Prayer is the acid test of personal faith. When there is no prayer there is no faith relationship. To pray is to move beyond concepts and propositions into a living relationship with Jesus Christ. But that is difficult because we are enamored with our theological distinctions and the finely tuned formulations of our dogma. Indeed, we are comfortable with a God we have been able to define and describe. He somehow seems under our control and we lull ourselves with the thought that he cannot get out of hand.
Prayer is dialogue. It is the dialogue of faith with a living Being who hears and who is responsive to our cries and petitions. To pray is to believe that there is a God who hears and who cares. Vital prayer is quite different from the normal experience of so many in the church. We seem to be caught in one of two extremes: either making our prayer life a theological process in the head or a folksy chat over the backyard fence. But this is no dialogue with God. It is merely a projection of my own ego onto some imagined cosmic movie screen.
To say that prayer is dialogue is to take both parties in the dialogue with utmost seriousness. It is to know the God of scripture, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ruth, Isaiah. Jeremiah, Mary, John, Paul, and Jesus Christ in the very vortex of one's own being. It is to know that the God of all the Universe is also the God who loves me and has come to dwell with me in Jesus Christ. "Jesus answered him, 'Whoever loves me will obey my message. My Father will love him, and my Father and I will come to him and live with him'" (John 14:23).
To pray is to address God as a living reality, and to come to see myself in the light of his love. One simply cannot pray without taking oneself seriously. I can only have the audacity to address God because I know that I have been addressed first in the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ. God does take me very seriously. God's love in Jesus illumines those parts of my being which are sin and need to be changed. At the same time his love cleanses and renews and gives me the power to live creatively and fruitfully in the gift of the Holy Spirit. Thus the Spirit through the life of prayer empowers me to change what needs to be changed in the light of God's truth, both within myself and in the world. Thomas Merton put it well in No Man Is An Island: "As a man is, so he prays. We make ourselves what we are by the way we address God."
We confess that "Jesus is Lord of All" and then we begin qualifying this by our confusion, our cowardice, and our lack of faith. Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk who died in 1968, has helped me to understand what prayer is all about, and most especially contemplative prayer. Through his own struggle for faith, and the life of prayer which he lived, he has helped me to break out of my own derailed faith and frustration in life. I want to share just a little of the insight of this contemporary spiritual guide.
I can imagine the immediate question of relevancy being raised in your mind. What possible word could a secluded Catholic monk have for prophetic evangelical faith and action in the world? It is difficult for me to explain as well that a Trappist monk should become the spiritual father of one such as myself, born and bred in the midst of Protestant America. But as I have shared my spiritual pilgrimage with others, I find that my own sense of faith obligation to Merton is by no means unique. He was a powerful and lucid voice not only for the contemplative life, but also for the very integrity of a vigorous faith lived out of the life of prayer in the midst of a turbulent world.
In this short essay I would like to share his particular thoughts about contemplation and action. We so often get caught at either one pole or the other, and then a peculiar short-sightedness sets in. Indeed one of the major scandals of the church of our day is the fact that we so easily divide ourselves into so called "Christ filled, praying" churches or "relevant social action" churches. And by this we betray our crucified and risen Lord who was both very much in the world, but yet not of the world. He gave himself in sacrificial love in obedience to his Heavenly Father that he might "proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to set free the oppressed, and announce the year when the Lord will save his people" (Luke 4:18-19). But he knew his Father's will through sustained periods of prayer, and he learned obedience in the wilderness, the natural habitat of contemplatives.
For Merton, contemplative prayer flows quite naturally into action in the world. One is the natural consequence of the other. And there is a necessary dialogue between the two. Indeed each feeds and informs the other.
Action and contemplation now grow together into one life and one unity. They become two aspects of the same thing. Action is charity looking outward to other men, and contemplation is charity drawn inward to its own divine source. Action is the stream, and contemplation is the spring. The spring remains more important than the stream, for the only thing that really matters is for love to spring up inexhaustibly from the infinite abyss of Christ and of God." (No Man Is An Island)
But what then is this "spring" and where can it be located and visited for renewal?
In his last major work, Contemplative Prayer, which was published after his death, Merton gives this simple definition of prayer: "Prayer then means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will and for a capacity to hear and obey him." Prayer implies a growing relationship with God. It is the desire to be in the presence of God and to lift up before him ourselves and others. We concentrate not so much on our needs as on our very beings. Such a life of prayer is fed by consistent meditation on scripture and the ongoing nurturing of corporate worship. But in the deep life of personal prayer our words are not very important at all. Rather the important action on our part is a quiet resting, which becomes faithful listening. Only by this kind of expectant receptivity on our part can we hope to discern his will.
Contemplative prayer is a longing for the very presence of God within us. It is the continuing life of prayer lived out of the "Practice of the Presence" as Brother Lawrence described it in his little classic of the contemplative life. Just as a plant reaches up to the nourishing light of the sun, so we reach out to the life giving presence of God. Contemplative prayer is the desire to hold ourselves in the presence of God wherever we are, to be led continually by his Spirit. Merton addressed himself to the practice of contemplative prayer throughout his writings: "Contemplation is the realization of God in our life,...the realization that we belong totally to him and he has given himself totally to us" ("Community, Politics and Contemplation," Sisters Today, XLII). And again: "Contemplation is the awareness and realization, even in some sense experience, of what each Christian obscurely believes: 'It is no longer I that live but Christ lives in me'" (New Seeds of Contemplation).
Contemplation is at times simply resting quietly with God. At other times it is suffering and struggling in his seeming awful silence. It is seeing ourselves bathed in his truth and his love and realizing that much needs to be changed. It is receiving a new vision of hope for the future in his love. Contemplation is the joy of seeing the world bathed in God's light, and in knowing that he seeks my good. It is knowing through and through that I am a loved child of God.
Where does this meeting with God take place? Must we be in a cathedral or on the top of a mountain? No, it can take place anywhere, because it takes place within us at the very center of our being. This is a recurrent theme in all of the great spiritual masters of the Church. The desert fathers spoke of the "Cave of the Heart," St. Teresa wrote of the "Interior Castle," Brother Lawrence of the "Oratory of the Heart." St. Paul writes in Romans 12:2, "Do not conform outwardly to the standards of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God -- what is good, and is pleasing to him, and is perfect." This communion with the living God in the "inner place of meeting" can take place in the center of the most congested city. We have but to be quiet and listen and respond in faith. It can happen in your own room before you go to sleep or when you get up in the morning.
In the work of this inner transformation wrought by God's Spirit, we come face to face with our own worst sin and alienation. And in dealing with the dread of who we really are, in the humbling realization of the lie that we are living, we are able to discern our true identity in the love and mercy of God. In a taped conference on prayer, Merton said: "Who am I? My deepest realization of who I am is -- I am one loved by Christ. ... The depths of my identity is in the center of my being where I am known by God." If we choose to lay hold of our true identity in Christ, then we engage with him in the exciting work of the creation of our own lives. "Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny" (New Seeds of Contemplation). It is crucial to note that this is not our own work. In contemplative prayer we join with God in working out our own salvation with "fear and trembling."
Divine love is the power source of our prayer life. It is also the reality of any valid Christian action. We grow in self-knowledge in God's love, and we are given the capacity to love all others whom God also loves in the same way. Merton is clear in his own mind that for an incarnational faith, this means all women and men. For him, the key to any kind of action in the world is the knowledge of my own identity in Christ, and the overflowing of this divine love into all parts of creation. Without this divine love, the Christian is just like anyone else.
The real purpose of prayer (in the fully personal sense as well as in the Christian assembly) is the deepening of personal realization in Jove, the awareness of God ... He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressivity, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means. (Contemplation in a World of Action)
These are harsh words and I fear they touch most of us in the church. In so many ways we have sought after the knowledge and techniques of the world in order to somehow "fit in" with contemporary society, and we have lost our spiritual souls. This is not to say that there has not been the desire to be more effective. But we have gone running after new skills and techniques at the expense of our own unique source of power. How many times have we looked at our date-books, and shaken our heads, and said with a smile, "But I simply do not have time for an hour or a half-hour of prayer and meditation each day." And so we continue to build buildings, wave our Bibles, and issue statements in a fitful attempt to justify ourselves. I suspect that all too many are precisely running away from that fear that they really do not have anything to give to others.
There is so much more to be said about this remarkable man of prayer. We have not even touched on his outspoken writings in the 1960s on racism, violence, nuclear disarmament, and the Vietnam War. For him to be silent would be to "enjoy the carrion comfort of acceptance in a society of the deluded by becoming a false prophet and participating in their delusions"; and so he spoke out where "Bishops" feared to tread. He was silenced for a period by his superiors. But he weathered that storm, and after Vatican II his voice was heard strong and clear once again. For him the whole rationale of Christian involvement was very clear and simple. He wrote these words back before 1960:
Love is the key to the meaning of life. It is at the same time transformation in Christ and the discovery of Christ. As we grow in love and in unity with those who are loved by Christ (that is to say, all men) we become more and more capable of apprehending and obscurely grasping something of the tremendous reality of Christ in the world, Christ in ourselves, and Christ in our fellow man. (Disputed Questions)
No man, woman or child could be ignored or mistreated because Christ was with them and in them. The writings of this secluded monk in the 1960s troubled and changed the minds of countless Americans.
Merton has spoken an important word to us about Christian prayer and action. We owe our allegiance to another Kingdom which is at fundamental variance with the "principalities and powers" of the world. It is not always easy to thread our way through the intricate webs of influence and power in the world. In the life of prayer we are in continuing dialogue with the one who alone can recall us to whom we are and Whose we are. The contemplative is the one who knows the sure source of power in divine love; a love which transforms us and leads us to love and serve the Christ in others. Without the life of prayer we are a people of no vision and no power.
In his last days Thomas Merton gave a conference on prayer in Darjeeling, India. This is a part of what he said:
Prayer is not so much something we do. but an expression of who we are. Our very being expresses itself with prayer because prayer flaws from our relationship to God and other people. A person can be a living prayer without ever saying a formal prayer. This whole life of prayer relates to God within us. Prayer comes from a deep sense of our incompleteness. The very nature of our being as creatures implies this sense of a need to be completed by Him from whom we come. To cultivate a life of prayer is to cultivate this sense of our relationship with God, the sense of being totally suspended from the loving grace of God, a realization of God's alliance with us. Prayer leads to a desire that His will be completely fulfilled in us, so that the essence of Christian prayer comes to be, "Thy Will be done--Thy Kingdom come.'' Our Christian life of prayer is centered toward the fulfillment of God's will, not only my good, but the good of all creatures. That is what God wants and plans, and has promised. So, as we go on in a life of prayer, we progress from a sense of incompleteness and loneliness to a sense of fulfillment and confidence, not based on anything in myself, but Jesus Christ, risen, in whom God's promises are fulfilled and for whose manifestation we are waiting.
Conrad Hoover was director of Dayspring Retreat Farm of the Church of the Saviour in Germantown, Maryland, when this article appeared.
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