authentic prayer demands that we change rather than God change. We grasp this very slowly, if at all. The irony often is that, in the very troubles and burdens that we want God to remove, we eventually will find the hidden blessing of life on the way to the “good things” of God’s Kingdom.

The growth in Christian maturity demands that we change our ideas of God and continue to deepen our self-knowledge. In maturing prayer, we move from asking God for our “good things”, the blessings that we think we need to bring peace and order into our own created kingdom. On the contrary, when we repent and seek Jesus’ Kingdom, our heart moves to seek what God desires. We gently become aware that God is the Creator and we are the creature. God’s better plan calls us to change, to grow in self-knowledge. That change is personal conversion, a gradual and life-long process transitioning from ourselves as the center to God as the center. The eyes of our heart slowly begin to see the beauty of God’s “good things”.

III

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who was one of the great spiritual teachers in the 20th Century North America, spoke eloquently about a deep personal prayer. Merton defined it this way: “Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of God’s word, for knowledge of God’s will, and for the capacity to hear and obey God.”

In Merton’s definition of prayer, God is at the center. We search for understanding and direction in our lives that need to open us to God. We find five helpful points for this goal in Merton’s definition of prayer:

1) All prayer must raise our awareness of God’s presence.

2) We need to encounter God’s Word. The most privileged way of this engagement is with the Bible but it also is in the experiences of life.

3) The encounter with God’s Word leads us to God’s will, a call out of selfishness to generosity toward God and others.

4) In this prayer, listening is the key.

5) New insight into the reality of God’s word and will guides our way of life.

Conclusion

It is clear that here is an interdependence between self-knowledge and prayer. In this mutual dependence, we discover one of the many contradictions in the spiritual life. As self-knowledge increases, there is a startling awareness that we just are not able to fix all that is broken. The consequences of original sin run very deep. This opens us to God’s mercy which, in time, moves us to a greater dependence on prayer.

The importance of Self-Knowledge on the Christian journey

II

Self-Knowledge and the Pursuit of God

Our normal mind-set is filled with deep prejudices, false values, illusions, and a grandiose sense of self-importance. They all join together to blind us to God’s presence in the depths of our heart. Clearing this passage is the task of an authentic spiritual life. Self-knowledge, an appreciation and awareness of what is taking place within us, is a crucial element on this path.

The journey of self-knowledge is often described as moving from the false self to the true self. It is a new way of looking at ourselves, at others, and at the world. It is a transformation of consciousness.

The false self is entrenched in our exaggerated sense of self-importance, our illusions of grandiosity, the blindness of our prejudices and addictions, and, most of all, the unreality of our idols. Our heart creates many false centers in our attachments, the distorted use of God’s creatures. The heart becomes fragmented and flawed.

We tend to become blinded to our faults and failures. We emphasize the shortcomings of others. Jesus put it ever so clearly when he pointed out our blindness to the log in our eye rather than our stress on the splinter in our neighbor’s eye (Matthew 7:4–5). Self-righteousness rises to the front and center. As we become aware of the false values flowing from our fragmented heart, we come to a fork in the road.

We have a choice of life or death. We choose death when we double down on the clamoring of the false self. We choose life when we open ourselves to the mercy of God, which leads to the true self. At the heart of this encounter is the perennial challenge of knowing ourselves.

Self-knowledge Opens to God’s Mercy

Even the simplest things in life are often misled by the false self. Having the right kind of clothes, a nice home, the lifestyle of our proper state, and a good reputation are all potentially innocent choices. The false self has a field day refocusing these items to contribute to a deceitful vision of self-importance. People spend billions of dollars on advertising to encourage us to feed the exaggerated demands of the false self. The unending pulls of a consumer society are a singular and horrendous obstacle on the road to the true self. All these deviations work together to weaken, and even hide, the longing of the true self calling us to move on to the center for a more authentic life.

Here again, self-knowledge, an awareness of what is going on within us, is critical in the necessary conversion that comes when we hear God’s word and obey God’s will in prayer.

Teresa of Avila and the Mercy of God

For Teresa of Avila, the long search for self-knowledge led to two important facts that became the foundation of all her spirituality. First, she had a clear encounter with the false self, a distracted heart pulled in many directions leading away from God. In this fragmented heart she identified her sinfulness. More importantly, she slowly accepted her helplessness to change.

The second reality Teresa welcomed was this: she was loved and forgiven. She lived in a sea of mercy. This led Teresa to accept life rooted in her helpless sinfulness. At the same time, she experienced life immersed in the loving mercy of God. She was the creature caught in sin but a loved and forgiven child of God. God was the creator revealing his power in love and mercy.

Self-knowledge, Prayer, and Life

Teresa of Ávila was relentless in declaring the importance of self-knowledge for the spiritual journey, the journey to God in the center of our being.

Well now, it is foolish to think that we will enter heaven without entering ourselves, reflecting on our misery and what we owe God and begging Him often for mercy. (THE INTERIOR CASTLE, 2.1.11)

For Teresa, prayer was the answer to almost all problems. Her notion of prayer was unrestrained. It takes place in the context of the relationship between God at the center and our life experience. In the interaction of these elements in prayer, self-knowledge has a pivotal role. The mystery of God unfolds in the dynamic of the person’s prayer and life experience. Self-understanding brings this process together. When we accept the reality of God’s place and our place, God’s mercy is the dominant issue. As she grew in self-knowledge, Teresa grew steadily more compelling in her oft-repeated conviction: “My life is the story of God’s mercy.”

As we grow in self-knowledge, we will celebrate our lives as immersed in the sea of God’s mercy. Self-knowledge will gradually bring us to embrace the wonder of this gift.

There is no better way to understand and enter into this relationship between God and ourselves than opening our hearts to Jesus and his call. Deep personal prayer will follow.

The Importance of Self-Knowledge on the Christian Journey

In the Exsultet, the most glorious Easter proclamation, we read:
That sanctifying power of this night
Dispels the brokenness, washes faults away,
Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,
Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

The Christian Life aims to make that beautiful vision of the Exsultet an overwhelming certainty in the life of each follower of Christ. One factor in this necessary personal transformation is self-knowledge.

The brokenness acknowledged in the Exsultet is our heritage, the consequence of the sin of our original parents, Adam and Eve. Every human being is caught in this Alienation that drives them away from God. This is the product of personal, social, economic and cultural factors. We are all caught in the grasp of a false consciousness that leads us to see things for our personal benefit. From these most fundamental desires flow the division, the isolation, the conflict and hatred so inherent in our common human experience. Likewise, culture creates further false values to support hostility and separation. The economic system adds to the pattern of lies that defines us as consumers with needs that supposedly only further acquisition can bring the happiness we long for.

The following five observations help clarify the intensity of this false consciousness that engulfs us.

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, nevertheless, that we embrace as true.

3) Part of this perspective. fostered by society and culture, and driven by our innate egoism, defines us primarily as a consumer.

4) We are constrained 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 interplay of all these forces, generating a false consciousness, deeply influences our quest for happiness. It is a never-failing way to ultimate disappointment and grief. These are patterns of deceit and distortion. They create a mindset that pursues goals that, in the end, can never achieve lasting happiness. Authentic self-knowledge is the only way out. Jesus has told us, “The truth will set you free.” (John8:32) The first step on the road to freedom is moving out of the captivity of the destructive lies. We need to move into the truth of God’s call to our original innocence. This is the work of the Christian life. Self-knowledge is a critical feature of the venture.

Here is a short personal example of false consciousness. As a child, I was told the “colored people” would never come past 47th St. Gay and lesbian people just did not exist. The glass ceiling for women, which was never mentioned, was more like a combination steel and titanium. All of these were wrapped up in a religious message of my beloved parish.

My spiritual journey has been an on-going struggle to break free of this racism, prejudice against the LGBTQ community and sexism. All of these destructive lies have festered deep within my false consciousness over a lifetime. Like a cancer, they have quietly been eating away at my spiritual well-being. The search for true self-knowledge has led to a fierce battle against my ingrained captivity. Eventually, a growth in self-knowledge, has been generated by seeking a true Christian life. This has been possible only with an encounter with Jesus in the Gospels and deep personal prayer. The struggle continues.

The Way of Prayer: A Guide to the Footsteps of Jesus

I

The Easter Vigil is the most sacred of all liturgical celebrations. The Liturgy of the Light is the first of four parts. It centers on the proclaiming of the Exsultet, the Easter hymn of singular beauty and sovereignty. This song celebrates the Easter victory of life over death, grace over sin, love over hatred. There is a crescendoing announcement expressed ten times in a description that begins “This is the Night…” In this story of salvation there are two stunning statements between the fourth and fifth declarations of “This is the Night…”. They challenge us to address the wonderful glory of the Easter reality.

O truly necessary sin of Adam,
Destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O Happy fault that earned so glorious a Redeemer!

Some verses later, the song continues:

That sanctifying power of this night
Dispels the brokenness, washes faults away,
Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,
Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

Part of the great mystery of Christ Crucified and Christ Risen that we celebrate in the three holy days of the Triduum is this. We see Christ as the New Adam. He is offering us a way out of the sinful state we were born into. Because of the sin of Adam and Eve, every human being comes into the world with a deep brokenness, a disoriented heart and blinded mind. Our natural state makes us the victims of ignorance and pulled toward division, isolation and hatred. This state of Alienation leads away from God in every possible way.

The clear message of the Exsultet is that God is calling us back to the original innocence. The vocation of every person is to forsake the Alienation, the inheritance of our first parents, and direct our whole being to the pursuit of God. Our true destiny is to restore ourselves and all persons and all creation as one in God. This is the goal of the true and authentic Christian life.

Jesus has given us an invitation and an opportunity for personal transformation. This is how the message of the Exsultet becomes reality in our life. Jesus calls: “Come and see.” (John 1:39) Jesus reveals: “I am the way and the truth and the life.” (John 14:6) Jesus gives us the path to freedom and life: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”(Mk 8:34)

Along with the sacraments, prayer becomes a central issue in refocusing our life in harmony with the beautiful message of the Exsultet. This is the message and the call of the gospel. This is walking in the footsteps of Jesus. A common name for this search for personal transformation is the spiritual life.

II

Here is a description of the spiritual life that I have found very helpful. It is the quest for self-transcendence. This is a long, painful process. It involves moving from ourselves as the center to making God the center of our reality. This is the Christian journey in the footsteps of Jesus. Every part of our life is involved in the personal transformation from selfishness to service and love. Deep and personal prayer is critical along with our relationships, responsibilities and commitments. This mature prayer integrates and authenticates all of our life in the pursuit of God.

III

Here is a simple description of the spiritual journey. There is the beginning. In this initial state the consequences of our sinful condition holds sway along with the superficiality resulting from a consumer culture. We take that first step away from our original sinfulness and selfishness. Then there is the actual journey which involves a conversion process. We begin the long road to freedom from our self-centered ways. Self-knowledge is a tedious but healing and redemptive element of this process. Eventually we have a sense of arrival. We gain an awareness of movement away from the dominance of the ego. These three steps of beginning, journey and arrival are the advancement of the spiritual life. There is true experience of progress. We have begun to transform the deep distortions of our heart with gospel values. Though we do not realize it at the moment, this is just the first step of a long, wearisome journey. The process will repeat itself over and over and over again. It is a spiraling passage to our center where God resides.

At each stage we see things with a more acute perspective but never with total clarity. The repeating conversions create a depth of purification and transformation. These new insights are far beyond our power to envision at the beginning of the journey. Each stage offers new horizons, new inclusiveness, new openness to reconciliation. Once we thought it was progress to see two sides to every story. Eventually we begin to see that often there may be several sides to the story. The same is true with our racism and our attitudes to different states of sexuality. Many other prejudices have held sway with no challenge. Each new level of awareness invites us to face turmoil and new choices. Slowly we begin to see the great chasm between what we want and what we need.

While we move forward by faithfulness to the struggle, each stage along the way enlightens us to see God’s goodness and our sinfulness more clearly. Humility becomes more important with each step of growth. The irony is that we recognize our personal limits and weakness and sinfulness much more clearly as we make progress in our pursuit of God. We see our sinful state with always more transparency with each step forward!

Another paradox of the spiritual journey is this. At each stage, we make significant progress from the previous stage. Yet we are more or less blind to the upcoming progress. That only happens when we do the necessary steps for the next conversion along the way. We are regularly tempted with the distortion that we have finally arrived.

The many phases of the spiritual journey always involve a deeper degree of prayer, more detachment, and especially confronting our addictions, that often cripple us from any further progress. Along the way, self-knowledge and humility shine the light in the darkness.

IV

The spiritual life seeks to transform us into that person described in the Exsultet:
That sanctifying power of this night
Dispels the brokenness, washes faults away,
Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,
Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

To accomplish this goal, to be a new person in the image of Christ, we will continue with some helpful material in the coming weeks. We will offer reflections on the Journey of self-knowledge, the Journey of Prayer, the Journey of Lectio Divina, the Journey of Christian Meditation and finally, some considerations on Teresa of Avila’s Program of Humility, Detachment and Charity. All of these reflections aim to help us to walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

Question #5: “The most difficult thing about the teachings on addictions is this: How can actions that we previously thought were not sinful, make us idolatrous and unloving? This is a real stretch for me!”

Of all May’s marvelous teachings on addiction, none is more important than this: we cannot overcome addiction by ourself. Naked willpower is a sure source of defeat. Only openness to God’s grace offers the possibility of eliminating addiction. There is no escaping this hard and fast reality. The combination of our generous cooperation with God’s grace is the only way to freedom from the addiction.

Here are a few helpful statements from May on the difficult topic of grace:

Grace is God’s love in the concrete.
Grace is God’s love that fills our total being.
We live in a sea of God’s loving mercy that is God’s grace.
Even when our choices are destructive such as our addictions, God’s love and grace never stop. God always pursues us without conditions or limits.
God’s grace always is embracing us in a way that is absolute, permanent and victorious.

The fact that withdrawal from addiction is only possible with God’s grace does not mean we simply wait for it to happen. It means that our action comes with recognition that God is in control. We are an active participant but God’s grace will determine the consequences. Both May and Teresa have helpful guidance on how we cooperate with God’s grace in breaking free of the bondage of addiction.

May and the saintly and motherly Carmelite agree that one of the great difficulties we all face is this. God wants everything. The only way we can approach that gift of self is one step at a time. Therefore, we need to address the addiction that has risen to the forefront of our consciousness. We must set up a plan to attack the number one addiction, the one whose behavior is most troublesome. Most likely, we have been trying to avoid the issue for a long time. Now is the moment of grace. It demands action. Down deep, we know we need to change. Equally down deep, we absolutely do not want to change. The struggle is on.

May’s Insight

May is emphatic that, in the end, freedom from addiction is the result of God’s grace and our cooperation. His teaching on willingness and willfulness brings some clarity to this process.

Willingness, for May, means advancing toward the deeper Mystery of life. We acknowledge that there is a reality beyond our self, a surrender that moves outside of ourselves. We accept that we seem separate yet are called to union with the Mystery that is the foundation of reality. Willingness calls us to participate in the reality that is beyond our control. On the other hand, willfulness centers on self-mastery. It seeks to put the focus on controlling and influencing reality to preserve the attention and control on oneself.

For May, willingness alone is the pathway that can free us from addiction. Willfulness is a guaranteed loser that prolongs the drudgery of addiction’s captivity.

Like the three virtues of Teresa’s Program, willingness seeks to make space for God in our heart. God is always seeking to awaken our hearts to his loving presence. Our major problem is our addictions. They keep the heart full with God’s creatures, not God. This draws the passion of the heart away from God. Willingness engages us in the unending struggle to choose God over God’s creatures with a maturing conviction and commitment. The relentless call of the Spirit implores us to empty our heart for God. This demands willingness over the self-centered approach of willfulness.

It is clear. God’s grace is in this struggle between our egoism and God’s loving call. By ourselves, we are not capable of the necessary total surrender. Yet, in the faithfulness to the struggle to create space for God, there is a wonderous gift. We gradually grow in our awareness of our absolute dependence on God. Therefore, in the end, the grace is found in true faithfulness to the struggle. The struggle keeps us alive as we await the gift of the abundance of God’s love that is contemplation.

Teresa’s Plan of Attack

Teresa points out that the demands on our generosity are being stretched beyond our limits. The struggle seems endless and hopeless. On God’s part, it is a gentle, consistent and determined invitation to love and freedom. This gift is found in Teresa’s Program, centering on the three virtues of charity, detachment and humility. It offers a twofold outlet. First, it gives us a way out of the paralysis of seeming helplessness. Secondly, it presents an encounter with God’s invitation to love and freedom. This is God’s love in the concrete which is grace.

There is indeed a struggle. It is a search for the passage way to the deepest recesses of our heart. Here we encounter a singular hunger, the hunger for God. Here we will find the only source for peace and true happiness. This is why our addictions are so destructive. They keep us from the true peace and happiness which is God.

This process of substituting the creature for the Creator is totally and undeniably contrary to everything our heart was made for. It makes us lapse into the deceptive lie of the addiction. This lie of the addiction truly draws us away from God. It makes us idolatrous and unloving. This produces the crippling bondage of our addiction. Teresa tells us a life committed to becoming more loving, a life of placing all creatures in their proper place by detachment and a life of accepting, in humility, the truth about God and ourselves, is what is necessary. It alone will free us from idolatry and the demise of love. It opens the way to freedom, peace and happiness now, and eternal life and love, in the future.

Tereasa expressed it in these words: “Everything I have advised you about in this book is directed toward the complete gift of ourselves to the Creator, the surrender of our will to his and the detachment from creatures …Unless we give our wills entirely to the Lord so that in everything pertaining to us, he might do what conforms to his will, we will never be allowed to drink from this fount. Drinking from it is perfect contemplation.” (Way pf Perfection.32.9)

St. Paul’s statement is never more appropriate than in the battle against addiction. “My grace is sufficient for you for power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Cor 12:9)

As we approach that surrender generated by God’s grace, we need to recognize two things. The first is a growing awareness of how feeble our love is for both God and our neighbor. Secondly, we need to stay in the struggle seeking to be more humble, more detached, and more loving by our faithfulness to prayer. Both of these items are expressions of the approach to life that is rooted in willingness. This way of behaving leads to our liberation from our addictions. This will prepare us for God’s purifying and transforming gift of contemplation.

Teresa’s Program and Addiction

Question #4: “Given the deep scientific basis for May’s insights on addictions. How can your favorite author, Teresa of Avila, have anything relevant to say about addictions?”

Teresa of Avila had none of the benefits of Gerald May’s gifted and exceptional scientific background. She had no awareness of the intricate connection of body, mind and psyche in today’s understanding of addiction. Yet, she had a profound experience of God in her life of prayer. In fact, it was brilliant enough that she was named the first woman Doctor of the Church.

In what has become known as Teresa’s Program, we have some truly helpful insights that supplement May’s teachings about addiction and the spiritual life. Teresa saw prayer as the central component of the individual’s purification and transformation on the journey to becoming one with God. She describes clearly the deep personal changes involved in a faithful prayer life. These changes are similar to eliminating the consequences of addiction in our day.

Teresa understood that the source of true prayer was the heart. The Bible mentions this more than a thousand times. Her genius let her see the chaos in the heart as the product of what we call today addictions. The heart was a battlefield where good and evil struggled mightily to gain control. One of Teresa’s gifts to Christian spirituality was to identify the interaction of prayer and the three virtues of humility, detachment and charity as a source of peace and order producing purity of heart. All of this takes place in a gradual journey demanding constant faithfulness to the struggle. The internal order and peace resulting from purity of heart, is the great treasure of the gospel parable.

The necessary interaction of the virtues and prayer helps the prayer grow in intensity and the virtues increase in their integrity and influence. This shared support gradually increases the peace and order flowing from purity of heart. This is the beginning of liberation from the chaos of the unchallenged addictions.

May describes the elimination of addictions as the outcome of freedom that opens to love. Teresa envisions energizing prayer by bringing an internal order that joins the virtues and prayer in shared growth. This, in turn, leads to a deeper, clearer and more free movement to be one with God.

The language, and even some points of emphasis, offered by Teresa and May are different. The reality of internal transformation, however, is truly the same.

The Three Virtues

Humility: Teresa repeats regularly that humility is the truth. The bottom line of our reality is that God is the Creator and we are the creature. Humility lets us embrace this certain truth.

For Teresa, humility is not about a loss of self-esteem. This is a dishonest and damaging misuse of humility. Such a state is disturbing and conflicted. Teresa, on the contrary, says, “Humility does not disturb or disquiet however great it may be; it comes with peace, delight, and calm…this humility expands the soul and enables it to serve God more.” (Way of Perfection 10.2)

To know and embrace the humble truth about ourselves is a source of our freedom. This is the same freedom that comes with withdrawal from addiction. We slowly begin to see more clearly who God is. This realization is the essential source of our humility. We also see the truth about ourselves with the gift of this virtue. Humility opens us up to the necessary personal conversion that leads to constant growth in self-understanding. It lets us grasp the wonder of God calling us into the Mystery of Love even in our broken and sinful state with all of our addictions.

Detachment: By detachment Teresa implies that we must put all things in their proper perspective. We need to relate to everything so they bring us closer to God. This particular relationship, that hobby, our cell phone, our favorite entertainments and all of our other possessions and relationships will either bring us closer to God or be a barrier in this search. The effects of original sin, often displayed in our addictions, drive us to make certain creatures our idols. In our culture, one of the great forces pulling us away from God is in the hunger for security. The three false gods in this deceit are possessions, power and relationships. Detachment attacks this perversion of reality so entrenched in our deceiving hearts.

True detachment unleashes our fundamental longing for God and sets our heart free. Jesus’ gospel teachings about detachment are about learning to love. Only when things are seen in the right light, with a detached heart, do they open the way to God. Otherwise, things are used only to prop up our selfish agenda, contrary to our goal, to seek God.

Charity: Charity is the proper acceptance of others. Love expressed in charity for our sisters and brothers is the index of our spiritual growth. For Teresa, the authenticity of our spiritual journey is measured by the quality of our interpersonal relations. This neighborly love moves us towards the center where God awaits.

This call to communal love is an exceptionally difficult barrier and challenge on our spiritual journey. Our selfishness most often is an expression of our addictions. Our addictions deepen our self-centeredness. We easily fall into a pattern of self-righteousness. Teresa understood this, saying, “Beg our Lord to give you this perfect love of neighbor. Let his Majesty have a free hand, for He will give you more than you know how to desire because you are striving and making every effort to do what you can about this love.” (Interior Castle.5.3.12)

Teresa has a simple example of how profound this practice is in ordinary life. She says if there is a person that we find difficult, we should go out of our way to support and help that person. If that individual receives praise, we ought to rejoice as if the praise is for us.

The Ultimate Goal

The journey to God is an interaction between these three virtues and prayer. We need to pray to be humble, detached, and loving. They open us to grace, the only way to escape of our addictions. This process will continue throughout our life.

Teresa saw our freedom from all creatures as decisive to the spiritual journey to God. This freedom happens by reducing the dominance of self-interest and by diminishing possessiveness and worldly honor. May describes the same process as breaking loose from the dominion of addictions.

The pursuit of God is a slow, steady development with little leapfrogging ahead. A necessary, incessant determination is at the heart of Teresa’s program, integrating prayer and a lifestyle guided by the three virtues. This is walking with Jesus in the way of freedom and love.

Question #4: “Given the deep scientific basis for May’s insights on addictions. How can your favorite author, Teresa of Avila, have anything relevant to say about addictions?”

Question #3: “While the material on addictions is fascinating and both frightening and helpful, how is it connected to my spiritual life?”

In almost all authentic spiritual traditions, even centuries before Christianity, the individual’s relationship to creatures has had a fundamental role. Creatures need to lead to God. When this role is perverted, the result is idolatry. This distortion starts with attachment which nails the heart to the object of affection. In explaining addiction, May highlights the long tradition on attachment and builds upon it. As an attachment escalates, it grows into addiction. May shows how the body, the mind and one’s feelings all work together to both create and maintain the path from an initial attachment to addiction. We are wired in the direction of addiction.

Some deeper considerations about addictions will be helpful in displaying the connection of addictions to our spiritual life. While defining addiction as any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits freedom and human desire, May stresses it is the action that is truly important in addiction. Desire for alcohol does not define an alcoholic. Regular over-indulgence in drinking does.

Here are five important characteristics of any addiction:

Tolerance: We always want more of the product of the addictive activity. In the end, whatever is the goal of the addictive conduct, it becomes consistently more difficult to achieve. This exposes a deeper but unsatisfied hunger. This is a truly ugly dimension of addiction. There never is enough.

Withdrawal symptoms: There are two. They are stress reaction and backlash reaction. In the stress reaction, the body reacts to the loss of addictive behavior in varying degrees of intensity. In the backlash, the person feels the opposite of the desired goal of the addiction.

Self-deception: The mind is fighting against itself to avoid loss of its “fix.” It creates “mind games” to distort and deceive anything that might deprive it of it of satisfaction. The mind loathes the possibility of the change built-in with withdrawal. The mind is ingenious in creating excuses to maintain full support for the addiction.

Loss of willpower: A fundamental deception or “mind trick” of addiction is focusing attention on willpower. The intention to stop addiction by saying, “I can handle it” is the sure path to preserving the addiction. The movement away from willpower to surrender and openness to grace is one of the great insights of May’s teachings. Willingness, leading to the surrender to grace, and not willfulness with its dependence on willpower, is the path to freedom.

Distortion of attention: Addiction absorbs our attention to distract our mind and heart from love. Attention and love are intimate partners. This is at the heart of the addiction’s destructive powers. It keeps us from the path of love for others and especially for God.

We need to work to identify our addictions. This is not so easy. Many addictions operate in a totally hidden manner. This invisibility can take place over a period of years. Other addictions are astute in creating deceptive mind games to minimize concern. How could being enthused about my team’s quest the championship be harmful? How could working extra to support my family be in conflict with being a responsible parent? Could being concerned about one’s health hinder my spiritual life? These, and a thousand other questions about ordinary activities and attitudes, can lead to uncovering of addictions in our life.

Addictions thrive in anonymity. It is self-knowledge, often driven by deep personal prayer, that unveils their destructive patterns. When a person brings the addiction out in the open, there is a choice: maintain the bondage or seek freedom. It is the question of Elijah to the people in the conflict with the false prophets: “How long will you straddle the issue? If the Lord is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him?” (I Kings 18:21)

When May states that addiction leads to idolatry, it sounds shocking. The same teaching has been part of our Christian spirituality since the earliest days of the Desert Mothers and Fathers as they entered more deeply into the depth and beauty of the gospel message.

At a personal level, the struggle is to let things, relationships and activities lead us to God. However, we are deeply inclined to twist and distort these items to direct them for our selfish needs. Rather than God as the center, we become the center. This struggle started in the Garden and will go until the end. Addictions are not centered in things or experiences. Addictions are all about the heart. Am I moving out of myself toward God or not?

Another helpful insight of May points out the difference between addiction, which often seems quite good, and areas of authentic commitment in our life. To determine the difference, we need simply ask ourselves, can we quit it? If not, it is an addiction no matter how good it may appear. Freedom is the source of all the good we do. For freedom gives us the capacity for love. Addiction is the enemy of both freedom and love.

One truly difficult part of May’s teaching on addiction is this: the most mundane activities lead to critical choices in our life. Listening to or reading the news, our cell phone, a few drinks, dents in our new car, a little extra work, planning for retirement – they all are possible addictions. They all can lead one on a destructive path. Will we choose the true God or a false god? This is the stuff of the gospel.

Here are just a few quotes from Matthew that challenge us on the topic of addiction and our spiritual life. “To save one’s life, one must lose it.” (Mt 10:39), “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth…” (Mt 6:19), “Ask and it will be given to you.” (Mt 7:7), “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” Mt 10:37), “Go sell what you have and give it to the poor.” (Mt 19:21).

I
Willingness and Willfulness

One of the most immediate difficulties in reading Gerald May’s classic, Addiction and Grace is this. He attributes real spiritual damage to indulgence in some of the most ordinary things in life: drinking a soda, watching a favorite TV show, commitment to your favorite team, using your cell phone and a seemingly endless list of other activities. For May, the pathology happens when these activities slide into an addictive behavior. May sees a deeper reality. Any addiction is filling a space in the heart that should be reserved for our pursuit of God. Most people find this hard to understand. They see their spiritual life primarily as a series of religious practices and moral behavior. The more personal connection with God comes later.

An example of the physical pathology of a stroke can be helpful here. Before a person has a stroke, there are a series of destructive events that are moving steadily toward the catastrophe that is a stroke. The events leading to the inevitability of the stroke are real. If they are observed with the proper medical knowledge, whether of a professional or the individual, they are a cry for medical intervention so the stroke can be avoided. Ignorance of their presence leads to silence and the devastation of the stroke.

In the spiritual life, addictions are those kinds of spiritual maladies leading to the spiritual equivalent of a stroke. They present a major blockage in the pursuit of God.

May’s teaching on willingness and willfulness is the healthy advice of true spiritual mentor who will protect us from the destructive possibilities of a misguided spiritual life. A true mentor will open a clear path for our heart to pursue our fundamental purpose to be one in God. For May, who is indeed a true spiritual mentor, willingness and willfulness are about one’s basic approach to life. They are tools of clarity or distortion in the wilderness of our spiritual quest. We are going to accept life as a mystery opening to God or as task to master reality for our own personal benefit and control. The proper understanding of willingness and willfulness and the choice they lay before us will be a great help as we try to grapple with the interplay of grace and addiction.

Surrender or Control

In willingness one accepts an openness and dependency leading to the search for union with God. This reduces independence and control. It is a choice of growing surrender to the mystery of life. It is the opening to see oneself, all people and all creation as being one in God. It is a losing of self to find a new self in God.

Willfulness is a movement to independence and control. It pursues self-mastery. It is the rugged individualism that is so exalted in a consumer society and so operative in countless personal, economic and political agendas.

A clear example is how these two mindsets approach the environmental crisis. Willingness sees a sense of unity within all creation and the human venture. There is a call for respect and responsibility for all of nature. There is a painful dimension in recognizing the on-going destruction of the environment. On the other hand, willfulness approaches the environment in a totally utilitarian fashion. Creation is there to serve the needs of the individual. Willfulness sees the physical world as a resource for a program of profit, convenience and comfort.

Willingness sees a single ultimate power in the universe. It sees self-surrender and movement toward union as the final and absolute task in life, to let go and let God. On the other hand, willfulness sees many spiritual powers in the universe. For it, life’s task is to get the better of the ultimate spiritual powers to one’s personal benefit.

A major goal of the spiritual life is to create a vision that facilitates true surrender. This kind of submission is only possible when the heart is free of attachment, and particularly, addictions. Prayer and meditation, along with fasting and service, help produce the freedom necessary for the movement from willfulness to willingness. In this new spiritual maturity, there is an interesting development. There is an emptying out of spiritual images and ideas that we held in great esteem. There is a diminishment of what seemed important and necessary and a movement towards emptiness. Our prayer becomes much more a quiet presence than brilliant insights and images. In this surrender and emptiness, we are moving towards true freedom.

A Key to Understanding Addiction and Grace

The proper understanding of willingness and willfulness has much to tell us about addiction and our spiritual wellbeing. They are a key to unraveling May’s great wisdom that connects the human sciences, and especially psychology, to the spiritual journey. This is a central message in May’s text, Addiction and Grace. Making the right distinctions between willingness and willfulness is truly the work of a lifetime. Yet May guides us with great vision into the beauty and integrity of this search for God that is rooted in our ordinary experience. The daily events of our life, along with our relationships and our responsibilities. all benefit from the enlightenment that flows from our understanding what willingness and willfulness signify in our journey. These insights will help us immensely in the following reflections on May’s lessons about the power of God’s grace when we face our many addictions.

Preface

I have been writing this blog, Praying Alone Together for seven years. To my utter amazement, I will have my two millionth visitor in a month or two.

When I started writing, a few things were clear to me. I wanted to treat Carmelite spirituality and prayer, particularly from the perspective of Teresa of Avila. Secondly, I wanted to write from the viewpoint of a pastor. Over the years, some things have come into sharper focus. Now, my main effort is to invite people to a deeper personal prayer. My efforts have been to attempt to offer them the guidance of how to accomplish the goal of deep personal prayer. Likewise, I have become aware of both the gifts, and the very real limits, of writing from a pastor’s outlook. It is a struggle to stay simple without being simplistic in presenting a truly complex challenge to guide and enlighten people in their experience of God. This has made me more and more aware of the need of both deep personal prayer and the ever-expanding need for humility on my part. My fondest hope is that my efforts will be a simple invitation to an openness to God’s call to a deeper encounter of love.

A truly clear example of my gift of pastoral insight and the constraints of insufficient academic expertise was a series of reflections on Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace. The responses I received from most readers were twofold. The material was new and interesting. Likewise, it was both insightful and confusing. I have received a series of questions on the topic of addiction. I hope I will be able to offer some clarification. The most common concern was the deep surprise about one’s own addictions and the spiritual damage they can produce. The second area of concern was about the depth of the connection of addiction to spirituality and the magnitude of personal and spiritual harm that is the product of unchecked addictions in the ordinary events of life.

In this second series of reflections on Addiction and Grace, I hope to address these and other questions that I have received from the readers of my first effort.

I am going to begin with a reflection on May’s teaching on willingness and willfulness. May sees in these two contrary items a fundamental approach to life. They involve the never-ending question of meaning and the elusive search for happiness as we face the mystery of life. Properly understood, the true meaning of willingness and willfulness acts as a guide to spirituality and our pursuit of God. Willingness and willfulness are two basic moves towards life. May’s teaching is truly an invitation into life’s true destiny, union with God. We need to approach it with a great deal of wonder and an ever-greater degree of humility.

Teresa of Avila’s classic, The Interior Castle, is about purification and transformation on the pilgrimage to God. It has an uncanny similarity to the role of purgatory in our salvation. The following five reflections seek to flesh out some positive elements in this connection. In sum, it is our invitation to a deeper and more productive spiritual life.

Aging: A Decisive Part of God’s Plan
God Sees the Clock Differently

Donald Trump has no monopoly on the “big lie”. History has been filled with them. One of the more insidious “big lies” we live with is this: youth is a precious gift and aging is horrendous. God does not agree. Aging is very much part of God’s plan. In God’s eyes, a healthy middle age or a confused adolescence or a painful old age are all the same. God has no dread of the clock. God only sees life in its many manifestations moving toward the final purpose. We are all called to be one with God for eternity.

Many people who have not seen me in a while often say I look great. The unstated part of the greeting is ‘for a guy in his eighties.’ I know the compliment is offered in good will. However, I am happy to be in the twilight of life. This is where God wants me. Any appearance of youth, relative or otherwise, is a total illusion. I experience something similar with my many visits to the doctors. Whether it is good news or bad news, I leave with the same thought: I guess I am going to live until I die.

God does not buy into the “big lie” about youth. God only sees the gift of life moving toward the divine design for every person, which is union with the Mystery of Love revealed in Jesus.

There is a multibillion-dollar industry whose self-interest is to protect the myth that youth is both possible and preferable for everyone. Its propaganda permeates all levels of our society. It is propping up a lifestyle of deception and distortion. Eventually, the uncompromising demands of time demolish the lie. The myth of eternal youth gets shattered by the simple and relentless tic-toc of the clock. We are all getting older. For God, this is good. God asks us to go with the flow, get in touch with the program. Aging is good because death is very much a part of life as God sees it.

The Gold in the Debris of Life
The Tragic in Life

Trouble will be there until the end. We see this mixture of good and evil in all levels of reality: the family, our community, our parish, our society and most of all within ourselves. In the parable of the weeds and the wheat (Mt: 13:24-30) Jesus captures one of the deepest aspects of our human experience

Despite the evidence of evil that is so pervasive in our daily experience, Carmelite spirituality testifies that God’s love is always present even in the wreckage of life, the time of our deepest trials.

As we continue to ponderer Teresa’s wisdom on the necessity of purification and transformation, the issue of the tragic in life is an essential ingredient. It pervades all human experience.

In the early stages of prayer, we start out seeking an answer to life’s problems. This search is done with a beginner’s faith. However, as the faith increases, we learn that today’s answered prayers all too quickly give way to an avalanche of tomorrow’s new problems.

Eventually, it becomes clear that we must change our approach. We must accept God on God’s terms rather than trivializing our faith journey by thinking of God as someone who is only there to solve our problems. This change is no small task. A great recognition comes when we finally realize that the problems are not the problem. Our approach to life’s difficulties is what needs to change.

Teresa arrived at a point in her life where she accepted God on God’s terms. This acceptance led her to great wisdom seeing life in all its joys and most especially in the sorrows and difficulties as a divine love story.

Teresa came to recognize that the tragedies in our lives hold the possibility of being one of our surest ways to find God. She invites us to discover the God hidden in life’s troubles. This acceptance leads us to the reject the culture’s relentless cry for self-indulgence. Then there is also the distortion of much religious practice that seeks only a “make me feel good Jesus”. These distortions, joined to our ingrained sinfulness, draw us into ever deeper deceiving illusions.

Eventually many people come to the awareness that they need a spirituality that addresses the tragic and broken elements of life. Jesus was clear about this in his call to join him on the road to Jerusalem.

Our brokenness leads to critical choices in life. We hold the options of peace or conflict, reconciliation or division. Teresa’s teaching about this is clear. Prayer at the moment of our crisis is important. However, there is something more important than the prayerful response to the immediate predicament. It is the habitual and continual practice of deep and personal prayer. This creates a reservoir of patience, insight, and prudence to help us with the unplanned eruptions of the debris of life.

God’s mercy is always on the prowl, always seeking us. A mystic of the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich, put it beautifully when she said, “First comes the fall and then the recovery from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.”

PART THREE
Prayer and Life Along with Life and Prayer
Life Is Where God Is

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 faithful and integrated incarnational spirituality must see that God is the ground of our being. All creatures exist because of this presence. The distortion is when we separate God from his creatures in our divided and isolated spirituality.

God is no less present with the family at the kitchen table on Sunday afternoon than at the Mass on Sunday morning. God is just as present to the garbage collector serving the community or to the struggling drug addict or to the nun in her contemplative convent. For each of these individuals, and for us, the primary issue is our awareness of God’s presence. This is Teresa’s message about the utter importance of prayer. We need deep personal prayer to expand our awareness of the loving and saving presence of God in all of life. We use the sacred moments of prayer, retreats, sacraments, and just openness to life, to grow in that awareness.

Teresa speaks loud and clear about the absolute importance of prayer. Without prayer, there is no progress in seeking God. The most common distortion of her teachings over the centuries has been to isolate this emphasis on prayer away from life. Life is where God is. This is why we can say that life is the greatest grace. The special moments of prayer and sacred space, the times set aside for the sacraments, retreat, and reflection are truly important. They bring us to an awareness of what already is. Most often, however, in the ordinary flow of things, we fail to realize we are in the presence of God.

Prayer flows from the deepest human reality, God within us. In this hidden ground of love, God is always taking the initiative. God never stops beckoning us to the true life. Here is a critical point. Prayer is a secondary response to this invitation of God. Life is the first response. Our experience is only possible because of God’s loving presence. Life is the greatest grace because of this divine bonding. Prayer opens us up to what already is: our relationship to God calling us home. Prayer is the guiding light to God at our center. In this context, prayer helps us understand and respond to our initial experience of God in our lived reality. In the framework of The Interior Castle, prayer draws us into the purifying and transforming action of God in life.

While God is everywhere, we have only one option to experience that presence. It is in our life. Our task is to seek the faithfulness, integrity, and honesty to live with a growing awareness and commitment to God’s presence. This is always a call to deeper life in the mystery of love. This God-encounter will always lead us to the purification and transformation that we so need to achieve our final destiny.

The encounter with God takes place within us. Then we move outward to our brothers and sisters. We slowly learn that all is grace. We are drawn away from separateness and division to the inclusiveness of Christ’s message. Among the many stories of inclusiveness in the Gospels, three marvelous examples are the Good Samaritan, the woman at the well, and the healing of the lepers. They all celebrate the outcasts being invited into the community. Eventually, we open up to our responsibility to transform this world in accord with God’s plan for the kingdom of justice and peace, where we build bridges not walls.

All Life Flows from God

We often hear that only God matters. This comes off as unreal and life-denying. It is not. We need to realize that all that is good, beautiful and life-giving in our relationships and in our responsibilities has a special source. These persons reveal the deepest love in our heart. This connection to our loved ones is powerful and meaningful because it originates from God. We cherish their goodness and beauty ultimately because it is a reflection of God’s presence. Watching children grow up or the peaceful death of a long-suffering parent or grandparent simply exposes the reality of God’s presence in life. It is a little more remote with the celebration of the success of a child in school or a teen’s first date. The fact is the total spectrum of our experiences emerges from the sacred presence of a loving and merciful God.

All experience of love in our life originates from God. This is where it gets its power to be real for us. Love remains the deepest of all human mysteries because it flows from the mystery of God. However, because we are sinful, most human encounters with love are limited and deficient. The gospel journey with Jesus is our invitation to the purifying and transforming process to make this love continually more selfless. Deep personal prayer helps us more than anything else in this journey with Jesus.

Each Morning’s Message

As a true disciple of Teresa, I have created this little example to display the need to integrate prayer and life. It also highlights another important element of her message: the centrality of seeking God’s will.

Picture this scene: when you wake up in the morning there is this very special table next to your bed. Only you can see it. Each morning God has a message for you. He lists your relationships and responsibilities. He lays out a “to do” list that will enable you to bring a little more love to all included in your relationships and responsibilities. Likewise, God will continue to nudge you to stay open to new horizons and possibilities in today’s experience. However, in all of this wonderful transaction, you will be able to read the content only with the help of deep personal prayer in your life. Through this prayer leading to love in life, God’s purifying and transforming grace will be making you a new person

Teresa of Avila’s classic, The Interior Castle, is about purification and transformation on the pilgrimage to God. It has an uncanny similarity to the role of purgatory in our salvation. The following five reflections seek to flesh out some positive elements in this connection. In sum, it is our invitation to a deeper and more productive spiritual life.

PART ONE

The Spiritual Life as Purification and Transformation

One of the clear lessons of Teresa of Avila’s classic, The Interior Castle, is this: the true purpose of prayer is not to change God, but to let God change us. Her program of deep personal prayer fosters a spiritual growth that purifies and transforms of the individual. This cleansing within the person is quite similar to what we understand happens in purgatory.

When we pray regularly with deep personal commitment, things happen within us. Purification, and the consequent transformation, produce a new consciousness. We begin to trust with a new sense of spiritual security. Faith leads us to be open to God leading us through the dark paths of life. Our relationships are enriched with a new sense of compassion. Likewise, we become more accepting and gentler with ourselves and with others. Failures become less troubling and even seem as an opening to let God take over. Our moral lapses are acknowledged. We find that we do not need to be in constant pursuit of looking good. All of these changes are gradual and almost always include times of regression and outright failure. The key is perseverance.

As our prayer becomes more authentic, there is a movement toward our true center where God is. This means moving beyond the superficial self, a self that is shaped by the advertising world of never-ending new products to fill the void in a misdirected heart. This is the self propped up by a lifetime pattern of self-absorption. Prayer brings us to an inner passage leading to the true self. This journey inward in prayer offers innumerable blessings, yet, in the early stages, it is always limited and deficient. We gradually come to see how distant we are from our real destiny: union with God.

With growth in this new focus on God in prayer, even deeper-seated changes within us continue to mature. The gospel values of Jesus’ message begin to take root. We begin to see the need for more honesty and authenticity in all our relationships to persons, things and ideas. We find it easier to cast out the log in our eye and to be more accepting of others in all their faults. “Either/or” thinking begins to fade away. The “both/and” view of life blossoms as a real possibility for us. Finally, we steadily begin to experience life as embedded in an overwhelming sense of God’s gracious presence. Prayer opens the road for our return to Paradise. In this movement toward God, Teresa of Avila offers a parallel to Purgatory’s goal of purifying and preparing us. The big difference is that in her strategy all this takes place in this life.

Love is the most powerful element of life. Love flows from the heart, the deepest truth about us. It is where we live when we are most authentic. The heart is our hidden center that transcends the power of reason. Only God truly understands the depth and beauty of our heart. All other loves are ultimately partial and incomplete when it comes to our heart. Ultimately, only God can provide full satisfaction for the heart. The heart is our way to discover what is truly real. There is a dynamic relation between prayer and the heart. They both need each other for the most trustworthy encounter with God.

As we make progress in prayer, it becomes clear that discipline is a truly important element of deep personal prayer. We need a commitment to make time for our daily prayer, whether it is a rosary or lectio divina, a novena or contemplative prayer. Without discipline, we can easily skip our prayer time. Steady prayer draws us into a spiritual warfare with the forces of darkness. This demands constant effort on our part, especially as we advance in prayer. It also requires the wisdom to see how we can be deceived into wasting our time at prayer.

As our prayer life matures, there is a common problem: just fulfilling an obligation. We decide we are going to pray even though our heart and mind are wrapped up in some upcoming project or emotional disturbance or some form of internal stress. What often happens is that we go through the motions of prayer without the essential component, communion with God. We just want to get our commitment to pray out of the way. We are not truly present to our prayer.

Our body is there, but our mind and heart are caught up in something altogether different. This is different from the ordinary distractions of our prayer. More importantly, this is not the same as dryness in prayer which makes our prayer time difficult. This dryness often is a sign of progress and purification. In this lack of composure of heart, our prayer suffers because our heart is not involved.

The Interior Castle and Learning Deep Personal Prayer
In this set of reflections on Teresa’s invitation to deep personal prayer, we will begin with a summary of her concrete suggestions in her classic text. Then there will be some thoughts on “What is Prayer” that leads to the importance of the Word of God for our growth in deep personal prayer. This will be supported by the presentation of two simple methods of prayer, Lectio Divina am d Christian Mediation.

Coming next will be a series of themes that help us both understand and better experience this prayer that calls us to change our ways to be free to walk with Jesus. Some of the topics are self-knowledge, composure of heart in prayer, difficulties in prayer, the stages of the spiritual life, practical consequences of being faithful to prayer and many more all leading to the strengthening our commitment of deep personal prayer.

In the end, we are all called to be one with God, to enter the deepest center of the Interior Castle that is our being. Here we can find out the answer to life’s truly big questions of who we are and both where we are going in life and how do we get there?

Part Two
The Parable of the Hidden Treasure
I

A good place to delve more deeply into the gift of prayer is the parable of the lost treasure. (Mt 13:44-46) This parable offers the challenge of action with three steps: finding, selling, and buying. One needs to find the treasure. Then there is a selling all one has. Finally, there is the serious commitment of buying the field.

The “finding” comes from a basic human experience. There is a universal hunger in the depths of the heart, a sense of incompleteness. There is a perception that life holds more than what we have.

Carmelite spirituality builds on the central Gospel truth that God loves us first and loves us as we are. The “finding” we experience is rooted in our encounter with God’s love for us in our brokenness. In the initial steps of faith, we begin to believe that God is at the deepest and most real part of our being. God is the center of both our heart and all reality. However, we seldom give much credence or attention to this reality. Deep personal prayer will draw us into an encounter with God at the center and let us begin to see God in all reality. This helps make our “finding” both concrete and productive.

The “selling” involves making a commitment to pray. This costs us our convenience, time, and comfort. Making time, generating a schedule, building an atmosphere, and discovering and practicing a method of prayer all come at a cost: self-sacrifice. What we are doing is making space for God in a growing surrender to God’s terms. In the process, we gradually learn God always wants more from us.

The “buying” brings one to a personal dedication to pray. The practice of prayer becomes a regular and disciplined part of one’s lifestyle.

II

The initial atmosphere for prayer is important. We need to minimize the distractions by seeking the most silence and solitude that is a practical reality for us. It is our responsibility to create this supportive environment. We need to be aware of who it is we are encountering. We need a growing sense of the sacred in our effort. Secondly, prayer always has to be rooted in love responding to love. Thirdly, prayer needs to come from a heart yearning for faithfulness to love, not just a brain having the right ideas. In prayer, insight is important, but it is always trumped by love.

The material we read, the thoughts that lead to reflection almost always have a spark of light. At times, it is more like a lightning storm. This touches our spirit. The new perspectives call us to change. When we accept the challenge we are now on the bridge between our heart and our life. Deep personal prayer is always rooted in the connection of God’s loving call, our acceptance in our poverty and our determination to make it take flesh in our life.

Prayer is measured by how we live not how we feel. Most often, God gives beginners at prayer a sense of peace and progress. Gradually God weans us from the beautiful feelings to sharpen our focus away from ourselves and towards God. We need to hunger for the God of consolations and not the consolations of God. This will be an ongoing battle for all who are serious about prayer.

III
Self-Knowledge

Genuine self-knowledge constantly helps our prayer. In turn, self-knowledge grows when our prayer is authentic. A major 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 process of growing in self-knowledge leads to that gradual development of personal transformation called conversion. It is repeated at several levels. The journey to refocus and recognize God at the center is only possible when growing self-knowledge nurtures a budding awareness of our sinfulness and pettiness. Once again, humility surfaces as essential to our prayer journey. To encounter ourselves with honesty is a challenging task. It is not a joyful part of our passage. Another name for it is getting real.

With faithfulness to prayer, self-knowledge helps us to slowly grow in patience. The possibilities of reconciliation come out of nowhere. Situations where it was difficult to see the other side of a story now often open up to four or five different valid points of view. The prejudices of a lifetime get exposed for exactly what they are, a lie.

These are just some of the benefits of self-knowledge and humility flowing out of a life of faithfulness to prayer. This is the fruit of the purification and transformation of the Carmelite Way. It is the dynamic beginning of the Pilgrimage to God.

A Really Different Experience

Part One
The contemplative switch takes place. In the fourth dwelling places God reveals a new presence and action in the spiritual journey. This is a transition, a stepping stone, to a much deeper and richer and transforming encounter with God. While it is more about the coming attractions, the present experience is quite spectacular yet very different than any previous expectations.

The Interior Castle with its seven dwelling places is simply a way of explaining how we experience God at the different stages on the journey to the center. It is the center where God resides. It is the center where we encounter our true selves. Self-knowledge, surrender, humility and love grow in each of the seven intervals. In the fourth dwelling places God takes on a more active role in this transforming experience. God’s love is a beacon. It lights up unrecognized brokenness and self-absorption that had been hidden. This active role by God is contemplation.

We must prepare for the fourth dwelling places with a long period of faithfulness to prayer and a committed life. Our daily prayers, rosaries, novenas, meditations, lectio divina and spiritual reading are all stepping stones toward spiritual growth. In the end, however, the fourth dwelling places is where our genuine efforts come face to face with their limits. Now, God’s intervention is the only way forward. Only the free gift of God will draw us into contemplation which is the foundation of al the remaining dwelling places.

Like all the experiences of the Castle journey, the events of the fourth dwelling places have a clear goal: self-discovery that energizes the path to union with God. This new action continues the gradual withdrawal from selfishness. It energizes our pursuit of God who dwells within us at the center. This transformation is the fruit of contemplative prayer. When this happens our life dramatically changes for the better.

The actions of the first three dwelling places are never free of the ego’s inescapable influence. Letting go and letting God becomes significantly more real in the fourth dwelling places. A growing awareness delivers us from being small-minded and thin-skinned along with many other personal shortcomings. On the contrary, a peace opens us up to submission and acceptance on an unprecedented level. We experience a new freedom in the Lord.

Something Truly Different

Teresa explains this dramatic change of the fourth dwelling places as contemplation, the action of God. She uses the comparison and contrast between two words: “contentos” and “gustos” In English they are “consolations” and “spiritual delights.”

“Well now. In speaking about what I said I’d mention here concerning the difference in prayer between consolations and spiritual delights, the term “consolations,” I think, can be given to those experiences we ourselves acquire through our own meditation and petitions to the Lord, those that proceed from our own nature – although God in the end does have a hand in them; for it must be understood, in whatever I say, that without Him we can do nothing. But the “consolations” arise from the virtuous work itself that we perform, and it seems that we have earned them through our own effort and are rightly consoled for having engaged in such deeds. (IC 4.1.4)

THE INTERIOR CASTLE AND LEARNING DEEP PERSONAL PRAYER

In this set of reflections on Teresa’s invitation to deep personal prayer, we will begin with a summary of her concrete suggestions in her classic text. Then there will be some thoughts on “What is Prayer” that leads to the importance of the Word of God for our growth in deep personal prayer. This will be supported by the presentation of two simple methods of prayer, Lectio Divina am d Christian Mediation.

Coming next will be a series of themes that help us both understand and better experience this prayer that calls us to change our ways to be free to walk with Jesus. Some of the topics are self-knowledge, composure of heart in prayer, difficulties in prayer, the stages of the spiritual life, practical consequences of being faithful to prayer and many more all leading to the strengthening our commitment of deep personal prayer.

In the end, we are all called to be one with God, to enter the deepest center of the Interior Castle that is our being. Here we can find out the answer to life’s truly big questions of who we are and both where we are going in life and how do we get there?

Deep Personal Prayer
Part One
I

One of the distinguishing characteristics of deep personal prayer is its goal. It is about changing us rather than changing God.

In my treatment of this style of prayer, I am going to use the definition of Thomas Merton and the added insights of Teresa of Avila.

Merton states:

“Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of God’s Word, for knowledge of God’s will, and for the capacity to hear and obey God.”

Teresa says prayer “is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him we know loves us.” (L 8:5) All prayer must raise our awareness of God’s loving presence. Humility is the foundation of prayer. It moves us gradually to appreciate both our total dependence on God and that God has a better plan for our happiness.

In deep personal prayer we are engaging God’s Word. The Bible is the privileged location for this special encounter. However, the experiences of life can speak eloquently of God’s presence and call.

The encounter with God’s Word leads us to embrace God’s will, an appeal to forsake our selfishness and grow in generosity toward God and others. In this prayer, listening is the key. Psalm 119:105 tells us “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path.” New insight into the reality of God’s will guides our way of living with the gifts of humility, love and service.

When I use the description of deep personal prayer it can include several types of prayer: vocal, mental, meditation, Lectio Divina, and contemplative prayer. The commitment to prayer requires a discipline to pray on a regular basis. This distinguishes this prayer from spontaneous prayer which can happen any time such as walking the dog, reading or watching a movie. Deep personal prayer is an effort to bring prayer into life habitually no matter how we feel. It might start out as only fifteen minutes a day but with commitment, discipline and generosity it will grow. It leads us in a journey of love whose final goal is to be totally in love with God. It will slowly but surely transform our lives.

Five Points of Prayer
II

Merton’s definition of prayer has five important elements. The first item is paying attention to the presence of God. This requires a conscious effort to expand an awareness of the sacred. Secondly, we bring God’s Word into our mind to seek understanding and insight. Thirdly, this reflection should lead us to take hold of just what God wants of us. We respond in prayer often just resting quietly in the loving presence of God. Finally, we bring this new awareness to our life so the Word speaks to us and leads us to live in obedience to God’s call. Prayer is all about life and the way we live.

The prayer form of Lectio Divina is a helpful model in talking about deep personal prayer. Lectio Divina is a prayerful reading of the Bible or at times reflection on a profound personal experience. It involves four steps: reading, reflecting, responding and resting. There are many other methods of mental prayer or meditation. If you are familiar and more comfortable using other approaches, this is no problem. We need to use what works for us. We should always pray as we can, not as we ought. Likewise, vocal prayer that is practiced with a deep sense of presence and attention to what we are saying can be a help to personal transformation.

As we begin deep personal prayer, the first item is to gather ourselves so we can pay attention to the fact that we are in the loving presence of God. This is called recollection. Teresa stresses we aare invited to a dialogue that with one we know loves us. This centering of our focus, helps us to realize that God is very close. In fact, God never takes his eyes off of us.

In speaking about prayer, the Bible speaks of the heart almost a thousand times. It is the heart that is the source of prayer. The heart is where we encounter our most real self. It is our center far beyond our power of reason. In prayer, we want to bring the heart into an awareness of God. It is about a sense of presence seeking deeper communion with God. “Listen, I am standing at the door knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” (Rv 3:20)

The first two steps of Lectio Divina, the reading and the reflection, may take the majority of the time as we begin the quest for a deep personal prayer. However, their job is to bring us to a more concentrated sense of presence so we can seek communion. These last two steps are the goal of our prayer: to respond with an open heart and to rest in silence in the loving presence of the one we know loves us.

The single greatest obstacle to prayer is not to begin. The second is the relentless attack of distractions. The resolution of distractions is an on-going problem that needs much attention but ultimately it is about a return to our focus.

This experience of deep personal prayer seeks to discover the will of God in the concrete reality of our daily experience. True prayer empowers us to bring God’s love to our life in service of the kingdom.

The Importance of Self-knowledge in Prayer

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Conclusion

The importance of Self-Knowledge on the Christian journey

II

Self-Knowledge and the Pursuit of God

Self-knowledge Opens to God’s Mercy

Teresa of Avila and the Mercy of God

Self-knowledge, Prayer, and Life

The Importance of Self-Knowledge on the Christian Journey

In the Exsultet, the most glorious Easter proclamation, we read:That sanctifying power of this nightDispels the brokenness, washes faults away,Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

The Way of Prayer: A Guide to the Footsteps of Jesus

I

O truly necessary sin of Adam,Destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!O Happy fault that earned so glorious a Redeemer!

That sanctifying power of this nightDispels the brokenness, washes faults away,Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

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The spiritual life seeks to transform us into that person described in the Exsultet:That sanctifying power of this nightDispels the brokenness, washes faults away,Restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to the mourners,Drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty.

May’s Insight

Teresa’s Plan of Attack

Teresa’s Program and Addiction

The Three Virtues

The Ultimate Goal

IWillingness and Willfulness

Surrender or Control

A Key to Understanding Addiction and Grace

Preface

Aging: A Decisive Part of God’s PlanGod Sees the Clock Differently

The Gold in the Debris of LifeThe Tragic in Life

PART THREEPrayer and Life Along with Life and PrayerLife Is Where God Is

All Life Flows from God

Each Morning’s Message

The Spiritual Life as Purification and Transformation

The Interior Castle and Learning Deep Personal Prayer

Part TwoThe Parable of the Hidden TreasureI

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IIISelf-Knowledge