Making the spiritual ascent into God is rather like trying to run up a downward escalator. The moment you stop moving steadily forwards is the moment when you start moving steadily downward. Going forwards means finding daily time to do what St Peter told his listeners to do when he was the first to announce the good news that God’s love had been unleashed on the first Pentecost Day. He told them to keep turning and opening themselves to God’s love every moment of their lives. Speaking to them in the language they could understand, he used the word “repent”. In Hebrew there is no such word for someone who has repented, but only for someone who is repenting. It is a continuous on-going process that pertains to the very essence of the Christian life. This repenting or turning and opening oneself to receive the love of God has to be learned, and the place where it is learned has traditionally been called prayer. That is why there is nothing more important in our lives than prayer, because without it we cannot receive the only love that can make us sufficiently perfect to enter into the life of the Three in One to which we have been called.
That is why St Teresa of Ávila said there is only one way to perfection and that is to pray and if anyone points in another direction they are deceiving you. There is nothing therefore more important than prayer. When human beings love their love is both physical and spiritual, but as God has no body his love is entirely spiritual. As a mark of respect we have come to call his love the Holy Spirit. As we keep turning and opening ourselves to receive the Holy Spirit in prayer, he continually draws us up like a supernatural magnet into Christ and then, in, with and through him into the life of the Three in One to contemplate and enjoy the Father’s love to all eternity.
Many years ago, I was privileged to attend a retreat given by Cardinal Hume. After agreeing with St Teresa he went on to define exactly what he meant by prayer. He first quoted and then slightly modified the definition given in the penny Catechism. “Prayer”, he said, “is trying to raise the heart and mind to God.” The word he introduced to the old definition was “trying”, to emphasize that the essence of prayer is in the trying.
The quality of our prayer is ultimately determined by the quality of our endeavour. It was for this reason that the great mystic and mother Saint Angela of Foligno said that prayer is the School of Divine Love. In other words, it is the place where we learn how to love God by trying daily to raise our hearts and minds to him. I intend to introduce you to the different means and methods that tradition has given us to help us to keep trying to turn and open our minds and hearts to God in this book, but first let me say this. There are no perfect means to help us keep trying to raise the heart and mind to God, just different means. What helps you at the beginning, may not help you later. What helps you in the morning may not help you in the evening. What helps me, might not help you. Remember the famous words of Dom John Chapman, “Pray as you can and not as you can’t.” The acid test is, does this means of prayer help me to keep trying to raise my heart and mind to God?
One thing I promise will happen when you seriously set aside some daily space and time for prayer. You will find that no matter what means of prayer you choose to use, you will be deluged by distractions. After a few weeks of distractions and temptations buzzing around in the head like a hornets’ nest, many people decide they cannot pray. They then tend to pack up giving a special time for prayer, and only turn to God in extremis when they are in trouble. Here is the secret of prayer that has to be learned from the outset. The very distractions that you think are preventing you from praying are the very means that enable you to pray. That is why St Teresa of Ávila said that you cannot pray without them. Each time you turn away from a distraction to turn back to God, you are in fact performing an act of selflessness; you are saying no to self, and yes to God. If in fifteen minutes you have a hundred distractions, it means that one hundred times you have made one hundred acts of selflessness. Gradually, if you continue to do this day after day, then acts of selflessness lead to a habit of selflessness that helps you to pray better and better.
This is why St Angela of Foligno said that prayer is the School of Love where loving is learned by practising selfless loving. If you have many distractions and you keep turning away from them, then you will accomplish straight As when the examination comes around. If, however, you only have two; one is dreaming about where you are going for your next summer holiday and the next is worrying about how to earn the money to travel there, then that is a different matter. Let us suppose that when you settle down to pray you fall asleep. Is that prayer? No. On the other hand, let us suppose that the moment you are preparing to pray you are swept up into an ecstasy. Is that prayer? No. In the first case you were doing nothing, and in the second case God was doing everything. Strictly speaking you were not praying at all in either case. Prayer is what happens between the sleep and the ecstasy where you are continually trying to raise your heart and mind to God, and in so doing learning how to love in the School of Divine Love.
St Francis of Assisi said that it is in giving that we receive. In other words, as we try to give ourselves to God in prayer he gives himself to us. In our very endeavour to turn away from distractions in order to raise our hearts and minds to God, our endeavour becomes the channel through which our love rises to God and God’s love descends into us. It is only then, as our weak human love is suffused and surcharged by the divine that we can begin to love God like never before. Then we can begin to observe the new commandment that Jesus taught us, which is to love God with our whole heart and mind, with our whole body and soul. At first glance it might be thought that this is not a new commandment, but the old commandment that the Jews in the Old Testament were taught. Yes, it was given to the Jews in the Old Testament, but they could never observe it as God wanted them to until Jesus came to show them how.
When St Peter told the crowd that the love of God promised in the Old Testament was on that very day being unleashed upon all, he told them to repent or to turn and open their hearts and minds to receive it. However, he told them to do something else too. He told them to be baptised, to undergo the new initiation ceremony. This initiation would not so much mark their entrance into a new organisation, institution or religion, but their entrance into a person, the person of Jesus himself now Risen and glorified. So now when they were told to continue repenting, trying to raise their hearts and minds to God, they would do it in Christ. But that is not all, for the same Holy Spirit whom he sent would so enter into their prayer that now they would be able to pray with him, and through him to the Father who had sent him in the first place. The daily battle against distractions now takes on a new meaning, for now it enables us to participate in Christ’s death and Resurrection by daily dying ourselves each time we say “no” to self and “yes” to God. Once prayer is seen in this context then what was originally seen as a pointless activity can be seen as the most important activity that we can ever perform. After all, how can we expect to find that learning the most important thing that any human being can learn is easy, namely loving God, the first of the new commandments that Christ gave us. Learning to love in the School of Divine Love is the most important thing that we can learn, not just for our happiness on earth, but for our ultimate happiness hereafter.
The selflessness learned in prayer helps us outside of prayer too, as the habit of selflessness enables us to love others, our families, our husbands and wives, our children and others, too, who have need of our love. Now we see that the second of the new commandments becomes possible, that we should love others as he loves us. This can only become possible when, as we try to love him in prayer, our endeavour becomes the channel that enables his love to enter into us and into our loving, enabling him to love others through us, as his love gradually begins to suffuse our love with his own.
Eventually, as Christ is born again in us, the love received from him overflows outside the special times set aside for prayer to irrigate everything that we say and do in the rest of our lives. In this way we gradually begin to practise the prayer without ceasing, as every moment of our day becomes the time and place where we try to love God in all we do, and through him those we try to love. The sacrifices involved in doing this become the offerings that we take with us to Mass. This is the moment when, with the rest of the Christian community we offer up to God, in, with and through Christ, all the sacrifices that we have made as we tried to pray without ceasing throughout the previous week. These sacrifices added to the great sacrifice of Christ himself, enable God to fill us with his love in return, for it is indeed in giving that we receive. It is important to emphasize that the capacity to receive his love in return will not just be determined by the quality of the love that we try to generate once we have entered the church, but by the quality of the love that we have generated in the prayers, the good works, and the sacrifices that we have made during the previous week. These are the sacrifices that, when offered at Mass, determine the measure of the love that we will receive in return. It is this love that will enable us to go out and make the rest of our lives into the Mass.
This essay is chapter two of The Primacy of Loving and is published here by gracious permission of the author.
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The featured image is “Sainte Thérèse” (detail) (1827) by François Gérard, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
