Articles under Contemplative Prayer

We do not often enough consider that in baptism, we have already begun living our resurrected lives.  The Resurrection of Jesus is not merely the first of many, it is the cosmic regeneration itself.  Gradually, from this center and foundation, Christ’s new creation is already growing.  We have been incorporated into Christ and thereby have become co-workers in His new creation.

The first task is for us to live ‘in newness of life’.  We ought to take time each day to reflect on this gift, so as to live as one of the saints already.  We would be so much less likely to forget God, to be at peace with our imperfections and attachments to venial sin, if we truly grasped that we bear the new creation in ourselves.  Its growth into the lives of others and into the cosmos itself depends on our appropriating for ourselves ‘the immeasurable greatness of the power at work in us who believe.’ [Eph. 1:19]

Heaven is not something waiting at the end of our lives as a token reward for having been morally upright.  It is a state of being in the present:  in unity with Christ, together with the saints who already enjoy the vision of God in eternity as members of the one Church.

Being human means dying every day.  We do not easily realize this when we are young.  As our twenties pass into our thirties and forties, however, we begin to discover that we must relinquish a great deal of what we had hoped for in life.  Our early successes fade into the past more and more quickly, and new successes are more difficult to achieve as the years follow relentlessly.

The life of Jesus Christ was, for many of His followers, an immense disappointment.  After the healings, the miracles, the inspiring teachings, how could this young man allow Himself to be brutally tortured and executed?  But the same question can be asked of every human life.  Each one is a kind of miracle; each one holds a particular kind of promise.  And each one is no less mercilessly snuffed out at the end—or so it would seem.

The mystery of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Death shows us the lengths to which God will go in order to give us life.  In solidarity with broken humanity, the immortal Son of God passes from the unrealized possibilities of this present life into the mysterious reality of another life which is accessible only to faith.  He is also the Son of Man, our Brother, and He invites us to make the same act of trust in the Father that He Himself did.

 

It is incumbent upon the Christian to die to the flesh so as to live to the Spirit of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, the practices of mortification represented by the scourging and the crown of thorns are universal obligations that we live out under various aspects, such as fasting, prayer and almsgiving.

But we are also individuals, unique creatures of a loving God Who endowed each of us with a particular dignity.  The negative side to this is that each of us has his or her own particular battle against sin and vice.  When our Lord invites those who follow Him to take up their crosses daily, He is inviting us to embrace our lives as they truly are, not as an abstract exercise in conformity.  This means embracing the particular sufferings that belong to my unique life, rather than blaming others or avoiding responsibility.  It does not mean planning and seeking out special sufferings, as if I knew best what is necessary for my growth in the mystical life.  Sometimes the absence of spectacular suffering is as much a mortification for those who desire holiness as is needed, and, in some cases, it may be more beneficial.  The key is to take up my cross and not someone else’s, to be open to the medicaments prescribed by the Heavenly Physician for my particular maladies, trusting in His love.

If the scourging signifies the mortification of the flesh, the crowning with thorns invites us to the mortification of the spirit.  The Word through Whom all things were created, the rightful King of Israel and, indeed, of all peoples, is mocked as if He were a common criminal.  Sometimes, we, too, feel that our rights have been violated; we feel that the very dignity of our existence has been denied by others.  On those occasions, let us call to mind the various temptations to which our spiritual natures are subject:  vainglory, which is the need for approval and praise (ie, worship!), and pride, which is the illusion of self-sufficiency.  Let us remember that our true dignity comes directly from the love of the Creator.  The ridicule of human beings, no matter how cruel, can never remove it.  But each of us can undermine our dignity by mistaken efforts to usurp our Creator’s role.

As with His Agony in the Garden, there are two situations in which the scourging of Christ is lived out anew in our bodies.  First of all, there are the major illnesses and injuries that eventually find us.  Bodily pain is a genuine test.  At the end of his life when he was suffering greatly from pancreatic cancer, Cardinal Bernadin taught that we should pray well when we are healthy, because it is difficult to pray when we are sick.  So the Passion of Christ can give us strength when it is our turn to suffer bodily pain.

Hearing the late Cardinal’s advice, though, and recognizing that conformity to Christ must be a daily effort, we can say that the scourging at the pillar corresponds to the bodily ascesis that anyone serious about the life of sanctity will need to adopt.  Fasting, eating simple foods, chastising the stirrings of lust, and avoiding addiction to bodily comfort do not normally cost us in suffering what serious illness does.  All the more reason to bear these discomforts willingly, like the athletes who carefully watch what they eat and push their bodies further each day for the sake of an earthly trophy.  When we do this, Christ is present in us, working out our transformation from darkness to light.

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.”