YES YOU, A SAINT (First published in 'NZ Catholic' Jan 26)

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 21^st 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’.