The parish is a school of prayer. Are you learning how to commune with God in your parish? Pope John Paul II saw that the identity of the parish, as a school of prayer, was to be the prominent pastoral priority .
Our Christian communities must become genuine ‘schools’ of prayer, where the meeting with Christ is expressed … until the heart truly ‘falls in love.’ Intense prayer, yes, but it does not distract us from our commitment to history: by opening our heart to the love of God it also opens it to the love of our brothers and sisters, and makes us capable of shaping history according to God’s plan.… [I]t would be wrong to think that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life. Especially in the face of the many trials to which today’s world subjects faith, they would be not only mediocre Christians but ‘Christians at risk.’ They would run the insidious risk of seeing their faith progressively undermined, and would perhaps end up succumbing to the allure of ‘substitutes,’ accepting alternative religious proposals and even indulging in far-fetched superstitions…. It is therefore essential that education in prayer should become in some way a key-point of all pastoral planning” (Pope John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte , 33, 34).
This is a truly remarkable call to the Church from the former pope. There, in the midst of the parish, priests and their delegates are to open the hearts of parishioners to the mystery of relating all their affections, thoughts, and ideas to the love of Christ.
To contemplate, to pray deeply , is to invite God to be the primary agent in our prayer and thinking and to have the ego to receive such agency, not compete with it. To what end is such prayer? Our tradition is clear: contemplation is to serve charity and evangelization. The fruit of contemplation for the lay person is an increase in desire to give public witness to the faith. Through prayer the laity develop a conscience, a heart, that is in communion with Christ and not this passing age (Rom. 12:1-2). Therefore they make decisions out of this intimate communion with Christ. They are liberated from thinking ideologically and can begin to think with the mind of Christ.
To have such a heart, however, laity must suffer the coming of Christ. It is not easy to learn to BE in the presence of God and delight in it, when heretofore one was simply paying attention to “the times.” Analogically, I can recall a time in my life when I had to stay at home with my wife and children for a longer than normal time due to a professional transition I had made. During this time there was nowhere to go. I had no work to do. I stayed home. My wife noticed my restlessness and invited me to simply accept this time as a gift from God to enter into the family more deeply. I had experienced this time as a time of discomfort and meaninglessness, so I was surprised to hear my wife call it a “gift from God.” Being open to my wife’s spiritual direction, I embraced the call to be with the family and rest in the intimate relations of their love. It was a call to embrace my vocation, to receive it at a deeper level. I am a father and husband and not simply a man of action and achievement. After a while I delighted in receiving this time and actually received the joy of fatherhood and husbanding anew. In order to rest in the truth of this vocation, however, I had to suffer the loss of my controlling, independent will. In order to receive a greater capacity to serve my family, I first had to receive the intimacy and love they willed to give me, not by doing things for me but by being with me. Out of the received presence of love is born the capacity to be there for others in their need.
Sacramentally, my wife and children symbolize God’s love when they invite me into their presence, a presence that opens me and makes me vulnerable to healing on many affective and spiritual levels. The gentle call of my wife awakened within me a new way of seeing my days at home. I was empowered to really be present to my family rather than pine after a busy-ness that carried exhaustion rather than life.
How is Christ mediating His call to come away and be with Him? Who are you listening to in order to form your heart? The prayer of resting in and drawing from the mysteries of Christ is to be received. Christ wants to give it to all — we only need to ask and receive. Lacking the desire to respond to the invitation of Christ to contemplate His mysteries, we enter the painful daily existence of getting more of what satisfies us less — more work, more activity, more appointments, more emotional restlessness, and so on (Mark McIntosh, Discernment and Truth , 89). In this kind of pointless succession of days, one exists only to work or for the recreation at the end of the work day. If Christ wants to give intimacy to His people, how should we understand the kind of contemplation that defines the lay vocation?
The contemplative lay person will inevitably turn his or her heart and will toward those who suffer. Contemplation does not leave one trapped within a self-obsessed heart; only pathology does that. The Eucharist, the core self-gift of Christ to the world, is what the lay persons is invited to contemplate. The laity are called upon to allow this Mystery to enter the soul and in so doing to come to assist others in doing the same. A lay person enters deeper prayer as a habit, as a gift to all the people he or she encounters. The evangelization of culture depends upon laity who see prayer as the gift they are becoming to the world and not simply as a discrete activity that begins or ends the day. The goal of intimacy with the Holy Spirit is to receive His love and allow His power to make our lives into prayer.
In part two of this meditation we will reflect upon this power as it relates to a way of being a lay person and a method of prayer that facilitates that vocation.