{"id":16857,"date":"2016-08-14T10:45:26","date_gmt":"2016-08-14T14:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/?p=16857"},"modified":"2016-11-21T16:48:45","modified_gmt":"2016-11-21T21:48:45","slug":"reflections-on-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/2016\/08\/14\/reflections-on-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"

The disciples ask our Lord to teach them to pray, and we must do the same. For we do not\u00a0know how to pray -\u00ad and knowing<\/em> that we don\u2019t know, and feeling<\/em> our incapacity, is part of\u00a0what praying involves. If we ever felt that our praying were adequate, or even proficient, it\u00a0would be a sure sign that we had gone astray.<\/p>\n

So when we ask our Lord to teach<\/em> us, we should not think of being shown a skill or\u00a0technique that we can master, in which we can watch ourselves growing and one day\u00a0satisfy ourselves that we have become fluent and accomplished. What we are being taught\u00a0is something we cannot really do, and the fact that we cannot do it is precisely what we are\u00a0meant to learn -\u00ad together with the necessity of carrying on. And in fact not just carrying\u00a0on, but in the midst of being taught our incapacity, we are also taught to be persevering\u00a0and full of confidence: Ask and it will be \u00a0iven to you; seek, and you will find; knock and\u00a0it will be opened to you<\/em>. This perseverance and confidence are not on account of our own\u00a0successes. Indeed, in as much as we are dealing with something we know how to do and to\u00a0achieve, we have no sign or guarantee that we are drawing near to God: our capacities\u00a0may in fact distance<\/em> us, while our incapacities<\/em>, lived out in prayer, can make us close. For\u00a0after all [we] who are evil know how to give good gifts to [our] children<\/em> -\u00ad here our\u00a0proficiency, our know-\u00adhow<\/em>, coheres with estrangement from God, and may even be a root\u00a0of it, since to focus on what we can do means we are still relying on ourselves. But the\u00a0ground of prayer is not our own<\/em> know-\u00adhow, but God\u2019s alone: how much more will the\u00a0heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him<\/em>. In being taught to pray, we\u00a0are learning to unlearn trust in ourselves, and to trust entirely in God. Learning to pray is\u00a0to learn failure at our own hands, and self\u00ad-abandonment into the hands of the Father.<\/p>\n

And even within our distance from God, even in the midst of our sins and imperfections,\u00a0we can give ourselves to Him in this way, we can still pray. In order to pray we do not have\u00a0to be what we are not -\u00ad we can pray exactly as we are, always and everywhere. In the\u00a0parable of the midnight visit of one friend to another, the householder rises up and gives\u00a0to his friend not because he is his friend<\/em>, but because of his importunity<\/em>. At first sight this\u00a0is disconcerting. Responding just because someone is persistent seems less exalted than\u00a0acting out of friendship, so why is this response commended to us? But it is intended to be\u00a0a parable of ourselves and God. God is the householder, and He does not await friendship\u00a0with us \u00ad we could put it by saying that He does not await our being in the<\/em> state of grace<\/em> – \u00adbefore responding to us; for even if we are estranged from Him by sin, still, if we give\u00a0ourselves to asking persistently, He will reach out to us, however ambiguous and divided\u00a0we may seem in our own eyes.<\/p>\n

And indeed when do we not<\/em> seem to ourselves ambiguous and divided? To be placed\u00a0before the Father, to abandon ourselves into His hands, is, precisely in our ambiguity\u00a0and dividedness<\/em>, to become a child. Being a child of the Father does not mean a return to\u00a0some impossible \u00a0nnocence and perfection. On the contrary it means taking our weakness,\u00a0our inabilities, our dependence, entirely for granted, regarding them as so obvious as to\u00a0be beyond question, and at the same time looking away from ourselves, knowing that even\u00a0as we are falling we are being upheld, that even though everything seems impossible,\u00a0unmanageably arduous and beyond us, nonetheless we are safe, if only we will cease\u00a0struggling and hand ourselves over. It is not our<\/em> name that we ask to be hallowed, but the\u00a0Father\u2019s<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In struggling to hallow our own names, to see in ourselves the ideal we aspire to, we cease\u00a0to be a child and treat ourselves as adults, turning inescapably from God to ourselves,\u00a0fascinated by our successes and failures, anxious to see ourselves according to the form\u00a0that we project and desire, and anxious that we cannot in fact find that form reflected\u00a0back at us, agitated that the mirror we hold up to ourselves denies us what we seek. How\u00a0easily the pursuit of salvation declines into this kind of sanctified narcissism.<\/p>\n

And then discouragement is almost inevitable -\u00ad unless it is staved off by rigorous self-deception. Discouragement in prayer, the feeling that we are getting nowhere and that\u00a0everything about it is pointless, is usually rooted in nothing more than vanity<\/em> -\u00ad frustrated<\/em>\u00a0vanity, the inability in prayer to find ourselves as we want ourselves to be. But prayer isn\u2019t\u00a0about finding ourselves, it\u2019s not even about finding God<\/em> -\u00ad it\u2019s about trusting God, handing\u00a0ourselves over<\/em> to Him, not because we can see what He is doing in us, and with us, but\u00a0because we trust that He is<\/em> acting nonetheless, even in our distractions and frustrations,\u00a0despite our helplessness to find reassurance in ourselves, notwithstanding that glance in\u00a0the mirror that always disappoints. We must stop looking in the mirror, stop being guided\u00a0by the image we hope to see reflected back at us, and instead give ourselves to God. When\u00a0we pray, we cast the mirror away from us and say Father<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But of course we can\u2019t<\/em> cast it away -\u00ad not definitively or completely. We cannot stop\u00a0altogether looking at ourselves, being anxious about ourselves. And so in prayer we always\u00a0expose ourselves to the possibility of own resistance, of saying no<\/em> to being a child, or at\u00a0least of feeling the turbulence of our folly, our pretentious adulthood, surging within us,\u00a0threatening to submerge our efforts to give ourselves away. This tension is central to\u00a0prayer, central to the way it draws us from ourselves even as we feel the pull of self-assertion, of attachment to our selves and our projects, to our hopes and our worries. All\u00a0this is what we call distraction<\/em> at prayer, and at least in any long term way it is probably\u00a0ineliminable. Prayer is a matter of having patience<\/em> with our distraction, not indeed of\u00a0giving in to it, but of being assured that, in spite of it, we are being sustained, given our\u00a0daily bread<\/em>, spared irresistible temptation even as temptation swarms within and around\u00a0us, and growing, in spite of everything, according to an often hidden work of purification.\u00a0Prayer trusts and awaits what it cannot necessarily see or feel, even sometimes in the\u00a0midst of seeing and feeling the opposite, experiencing the defeat of its demands and\u00a0expectations \u00ad- seeming to receive the serpent<\/em> rather than the fish<\/em>, the scorpion<\/em> rather than\u00a0the egg<\/em>. And yet God knows what He is about. And so prayer says Thy Kingdom come<\/em>. We\u00a0do not ask to apprehend<\/em> the Kingdom, to witness<\/em> or experience<\/em> it. We ask only that it be –<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0and this asking, this confidence and patient awaiting, in the midst of every obscurity, is\u00a0itself the Kingdom and its coming<\/em>, which is the work of prayer, the giving of ourselves to\u00a0God.<\/p>\n

Finally, we should note that the disciples ask to be taught how to pray after they see Christ\u00a0Himself at prayer; and when He reassures them that the Father knows what they need\u00a0and means to give it to them, He summarizes this promise by speaking of the gift of the\u00a0Holy Spirit. Christ Himself praying, and the promise of the Holy Spirit to those who\u00a0follow Him -\u00ad these two themes, the very beginning and the very end of today\u2019s Gospel,\u00a0frame for us theologically the whole mystery of prayer. For Christ Himself prays to the\u00a0Father in the Holy Spirit, and it is in the Holy Spirit that we ourselves are given a share in\u00a0the relation of the Son to the Father, which means that our<\/em> prayer is ultimately to be\u00a0understood as a sharing in the prayer of Christ Himself. Just as there is only one Sacrifice\u00a0in Christianity -\u00ad the sacrifice of Christ \u00ad- and every other sacrifice is simply a participation\u00a0in it, so there is really only one prayer in Christianity -\u00ad the prayer of Christ to the Father -\u00ad\u00a0and every other prayer is only a participation in this one. So everything that we have said\u00a0about prayer speaks of a mode of our participation in Christ.<\/p>\n

We can think of this from two perspectives: from the point of view of the Old Testament\u00a0and the New. First, from the point of view of the Old Testament, it is one of the oldest\u00a0insights of Christianity that in the psalms we hear, as if veiled, the voice of Christ in\u00a0prayer to His Father. Now if we think of the psalms, and of how often they speak of\u00a0affliction and darkness in our relation to God, and of the temptation even to despair, and\u00a0then consider that this is ultimately Christ speaking in<\/em> us and for<\/em> us -\u00ad then we can see that\u00a0no difficulty in prayer, or in the life of one who prays, is alien to the prayer of Christ, and\u00a0therefore to His companionship and strength in the human struggle to pray.<\/p>\n

In the New Testament, the pattern veiled in the Old Testament is made visible and\u00a0brought to completion. The psalms are brought to consummation in the Paschal Mystery,\u00a0so that the challenge<\/em> of prayer, its difficulty<\/em>, sometimes even its apparent impossibility<\/em>,\u00a0are revealed as dimensions of our participation in the prayer of the Incarnate Word in\u00a0Crucifixion and Resurrection. Now we<\/em> can participate in Him<\/em> only because He<\/em> first\u00a0participated in us<\/em>\u00a0-\u00ad taking to Himself everything that belonged to our condition, including\u00a0all the struggles of prayer, and enacting, in<\/em> them and through<\/em> them, what it means to be a\u00a0child of God. So He inhabits our struggles to pray, and in inhabiting them extends to us\u00a0His capacity, which is otherwise entirely beyond us, to endure them and, through that\u00a0endurance, to bring our prayers to fruition. But just as, in His case, the bearing fruit of His\u00a0prayers to the Father, in the Resurrection, was possible only because there was first the\u00a0Cross, so that the only possibility of prayer for Him, in the end, came down to utter self-abandonment, beyond anything He could see or feel or even articulate -\u00ad so also for us,\u00a0who share in His prayer, our praying will take place inescapably under the sign of the\u00a0Cross, as the condition of any fruitfulness it has for us and for the world. Our incapacity to\u00a0pray, as well as our perseverance and confidence in doing so, is finally revealed as having\u00a0a Christological form, in which we encounter Christ Himself, in His weakness and in His\u00a0strength. For when we pray we are entering, in the Holy Spirit, into the Passion and\u00a0Resurrection of Christ, placed in union with Him before and towards the Father, for the\u00a0sake of the reconciliation and \u00a0consummation of the world. For all our mediocrity and\u00a0insufficiency, nothing less than this is the horizon of our praying.<\/p>\n

By Fr Philip Cleevely, Cong. Orat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The disciples ask our Lord to teach them to pray, and we must do the same. For we do not\u00a0know how to pray -\u00ad and knowing that we don\u2019t know,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/adoration-of-the-shepherds-cropped.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8brX6-4nT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16857"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16857"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16858,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16857\/revisions\/16858"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oratory-toronto.org\/map-year\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}