In the "New Covenant" made by our Creator God with humanity (Jeremiah 31:31-34) every person can know God from within - because the Holy Spirit is revealing our Creator to all who are willing to know the Lord and trust in Him. We can still help each other along the way; so may you be pleased to find here a variety of helps to the life of faith in God through Jesus Christ. G.S.
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Prayer: from absence to the living presence
Prayer is difficult. Why? It’s that God seems absent.
In a world where one thinks in terms of productivity, efficiency, activity, evidence, there is no room for the invisible and silent God. His immaterial presence cannot be grasped. Christ himself, “God with us”, dead and resurrected, has passed into the world of the invisible and of transcendence. We would want to seize him, to make him ours; he eludes us.
Men struggle and suffer; God seems indifferent and deaf. Besides, God is eternal, non temporal, beyond time. His mystery frightens us; praying seems to us to leave the realm of time, to escape the human condition and a waste of time. So it’s better to act, to run….
Absence of God…. He is absent from your life, from our heart. When we try to pray, we meet no one…. And we walk, sad, along the road, like the pilgrims to Emmaus. Fleeing pilgrims; like them. We flee ourselves; we throw ourselves headlong into activity; which spares us from SITUATING OURSELVES before God, from thinking of our human condition, about what we are, where we come from, where we are going. We flee the Father’s house, like the prodigal son who goes off to spend all he has without knowing why.
But, if God is absent from our heart, it is we who are absent, far from him. For he, like the “Father of the Parable (Luke 15:20), is there and waits for us every day: “I raised and brought up sons, but they rebelled against me.” (Isaiah 1:2). He is always present; and Jesus came to announce to us his presence: “The Kingdom of God is very near.” (Mark 1:15). Kingdom of God means loving presence of God in our midst and within us. But between him and us, there is a wall, a locked door: it is our heart, our heart slow to believe.
God is absent from our heart: and we blind ourselves, either to affirm that it is impossible to approach him, or to affirm that he is already present with us, all with a good conscience which spares us having to convert ourselves. One way like the other, it is impossible for us to pray in truth.
But Christ came for a “judgement”, to make clear what was hidden, unconfessed, “so that the blind may see and so that who see may become blind”. He says to us: “If you had been blind, you would be without sin, but you say “we see”, your sin remains.” (John 9:41-42). And in effect we remain in our sin, in the practical refusal of God in us, and of his Kingdom.
There is a moment where all can change. “Nothing is more intolerable to man than to be in complete rest, without passions, without business, without entertainment, without application. Then he feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his dependence, his powerlessness, his emptiness. Incontinent, he pours out from the depths of his soul anxiety, darkness, sadness, grief, despondency, despair.” (Pascal, Pensées, no. 224).
“All of men’s evils come from a single thing, which is to know not to be at rest in a room.” (Pascal, Pensées, no. 232 a). I must accept to STOP, before my self and the invisible God, and allow what I am to rise to the surface. I must become aware of the absence of God in my heart, and of my sin. Then I become capable of praying.
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At that moment, I am poor, a sinner, a paralytic, a blind person from the Gospel, and I cry: “Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner! If you wish, you can heal me!” Christ came to take that poverty, mine, and with mine, that of all men; for my poor pleading prayer isn’t only mine, it is that of all sinners, which arises within me towards God. It becomes at the same time intercession for all men. And God, apparently absent, is then within me as a call, as a cry. It is the Spirit who cries within me: “Father!” it is Christ on the cross who cries within me: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Mt 27:46)
And so I learn to cry, as the newborn baby learns to use his voice by crying and screaming: his cry calls his mother, and it is in his cry and the presence of his mother bending over him, that he learns that his relationship with her, it is his life. And so it is for us with God. Only, we must accept to “be born anew” (John 3:3), accept to “become again as little children”, and to begin again to live differently, in dependence on the One who gives life. It is the condition for entering into the Kingdom of God (Mathew 18:3).
I well know that certain psychologists will object that this practical faith, so humble, is nothing but an infantile and comforting capitulation… I cannot reply directly to them in the context of this article. However the blind man of Jericho, (Mk 10:47), the publican in the temple (Luke 17:13), the forgiven sinful woman (Luke 7:34), did not ask themselves the question in those terms: the one who is in the night cries toward the one who is in the light, the sinner cries to the Holy One who forgives and purifies, the thief on the cross calls to Jesus for help and dies in the hope of a new life, while his companion dies in despair (Luke 23:42). In a word, faith is a matter of life or death: when we die, we TURN towards the One who IS LIFE, with a foolish hope.
That is why we wait for him, we look for him during the night; we learn with our misery to cry out to him, knowing that the cry of our heart, he hears it before it reaches our lips, but he waits for it before responding, as he waits for our glance which looks for him, our fist which knocks: “Ask, and it will be given to you, seek, and you will find, knock, and it will be opened to you!” (Luke 11:9). And so it is that with all the praying and hoping our heart will open up to God and become prayer. “Find the door of your heart, said Saint John Chrysostom, and you will find the door of the Kingdom.
And so, rather
than always trying to express ourselves, we will come to listen within us to
what he says to us by his revealed word. The silence of his absence will become
the setting for his presence: “We keep quiet before listening, because our
thoughts are already directed towards his message, as a child is quiet before
entering into his father’s room. We keep quiet after having heard the word of
God, because it resounds, lives, and wants to find a home in us. We keep quiet
on rising in the morning and on going to bed at night, because the first and
the last word of the day belong to God.” (Bonhoeffer, “La vie communautaire”, ch. III, p. 78, Ed. du Cerf – « Life
Together » Harper ed. pages may vary).
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Our eyes finally open to a new light, our ears become able to hear his
word: “who is of God hears God’s words” (John 8:47), because we begin to be
reborn in God, “engendered by the word of truth” (James 1:18).
In prayer we will learn to become disciples of the Word. By and by,
through the Word, God will come alive for us in his Christ: it will enlighten
our days; all our relations will be transformed as Christ looks on, living Word
of God, and by the action of his Holy Spirit “who will remind you of all that
he had said” (John 14:26). “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples;
you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32).
But for this, we must, like the Virgin Mary, learn to keep the Word in
the silence of our heart. “That we have to learn to keep quiet, in an age where
we give the greatest importance to chatting, is for each person to discover,
and in this domain, only the spiritual act of silence can bring about a positive
result. Silence observed before hearing the word of God will have its effect on
the whole day. It will teach us to live while weighing our words…. A
Christian’s silence is a silence full of attention, humble, and which because
of its humility, accepts to be interrupted. It is connected to the word. “No
one speaks with greater assurance than the one who can keep quiet. There is in
silence power of clarification, of purification and of understanding what is
essential…. We thus avoid much uselessness. And then it is in few words that we
can utter, at the right moment, the word which matters and helps. (Bonhoeffer, “La vie commun. p.
78-79.)
If we learn to keep quiet to listen to God, we will also learn to listen
to others, and to hear in them what God says to us. We will learn to hear their
calls and their questions, to help them to also listen to his word of mercy and
to rediscover the door of their heart where God dwells.
Thus prayer will by and by bring us from the darkness into the light. It
will take us where we are, as low as we may be, if we recognize ourselves as
sinners. In prayer, the Holy Spirit will make in us “a new heart, a new spirit”
(Ezekiel 36:26), a new sight. We will become those poor in the Gospel to whom
the Kingdom is given who wait to be saved.
Prayer will bring unity to our life: drawing us to God, it will send us
out to men to save them, and in everything and everywhere we will live Christ.
And by and by we will live the Gospel on the street today, as a priest worker
said.
Prayer is a way of life, where we journey day after day, step by step,
wherever we are, in the rhythm and vitality of walking and breathing; on which
path the Eucharist and fraternal communion will give us the strength to
PERSEVERE and to bear fruit, for we walk there with others, with the Church and
all her members, animated by the Spirit “who animates the children of God” and
“who comes to help our weakness” (Romans 8:14, 26).
“Who perseveres to the end will be saved.”
Every day we must have A TIME of silent and solitary prayer, so that all
time may be enlightened and animated by prayer. There needs to be a time of
silent interior prayer, lest we deserve this reproach from the Lord: “This
people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
Solitude in prayer requires that we personalize our prayer; but we must also, often, pray in groups, “in Church”: it is the sign that all prayer – being communion with God – is also communion with all the children of God, and with all men who seek Christ; this prayer in common also realizes and manifests, in a special way, the presence of Christ: “There, where two or three gather in my name, I am there, among them.” (Matthew 18:20).
Hubert de Maigret, moine de Fleury, Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire
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In the "New Covenant" made by our Creator God with humanity (Jeremiah 31:31-34) every person can know God from within - because the Holy Spirit is revealing our Creator to all who are willing to know the Lord and trust in Him. We can still help each other along the way; so may you be pleased to find here a variety of helps to the life of faith in God through Jesus Christ. G.S.
© 2006-2021 All rights reserved Fr. Gilles Surprenant, Associate Priest of Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montreal QC
© 2006-2021 Tous droits réservés Abbé Gilles Surprenant, Prêtre Associé de Madonna House Apostolate & Poustinik, Montréal QC
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