Articles under Contemplative Prayer

The Sorrowful Mysteries are, in many ways, the easiest to pray ‘incarnationally’.  The humanity of Jesus is on full display, and our own experience of suffering typically provokes us to prayer more readily than does joy.  What we find in the pairing of the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries parallels the traditional stages of the interior life, the active or ascetical followed by the contemplative.  We put to death the desires of the flesh in order to rise in a spiritual manner and follow Christ to the Father.

How do we recapitulate the Agony in the Garden?  Clearly, we do this when we are faced with a situation that brings with it fear, an indication that we may anticipate pain of some kind in our future.  So when duty requires us to say difficult things to someone, or to begin a new job outside of our present competence, we are confronted with our human nature wishing that there were some way around these unpleasant experiences.

These situations can be somewhat abnormal, however.  Our Lord’s agony can also be a spur for the small, quotidian sacrifices that discipleship requires.  Not looking with lust or not harboring anger in my heart might not immediately cause me great suffering, in the sense that we think of suffering.  But it does require me to expend effort in a negative way that doesn’t seem to produce much fruit.  It is an inconvenience to be borne, and this bearing of irritations and uncongenial actions is at the heart of the quintessential monastic virtue of patience.  The Latin patior means both ‘to suffer’ and ‘to allow’.  When I take Christ’s instruction to heart literally, I must suffer or allow all kinds of minor discomforts.  Each morning, we should join Christ in the garden seeking that the Father’s will be done in us.  In our small, hidden sufferings, by which we uproot any affection for even venial sin, we will give glory to the Father, and Christ will be more clearly present in us.

In what sense can we recapitulate the institution of the Holy Eucharist, unless it is by accepting daily the death of Christ in our bodies?  There is only one Eucharistic sacrifice:  we do not sacrifice Christ again and again, but our approach to the altar is always to the same Christ, the same Supper.  We experience it differently because we change through time.  For this reason, we must institute the sacrifice each day in our own lives, taking up the cross daily and following Christ to Calvary to offer ourselves in union with Him for the salvation of the world.  When we do this, we receive our resurrected lives back again, at least in promise, in preparation for the full effects of resurrection in the world to come.  But for now, when we re-institute the Eucharistic sacrifice in our lives, we offer to the world a promise greater than any other gift that we might offer.  Indeed, all of our good works in some way must point back to this reality:  we embrace dying in Christ in order to embrace True Life in Christ.  We do not offer simple human camaraderie in our works of mercy.  We must offer our very selves, and in such a way as to offer Christ.

In the Transfigured Lord, we see a glimpse of our own future, in glorified bodies, radiant like the sun.  The illumination we received in baptism, as the counter to the darkening that our minds underwent because of sin, eventually suffuses even the veil of the body itself.  Evagrius writes of seeing the light of one’s own soul, and this imagery is very much alive in Orthodox spirituality.

Such a transformation takes place only after long effort under the influence of grace, the doing of many good works in charity.  But it also presupposes prayer and the renewal of one’s mind.  The whole of the soul must be refashioned according to the model of Christ.  When we put on the mind of Christ and, over all the virtues, put on love, we become transparent bearers of the uncreated light of the indwelling Holy Trinity.

Will we ever strive for such a beautiful gift—such a gift to the world, which longs for beauty and transcendence—if no one ever meditates on our calling to live transfigured lives?  Will we follow Christ to a place to be alone with Him, to be transformed by the light of His face and the sound of His voice?

We certainly need apostles in today’s Church, but what is the Lord Himself actually doing while the Twelve are out preaching?  We are not directly told.  However, in a passage from John’s gospel with many parallels (chh. 15-17), Jesus prays that the Holy Spirit may keep the Apostles in truth.  Rejoicing in the Spirit, He gives thanks to the Father for the mission.  Finally, He prays that all may be one, as He and the Father are one [17: 22].  For this purpose He consecrates Himself by His death, that the Apostles may also be consecrated.

Now, that Jesus may have been praying very much in this vein during the pre-Resurrection mission (surely the model for the post-Pentecost mission!) is confirmed by the following verses in Luke’s gospel.  Upon the return of the seventy, He “rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth…” [10: 21].  This paragraph is known by Biblical scholars as a ‘Johannine logion’, meaning a saying of the Lord’s that sounds like it was transplanted from John’s gospel.  So there is clearly overlap here.

In any case, if we wish to meditate on this mystery in an Incarnational way, we must learn to recapitulate in our own lives the life of Christ.  We must allow for the possibility that our contribution to the Church’s mission might entail the self-immolation that is a life of ceaseless prayer, perhaps even with aspects of the cloister.  Christ is ‘hidden’ during this mission, like St. Thérèse of Lisieux, in order to strengthen the Apostles in a mystical fashion.  We do this when we rejoice in the Holy Spirit, give thanks to the Father, and pray that our leaders in the faith may all be one.

Jesus changes water into wine.  I relate to this mystery primarily as a priest, but I think that the overall lesson applies to all.  Those invited to the wedding of the Lamb come to Mass desiring to celebrate, whether fully conscious of this or not.  But they are often held back by various sufferings, confused thoughts and the like.  “They have no wine!” says Holy Mother Church.  Will I be able to offer the spiritual wine fermented by love and unity with Christ, and by personal experience of prayer?  Will the living water of the Word become the wine (say, in the homily) that gladdens men’s hearts?  Perhaps, if I “do everything that Christ tells me.”

Confirmation, also known as chrismation, deepens the Trinitarian imprint on our new lives.  The Holy Spirit descends upon us, and a more ‘public’ mission is enjoined upon us.  Unfortunately, it is rarely understood today in the light of this commissioning.  It is instead understood as a personal choice and commitment.  But when the Holy Spirit descended on Christ, we read nothing of His personal choice.  We see rather the revelation of Who He truly is, and afterward, He is impelled into the desert by the Holy Spirit.  In the sacraments, we are reborn as the ‘real’ person that God intends us to be.  We certainly can refuse, but just as certainly we are not free to cast about for ideas to create our own identity.  If we are earnest about the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we will find ourselves driven into spiritual combat as Christ was after His reception of the Spirit: a combat from which we are certain to emerge victorious in faith.

The Presentation and Finding of Jesus in the Temple both foreshadow Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection.  Here, after three days in which He is missing, He is found once more ‘in His Father’s house’.  As Christ grows in wisdom and power and transforms us from within, we often experience this as a loss of ourselves; we no longer quite know what to expect of ourselves, where we ought to turn, how we should act in certain situations.  This mystical dying and rising finds its meaning when we find ourselves in God’s house, either in the liturgy of the Church, or in fervent interior prayer.

Inevitably, mission within the Church will require making an offering of ourselves to God.  The Virgin Mary presents the child Jesus in the Temple in order to fulfill the requirement of the Torah that each first-born son must be given to God.  This is a reminder that God spared the first-born of the Israelites, ransoming them from Pharaoh.  In Christ, then, the Church makes each of us an offering to God.  This is perhaps best experienced when the precepts of the Church prove difficult, when fasting or tithing or adhering to moral teachings gives us reasons to ‘go where we do not choose to go’.  This act of faith, the interior oblation of the will, is the ‘obedience and not sacrifice’ that is acceptable to God.

Obviously, Christ’s birth corresponds in one clear way to baptism again; but in the images that I have offered so far, we see that a time comes when we are no longer nourished passively within the Church.  We must venture out into the world, still as children, perhaps, but with an eye toward mission.  As the Father sent Christ into the world, so does Christ send us.  This mission does not mean that we are separated from Christ, but it does mean fully accepting our responsibility for the Church, for spreading the faith and giving witness to God’s love.