"Lord, teach us to pray...." Prayer and Identity

I have always been attracted to the thoughts and writings of Thomas Merton, who began his spiritual life as an Anglo Catholic writer and mystic before turning to Roman Catholicism. A Trappist monk of the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky, he was a poet, social activist, and student of comparative religion. In 1949, Merton was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis. The excerpt below appeared in a March 2009 issue of Cross Currents and is a splendid example of Merton’s views on prayer and the spiritual life.

“We come to prayer with ambiguous hearts, and we have in ourselves the same doubts as other people to some extent. We are not safely walled off from the world in a little religious universe where everything is secure. Our faith is not secure in the modern world, not that the modern world attacks our faith but that we are simply modern people and therefore ambiguous, and therefore, we tend to doubt. We don’t have the simple, direct faith that people of another, less complicated, age were able to have, and we don’t have to have that simple, direct faith. We are bound to have a certain element of doubt in our lives because we are ambiguous people, and it is simplicity to recognize this and not to pretend that we are totally out of it. Of course some are more simple and less complicated than others. You don’t have a duty to be ambiguous. I’m not saying that your whole life has to become that of playing the role of an ambiguous, doubting person; but with the sincerity that we have in our own hearts, we must respond to God in prayer.

“It is God who calls us to prayer. So prayer, first of all, is a response to a call from God, a personal call from God, and I think we should look at it that way even though we don’t feel like praying. Let’s admit that very often we don’t feel like praying and that there are a lot of other things we’d rather do than pray.

…

“Guardini says that if the heart yields to the call, then something happens to it: for the first time appears the genuine center. The genuine center, the counterpart of the divine center that is calling, for the first time awakens – the genuine God-intended self, the real self. So what we are aiming for in prayer – right now I’m talking especially of meditative prayer – is this awakening of a genuine center, an authentic personal center that is the counterpart to the divine center that is calling. They are both within us, and yet we don’t find them by introspection. Introspection is usually not helpful for prayer.

“In this opening up and acceptance of God’s call in our genuine center, our depth, Guardini says, the mystery of that absolute initiative by which God reveals himself gives light, touches the bottom of the heart so effectively that it unbinds itself, opens, and recovers sight and freedom. So, a further development in our life of prayer is this interior opening up, this unbinding of the inner self at the touch of God, to recover sight and above all to recover freedom. (The reference is to Romano Guardini’s Pascal for Our Time)

…

“Of course here we come to the problem of the new consciousness of modern man, which is such a great problem because it is our problem to a great extent. We all have this problem of modern man for whom, as they say, God is dead. Of course that can mean all kinds of things. It may mean just that modern man is unable to conceive God in any way and remains inarticulate before him. [Then there is] the so-called self-withholding of God that somebody has spoken of: that modern man is inevitably in a position where God withholds himself from modern man. But is this true? This is no dogma of faith; this is no axiom. We know that God does not withhold himself; but people who are too influenced by what other people are saying are soon going to be running around saying God is simply inaccessible to any of us: what’s the use of trying to pray, what’s the use of anything like this; we must find God in some totally different way – because he withholds himself we have no access to him, and so forth. This is not true; it just simply is not true, and we as Christians realize that even though we may at times have moments of great dryness and desolation and so forth and so forth, it doesn’t mean a thing. God does not withhold himself from his children. We have received his Spirit; we live in Christ. Does God withhold himself? He gives us the Body and Blood of his Son. What do you mean, withholds himself? We don’t need feelings of consolation to realize that God gives himself.

“To confuse God’s giving of himself with feelings of consolation, that’s –well, it’s an old-time mistake; we know that’s delusive. But we have to realize that God is an infinitely higher reality than we are, and  when a higher reality meets a lower one, Guardini says, this occurs in such a way that the higher reality appears questionable from the point of view of the lower reality, so we instinctively doubt God. It’s understood that we are creatures of doubt, but doubt and faith in a certain way can coexist in the same person – not real theological doubt but questioning, self-questioning above all. We must not confuse our self-questioning with our questioning of God, our self-doubt with our doubt of God. We come to God in prayer with a great deal of doubt of ourselves, a great deal of doubt of our own authenticity, and we should because we’re not totally authentic, but that should not become also a doubt of God.

“Nevertheless, when we do come face to face with him we find that he is questionable from our point of view, until faith breaks through and, by his gift, that question is resolved: not by our figuring, not by our reasoning, not by our reading, and not by somebody else telling us, but simply by God resolving the difficulty.” (Thomas Merton, Prayer and Identity)

Love One Another - Brian