Friday, November 14, 2008

Strip your prayers


This is crucial: as long as we pray only when and how we want to, our life of prayer is bound to be unreal. It will run in fits and starts. The slightest upset–even a toothache–will be enough to destroy the whole edifice of our prayer-life.

"You must strip your prayers," the novice-master told me. You must simplify, deintellectualise. Put yourself in front of Jesus as a poor man: not with any big ideas, but with living faith. Remain motionless in an act of love before the Father. Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach him in love; that is possible.

The struggle is not easy, because nature will try to get back her own, get her dose of enjoyment; but union with Christ Crucified is something quite different.

After some hours–or some days–of this exercise, the body relaxes. As the will refuses to let it have its own way it gives up the struggle. It becomes passive. The senses go to sleep. Or rather, as St. John of the Cross says, the night of senses is beginning. Then prayer becomes something serious, even if it is painful and dry. So serious that one can no longer do without it. The soul begins to share the redemptive work of Jesus.

Kneeling down on the sand before the simple monstrance which contained Jesus, I used to think of the evils of the world: hate, violence, depravity, impurity, egoism, betrayal, idolatry. Around me the cave had become as large as the world, and inwardly I contemplated Jesus oppressed under the weight of so much wickedness.

Is not the Host in its own form like bread crushed, pounded, baked? And does it not contain the Man of Sorrows, Christ the Victim, the Lamb slain for our sins?

Letters From The Desert

Carlo Carreto

2 comments:

Rufus McCain said...

This one nails me. My whole life is fits and starts, really. So tenuous a house of cards is it that a few days ago, I came down with--not a toothache--but a measely head cold, and it totally derailed my prayer life and pretty much everything except the bare minimum of functioning. So I'm reading back through some of these--and this one nails me. Lord have mercy and help me strip away everything except the cross that leads to life.

The Ironic Catholic said...

I love this one too--it does hit hard.

I think the "In the ordinary" post is for you today....