Pope Francis on prayer

From the close of the interview: 

“I pray the breviary every morning. I like to pray with the psalms. Then, later, I celebrate Mass. I pray the Rosary. What I really prefer is adoration in the evening, even when I get distracted and think of other things, or even fall asleep praying. In the evening then, between seven and eight o’clock, I stay in front of the Blessed Sacrament for an hour in adoration. But I pray mentally even when I am waiting at the dentist or at other times of the day.

You cannot bring home the frontier

The Pope on frontiers, also from the interview. This is a good gloss on what I've tried to get at earlier in the Pope's thought as it relates to the periphery (which in his earlier thought he seems to refer to as the frontier). [See the tag periphery below for earlier posts on the topic.]

"When I insist on the frontier, I am referring in a particular way to the need for those who work in the world of culture to be inserted into the context in which they operate and on which they reflect. There is always the lurking danger of living in a laboratory. Ours is not a ‘lab faith,’ but a ‘journey faith,’ a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths. I am afraid of laboratories because in the laboratory you take the problems and then you bring them home to tame them, to paint them artificially, out of their context. You cannot bring home the frontier, but you have to live on the border and be audacious.”

And he links the frontier/periphery, again, with the poor: 

“When it comes to social issues, it is one thing to have a meeting to study the problem of drugs in a slum neighborhood and quite another thing to go there, live there and understand the problem from the inside and study it. There is a brilliant letter by Father Arrupe to the Centers for Social Research and Action on poverty, in which he says clearly that one cannot speak of poverty if one does not experience poverty, with a direct connection to the places in which there is poverty. The word insertion is dangerous because some religious have taken it as a fad, and disasters have occurred because of a lack of discernment. But it is truly important.

Your life story

Here are two excerpts from Pope Francis's recent homilies at Casa Santa Marta.

Jonah. John August Swanson.

1. On Jonah and the good Samaritan: "I ask myself and I ask you : Do you let God write your life story or do you want to write it yourselves? And this tells us about docility: are we obedient to the Word of God? 'Yes, I want to be docile!' But you, do you have ability to listen, to hear it? Do you have the ability to find the Word of God in your every day life, or are your ideas what keep you going? Or do you allow yourself to be surprised by what the Lord has to say to you?"
2. On Martha and Mary: "And we ourselves, when we don't pray, what we're doing is closing the door to the Lord. And not praying is this: closing the door to the Lord, so that He can do nothing. On the other hand, prayer, in the face of a problem, a difficult situation, a calamity, is opening the door to the Lord so that He will come. So that He builds things, He knows to arrange things, to reorganize things. This is what praying is: opening the door to the Lord, so that he can do something. But if we close the door, God can do nothing!"

Who is writing our life story? Who is building our life? Am I, or is God?

Where there is darkness...

We recently celebrated the feast of St. Francis. Below is a prayer attributed to him. The Missionaries of Charity pray it every day after Communion, so it played an important role in Mother Teresa's spirituality. I think that the references to light, peace, love, and joy had a special resonance for Mother Teresa. Jesus told Mother in a locution, "Come, be my light," which is also the title of a book that recounts Mother's dark night of the soul in her own words. In many ways this was her mission, to be Christ's light to the world. The references to peace and love are remembered in Mother's "business card." Of course, these are cursory thoughts; a fuller exposition of the prayer and its role in Mother's spirituality would be a major project in itself! 

Here is a version from the National Shrine of St. Francis in San Francisco: 

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, the truth;
Where there is doubt, the faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. 

Amen. 

What are you doing here?

There is a well-known passage in the First Book of Kings that recounts one of Elijah's encounters with the Lord. Elijah has just called down fire on Mount Carmel and executed the prophets of Baal. He is on the run from King Ahab and his idolatrous wife Jezebel, who are seeking to kill him. Elijah despairs of his life and asks that the Lord end his misery and kill him. He then falls asleep under a broom tree, but is awoken by an angel who provides him two meals of bread and water. Elijah then begins a forty day fast, and sets out on a journey to Mount Horeb (Sinai).


Once Elijah arrives, the Lord instructs him to stand on the mountain, the same mountain on which the Lord descended, accompanied by earthquakes, fire, smoke, and trumpet blasts, to give the law to Moses. But now God acts differently: "A great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, the sound of a low whisper."

The literal Hebrew here is "thin silence."

At this point, Elijah wraps his face in his cloak and stands at the entrance of the cave in which he has been living. God asks, "What are you doing here, Elijah?" Elijah complains of his plight, and God responds by providing a sort of rescue plan for Israel. He instructs Elijah to anoint a new king and a new successor to his own prophetic ministry. This will be the prophet Elisha.

And so begins a new chapter in the history of the Kingdom, that will lead to many more prophets, who will guide Israel through its exile and return, preparing it ultimately for the Messiah, and the fulfillment of the promise that God made to Abraham that all nations be blessed through his offspring. It is one small but indispensable episode in the history of salvation.

***

One could easily write a book on the exegesis and interpretation of this story. I want to make one point, about the necessity of silence. Elijah has apparently suffered a major defeat. He is on the run from a bloodthirsty king and queen. In his own eyes he has failed his mission. He has not brought Israel back to covenant faithfulness with God. He has won the battle with the prophets of Baal, but he has lost the war with King Ahab. In the wilderness, Elijah is perfectly alone. He is in the depths of despair. He asks that God end his life. He is disoriented and lost, to say the least.

And what does he do? He travels to the holy mountain, the fount of inspiration, the place where Israel became a nation by receiving the laws from the hand of God. It is the spiritual birthplace of the people of God, the first stop they make after leaving Egypt, the place of death. What does Elijah expect to find there? We are not told. Perhaps Elijah himself does not know. But he makes the arduous journey, more than 250 miles on foot over treacherous terrain as a fugitive, seeking an answer.

He arrives at Sinai and he experiences a magnificent show of power in the wind, earthquake, and fire, all of which hearken back to the first Sinai theophany to Moses. But God is not in them. God reveals himself in the "thin silence." And from this silence he speaks to Elijah: What are you doing here? Presumably God has not instructed Elijah to come to Sinai. He comes of his own accord.

Perhaps we, too, are looking for great prodigies of God's presence, when he wants instead to reveal himself in silence. Perhaps we, too, are lost and yearning for something, searching for purpose and meaning, but we don't know where to look. Perhaps we don't even know what we are looking for. And as with Elijah, perhaps God will answer our questions with a question. "What are you doing here?"

What am I doing here in this job, this career? What am I doing here in these relationships? What am I doing here on this earth? What is the meaning of this seemingly routine and banal life I live? What is the meaning of the sufferings and difficulties I have encountered, for which I am not responsible?

We seek after the Why. Why am I here? And why am I going where I am going?


These are peripheral questions in more than one way. They are peripheral to the world, insofar as the world does not care to ask or answer these questions. The world does not ask Why, it asks How. How can I gain more wealth? How can I obtain power, pleasure, honor, fame? But these questions are peripheral in a positive sense as well. They are questions that go to the edge of existence, to the limits and bounds of knowledge, to the limits of being and into being itself who is God. To ask these questions and to live the answers is to live a peripheral existence, or what I called in an earlier post an asymptotic existence. It is to live the fullness of the Gospel. And it is joyful.

If we have not asked these questions, we won't have answers to them. And if we don't have answers, there's a good chance that we're wasting the precious little time we have to live. Of course, there are answers to these questions. Answers that give meaning and direction to our lives. God has a plan for us, just as he did for Elijah. And just as his plan for Elijah contributed to a larger plan for Israel, which itself existed for the salvation of the world--so, too, does God have a plan for us, which contributes to the completion of his cosmic design. And without our cooperation, he cannot accomplish that plan of divine beauty. But the first step in all this is to hear the question in the silence. To hear God questioning us.

Elijah does not give an answer to the question God asks. His answer amounts to a complaint that he is alone and has failed, when neither is truly the case. We all face this temptation--not to answer the meaning of our existence, but to complain instead about the discomforts we face. But we must keep returning to these ultimate questions, as Elijah did, and live the answers, as Elijah did.

Above all, we must keep returning to the silence in which these questions surface. Is there silence within us? Can we hear God asking those questions? It is only in the silence that we recognize the shape of our lives and its direction.

Let us ask for the grace of a silent heart. Lord, give me ears to hear!

Mother's business card

The fruit of silence is prayer.

The fruit of prayer is faith.

The fruit of faith is love.

The fruit of love is service.

The fruit of service is peace. 

What is our business? What is our work in this world?

The answer is born from the womb of silence.

A missionary's toolkit

A brilliant talk that every Catholic should hear, from one of the great evangelists of our day. From the excellent website, Word on Fire. If you aren't familiar with it, go check it out!

The speaker is something of a hero of mine, Father Robert Barron, the current rector of Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Many will know him for the Catholicism series that he recently finished. He has been called the hardest working priest in America. I admire him especially for his outstanding ability to build bridges between our culture and Christ. He has an uncanny ability to identify "logoi spermatikoi" (seeds of the Logos) planted throughout the culture. It is our job to cultivate these mustard seeds, knowing always that Christ gives the growth. 

(A) In summary, a new evangelist is: 

1. Prayerful. In love with Christ. 
2. Zealous. On fire in proclaiming Christ. 
3. Scriptural. A good storyteller of salvation history. 
4. Compassionate. Familiar with our culture and its desires. 
5. Studied. Steeped in the riches of the Catholic tradition.
6. Pastoral. A missionary passionate for souls. 
7. Savvy. Adept at communicating via the New Media.

(B) So all begins in prayer, as Mother Teresa was so insistent in reminding us: "The fruit of silence is prayer. The fruit of prayer is faith. The fruit of faith is love. The fruit of love is service. The fruit of service is peace." We cannot be missionaries unless we are first souls of deep prayer, because we cannot give Christ if we do not first possess him in our hearts.

Before we can speak, we must learn deep silence.

Let us resolve to spend some minutes in silent prayer each day.