Category Archives: Prayer

Encountering Jesus

Prayer, The Life of Jesus

Stunned silence—that is invariably the response when I ask what, at first glance, seems to be a softball for any Christian.  How do you know that Christ died, not just “for us”, but for you?  It is the classic head and heart problem.  The head can answer that Christ died for all of us and that includes me.  But only the heart can echo the confidence of St. Paul “I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me” (Gal 2:20, emphasis added).  All of the Church’s doctrine and dogma is meant to feed the head with truths that are then realized in the heart of the believer.  But it is this very specific truth upon which the entire edifice of faith rests.

When the “Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” time and eternity met.  Everything that the Son of God did during His earthly sojourn does not merely remain the past as a single historical event, but “participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all” (CCC 1085).  Abstractly we can say that this means that the effects of the Cross and Resurrection are felt at all times (even those “prior” to the actual event).  We can move beyond the abstraction if reverse what is being said: at every moment during the Incarnation, all of history was present to the Son.

Sitting with this for a moment, something profoundly personal emerges.  If all moments of time were present to Him, then every moment of my life was present to Him.  In other words, there was not a single moment in time when I was not on Our Lord’s mind.  There was not a single moment of His life that He did not love me, not just affectively, but effectively.  At every moment He was actively working out my salvation for me and winning some very specific grace for me.

Now, I recognize that this may be very difficult to believe, not because it is unbelievable per se but because it is almost too good to be true.  That is why it helps to come at this truth from the darker side first.  Christ took on the burden of our sins during His Agony in the Garden.  The guilt of each and every sin of mankind was laid upon Him so that He could pay the price of our reconciliation.  While He saw each and every act of disobedience, there is a flip side of this as well; a side that Pope Pius XI points out in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart:

“For anyone who has great love of God, if he will look back through the tract of past time may dwell in meditation on Christ, and see Him laboring for man, sorrowing, suffering the greatest hardships, ‘for us men and for our salvation,’ well-nigh worn out with sadness, with anguish, nay ‘bruised for our sins,’ and healing us by His bruises… Now if, because of our sins also which were as yet in the future, but were foreseen, the soul of Christ became sorrowful unto death, it cannot be doubted that then, too, already He derived somewhat of solace from our reparation, which was likewise foreseen, when ‘there appeared to Him an angel from heaven’, in order that His Heart, oppressed with weariness and anguish, might find consolation. And so even now, in a wondrous yet true manner, we can and ought to console that Most Sacred Heart …” (Pope Pius XI, On Reparation to the Sacred Heart, 13).

More on the implications of this in a moment, but it reinforces the truth that what Christ did, He did very specifically for me.  How do I know this?  Because what I do now, effected Him then, both good and bad.  In other words, I know this because I was there with Him.  He willed to do what He did for me.  I can say that Christ would have still done what He did even if I was the only one who needed saving because in a very real sense, I am.  Each and every one of His acts is a personal act done for me.  It is not a single moment or act, but all of His moments and acts.

Conversion of Paul

Profound as this seems, this idea is not something new.  It has been part of the treasury of the Church and is summed up best by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical on the Mystical Body:

“[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love. O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Mystici Corporis Christi, 75).

Certainly our hearts are stirred when we grasp this, but we can realize in our lives in two particular ways.

Once grasped this truth takes flesh in our prayer lives; changing them forever.  St. Ignatius taught his followers to use their imagination in developing a composition of place when meditating on the life of Christ.  The reason why this is such an effective means to entering into dialogue with Our Lord is because we were actually in those places with Our Lord.  It is left to us to discover why Our Lord had us there.  In essence, we enter into those moments with Our Lord and ask Him what He wanted to give to us for our particular situation.  This also explains why when we meditate on the same event in Our Lord’s life at two different times, our experience is vastly different each time.  He didn’t just have a single grace to give us, but a particular grace suited to the very time we would approach Him.  It also keeps us from merely offering exegesis on Scripture during our prayer, but breathing it all in.  We will be exhausted long before we exhaust all that Our Lord willed to give us by His actions.

The second way is particularly appropriate during this Year of Mercy.  In Dives in Misericordia, St. John Paul II says that it is possible for us to show mercy to Jesus Himself.  He is referring not just to the Scriptural Works of Mercy of Matthew 25, but also acts of love that relieve the sufferings of Christ (DM, 8).  This follows directly from Pius XI’s teaching on Reparation to the Sacred Heart quoted above.  The idea of reparation may seem mechanical and cold, but once we look on it as “mercy” on Jesus it becomes a richly personal activity.  Mercy means to take on the misery of your friend as if it is your own.  So, for example when we genuflect before Him in the Tabernacle, we alleviate the pain of the mockery during His Crowning with Thorns.  When we have a bad night’s sleep we can offer it to Him who had nowhere to lie His head.  The instances could be multiplied, but the point is that in “offering it up” we are not mechanically writing in some spiritual ledger but personally entering into the Incarnation.

Pope Francis throughout his pontificate has spoken of the necessity for Christians to foster a “Culture of Encounter” by which we step out of ourselves to encounter other people.  This encounter is founded upon a very real encounter first with Jesus Himself—a response to His encounter with each of us during the Incarnation..

On Petitionary Prayer

Prayer

To the outsider, Christian doctrine gives the appearance of having many contradictions.  A common example concerns the Christian practice of petitionary prayer.  The objection goes something like this, “If God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent, then why would we pray to Him?  If something is good and part of His plan, isn’t He going to do it anyway?  How could a mere creature ‘suggest’ to God what He should do?”  We must admit from the outset that this line of thinking is a slippery slope.  It turns out not to be an argument against prayer per se, but an argument against us doing anything since God will do it anyway.  Nevertheless, the question about petitionary prayer is a good one, especially when asked in a true spirit of inquiry (rather than merely trying to “debunk” Christianity).  Therefore this question deserves a well formulated response.

If we turn to the teachings of Our Lord, the spirit of our interlocutor appears to be something that He had in mind during His preaching.  While giving the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, when addressing petitionary prayer says that “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Mt 6:8).  Despite the knowledge God has of what we need, Jesus still commands His followers to “[A]sk and it will be given to you…If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (Mt 7:7,11).  Based on this, we can conclude definitively that God both knows what we need and that we must ask.  It remains then for us to understand why this might be so.

Jesus Praying

We might begin our inquiry by looking at the principle of causality with respect to God Himself.  Because God is omnipotent, we can say that God is the primary cause of all that is.  This manifests itself through His Providence, that is, He has a plan and the power to carry out His plan in exactly the manner He intends.  Despite this power, He will everywhere throughout creation use secondary causes to bring about the desired effects.  This includes not only using something like the law of gravity to bring about His will, but also the wind or even free will decisions of His creatures.  He might intend to heal someone from illness and rather than miraculously intervening, He uses the skill of a doctor in aiding the body to heal itself.  While we clearly differentiate between the miraculous healing and the natural healing, both have God as their author.  It is only in the miraculous is He also an actor in the drama.  It is also helpful to point out that when there is a “natural” healing of the patient God used not only the doctor but also the body’s natural healing faculties.  Therefore God uses not just single secondary causes but multiple causes to bring about a given effect.

What does this have to do with petitionary prayer?  Prayer simply is another cause in bringing about an effect.  In other words when a given person is sick, God has ordained that the cause of his healing is not just medicine and the body’s natural healing faculties, but prayer as well.  It is those three causes (at least) that bring about the effect.  Each is built into God’s plan as a singular cause and therefore all three are necessary for the healing of the patient.

It is not just the outsider that struggles with seeing the use of petitionary prayer.  Many Christians look upon it as a lower form of prayer and therefore as something to be left behind.  But very often what they are really questioning is the purpose.  There is nothing “spiritual” about setting petitionary prayer aside because you don’t think it works.  No matter what level of prayer you have achieved, petitionary prayer is never something that can be left off.  With growth in the levels of prayer, there will be a corresponding increase in the role petitionary prayer will play.  One of the fruits of mental prayer is to “put on the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16) so that we develop the habit of asking for exactly the right thing at the right time in the right way.  This is why St. James can confidently assert that the “prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much” (James 5:16).

Prayer, even petitionary prayer, is primarily about relationship.  God wants us to ask so that we know where it came from.  He does this not so that we will pat Him on the back, but so that we will concretely experience His love for us.  He wants us to know how much He loves us and there is no better way than for Him to give us something after we ask for it, especially when we ask boldly for things that seem impossible.  Gratitude, while it is directed to God, is primarily for our own benefit.  The more often we are aware of God’s action in our life as an experience of His Fatherly care, the more convinced we are of His love.  If things just appeared without ever being asked for, we would begin to forget about the Giver.  It is not without accident in a culture of such material wealth that petitionary prayer has fallen into disuse.

As a necessary tangent it is worth mentioning that there is nothing noble about not praying for yourself.  It really betrays a hidden sense of pride—“I have everything I need and therefore I will pray for others.”  At the very least, if God really does know what we need before we ask, shouldn’t we ask Him what it is that we really need?  In other words, perhaps our greatest need is to know what we need so that we can ask for it and so that He may give it to us.  We should pray for ourselves because very often what others need more than anything else is that we become holier.

Some of this is also caused by our own thinking that there is a limitation on the number of Divine withdrawals we can make each day.  With this limit in place, we want to make sure others are taken care of.  But we aren’t somehow limited as to the number of things we can ask for.  God is beyond generous and so “we should put all our cares before the Lord” (1 Pt 5:7).

There is also the habit of thinking that we should only pray for those things that we need; for the things we might like or want, we are on our own.  Certainly there is a hierarchy of sorts related to what we should ask God for so that we do not lose sight of the heavenly treasure.  But God wants us to ask for the things we want as well.  He cares about our temporal happiness too, especially when we acknowledge Him as the benefactor.  When Jesus turned the water into wine, it was not based on any absolute need.  Instead He produced a superabundance of 520 liters of wine for a private party to help us to see the depth of His generosity, even of temporal goods.  While this is in no way an endorsement of the “health and wealth Gospel” which creates an unhealthy attachment to temporal goods, material things beyond mere biological needs can be a good.  I can remember a number of years ago one of my sons wanted a pet frog.  I didn’t want him to have a pet frog so I foolishly told him to pray for it.  He did and when we came home there was a huge frog sitting in the driveway.  When he got out of the car, the frog started hopping toward him.  He had a pet frog like he asked and there was no question where it came from—Deo Gratias.

Pascal once said that “God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.”  In other words prayer raises our dignity by allowing us to share in God’s power of being primary cause.  In this way it is our most potent work because by exercising it we are most like God.  God speaks and things happen.  His words are His actions.  So too when we speak in prayer, things happen merely by our words.  We hold great power in our tongues, especially when our prayers are uttered in the name of Jesus.

Living the Mysteries

Incarnation, Prayer, The Life of Jesus

Two weeks after being elected as Pope, St. John Paul II gave the members of the Church a glimpse into one of his secrets to sanctity when he admitted that the “Rosary is my favorite prayer. A marvelous prayer! Marvelous in its simplicity and its depth.”  Its simplicity is marked by its humanity.  Unlike any other method of Christian prayer, it engages the entire person—hands, voice, imagination, memory, intellect and will.  Its depth is unparalleled because of its content—the Mysteries of the Life of Christ offered to us food for contemplation.  As Paul VI said, without contemplation “the Rosary is a body without a soul and its recitation is in danger of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas and of going counter to the warning of Christ: “And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Mt. 6:7)…” (Blessed Paul VI, Marialis Cultus, 47).  Unfortunately, for many of us who pray the Rosary regularly, this danger is ever-present.

Why do we refer to the events in which we contemplate as the Mysteries of the Rosary?  What exactly do we mean when we use the word “Mysteries” when referring to the events in the life of Christ?  Once we are able to grasp the meaning and implications of using this term, the Rosary comes alive and becomes a source of grace in the life of every Christian who prays it.

In his book titled Christ in His Mysteries, Blessed Columba Marmion defines mysteries as “human and visible signs of a divine and hidden reality.”  He uses “mysteries” in the plural to differentiate from the Mystery of the Incarnation as a whole in order to refer to the fact that in Christ’s life there were no mere events or circumstances.  Everything He did and said has eternal significance and dimension.

The truth that everything that the Word Made Flesh did during His earthly sojourn was charged with eternal meaning stems from the very nature of the Incarnation; time and eternity meet in each event in the life of Christ.  He may have been performing the simplest human action but it was always the Eternal, Unchanging God Who did it.  It may have been accomplished at a specific historic moment, but it is an act that reverberates through all times.  This means that although the historical duration of His actions are past, “they still influence us because each of the mysteries brings its own special grace for our salvation” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 165).

Because of this, Blessed Columba says that all of Christ’s mysteries are meant to become our mysteries.  Christ received the fullness of grace in His sacred humanity but it was not for Himself alone.  Instead it is for us—“of His fullness that we have all received grace upon grace”(John 1:16).    What he means is not just that we collectively receive graces from each of His mysteries, but individually.  The Catechism, quoting John Paul II’s Encyclical Redemptor Hominis, says that “All Christ’s riches ‘are for every individual and are everybody’s property” (CCC 521—emphasis added).  This means that I can say not just Christ came for us but echo St. Paul’s conviction that Christ “loved me and gave Himself up for me” Gal 2:20).

Fra Angelico--Crucifixion with Sts Dominic and Thomas

In order to take ownership of what Christ won for me, I have to come to the conviction Christ had me very specifically in mind when each of these events happened.  Cultivating this conviction is the key to applying the events of the Gospel to our lives and to praying the Mysteries of the Rosary well.

This is where it is helpful to look at some of the effects of the Incarnation.  Specifically, how could Jesus, a man in all things but sin, have had me in mind when He did something?  After all, He was, like all of us, constrained by time.  He did not have “time” to think of all people, at all times when He did something.  But this was no mere earthly man, but the “man come down from heaven” (John 6:46) whose soul was united to the Second Person of the Trinity. In Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John’s Gospel, He says that eternal life is that the blessed should know God.  When we speak of the beatific vision, what we mean is eternal union with God.  Christ’s soul had this from the moment of conception because it was more closely united to God than any other soul.  It was united in the Person.  This truth is more than mere theological musing, but has very specific consequences related to our discussion.  In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII says “[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love. O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (75).  I never ceased to leave His mind during His earthly life even as I never cease to leave it today.

This awareness that I was present to Christ when a specific event was occurring changes the very tenor of my prayer.  I am able to enter the event in the manner that He intended and participate it.  I may speak to Him about the specific grace that He won for me and ask Him to prepare me to receive it.  Without this, Christian meditation is always in danger of becoming merely pious sentiments or intellectual investigation instead of a Spirit-driven response to the Word made Flesh.

This is what make the Rosary such a powerful Christian prayer.  By contemplating the Joyful Mysteries, I am able to be present in the “Hidden Years” of Christ’s life when He wins the graces of everyday life for me.  By contemplating the Luminous Mysteries, I am able to be present in those moments when Christ sought to reveal Himself more fully to me.  By contemplating the Sorrowful Mysteries, I am able to be present in those moments of His sufferings offering Him consolation.  By contemplating the Glorious Mysteries, I am able to share now in the personal fruits of the Resurrection and Pentecost with Mary, the Queen Assumed into Heaven.  The point is that the Rosary grows in depth in proportion to our habit of placing ourselves within the specific mystery, knowing we were already there in Christ’s mind and that He has something very specific He intended to give us personally.

Very often art can teach us deep truths in ways that mere words cannot.  It seems that no artist captures this truth regarding our presence with Christ during His life than Blessed Giovanni of Fiesole, better known as Fra Angelico.  In many of his paintings that depict scenes from the life of Christ, he also includes a well-known saint alongside Him to reveal this deep truth.  May we too strive to take our rightful places in the life of Our Lord!