I was highly edified, not to say tickled pink, when I discovered the first book Benedict XVI turned to in his retirement from the papacy is one by Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Swiss theologian whose work on contemplation, Prayer,  is currently keeping me up late at night reading.

 

Balthasar founded the journal 'Communio' with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and died (in 1988) just a day or so before John Paul II was scheduled to create him a cardinal. Now of course God always knows what's best, but it seems a pity that a theologian celebrated as one whose influence would long outlive his century wasn't in Rome last month. to exercise that influence in the conclave to elect Benedict's successor.

 

As a young Jesuit novice Balthasar reportedly found lectures on Thomas Aquinas so boring, he stuffed his ears so he could read Augustine and the early Church Fathers instead. It wasn't the 'angelic Doctor' he found fault with, it was his professors’ treatment of such an exalted subject as theology.

 

I think I know how he felt, or rather thought, about theologians. Something like the philosopher Maurice Blondel whose 19^th century comment was, ‘as soon as we regard (God) from without, as a mere object of knowledge or a mere occasion for speculative study without freshness of heart and the unrest of love, then all is over, and we have nothing in our hands but a phantom and an idol.’

 

It was as a teenager that I first read these immortal lines of Keats:

 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. - That is all

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

 

Then, in middle age, while reading under a taupata tree on a beach I was handed a book called Fire Within, a treatment of contemplative prayer by famed Marist spiritual director Thomas Dubay, which elaborated on Keats' theme - and Blondel's, and von Balthasar's.

 

Listen to Dubay: ‘One of the most commonly admitted, frequently lamented and rarely corrected defects in current moral theology is its dire lack of a contemplative/mystical dimension.’

One is tempted to draw the conclusion that most theologians, like so many priests,  don’t know how to pray.