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| John Cassian |
I never got to post yesterday as we had
an internet outage but want to build a bit on the previous day’s post and the
importance of contemplative prayer in a genuinely evangelical Catholicism. Contemplative prayer is deeply rooted in the
Word of God: it takes the Word of God and “digests” it our lives in such a way
that the Word transforms us, we become living extensions of that Word. Perhaps better said, we are transformed—very
gradually and over the period of our lives—into an embodiment of the Word. This is why, I believe, Karl Rahner said that
the Christian of the future—of evangelical Catholicism—must be a mystic if he is to be at all faithful to
the Gospel of Christ in a post-Christian world.
It is only by this transformation, by allowing the Word of God to
transform us into its incarnation, that we can stay on the track of the life of
discipleship.
When I say that contemplative prayer
takes the Word of God and “digests” it into our lives, I am referring back again to John Cassian, the late
fourth-early fifth century monastic writer to whom we owe so much for the
foundations of Christian spirituality.
Cassian compares the role of the Word of God to the cud a cow
chews. The cow chews the cud and
swallows it into the first of her four stomachs. She then regurgitates it and chews it again
before swallowing it into the second of her stomachs—and so on until the cud is
completely digested. Cassian says that
we should take the Word of God—and, obviously in a “bite-sized” piece which we
can digest, not an entire chapter or so—“chew” on it by meditation. We then swallow it only to bring it up and
chew on it for further enlightenment. We
repeat this process with the same morsel of Scripture until we have sucked out
all the nourishment it has at that time to give us. As we move from one “stomach” to the next in
the digestive process—we move from hearing the Word to understanding the Word
to embracing the Word in our particular situation to letting the Word shape our
will to bring it into conformity with God’s Word.
Do you pray like this—chewing the Word
over and over, sucking out its nourishing juices until you not only understand
what God expects of you but you develop a passion for it? It is a long way from a string of “Hail Mary,
full of grace,….” Not that there is
anything wrong with the Hail Mary or other fixed prayers—but for so many people
they never grow beyond the initial stages of prayer and mature into an adult
spirituality.
Most of us begin to pray as small
children by learning rote prayers. “In
the Name of the Father….” Rote prayers
are fine, especially for small children.
Even as adults there are times when the best we can do is to go back to
them. We might be upset or worried; we
might be exhausted; we might be dispirited.
The rote prayers of our childhood are a good comfort to us and are
always still pleasing to God. But God
does want more for us.
Perhaps the next level of learning to
pray for most of us is the liturgy. It
is a good step up from the rote prayers.
Our parents bring us to Mass. We
learn the (rote) prayers of the Mass. We
also learn, over time, to listen to the Word in Scripture and to the Prayers
which the Priest says on our behalf.
This expands our horizons of prayer.
Learning to pray the liturgy is a life-long process. If we are attentive in the Liturgy we never
tire of it and find in it unlimited and rich sources for our private
prayer. There are those, however, for whom the Liturgy
remains always and only text: words to be said and things to be done. That is not a problem limited to
Christianity. The Dalai Lama speaks of Buddhist
monks for whom the depths of prayer are lost in the tasks of polishing of the
bowls on the altar and trimming the butter-lamps that burn before the Buddha. The words of the sacred texts they chant as
they go about their liturgies are simply syllables that never pierce their
understanding. Last Sunday’s Gospel
spoke to that as well—those who hear but do not listen or understand lest they
be converted and be healed. There are
plenty of people who sit in Church Sunday after Sunday, or even day after day,
and neither listen nor understand.
This brings up the whole issue of
“checklist prayer.” I see this level of
piety all the time. I have my packet of
novenas and I arrive at Church forty-five minutes before Mass. I work my way through the novenas, make the
Stations of the Cross, join in the rosary before Mass, Mass and Communion, say
my thanksgiving and go about my day, work accomplished. Prayer is something we “do.” There are a lot of people stuck at this
level.
Somewhere along the line, sometimes even
as children, we learn, in the words of Teresa of Avila, that prayer is a “conversation
between friends.” And so we learn to
talk with God in our own words. We add
this conversational prayer to the rote prayers and to the liturgy and that is
appropriate. We learn to just speak to
God as we would speak to the person next to us.
Some people use more formal language, perhaps—“thee” and “thou” and even
a “shouldest” or two. We don’t need to
of course, but for some people God is King and for others he is “Father,” or in
the case of Jesus, “friend” or “brother.”
Now, my experience is that this is about as far as most people go. And that is too bad because it brings us to
the brink of a spiritual breakthrough if we will only keep going.
Prayer up to this point is all about what
we
are doing. It is “piety.” The word “piety” comes from the Latin pietas which is a word used to describe
the duties one owes ones parents, one’s mentors, elders, and one’s gods. Piety is a religious experience in which the
individual is pro-active, performing deeds directed towards initiating and
maintaining a relationship with God and which conform to the individual’s
understanding of (Christian) doctrine. Piety is good, but it is not enough to sustain
us in a life of discipleship.
Spirituality, on the other hand, is a relationship with God, at the
invitation of God and maintained by grace and the individual’s response to
grace, made possible by doctrine but not determined by it, and which sometimes transcends
the existing limitations of doctrine. Piety is something the burden of which falls
on us—we “do” it. It is essentially
active prayer. But when we learn to move
into an attentive listening to God with the heart, we move into contemplative
prayer. By attentive listening to God
with the heart, I mean this process of Lectio
Divina described by Cassian as
nourishing ourselves deeply with God’s Word.
In piety we perform our duties toward
God. We make our visits to Christ in the
Blessed Sacrament. We say our rosaries.
We do our bible studies. We go and feed
the poor for Jesus’ sake. And we don’t
give up piety as we mature into a deeper spirituality. The forms our piety might take will change
perhaps. We might find ourselves going
to prayer meetings when we used to go to Legion of Mary meetings. We might find that we prefer icons over
statutes for our personal devotions or even that we “get more” from the Divine
Liturgy in the Byzantine Rite than the Roman Rite Mass. We might find that a good devotion for First
Friday is working the Food Pantry or that helping at a shelter for unwed
mothers is a way that helps us honor Our Lady.
The forms it takes might change, but the need for piety always
remains. Avoid extremes. The person who likes to prostrate on the
floor before the Blessed Sacrament, unless the church is empty, needs to
remember not to perform deeds for other people to see. It is more important to bend our hearts than
our knees when we come to receive the Eucharist. Things that call attention to
ourselves—eccentricities in dress, in speech, or in action are not indications
of genuine piety but almost always a spiritual exhibitionism. Jesus didn’t have a lot of use for that with
the tassels and the front row in the synagogues.
More important is learning to take that
Word of God and make it our spiritual nourishment, listening attentively in
silence and solitude to the Word and entering deeply into the Mysteries of
God’s Kingdom that it holds. I don’t
find this in Weigel’s book. I don’t
think he is familiar with the spiritual life.
Piety—for sure. But the Christian
of the future must be a mystic if he is to be faithful in the post-Christian
world.
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