Loving A Hidden God
BRAVE PRAYER
O God, everything good comes to me from you and you stand ready to protect me in my times of trouble. I therefore offer you this prayer. First of all, I ask for the power to pray. If you ever left me I would just be lost, but I know that you are too good to let that happen. You are too good to allow anyone to be lost who is really trying to find you. You would work it out someway that they would find you. Indeed, you are so good that I know that you will give me the power to try and find you. Keep me from making the mistake of attaching myself to anything except you. Wash me free of all my silly earthy desires so that I may be clear-eyed enough to see you.
Soliloquies, 1.6
Up to this point in our journey towards loving the hidden God, all of our reflection has been directed towards what has been happening inside us: our darkness, our listening, our growing knowledge, our bravery. Now we must turn our attention to what is beyond us. Now we must get out of ourselves through prayer, reaching out to someone beyond ourselves for the strength, the fortitude to continue our quest. It is a natural progression. Sooner or later sensible human beings confronting the disorder in life both inside and outside themselves, begin to realize that they need someone's help to survive. It is then that they may reach out in prayer to a God believed in but not yet seen.
It is appropriate that Augustine introduces prayer at this stage of our voyage towards the vision of God. We now realize that we need to be strong in the face of the contingency of life, where so many things can go wrong in the world around us and in that mysterious world inside us. Coming to know the flawed reality of life and beginning our first steps to deal with it we reach out and pray for the strength to endure. Our prayer must be a brave prayer because we must continue to pray even though the God we pray to is still unseen. We need the strength to be able to bravely pray and hope even when we are crushed by tragedy. The death of our child, the departure of our loved one, that "pink slip" which announces the end of our life-time career, all such crushing blows impel us to reach out for someone to hold us tightly and take us into our unknown future ahead.
It is good that prayer does not demand that we "feel good" because often our most fervent prayers are offered when we feel bad. It is also good that it does not depend on fine words because often in the midst of our distress we are mute in body and spirit. Of course we may pray at times of ecstasy too (infrequent as they may be) and sometimes we may pray with flourish, but that does not make our prayer a good prayer. It is our desire for God, perhaps for a God who seems far distant and hidden, that makes our prayer good. As Augustine remarks:
The desire of your heart is itself your prayer. If your desire is constant, so too is your prayer. Whatever else you may be doing, if you but fix your desire on the heavenly rest promised by God, your prayer will be ceaseless.
Commentary on Psalm 37, 13-14.
If we pray with many words but no desire, we are mute as far as God is concerned. (Commentary on Psalm 86, 1) As our mouths are to the ears of men, so are our hearts to the ears of God. As a result many will be heard in their silence while others are ignored despite their loud chatter. (Commentary on Psalm 119, 9) The desire for God that prompts our prayer is expressed more powerfully by the way we live than by the noises we make. As Augustine says:
God has greater regard for how you live than how you sound. No matter how grandly you call out to God, you blaspheme him if the manner of your living is contrary to his will, if (for example) you deceive another in a business deal or if you eat and drink too much.
Commentary on Psalm 146, 2
True prayer is not easy. There are many challenges that must be bravely overcome. The first of these is the difficulty in communicating. How can we pray to a God that is still unseen and to some extent unknown? For most of us the only way we "know" God is through faith. We may have developed a conviction that God exists and (if we have come to believe in Jesus) we may even know something about what God is like. But we still have not experienced God and praying is still a little like sending an E-Mail out in the wild blue yonder, hoping that it will finally end up in the hands of someone who can be of help.
Augustine, through his belief in Christ, was able to get some response to the prayer he made soon after his conversion:
Oh never-changing God, let me know myself, let me know you.
Soliloquies, 2.1.1
As an answer to that prayer, he gradually began to see that he was a wounded, dreaming beast and that the God he prayed to was an infinite being who was yet in some mysterious way the Father of us all. The difficulty in communicating between these two worlds was obviously immense. On one side there is the city of this world, the material world, the world of day by day needs and pleasures. On the other side there is the land of the Lord God, the world that can be touched only rarely by mystical experience and most often only by faith, the infinite world that is around us and above us and in front of us. The life of any human is thus a "tale of two cities", the earthly city and the city of God. Faith reveals that happiness will come through the permanent possession of God. We will possess God only by becoming permanent citizens of his city and we become citizens only by desiring God above all.
But to desire God we must first pay attention to him and it is through our prayer that we begin to pay attention: the prayer of our voices, the prayer of our hearts, the prayer of our lives. Such prayer is not easy to achieve because we are still tied down to earth. We are like thistledown in high mountain meadows, straining this way and that, desperately seeking the freedom to fly to the peaks but held firmly in place by our earthy roots. As human beings we have a natural gravity that draws us to this world and this weight upon our spirit has been increased by the weakness from our wounds. It is hard enough to fly when gravity pulls you down; it becomes almost impossible with weakened wings.
Augustine himself experienced how hard it is to keep a focus on heaven when consumed by worldly desires and worries. One day as he was trying to pray he cried out in frustration:
God, why do I pray to you in such a fickle and imperfect way? My mind is fixed on praying to you only more or less. My spirit flits here and there, distracted by all sorts of earthly desires and worries. The words of the book of Wisdom (9:15) are certainly true of me: "The corruptible body burdens the soul and the earthen shelter weighs down the mind that has many concerns".
Commentary on Psalm 145, 6
In the midst of such difficulties it is consoling to know that God does not expect us to be "perfect" in prayer, only that we try our best. My best may be none too good here and now, but it is good enough if truly it is my best. Just now I may not be able to think about God without distraction. Just now I may not be able to speak to him with words that are really felt. When a loved one dies we may say "Your will be done, God!" while inside feeling cheated that our love has been taken from us.
I cannot always control how I feel, but even in my worst of times I can at least try to live a decent life. I can try to live as though I believed in God's existence and that his existing was an important factor in my life. Living such a life may be the best I can muster on some days and, if so, it is the best prayer I can offer to God. We should therefore not be upset if on some days we cannot pray to God with enthusiasm, that we cannot offer a perfect prayer. Augustine reminds us:
The praising of God will not be perfected until you become like the angels. You will be perfect in prayer only when the demands of the body will no longer plague you, when hunger and thirst will no longer bother you, when you will no longer be worn out by the heat and frozen by the cold, when you will no longer fall into consuming depression, when death will no longer be a factor in your life. Just now you can only prepare for such a perfect state by trying to praise God with a life as good as you can make it.
Commentary on Psalm 146, 2
The trouble now is that to pray to God through our desire we must have some minimal awareness of his presence in our lives. It is true that some of the great mystics prayed through their "Dark Night of the Soul" when God seemed absent, but they were at the climax of their spiritual journey. For most of us poor clods just beginning or at best in the middle of our journey towards loving God, a sudden dose of "God's absence" might do us in. We would sit down in the middle of the road and go no further, or perhaps begin running back to our former but at least real earthy pleasures.
A fact of our mediocre lives is that we can't talk to a stone wall for very long without getting bored or going a bit insane. But if have even a minimal awareness of the presence of another, we can keep up a conversation even though it seems one-sided. I have known people who were able to speak lovingly to a comatose loved one for years and years. There was never much of a response but at least they could see their beloved there before them. They knew that they were in the living presence of a "someone". So too, we can try to speak to God if we are aware that SOMEONE is there, if we have at least the beginning of awareness of God's presence in our lives.
Unfortunately there are no infallible guidelines for experiencing that divine presence. There is no sacred place where he waits to introduce himself to us. Indeed, our faith tells us that God is where we are. The divine is present in us. This place where I am now is the place of God. Why then am I not aware of this presence? Perhaps I expect too much from it. We mislead ourselves by thinking that this or that is an essential characteristic of God's presence and when these are not present we sadly conclude that God must be someplace else.
However, the experience of those saints who have gone before us reveals some truths about this Divine Presence in our lives. The first truth is that it does not necessarily involve ecstasy. It does not always make us feel any better. Dismas felt the pain of crucifixion even though Jesus was at his side. The disciples caught in the storm were still frightened half to death even though their God was in their boat. A second truth is that the form that the awareness of God will take varies from individual to individual. Sometimes it may be accompanied by an emotional high. Sometimes there is no emotion at all. Sometimes it will come in a moment of quiet contentment, sometimes in a patient endurance of a painful situation, sometimes in a realization of one's wounds and the fact that they can be healed.
A final and perhaps most important truth is that there is a need for grace at every point in our effort to pray. We must desire God to be saved. Before we can desire him we must pay attention to him and we cannot do this unless we have some awareness of his presence. We need the grace of God to become aware of his presence in the midst of our turbulent lives. We need God's grace to pay attention to God. We need God's grace to pray for the strength to pay attention.
How can we prepare for the grace to do all of these wonderful things? How can we prepare ourselves so that at least we are able to pray, we are able to begin to desire God? There are some obvious answers to such questions. The first thing we must do in preparation for prayer is to eliminate selfishness from our lives. The reasons are obvious. We have limited psychic energy. If all or most of our energy is directed towards ourselves, there is nothing left to prepare for God. Moreover, even if we had an infinite supply of energy, we still cannot do two things at the same time. If we spend all our days paying attention to ourselves, there will be no time to pay attention to God.
We cannot excuse ourselves from this requirement by saying "I am not thinking about myself. I am thinking about my neighbor." This may be form of veiled selfishness. It is easier sometimes to pay attention to our neighbor than to our God. The return of love from those we help is very satisfying. It can make us feel very good about what we are doing. Trying to pay attention to God is not as likely to bring such immediate satisfaction. Helping one's neighbor can be exciting. Praying to God is sometimes boring. I have never fallen asleep teaching class. I cannot say the same for my times of quiet thought about God.
If we have eliminated selfishness from our lives, then we can only wait quietly for God to come. To do this we must reserve for ourselves some time for solitude and silence. To think about God deeply and without interruption we must "be by ourselves and in ourselves". Most of us need physical solitude for this. Sometimes in the midst of common prayer with others we may achieve a solitary communion with God, but I suspect that such moments of common solitariness (if you will, "group solitude") are few and far between. When we are in the presence of others we tend to think about their foibles more than God's friendship.
Even when we are alone it can still be difficult to focus on God if we are consumed by day by day worries. As Augustine says:
There is very little advantage in going into your solitary room if you leave the door open to every passing visiting thought that can grab your attention.
Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, 1.2.11
But how can we "turn off the switch" to the problems and gossip of our times so that we can think about eternity? A possibly depressing reality that may help us take "time off" is that, although none of us is superfluous, all of us are expendable. The future of the world depends on Divine Providence, not us. We are not the saviors of the world. Jesus is the only Savior. We are just cracked pots who try to do a little work for him. We can't do everything. If we do one job well, that is enough for the Lord. But to do even that one good work on the outside, we need quiet time for our God inside.
Moreover, If we are honest with ourselves, we must come to the humble conclusion that every job that we are doing can almost certainly be done better by someone else, every job, that is, except one: finding our personal Lord and saving our individual soul. Only we and the Lord can accomplish that task and that is the only job that we must do on absolutely all occasions. We can afford to leave the world outside the room of our mind for a while. It will not fall apart if we do not attend to it. God is still there, holding it in the palm of his hand.
No matter how imperfect our attempt at prayer, it does have great good effects in our lives. Our effort to pray is a sign that we have somewhat overcome our pride. Moreover, in reaching out in prayer we extend and expand ourselves, opening up new spaces in our lives that God can fill. As Augustine wrote to his friend Proba:
God wants us to exercise our desire through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what he is preparing to give us. His gift is very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it. The deeper our faith, the stronger our hope, the greater our desire, the larger will be our capacity to receive that gift which is very great indeed.
Letter 130 (to Proba), 8.17
If only we could free ourselves of our selfishness that makes us think of ourselves and the desirable things of this world, if only we could build for ourselves times of solitary silence in the midst of our busy days, if only we could find places of solitude deep inside ourselves to pay attention to God, then we would be prepared to receive the grace to make a brave prayer in the midst of our present troubles. Even without saying too much, our attention would gradually become fixed on God. And sooner or later, if we are patient (and sometimes great patience is necessary), God will come and we will perceive him in our cloudy life and begin to desire him. We will fulfill Augustine's prediction, our love will become our weight, now drawing us forward irresistibly towards Wisdom, the vision of God in his heavenly city.