For prayer to develop this power of purification, it must
on the one hand be something very personal, an encounter between my intimate
self and God, the living God. On the other hand it must be constantly guided
and enlightened by the great prayers of the Church and of the saints, by
liturgical prayer, in which the Lord teaches us again and again how to pray
properly.
Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan, in his book of spiritual
exercises, tells us that during his life there were long periods when he was
unable to pray and that he would hold fast to the texts of the Church's prayer:
the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the prayers of the
liturgy. Praying must always involve this intermingling of public and
personal prayer.
This is how we can speak to God and how God speaks to us.
In this way we undergo those purifications by which we become open to God and
are prepared for the service of our fellow human beings. We become capable of
the great hope, and thus we become ministers of hope for others. Hope in a
Christian sense is always hope for others as well. It is an active hope, in
which we struggle to prevent things moving towards the “perverse end”. It is an
active hope also in the sense that we keep the world open to God. Only in this
way does it continue to be a truly human hope.
Spe Salvi 34
Reflection –
We jump ahead in our reading of Spe Salvi
now to the section on prayer. I have now done almost the entire encyclical
on this blog now, and the whole thing can be found here.
The power of
purification in prayer that Pope Benedict writes about here is explained
beautifully in the previous paragraph: “When we pray properly we undergo a
process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow
human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what
is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must
learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we
desire at this moment—that meager, misplaced hope that leads us away from God.
We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes. We must free ourselves from
the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves.”
The Cardinal Van Thuan
he refers to here was the Archbishop of Saigon when it fell to the Viet Cong,
who spent 20 years imprisoned by them, much of it in solitary confinement. He
is the great apostle of hope in our times, and should be much more well known
than he is. His books Testimony to Hope and
The Road to Hope are modern spiritual
classics.
Deprived of his ability to function as a bishop, only able to even
celebrate Mass with great difficulty and at great risk, and with little
prospect of ever seeing the world outside his prison, he chose to simply live
as a Christian within the circumstances he had been given. He strove to love
the only neighbors the Lord had provided him with—his jailors. And he strove to
pray as best he could each day, and in so doing to deeply entrust his life to
the Lord each day. He emerged from his
long imprisonment a man transfigured by grace, and ended his years in Rome, a
living witness to the power of Christ to redeem the worst and most hopeless
situations.
And so we need to
really apply this to ourselves, don’t we? Most of us are not so badly off as
Cardinal Van Thuan (well, really all of us, since anyone reading this blog post
is not languishing in solitary confinement as a victim of religious
persecution). But we all can choose to in some way or other lose hope, to focus
on those elements of our life that are difficult or painful, that do not seem
to be conducive to health and happiness. We can all choose to turn from God,
stop praying, despair in His power to redeem our situation. We can all be so
sure that the only way we can become joyful is if the painful and difficult
things go away, that we miss the gift of God that He is trying to give us in
the midst of these painful and difficult things.
And this is losing
hope, when we are so determined to find our happiness in this life and in
having things as we want them in this life. Meanwhile, God is continually
opening us up to this much bigger, much deeper, much more enduring happiness.
And it is prayer, the choice to perpetually and continually turn our face and
our heart toward God, be it in the liturgical and Scriptural and devotional
prayers we have learned or in the simple outpouring of our hearts to God, that continually
purifies our hope and makes it grow stronger and more well founded.
And this is our call
today—to pray and to let God purify our hearts to seek Him in whatever
circumstance we are living in today, good, bad, or something in between. So,
let’s get on with that.
