Google, email, smartphones, Facebook, Twitter: look how we humans
communicate now, compared with at the time of Christ. We can contact millions in
an instant. So you’d think the 21st century must also know better
ways of contacting God.
The wish being father to the thought, technology now has
methodology to match. Techniques. Procedures. Mantras. Prayer words. It’s all
about how we pray – isn’t it?
Ah. ‘So are my ways exalted above your ways, and my thoughts
above your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55, 9). It seems to me that it’s more about why we pray and how we live, and Isaiah sheds more light on
contact with God than any current writer. As the Douay’s epigraph to that
chapter puts it, ‘God promises abundance of spiritual graces to the faithful, that
shall believe in Christ out of all nations, and sincerely serve him.’ There you
have it in a nutshell.
Oh, but the Bible’s old hat. Specially the Douay, specially
the Old Testament. Isaiah, for heaven’s sake. Surely we’ve moved
on from there. Well yes, we have – to our great and tragic loss. For all the
thousands, maybe millions of Catholics in the West who since the 1980s have
embraced methodologies oriental as well as occidental, discursive and centering,
what are the fruits? Where are the churches full on Sundays? Where are the weekday
Massgoers, queues at confessionals and large Catholic families? Where are the vocations
to priesthood and religious life?
Someone recently asked me the perennial question, what’s the
difference between meditation and contemplation? I’m no expert, but as well as
praying I can read. Because I want to pray only for God’s sake, to serve God, I
read only Scripture and the saints and writers who accord with both, informing
my conscience with study of Catholic doctrine.
But about a year ago, distracted
by travel and exotic surroundings I forgot my self-imposed rule, and meandering
into the morass of modern spiritual writing found myself, prayer-wise, up a gum
tree. And the reason I climbed down again before too long was, someone was
praying for me.
Meditation is up to us; contemplation is down to God:
essentially, that’s the difference. Although methods can be useful for
meditation as a necessary introduction
to contemplation, that grace is won only by the fruit of such meditation: love of
God proven by doing his will - generously.
And before you say, ‘Oh, no wonder I’m not a contemplative, that’s
okay for priests and nuns but you try doing God’s will when you’ve got what I
have to put up with’, the fact is that God gives or allows whatever you have to
put up with precisely to make you a saint.
Me, a saint? Yes you, a saint. St Paul insists (1 Thes, 4:3);
Vatican II insists (Constitution on
Divine Revelation). And you can’t become a saint without prayer.
In this new year, let’s turn to Dom John Chapman OSB, in Spiritual Letters : ‘The way to pray
well is to pray much’.
