04/02/00

Lent: a season for prayer in and for the world

Lent is a season for more intense prayer, and prayer is conversation with God. But how can one speak to and with God in and for a world that has “come of age” by declaring independence from God? Even for believers in this kind of world, prayers of trust, awe, adoration can become something of an embarrassment, something we shouldn’t do because they express a dependence one is somehow ashamed to acknowledge, a throwback to a more “immature” age. “Modern” prayer becomes, instead, a form of inviting God to cooperate with us in the task of re-making the world according to values we recognize as important. We don’t ask; we express our dreams to God and count him lucky to hear them.

A modern saint who tells us much, I believe, about how to pray in today’s world is St. Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower. She was characteristically modern in her acute self-consciousness. For Therese, as for young people today, the self is something to be achieved rather than something given. She was a source of anxiety to herself. Her experience of the “desert” which is always part of the spiritual life was internal rather than external. Her very existence, and therefore her prayer, was marked by a certain aridity. Her encounter with God, and therefore her prayer, was simple and without formality. Her life and her prayer blended, as did her love of God and neighbor. Just as Jesus gave himself for the world’s salvation because he loved the Father perfectly, modern spirituality cannot see the face of God apart from the face of one’s neighbor.

St. Therese’s was a child-like love and a child-like prayer at a moment when childhood was being lost to the world and the Church. In the world, total war, invented in the aerial bombing of the First World War, targeted children as well as soldiers. Children as well as adults perished in the Nazi camps and in the planned famines of Stalin and Mao. Children are uniquely the victims of abortion. All of these—total war to make the world safe; destruction of class enemies to make the world just; killing unborn babies to make the world free—have made childhood dangerous in our age.

And in the Church, modern scriptural criticism’s approach to the infancy narratives of the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke has tended to remove a Christological foundation from the spirituality of childhood. St. Therese’s becoming a Doctor of the Church last year works as something of a corrective to a too narrow and complicated approach to Scripture which leaves one with only shards of texts based on guesses from experts whose conclusions will, in time, be disproved by their students.

The danger of modern spirituality, even as exemplified in St. Therese of Lisieux, is that simplicity can slide into sentimentality, a subjective caricature of objective love. Without a sense of history and of God’s self-revelation in time as well as in one’s heart, without the social discipline of the liturgical year and of approved devotions, modern religion degenerates into a response to the demand for emotional companionship in an age of isolation. But we pray as we can; and we can pray only in our own time, with its particular opportunities and its peculiar dangers.

How then might we pray, this Jubilee Lent at the beginning of a post-modern age? St. Paul himself tells us that we do not know how to pray (Romans 8:24 ff). No technique will secure our life of prayer, because prayer is God’s gift to us. Prayer is an immense privilege given to us, not a method to be followed. There is no fail-safe yellow brick road to get us to the Wizard of Oz. Prayer is possible not because we want to do it but because Christ, who dwells in us by the power of the Holy Spirit, wants to grow to full stature in us.

Our private prayer should therefore be frequent but often brief. A very holy religious woman, when I became Archbishop of Chicago, told me that I should stop for just a few seconds each time I moved from appointment to appointment on busy days in order to re-establish contact with God and offer to him the next event of the day. Praying frequently and briefly means praying at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, at the beginning of an activity and during and at the end of that same activity, before meals and after meals. It means turning to God when we are happy or sad, when we have something to say and when nothing at all comes, when we find a parking space and when we don’t.

Dom John Chapman (1865-1933), an English Benedictine spiritual writer who wrestled with the question of prayer in the modern world, wrote: “We must wish to have the prayer that God gives us and no other. A distracted prayer, a desolate prayer, a happy prayer—we must take everything as it comes...When we seem unable to do anything, if then we throw ourselves on God and stay contentedly before him—worried, anxious, tired, listless but, above all and under it all, humbled and abandoned to his will, contented with our own discontent—if we can get ourselves accustomed to this attitude of soul, we have learned how to pray.”

It is my prayer that God, as a Jubilee gift, will teach us all how to pray more intensely this Lent. God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago

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