Characteristics of Prayer
"Leaving prayer aside, the whole spiritual edifice
collapses and a pile of ruins remains, a fine castle but a dilapidated one"
(UPS II, 12). The inescapable necessity
of prayer must urge us on to find out what are its principal characteristics,
so as to live it authentically and not fall short in this essential commitment in
the life of everyone, and in particular in the life of every consecrated
person.
Many characteristics are obvious, but the Word of God suggests
the essentials without which prayer can hardly exist. St. Luke speaks about the
disciples gathered in the Cenacle while awaiting the coming of the Spirit. He
says that "together they devoted themselves to constant prayer. There were
some women in their company and Mary, the Mother of Jesus" (Acts 1,14).
They devoted themselves to constant prayer and they were together. These are
two essential characteristics if our prayer is to be successful:
"unanimity" and "perseverance."
UNANIMITY: Prayer is unanimous when all those praying are in
agreement on asking essential things - in fact the same things. Can we in the
Institute achieve that sort of unanimity?
I think so.
We must first of all pray for greater holiness - what good
is our consecration if it does not lead in that direction?
Next we must pray for more vocations and for the energy to look
for them. What good is our consecration if our numbers are going down? Our
holiness in the Institute is a community holiness, a family holiness, not
something individual only. It is also individual but increases when more people
are brought in to make their contribution of prayer and sacrifice. Our prayer
benefits them, their prayer benefits us.
Next we should pray for all Pauline Family members. For this
purpose the monthly calendar with the names of our deceased is very useful.
Useful also is information on what is happening in other parts of the Family
and what are the directives of the Superior General - these have been published
regularly for several years.
Next we have the common intentions, mostly for the sick, published
each month. Sickness is a great unifier and we seem to have no shortage of it,
so we pray for each other, those listed and those I either don't know about or
who have asked not to be listed. In this same connection come prayers for your
own family members.
The power of our prayer in this sense does not lie in our being
physically together (rather rare in our case) but in being in agreement on the
principal things to ask for. It does not lie so much in repeating the same
formulae (these are important because they are compendium of spiritual experiences,
but we have to make them ours) but in the fact of agreeing to make the same
request.
"Again, I tell you, if two of you join your voices on
earth to pray for anything whatever, it shall be granted to you by my father in
heaven. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am in their
midst"(Mt. 18: 19-20).
Unanimity is far deeper than uniformity. Uniformity means saying
the same things together, giving the same responses, reciting the same prayers.
On the other hand, unanimity requires that deep, heartfelt union, which causes
the request made by one member of the Institute to become everybody's request.
And what one member of the Institute suffers becomes the common suffering. The
Institute thus becomes (or can become) "one heart and one soul" in prayer.
If the Institute practices only uniformity in prayer it:
runs the risk of becoming fossilized as the members live largely by rote. In
fact we cannot limit ourselves to reciting the basic prayers but should vary
them by perhaps omitting some but pondering on what might be the deeper meaning
of others. The prayers are the scaffolding setting us off from all other groups
in the Church but we have to build our own personal "castle" within
that scaffolding! This is an excellent and practical meditation and we should
continue as long as the Master inspires us. Each of us has personal graces and we
are entitled to his assistance when we ask how better could we understand the
Institute and the Pauline Family and how better - perhaps - could we serve
both.
PERSEVERANCE: Perhaps we can best understand the real meaning
of the perseverance the Master invites us to have, if we say what perseverance
is NOT. It is not a pagan perseverance, the multiplication of words for fear
that God will not hear, that He is distracted or is ignoring us. Such a
perseverance, ironically, is founded on lack of trust in God and so misses the
essential condition for entering into God's plans: faith (cf Mt. 6,7).
It is not the perseverance of the priests of Baal who spent the
morning leaping about the altar calling down fire from their God on the victim
being offered (1 Kings, 18,25). They were calling on a non-existent God and
this is a risk we, too, can run when we invoke a "vending-machine"
God or a very distant one. The God of Jesus is completely different. He is a merciful
Father, continually bent over human beings and over their sufferings and needs
and continually ready to forgive.
It is not even the perseverance of the inhabitants of the city
of Bethulia who, besieged by the Syrians, were starving to death. Their
perseverance set certain limits on God and Judith rebuked them, saying:
"It is not for you to make the Lord, our God, give surety for His plans
... we wait for the salvation that comes from Him"(Judith 8, 12-17).
In a word, perseverance is a trust-filled waiting on God’s intervention,
on His freeing or consoling intervention, and so: * It resembles Elijah’s
perseverance on Mt. Horeb. He does not whine to obtain rain (though there had
been a three-year drought), but awaits with faith until the Lord manifests his
will (1 Kings 18: 41-46).
* It is above all the sublime and inimitable perseverance of
Jesus who, in the Garden of Gethsemane repeated "the selfsame words"
(Mt.26,44), so that these words would effectively enter his life and make him
capable not just of "doing" the will of God, but of
"becoming" and "being" the will of God.
~Concord July 2015
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