Writings and talks of a general interest
|
|||
To
Learn to Pray or to Learn to Live? by Armand Vellleux[1] As Christians, we belong
to a long spiritual tradition coming from Jesus of Nazareth and
extending its roots beyond him through four thousand years of
religious experience of the people of For this reason, when we
desire to go deeply into the prayer of the great biblical witnesses,
it is well to resituate it within the larger context of the religious
experience of the whole of mankind. And when many Christians nowadays
experience a taste for prayer and desire to learn-or re-learn-to
pray, this phenomenon should be analyzed in relation to the evolution
of the religious sentiment and the relation of that to the experience
of faith in contemporary man and woman. To Learn to Pray Frequently
today one hears various persons who, talking to a spiritual guide,
or coming to the guesthouse of a monastery or a "Center for
Prayer", repeat in their turn the request of the disciples
to Jesus: "Teach us to pray". Such
a thirst for spiritual values is doubtless explained to a large
extent by the profound dissatisfaction engendered by a materialistic
and unidimensional civilization-whether in our western capitalist
societies or in the various socialist regimes which are more
openly atheistic. But is such an explanation alone sufficient?
And is it always an authentic thirst for spiritual values? Many
Christians have long ago abandoned traditional forms of prayer
because they no longer seemed to satisfy their spiritual needs,
and have practically ceased to pray; but now they experience
a malaise, almost a sense of culpability, that they desire to
calm by rediscovering prayer in new forms by means of new methods
or techniques. Others sense, beyond this void, a need and even
a much deeper yearning, and desire to be guided in the ways of
spiritual experience. No matter
how deep this renewal is or is not, it must be seen in relation
to a widespread religious revival, a vast movement of resurgence
of religious sentiment which is not peculiar to Christianity
alone, but which can likewise be seen in the religions of Asia,
in the traditional religions of black Faith and Religion While
it is necessary to avoid separating faith and religion, it is
also important not to confuse them. By faith
I understand the authentic spiritual experience by which
a person makes contact with his or her deepest self, enters into
relation with God who dwells there, and becomes aware of the bonds
which unite oneself to Him, to the rest of humanity and to the
cosmos. Religion is constituted
by the ensemble of traditions, beliefs, rituals and moral laws
which constitute the expression of the collective memory of this
experience of faith, and by which this faith can be maintained,
sustained and in some way relived. A collectivity can also find
in this its identity and its cohesion. Throughout history, each time that a person has had a mystical or spiritual
experience that is more significant for him/herself, he/she has
felt the need to objectify the memory of it in a place, an altar or a
temple, and periodically to relive this experience in various
rites, sacrifices and liturgies. By this religious activity, one
enters into contact with the collective religious substratum which
is expressed in the myths and great archetypes elaborated in the
various religions. However, in our age when we witness a considerable
widening of the field of consciousness in all areas, the collective
power of rites and cults has greatly diminished and we see a loss
of the place of "ritual" and hence of the "religious"
taken in this restricted and specific sense, and a greater importance
given to mystic experience properly so-called. Individuals perceive
much more clearly their personal responsibility for expressing
this experience of faith through their lives rather than through
a ritual activity. The radical lessening of "religious practice"
in the traditional sense in recent decades must perhaps be seen
in relation to this development which is of extremely vast importance,
rather than in relation to some dechristianization or increase
of materialistic atheism. If the evocative force of
collective ritual symbols of the past has become blunted, contemporary
humanity has become more sensitive to the symbolic value (at times
with extreme intensity) of the realities which it lives or which
surround it. The phenomenon of torture, which is present in every
part of the world, has become for contemporary humanity a disturbing
and eloquent symbol of the active presence of the forces of evil
in humanity, much more so than any "liturgical" symbol
which has become obsolete and frequently is incomprehensible apart
from explanations. Are we not presently at an
important turning-point of human history, where the relation between
the experience of faith and its religious expression, as well
as their meeting point, are in the process of being redefined?
This is so not only within Christianity, but in all of the religious
traditions of humanity. And is it not possible that this might
be seen as an authentic realization of an important aspect of
the message of Jesus of Nazareth, even though regrettably late
in coming? And if such is the case, it will obviously be important
to distinguish clearly among the numerous elements of the contemporary
phenomenon of renewal of various forms of prayer that which is
in line with this important evolution and that which is an instinctive
reaction of conservation and self-defence in the face of the truly
agonizing perspectives opened by such an evolution. In our effort to obtain a
better understanding of this contemporary phenomenon in the light
of tradition, let us pause to reflect on the prayer of Jesus of
Nazareth and other witnesses of the spiritual tradition within
which he was born and lived. The Prayer
of the Biblical
Witnesses With
time, every religion runs the risk of exteriorization, formalism
and ritualism. The traditions continue to be repeated, the formulas
are recited, the rites are practiced; but the experience of faith
which served as the origin of the entire religious movement and
gave it its meaning is gradually forgotten or weakened. The People
of Israel did not escape this danger, even though it distinguished
itself from all the other peoples who surrounded it by its experience
of a personal God sharing its life, its wars, its efforts at liberation,
etc. It is for this reason that the great prophets of The
psalms, too, reveal to us a spirituality which is closely connected
with everyday life. If these beautiful formulas of prayer still
continue to be used in our days, after nearly three thousand years,
this cannot be explained merely by the fact of various canonical
prescriptions. There is in them something which is bound to the
very depths of our being for all times and every culture. They
express the full gamut of the religious sentiments which humanity
can experience. Beyond all else, the psahns are the prayer of
human beings living not only in communion with God, but also in
contact with themselves: with their desires, their fears, their
sentiments of hate and love, of vengeance and pardon. If today
we are sometimes ill at case with certain psalms which are called
cursing psalms, to the point of suppressing them in our Christian
prayer or abbreviating them, this is perhaps because we fear being
confronted with the very same sentiments which we bear in the
depths of our own hearts. But if we fail to exorcise these fears
and these passions by allowing them to come to the surface of
our awareness in prayer, they will continue to poison our lives
and that of others as well. In line with the prophets, but going far beyond, Jesus of Nazareth taught
by his life and his preaching that the spiritual experience of
faith must be expressed foremost in a life of respect for the
other, mutual service, justice, love. It would not suffice to
say "Lord, Lord" in order to enter the kingdom of heaven,
but it is necessary to live in poverty and purity of heart. The
hour has come at last when it is no longer a question of offering
God worship either in the While
stemming from the religious tradition of For
thousands of years humanity has succeeded in living, in spite
of the violence which dwells in it, because it had transposed
this violence into rites. Jesus has dismantled this mythic process.
He was not the " innocent victim" accepting to play
the traditional mythological role of the scapegoat. He was a man
who consciously faced his lot, clearly even though sorrowfully
accepting the consequences of his acts and his words. By his violent
death, which was in no way ritual, he referred man to his own
violence, that which he has been bearing within himself from all
times. Those who liquidated Jesus were moved by that fear.
affecting man of all times-confronted without veil or defence
by all of the violence, hate and instinct for destruction that
he carried within his own heart-unable as they were to bear this
demanding confrontation. Jesus
put an end to all sacrificial religion. And it is doubtless one
of the greatest paradoxes of the history of Christianity that
his death was interpreted at a very early date in sacrificial
terms-that which, in the New Testament, was simply a parallel
with the sacrificial world of the Old Covenant being transformed
into theological interpretation. Perhaps we have arrived at last today at the point where this essential
aspect of Jesus' message can be realized and is in the process
of being realized, not only in historical Christianity, but also
within the other great religions of humanity. Thanks to a development
of human consciousness, which doubtless is part of the movement
of humanity towards its pleroma, many things which have been relegated
for centuries to the collective unconscious have risen to the
conscious level, and the great traditional archetypes have lost
their efficacy. At no time can faith evade the test of concrete
life; less than ever can it today take refuge in ritual. Prayer in Spirit and in Truth Jesus
is all prayer, in his very being as in his life, since he is,
in his whole being, relation to the Father, a desire directed
towards the Father. His full being is expressed in its fullness
in the exclamation "Abba, Father". But at the same time,
his being cannot be dissociated from his mission. It is for this
reason that those few prayers which the evangelists place on his
lips are intimately connected with his work of salvation: "I
thank you, Father, for you have hidden these things from the wise
and the great and have revealed them to the little ones..."
"I pray not only for these, but for all those who, due to
their word, believe in me..." The
Jesus in whose name we pray-in whose person we pray-is not merely
a historical personage who lived two thousand years ago. He has
been raised up and transcends all the limits of time and space.
He is present to us to the point of being part of the very structure
of our personal being, since he is the pleroma in which we all
participate. By the fact that he has been given the Name, and
that the fullness of the divinity dwells in him, he is the plenitude
of consciousness, the fullness of the "self". To the
extent that we consciously live, that we are in contact with our
"self", that we are "ourselves" (our deep
and true selves), to that very extent we participate in his being,
we become persons of desire and relation: we become prayer. The
prayer of Jesus in Gethsemani, like that of the psalmist, but
with immensely greater intensity, is that of a man in touch with
himself, with his fear and his distress in the face of the apparent
failure of his mission to mankind, as well as with the sense
of his mission itself. Because he is "in touch" to such
an extent, he can experience these heart-rending realities without
being broken. His prayer is that of a free man. He teaches us
not to objectify our miseries in various scapegoats, but rather
to confront our own miseries, our own failures, our own self-deficiencies. When man existentially makes contact with his wounds and his weaknesses,
the awareness of his needs dawns upon him and spontaneously expresses
itself in a prayer of request and supplication. But underlying
all these needs, there is in him a deeper desire which is a radical
and transcendental aspiration towards Being, Life, Plenitude.
Created in the image of God, and having received within himself
at the time of his creation a seed of divine life, man is born
with an infinite capacity for growth, the possibilities of which
are fully revealed only in Jesus, in whom this seed of divine
life attained its full flowering. In him, the image of God is
perfect; he is so fully man--to the full extent that God has called
man to be--that he is God. If Jesus is fully "prayer"
because he is totally desire
turned towards the Father, our own
life also becomes prayer to the extent that we consciously live
this desire, this aspiration towards Life which constitutes our
very being. This
desire is not something that we have to stir up within ourselves;
it is given to us. It is the groaning of the Spirit of which Paul
speaks in chapter eight of the Epistle to the Romans: "We
do not know how to pray, but the Spirit of God prays within us
with unutterable groanings". And a few verses earlier, Paul
had explained how the Spirit of Jesus is united to our spirit
to express with him one and the same cry: "Abba, Father",
which is simultaneously from ourselves and from him, and by which
we are constituted and proclaimed children of God. Moreover, Paul
connects this "cry" with the groaning of all creation
which is in labor, which groans out in the pains of childbirth,
while awaiting the full revelation of the adoption as children
of God. Therefore, we are all part of that great cosmic prayer
which is totally and substantially expressed in Jesus. This prayer
becomes our own-and we become prayer-to the extent and at those
times when we consciously assume it and express it. But
how are we to express it? It is here that important differences
between the various religious traditions become apparent. In the
face of the mystery of the divinity, the religious person of the
Judeo-Christian tradition easily becomes talkative. That person
tries to speak
of that person's God, even forgetting
rather too easily that all the images used to do this are precisely
only images and that these become idols as soon as one forgets
their relative character. One also tries to express one's self
to one's God, to express to Him one's needs, one's expectations,
one's gratitude, one's adoration, one's love, etc., making use
of the language of gestures as well as that of words. The religious
person of the great traditions of the Far East, particularly those
of The weakening of the great traditional archetypes, along with the crisis
of language which has affected the western cultures for a long
time, is to a large extent at the source of the crisis of prayer
experienced in the West which had known until recently a prayer
that was predominantly ritual and verbal. This very real crisis
should not be minimized, in spite of the presence of an authentic
spiritual thirst and the sometimes spectacular development of
certain forms of prayer. Fortunately,
our period of history is also characterized by the encounter of
the various great religions of the world which had previously
existed in isolation from one another. The fact that the Word
of God became flesh within a particular religious tradition---just
as He became flesh at a particular time and place--does not lessen
in any way the value of the other religious traditions. In our
day, if Christianity wishes to be faithful to the universal design
of Christ Himself, it must know how to integrate the religious
forms of the other spiritual traditions within the expression
of its faith in Christ. In this regard, the Christian West has
a great deal to learn from the mystical traditions of the East,
in order to come to the full flowering of its own mystical roots.
And in fact, to an ever greater extent Christians are drawn to
the prayer of silent adoration. In the
current religious revival, which cannot fail to be a cause for
joy, it is important to distinguish between that which is oriented
toward the future and life, and that which is rooted in the past.
Those forms of spirituality which develop a mystical and contemplative
experience which is bound up with daily life, inseparable from
the human search for psychological growth and affective maturity,
as well as from the struggle for justice, seem to me to constitute
the heart of the Church of the future. As regards the recrudescence
of religious fundamentalism, the forceful return of ritualism
and the development of a verbal prayer appealing to a large extent
to the collective subconscious level, I see in this one of the
last convulsions of a form of religiosity which is in the process
of undergoing a profound transformation. For we are truly at a
turning point of humanity, at the meeting point of two great cycles
of civilization, where the relation between the experience of
faith and its religious expression is in total mutation. Can Prayer be Taught? Many
from the West go to the East or to oriental masters in order to
learn meditation and prayer; many others, as I indicated at the
beginning, remain in the West and go to spiritual guides or various
Centers of Prayer, asking: "Teach me to pray". But can
one teach prayer? If the truest and deepest prayer is the Breath
of the Spirit within the depths of our heart, can one human teach
it to another human? Does a mother teach her child how to breathe? Obviously
one cannot breathe with the same ease in every context. If one
is enclosed in a box which is hermetically sealed, it is not possible
to breathe long. Without going to such an extreme, it is obvious
that any polluted atmosphere makes breathing difficult. Thus,
it is not by giving lessons in proper breathing that one will
protect those who work with asbestos from asbestosis. One sometimes
encounters persons who live in situations which are totally false
or extremely ambigious in their married life, their life in community,
their social life, etc., and who desire to be taught how to pray,
but are not disposed to question their way of life and to re-establish
harmony in it. Prayer is scarcely possible for them, even with
the use of the most sophisticated methods. To learn
to pray?-Perhaps. To learn to live?-Definitely! Much more than
simply learning to pray, it is a question of learning to live
in such a way that our life might be prayer, that it might be
a presence as constant as possible to this thirst for life which
is the breathing of the Spirit of God in us. A life of prayer
is an integral life, a life in which all of the elements form
a harmonious whole, in which one is in harmony with oneself,
with others, with the cosmos, with God. Harmony is prayer. To learn
to live is to learn to grow, and for this to learn to heal one's
wounds and also to learn how to grow old. How can one become a
person of prayer without being in full communion with the movement
of life which bears us progressively and irrevocably towards the
conclusion of our earthly pilgrimage? To learn how to grow old
takes on a special importance in our modern contraceptive society,
which is terribly aging, but where one pretends to remain young
indefinitely, refusing to those who are truly young the support
and contribution of true old age. And what is more beautiful than
an old man or woman whose life has become a prayer? Finally,
to learn to live-and thus to learn to pray-is also to learn to
die, for death is not improvised. And here again, the supreme
lesson comes to us from the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemani and
on the cross. The total giving up of his being in the rending
of a cry: "Into your hands 1 commit my spirit" expresses
his total self as prayer, as total abandon, as absolute and unconditional
self-giving. Beyond all of the ritual offerings and all of the
formulas of giving, our death will be our ultimate prayer. Our
life of each day must be a conscious anticipation of this. Monastery of the Holy Spirit 2625 Highway 212 S. W. Translated by Fr James Conner
Osage Monastery [1]
This article originally appeared in French as
a chapter of a book on prayer today by professors of Scripture
at the University of Montreal and published in 1981 by Les Editions
Paulines of Montreal under the title L Eglise en Prière We are
grateful for the permission to publish it in English, and to
Fr James Conner for translating it far Cistercian Studies. |
|
||