Limerick Diocese - Publications

One of the most striking characteristics of traditional Irish spirituality was the ability to see God in everything, in every activity and experience of life. The context of Ireland today, and of much of western society, could hardly be more different. To recognise the presence of God, to hear God’s voice, to address ourselves to God – in other words, to pray – demands an effort that consciously goes against the grain of a frame of mind that is ‘part of what we are’.

It struck me, when Sister Mary asked me to talk about prayer in today’s culture, that one clear way of approaching the question would be by looking at some of the things that are said about prayer in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a document that was bought on a very large scale, but, I suspect, read on a much more limited scale! Unfortunately, since the section on prayer is at the very end, many people may have given up long before getting that far. But even those who are familiar with what it says, would find it worth coming back to again and again.

First, however, I might begin with a memory I have of Cardinal Basil Hume, who was a great guide in leading people to reflect on the spiritual dimension of life. I was present at a discussion about prayer at which he began by saying: “I have to admit that, when it comes to praying, I am a complete flop!” I have always found that encouraging!

In the section of the Catechism headed “ THE BATTLE OF PRAYER ” lots of us may find an echo of the difficulties we experience in praying in our kind of world. Paragraphs 2726 and 2727 list some misunderstandings about what prayer is, about what it means to be in touch with God. I intend this morning simply to reflect on those two paragraphs, which I hope you will see hold a lot of food for reflection. It is worth asking ourselves if any of it echoes in our hearts. Might the fact that we find ourselves living in a world in which God appears to be silent, be due to the fact that we find ourselves in a world in which we do not know how to listen? People today, Pope John Paul said, are often unable to be silent for fear of meeting themselves, for fear of feeling the emptiness that asks itself about meaning ( JOHN PAUL II, Orientale Lumen, 16 ).

The section begins by saying that, “Some people view prayer as a simple psychological activity, others as an effort of concentration to reach a mental void”. These are not bad things – to be psychologically prepared and to free the mind from the bustle of life. They are, in fact, necessary elements in preparing ourselves to pray. We pray with our whole selves, so a relaxed body, good posture and breathing are very helpful in leading us towards and maintaining a prayerful frame of mind. But relaxation, although it may induce a feeling of peace and wellbeing, is not prayer. It is not in itself a dialogue with God or an experience of God’s presence.

The same can be said about clearing one’s mind – insofar as that is ever possible. An empty mind is not necessarily in touch with the deepest truths; it may just be empty; it may be having a little snooze. In any case, the emptiness which prayer requires does not primarily mean being cut off from the world, from experiences, from joys and anxieties and so one. It means trying to turn from our own selfishness, from putting things or people (and first of all ourselves) in the place of God.

God is certainly to be found in the deepest recesses of our beings where, as Vatican II put it, we are alone with God whose voice echoes in our depths ( VATICAN II, Gaudium et Spes, 16 ). As Saint Augustine says, God “is higher than my highest and more inward than my inmost self”. But there is a danger than I may remain within myself, without touching the questions and the needs and the hopes which point me to the One who fulfils all needs and hopes in a way that it has not entered the human heart to conceive (I Cor 2:9). Prayer is a dialogue not with myself but with the God who is deep within me but who is also higher than my highest self.

The idea of dialogue is important. Prayer is always directed towards “Another”. In our relationship with God, we are not swallowed up; our relationship to God makes us more rather than less ourselves. Two famous Catholic philosophers, Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, who were husband and wife, were at Mass in the university chaplaincy one November day, when the young chaplain spoke about how the dead were ‘absorbed’ into God. Peter said quite loudly, “Did he say absorbed, darling?” She replied, equally loudly, “Yes, darling, I’m afraid he did!” The union with God which the Christ promises us reconciles what a Vatican document on meditation described as “perfect union with the otherness existing between lover and loved, with eternal exchange and eternal dialogue” ( CDF, On some aspects of Christian Meditation, 15 ).

The second point is obvious enough: “Still others”, the Catechism goes on, “reduce prayer to ritual words and postures”. Once again, it is not that words and postures are unimportant. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he responded by teaching them the Our Father. But in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus introduces the Lord’s Prayer by saying “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think they will be heard for their many words” ( Mt 6:7 ).

Obviously the highest form of prayer for us is the liturgy. The Eucharist and the other sacraments are an inseparable combination of words and actions, including postures and symbols and gestures ( 1153-1156 ).

What the Catechism is warning against here, I think, is that the heart of prayer is not words and postures: “The life of prayer is the habit of being in the presence of the thrice-holy God and in communion with him” ( CCC 2565 ). Once again the issue is that the words and gestures and postures can enrich and express prayer, and allow our prayer to ‘take flesh’, but as the Catechism puts it, quoting St John Chrysostom: “It is most important that the heart should be present to him to whom we are speaking in prayer: ‘Whether or not our prayer is heard depends not on the number of words, but on the fervour of our souls’” ( 2700 ).

This is a useful question to ask ourselves. We can be committed to vocal prayers, whether in the liturgy, or in popular devotions like novenas and so on. The challenge to us is to try to ensure that our hearts are present to the thrice-holy God and that the words and activities doe not function instead as distractions from the heart of prayer – “I must keep talking and doing in case I might have to listen”.

The third point made by the Catechism probably moves closer to the core of what I think you wanted to reflect on this morning: “Many Christians unconsciously regard prayer as an occupation that is incompatible withal the other things they have to do: they ‘don’t have the time’”.

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge of finding God in an increasingly secular society. Secularism does not necessarily deny the existence of God. What it does is to try to give God a strictly limited and defined place – “religion is a private affair”. Because that initially sounds reasonable and because we are all aware that church people interfered in political, scientific and academic spheres in ways that would now be recognised as improper, we can feel that it is all we can hope for and is enough to allow us to get on with the religious dimension of our lives.

The problem is that a God who is not the God of the whole universe, of every moment, every place, every situation, every sphere of life, is not God at all. The idea that religion has no place in particular settings, that it can have nothing to say to politics, social life, economics and so on, is not just a compromise with secularism; it is a capitulation. The fallacy in the secularist approach is that, at best, it tries to look on God as simply one among the many demands on our attention, one of the various spheres among which we need to divide our time. But God is not one among the realities we deal with; rather God is the source and foundation of all of them.

Obviously the ways in which religious considerations interact with these spheres must respect the differing convictions of other people, must respect the fact that no reflection on the Gospel will yield a detailed political programme, must respect the autonomous role of governments, must respect the expertise that exists in these various spheres, must respect the fact that it would be wrong to try to impose religious norms on others simply because they are our religious beliefs. But what the believer cannot accept is that there might be a sphere of life which has nothing to do with God.

Secularism, at least in some of its forms, may be willing to accept God, provided God “knows his place”. Prayer is an acknowledgement that the whole universe, and every molecule of it, is God’s place. Therefore prayer is, you might say, counter-cultural. The risen Christ is always with us, drawing all things to himself. The Catechism quotes St John Chrystostom: “It is possible to offer fervent prayer even while walking in public or strolling along or seated in your shop… while buying or selling… or even while cooking” ( 2743 ).

Not only that, the person who prays grows not only in relationship with God, but also with other people. Prayer will affect how he or she sees others and relates to them: “Contemplation must be ecclesial and universal, and it must endeavour to extend to the breadth of God’s plan for the world” ( VON SPEYR, Light and Images, Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 28 ).

God’s revelation has given us, as Pope John Paul has put it, “a new model of the unity of the human race, which must ultimately inspire our solidarity. This supreme model of unity, which is a reflection of the intimate life of God, one God in three Persons, is what we Christians mean by the word ‘communion’” ( JOHN PAUL II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 40 ).

The highest form of religious life, according to Aquinas, is not the active life, nor the contemplative life but the life which combines them – bringing the fruits of contemplation to others: “It is greater to share what is contemplated with others than simply to contemplate” ( AQUINAS, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 188, a. 6c )

This raises an issue that is perhaps at the back of our minds but which we do not advert to. The marvellous advances of science have raised questions which have been very eloquently stated by agnostics or atheists like Richard Dawkins. They suggest that as we understand more and more about things from evolution to meteorology, less and less room is left for God.

We pray for good weather for the Bank Holiday or for some open air event. But we know that no weather forecaster ever comes on the television to say that a rain belt has disappeared without explanation! We are told by various scientists that the existence of the human race is the result of random changes and a process of natural selection. Since this process has been going on for millions of years on millions of planets, it was inevitable that sooner or later it would produce something like us! Therefore, they suggest, God is unnecessary to explain the world as we know it.

In its own way this is the same mistake as the secularist approach that I tried to describe. God is not a force in competition with the laws of creation. It is not the case that the more fully one understands these laws the less one needs God. Rather the more fully we understand God’s creation the more fully we understand the presence of the Creator. No doubt science may some day hope to resolve any of the questions we ask about how the universe ‘works’. These answers will be ‘verifiable by reason and by science’. What it will never be able to answer is why the universe exists, why anything exists and whether it has a meaning and purpose that is greater than we are. There is no experiment by which one could verify the answers to such questions.

Science itself raises questions which it could never fully answer, questions which give rise to prayer: What does it mean to be human? What does suffering mean and how can one make sense of it? What is death and what happens after death? What is the purpose of all our achievements and progress? ( Cf. Gaudium et Spes, 10 ) Every human being is a question to him or herself, and one would look in vain to science for a response. Each of us is, as the philosopher Gabriel Marcel often pointed out, not a problem but a mystery. A mystery is a question which we cannot lay out in front of us and examine because we are part of the question ourselves.

We are certainly part of a culture that ‘overly prizes production and profit’. Contemporary life is full of pressures and full of demands that fill our time. The more labour saving devices we invent the busier we seem to get. It is a world that likes to see results and what they call ‘the bottom line’.

“When self-worth depends on achievement then very few persons are going to spend much time in prayer or contemplation since these are by definition non-utilitarian, pragmatically useless, a waste of time, nothing is accomplished. One of the major reasons why we are not more contemplative, why we do not pray more, and why we do not take time to smell the flowers, is that these activities do not accomplish anything, produce anything, or practically add anything to life. We feel good about ourselves when we are doing useful things. Contemplative activity, by definition, is pragmatically useless” ( ROLHEISER, R., The Shattered Lantern, Hodder and Stoughton, 1994, p, 35 )

This focus on profit and achievement makes it necessary to make a deliberate effort in order to give time and attention to hearing the voice of God. Elijah found that God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but in the still small voice, or what the new RSV calls “a sound of sheer silence” ( I Kings 19:12 ). The sound of silence is an unusual and, for many people, an uncomfortable phenomenon in today’s world.

We are deeply affected by this urge for efficiency. When we take up something to read it, we are inclined to flick through it, disregarding what we already know and picking out the points that are interesting and new. When we bring that kind of approach to bear on reading the Scriptures or the Divine Office, before we realise what we are doing we have registered whole tracts of it as “things we know already”. The fact is that as a friend of mine once said, “Speed reading is a great idea, but only for things that have been speed written.” Some things, like poetry, or a letter from an absent family member, are only read properly when they are savoured. Some events like responding to the needs or hopes of a person who means a lot to you, are only properly experienced with one’s whole heart. A personal encounter, like prayer is not measured in terms of efficiency.

The overemphasis on profit and productivity can translate itself into an attitude to people – those who are active, contributing to the country’s prosperity are valued and those like the old and sick, who are a drain on our resources, are not. One sometimes even sees people, at the end of their lives, referred to as ‘bed blockers’. That leads us back to the realisation that prayer fosters a universal vision which sees every human being as a sharer with us in God’s promise.

In Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul points to the disintegration of values that can be brought about by an overemphasis on profit and productivity, and how that leads to the increasing marginalisation of people who are considered ‘unproductive’. In order to counteract such trends, he points to the need to develop what he calls ‘a contemplative outlook’:

“It is the outlook of those who see life in its deeper meaning, who grasp its utter gratuitousness, its beauty, its invitation to freedom and responsibility. It is the attitude of those who do not presume to take possession of reality but instead accept it as a gift, discovering in all things the reflection of the Creator and seeing in every person the Creator’s living image. This outlook does not give in to discouragement when confronted with those who are sick, suffering, outcast or at death’s door. Instead, in all these situations it feels challenged to find meaning, and precisely in these circumstances it is open to perceiving in the face of every person a call to encounter, dialogue and solidarity” ( JOHN PAUL II, Evangelium Vitae, 83 ).

That call is very significant and it is certainly applicable in Ireland. That means that it is applicable to each of us; our culture is not outside ourselves it is ‘part of what we are’. The trends in Irish society were well summarised by Archbishop Seán Brady earlier this year:

Just observe the level of preoccupation in the lives of those around you, perhaps even in our own lives. We are in real danger of losing our balance. Apart from the occasional upward glance at a Church spire or the jolt from a personal or global catastrophe, we are less inclined to ask eternal questions, to ponder the human, to contemplate the beautiful. And when we lose this capacity, we begin to measure the value of things by their usefulness and expediency rather than by their beauty or their being. Impatience, aggression and isolation begin to displace the culture of civility, courtesy and community. There is ample evidence that this displacement is already underway in Ireland. Yet few of our social commentators, apart from the faith communities, appear to be concerned about analysing the underlying causes of this shift or acknowledging its potentially destructive consequences ( BRADY, S., Address at the Opening of the Irish Inter-Church Meeting, Cork, 5 May 2005 ).

In other words, the call to a deepening of prayer is a personal call to each of us and it is a key to the renewal not only of the Church in Ireland but of our whole society.

Under this heading of profit and productivity, perhaps it is worth reflecting for a moment on prayer of petition. This is an area where we like to think our prayer is productive. Is asking God for something likely to make it happen? As I suggested earlier, modern weather forecasts and studies of natural disasters have raised often unformulated questions in people’s minds as to whether prayer ‘can make any difference’.

The Catechism occasionally has some very striking statements. Two of them are precisely in this context. The first is when it points out that the dialogue of prayer begins with God not us. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us” ( I John 4:10 ). And so the Catechism says: “Whether we realise it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours” ( 2560 ). That means that, even when we ask God for something, we are asking because he has first offered. “Paradoxically”, the Catechism goes on, “our prayer of petition is a response to the plea of the living God… Prayer is the response of faith to the free promise of salvation and also a response of love to the thirst of the only Son of God” ( 2561 ).

The second statement it makes about prayer of petition is even more pointed and challenging:

“In the first place we ought to be astonished by this fact: when we praise God or give him thanks for his benefits in general, we are not particularly concerned whether or not our prayer is acceptable to him. On the other hand, we demand to see the results of our petitions. What is the image of God that motivates our prayer: an instrument to be used? or the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” ( 2736 ).

The first thing that prayer of petition, like all prayer, does is to make us more aware of our relationship to God and it makes us aware of the many ways in which our relationship to God is flawed – perhaps even in the requests we make! So the first petition is a petition for God’s mercy and for appreciation of what Pope John Paul called God’s ‘most stupendous attribute’ (JOHN PAUL II, Dives in Misericordia, 13 ).

The second thing is that the focus of our prayer is the desire and the search for the first petitions of the Our Father – the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, and the doing of his will. The reality is that these are what we are seeking. “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” ( Rom 8:26,27 ).

The third thing is that sharing in God’s love we recognise that all our needs can be brought to that love. It is ourselves and our deepest longings that we bring to God. Those are the longings that God has already promised to answer. All our needs exist only because our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

The model of all prayer is the prayer that Jesus taught, which begins with three petitions welcoming and praising God’s name, kingdom and will (as does our response: “For the kingdom the power and the glory are yours”). We also see it in his prayer in Gethsemane, which it would seem was not answered: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.” But it was in fact answered because he added “Yet, not my will but yours be done” ( Lk 22:42 ).

It follows that any attempt to measure prayer of petition by criteria of efficiency and productivity tries to turn it into a different kind of reality. We always knew that in our hearts. We have all known wives who prayed desperately that their beloved husband would recover from his illness and parents who prayed for their children in illness or in trouble with drugs or other crime. They would probably have said that they were confident that God would never let the worst happen. Yet when it did, their faith was still what sustained them. They did not, when it came to the point, see God as ‘an instrument to be used’ but rather as ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ who died so that we could reach a happiness beyond all our imagining.

What every Christian prayer of petition requests is summed up in the petition “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”:

We ask the Father to unite our will to his Son’s, in order to fulfil his will, his plan of salvation for the life of the world. We are radically incapable of this, but united with Jesus and with the power of his Holy Spirit, we can surrender our will to him and decide to choose what his Son has always chosen: to do what it pleasing to the Father (2825).

If our prayer is resolutely united with that of Jesus, in trust and boldness as children, we obtain all that we ask in his name, even more than any particular thing: the Holy Spirit himself, who contains all gifts (2742).

One can see in modern societies a kind of practical atheism, what a French cardinal a few years ago called a ‘tranquil apostasy’. In other words, people live some or all of their lives “as though God did not exist”. I don’t mean that their lives are malevolent and evil, but simply that the idea that there is anything beyond this life does not impinge on them from one day to the next. If our life is in practice directed towards lesser, created goals, if they are in fact what we live for, how can our prayer be genuinely directed to God? Ronald Rolheiser puts it trenchantly:

The unconscious, and in many cases the conscious, mythology that moves people today is that of success, of moving up the ladder, of being rich, of having a beautiful body, of being well-dressed, of having prestige, of luxuriating in material comfort, of achieving optimally, but in comfort, everything that is potentially obtainable within our limits ( The Shattered Lantern, p. 27 ).

When we stand before reality self-preoccupied we will see precious little of what is actually there to be seen. Moreover, even what we do see will be distorted and shaped by self-interest… When we are excessively preoccupied, we tend to see nothing beyond our own heartaches and problems. Our sense of reality shrinks accordingly and it is not then surprising that we have trouble believing in the reality of God since we have trouble perceiving any reality beyond ourselves ( The Shattered Lantern, pp. 30,31 ).

That is why it is important to recognise that the search for God in my deepest self needs to be a search for God and not just a search for me!

The self-sufficient quest for self-perfection that is implied in this approach is profoundly opposed to the whole thrust of the Gospel, which is to tell us that we cannot save ourselves and that we can only be saved by entrusting ourselves to God’s forgiving love.

An article in Harper’s magazine in the US earlier this year caused a stir by asking how what is perhaps the most professedly Christian nation on earth should have got it so wrong, by thinking that being a Christian is about perfecting ourselves. It claimed that this paradox “ illuminates the hollow at the core of our boastful, careening culture” :

Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up (McKIBBEN, B., ‘The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong’, Harpers, August 2005).

The author is a little unfair in suggesting that this phenomenon is found only in the United States. It is, in fact, that most persistent of heresies – known as Pelagianism – which holds that we can save ourselves by our own efforts. It is a heresy that all of us can find lurking somewhere in our own hearts!

There is an approach to prayer which is little more than an attempt to escape from reality. I suppose that is what we mean when we describe someone – though I’m sure we never would! – as a ‘holy Joe’. There is a danger of a prayer which wrongly detaches us from what we should be involved in, as when someone is so ‘holy’ that their family never sees them.

We live in a world in which the suffering of our fellow human beings is clear to us. There is the ongoing scandal of the developing world. Pope John Paul spoke of the “gigantic remorse caused by the fact that, side by side with wealthy and surfeited people and societies, living in plenty and ruled by consumerism and pleasure, the same human family contains individuals and groups that are suffering from hunger. There are babies dying of hunger under their mothers’ eyes” ( Dives in Misericordia 11 ) .

The same concern was echoed in Pope Benedict’s homily on the day of his solemn inauguration:

“…there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance.

Prayer, in fact, should be the opposite of an escape. I have often been struck by how much in touch contemplative sisters can be with the worries and sufferings of people– and you might easily imagine that they knew nothing of what goes on outside their convent! Prayer expands our recognition of God by seeing him as the God of people whose lives differ enormously from our own, who seem to have little in common with us, whose lives are such that our natural reaction would be disgust and disapproval. We learn to see God as the only one who can reach and vindicate all those whose lives have been brutalised and miserable and who are beyond our reach – as most of those who suffered throughout history are for the very basic reason that they are dead! This can help us to see the limitations of the perspectives and assumptions of our cultural situation. We learn to see God reflected in people of other backgrounds, ‘to see in every person the Creator’s living image’.

Perhaps the only way we have of not letting ourselves be swallowed whole by our culture is to kiss the leper [a reference to the conversion experience of Francis of Assisi], to place our lot with those who have no place within the culture, namely the poor with their many faces: the aged, the sick, the dying, the unborn, the handicapped, the unattractive, the displaced and those who are not valued by the culture. To touch those who have no place within the culture is to give ourselves a perspective beyond the culture” ( The Shattered Lantern , p.27 ).

I might try to sum up what I have been saying with a brief reference to the threefold answer which the Catechism gives to the question “What is Prayer” ( 2559-2565 ).

Prayer is considered first of all, as God’s gift. By revealing himself to human beings, “God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing him and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity” ( 52 ). It begins from God: “God thirsts that we may thirst for him” ( 2560 ). “In prayer, the faithful initiative of God always comes first; our own first step is always a response” ( 2567 ).

It then looks at prayer as covenant. Prayer is a covenant relationship. Under this heading, it stresses particularly the fact that, as it says, “According to the Scripture, it is the heart that prays.” (2562 ). This ties in with what we touched on earlier on about the importance of interiority. The heart, it says, “is the place of covenant”. “The heart is our hidden centre, beyond the grasp of reason and of others… the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives… the place of truth, where we choose life or death… the place of encounter, because as the image of God we live in relation.” ( 2563 ). This is very interesting and crucial. It is about depth and interiority. The absence of depth can be fatal in a secularised world not only in relation to prayer but also in relation to morality. At the core of our beings we respond to God both in prayer and in the way we live.

Finally it says that prayer is communion. There is nothing clearer through the whole treatment of prayer in the Catechism than that prayer is our response to a dialogue initiated by the Trinitarian God: “Prayer is the living relationship of the children of God with their Father who is good beyond measure, with his Son, Jesus Christ and with the Holy Spirit” ( 2656 ).