Many days I look through my old journal–which is mostly a quote journal–to find something to inspire me (or you). Today I did the same with my old posts here, looking for Amy Carmichael. Here’s one: Looking out the window.
Author: Sr. Dorcee, beloved
I am the one whom Jesus loves.
On Corpus Christi, Before the Blessed Sacrament
On Corpus Christi, Before the Blessed Sacrament
You languish in the darkness like
a criminal imprisoned
a sick man quarantined
an eccentric, babbling uncle, hid away.
Are they so afraid of You?
Are we so ashamed of You?
This is Your pageant day!
Where are Your holy calvacades?
Your solemn ranks of soldiers
with their Captain at their head?
Your festal, fair processions
winding through the curious crowds
who marvel at the sacred spectacle?
In the quiet I hear the echoes
from the stones of ancient streets
crying out with praise to shame us
for our silence.
In the blackness I see faces
of a multitude of children
looking down the ages, wondering
to see so plain a feast.
For the glory due Your name,
how long, O Lord,
must You wait?
~Paul Thigpen
False images
What is the greatest obstacle to prayer? In my opinion, it is our ideas of who God is (or isn’t). We so easily limit Him or distort His image. At least, this is one of my primary battles. It is all too easy to impose our own ideas or our own experiences of our earthly fathers upon our image of God. That, in fact, is idolatry. The Catholic Catechism says: “God our Father transcends the categories of the created world. To impose our own ideas in this area ‘upon him’ would be to fabricate idols to adore or pull down. To pray to the Father is to enter into his mystery as he is and as the Son has revealed him to us.” (CCC 2779)
In what ways do you distort God and make Him into your own image?
Hope in the midst of darkness
“And if everyone lit just one little candle . . .” A photo from a recent cancer walk in Canada. A luminary for each family member or friend who had died from cancer, one of our Sister’s mother was represented. She aptly described this photo: “Hope in the midst of darkness.” Her niece, a brave young cancer survivor, walked.
May we each become a luminary, shining with Christ’s presence within us, to this dark world in which we live.
Making helplessness a prayer
Another dip into my journal, regarding prayer:
If prayer is the acknowledgement of one’s own helplessness and the awaiting of everything from God, then prayer is the existential calling of spiritual poverty and inner emptiness of a person so that the Holy Spirit may fill him with His presence and strength. As one’s faith develops, prayer becomes purer and more ardent. (Fr. Tadusz Dajczer, Gift of Faith)
When you face your helplessness today, do your best to stop and make it a prayer, a turning to God in the very midst of your helplessness, and then await everything from God.
“But I do not know how to love the Lord any more!”
Dipping into my past journals, I am finding many quotes on prayer. Here’s one by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene:
It [the soul] should learn to be content to remain in the presence of the Lord, attending to Him simply with a regard full of love. It should remain there to keep Him company, satisfied to speak some words of love to Him from time to time. Little by little it will become accustomed to make its prayer in this way. Then it will become aware of being in contact with Him in a way, in essence, that is better than the former.
“But I do not know how to love the Lord any more!”
Do not believe it! It is true, you do not love more sensibly than you did at first, when your heart was moved at the thought of God’s love for you. But remember that the Love of supernatural charity is not a sensible love, it is a love of the will, which it is not necessary to feel. It consists only in an interior decision of the will, with which the soul gives God preference above all creatures and wants to consecrate itself wholly to His service. This love is there in you, and this is true love, the love that leads to the sense of God.
More than that, St. John of the Cross believes that with the crisis of aridity there begins to be born int he soul that which he calls infused love, that love with which the soul not only thrusts its will towards God, protesting that it wants to love Him, that that happens to be in a certain way secretly drawn to God. In such a state the soul’s love greatly increases and it progresses rapidly in the ways of the spirit. While from one side it is pushed on, for the other side it is drawn, it travels quickly!
“The only way to pray is to pray . . .”
From a letter by Dom Chapman on prayer:
My dear . . .
As to advice, I can only tell you what I think.
I recommend you pray, because it is good for everybody, and our Lord tells us to pray. As to method, do what you can do, and what suits you. It seems obvious that most spiritual reading and meditation fails to help you; and the simplest kind of prayer is the best. So use that.
But prayer, in the sense of union with God, is the most crucifying thing there is. One must do it for God’s sake; but one will not get any satisfaction out of it, in the sense of feeling “I am good at prayer”, “I have an infallible method”. That would be disastrous, since what we want to learn is precisely our own weakness, powerlessness, unworthiness. Nor ought one to expect “a sense of the reality of the supernatural” of which you speak. And one should wish for no prayer, except precisely the prayer that God gives us–probably very distracted and unsatisfactory in every way!
On the other hand, the only way to pray is to pray; and the way to pray well is to pray much. If one has no time for this, then one must at least pray regularly. But the less one prays, the worse it goes. And if circumstances do not permit even regularity, then one must put up with the fact that when one does try to pray, one can’t pray–and our prayer will probably consist of telling this to God.
. . .
Room in this inn
A Sunday-poem from Mother Mary Francis, from a longer poem entitled “The Mysteries of the Rosary”:
XIII. The Descent of the Holy Spirit
Fiat! there’s room in this inn
Of huddled community, Mary,
For you and your telling of Jesus
Over and over again
Until there’s a splitting of heavens
And fire comes and Spirit, and souls
Are drenched with the wine of that Fiat!
That suits men for martyrs. Is there
Space for us, too, in that upper
Room of your love where first Fiat!
Let God be Man, where first Fireing
Of Spirit enkindled Redeemer?
Pray as you can
A brilliant piece of advice from Dom Chapman on prayer:
The rule is simply:–Pray as you can, and do not try to pray as you can’t.
Take yourself as you find yourself, and start from that.
“I have loved thee”
I have been thinking about starting a kind of series for you all: some musings on prayer, some thoughts, some gleanings, probably in random order. I pulled an article out of my files this morning by Jessica Powers, OCD, entitled “Who Hath First Loved Us.” Those five words are the key and the basis for prayer. Prayer is nothing but a response to Him “who hath first loved us.” And so we must start by steeping ourselves in His love, by consciously opening ourselves up to His love, by paying attention to that desire at the core of our being for His love. For that desire is, in and of itself, a response to His love touching our lives. “Quest is the condition of the wayfarer, of the lover. The mind points out the search, and the heart goes seeking; it reaches out toward the lovable known. This is the fundamental attitude of the Christian.”
The condition of search . . . presupposes another condition that the words of the Mystical Doctor [St. John of the Cross] always imply. It is the condition of being sought. God is there in the shadows; He has been seeking the soul, inviting it, calling it to Himself with the cry of infinite and incomprehensible love. He says to ever soul: “I have loved thee by name; thou art Mine.” And this is no sudden movement on the part of God! It is a search that had no beginning. “I have loved thee,” He says, “with an everlasting love.”
Just sit with that last sentence for a minute . . . a long minute . . . and let it speak deeply to your heart. That is prayer.
Witnesses to Hope 