Let Nothing Disturb Thee

Let nothing disturb thee,

Let nothing affright thee.

All things are passing,

God never changes.

Patient endurance

Attains all things.

Who possesses God

Wants for nothing.

God alone suffices.

St Teresa of Avila

Reflection – Yesterday’s post about Therese of Lisieux has put me in a Carmelite frame of mind, and so I woke up this morning with this prayer by Teresa of Avila on my mind. It is one I often revert to; I wrote a simple musical setting for it that we do from time to time here at Mass, and it is a prayer that has thus slipped into the collective consciousness of our community.

I have been concerned for some time about the degree of ‘disturbance’ in people these days. I do not live under a rock; I do know, quite well, what is happening in the world, and pay close attention to it, as best one can. There is great violence loose in the world, a spirit of war, as one of my wise brother priests puts it here.

In the face of great evil—beheadings and the like—and of all the lesser evils we encounter as a matter of course (corrupt venal politicians, weak or worldly leaders in the Church, and other sundry nonsense), the great tendency many of us have is to Get Mad, and in that to Get Loud.

The Internet has been the great accelerant of anger and volume in our day, of course. Every one of us who has access to technology has a giant megaphone with which we can trumpet whatever is coming out of our hearts and minds. In the past, only the words of the great and powerful could extend beyond the immediate earshot of the speaker; now, these very words I am typing will be read by someone in India in less than an hour’s time (hi, you know who!).

What this means for all of us is a great responsibility. ‘To whom much has been given, much will be expected.’ If I have been ‘given’ (in the sense that I certainly didn’t invent it), the ability to instantly communicate a message to the entire world, and if I in fact know that by the end of the day a couple hundred people anyhow will have read my writings, then I have to be very careful in choosing my words.

Those who have greater readerships, have greater responsibility yet. And this is where I personally am very concerned—there is just so much anger, so much vitriol, so much name-calling and seething contempt out there. And… I’m talking about the ‘Catholic’ blogosphere here, folks.

There is so much anger and hatred and fierce contempt and violence in the world. Do we really need to pour out from our hearts our own bile and venom and disdain? How does this serve the cause of Christ and the life of the Body of Christ, the Church?

‘Let nothing disturb thee, let nothing affright thee. All things are passing, God never changes. Patient endurance attains all things. Who possesses God wants for nothing. God alone suffices.’ Surely this is to be the starting point for every Christian engagement in the world, isn’t it? And out of this, we can find the right words to talk about Islamic terror, police brutality, the genuinely debased and diseased nature of politics in our countries, the rampaging agendas that threaten religious and civil freedoms, and so forth.

We do have to speak about these matters, and I have, to some degree, done so on this blog. But we have to speak with mercy, with patience, with respect for those who genuinely disagree with us, with respect for the basic human dignity and God-created goodness of those who we believe to be behaving wrongly.

We must never seethe with dripping contempt and vituperous abuse and insult, name-calling and blackguarding and ranting against how very, very lousy… everyone else is.

I, Fr. Denis Lemieux, am a sinner. I am lousy. Who am I to denounce the sin of my brother or sister? But with patient endurance I wait—we all wait—on the God who never changes, and hope to possess Him, and so want nothing. And so it must be in the Christian engagement with evil in the world, or we are just one more angry, violent voice doing nothing to make anything better, and doing quite a bit to make things a lot worse.

Lots of people can spew anger into the internet. We who are Christians are the only ones who can proclaim Christ into the internet. If we don’t, nobody will, and the world will be an angrier, colder, more polarized and hate-filled place. And we will not have to look far to know who is responsible for that.

Let nothing disturb thee. Patient endurance attains all things. God alone suffices.

Not Only is Heaven for Real, It is the Only Real Thing

Now the good Jesus bids us say these words, in which we pray that the Kingdom may come in us: Hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come. See how great our Master’s wisdom is! I am thinking of what it is we are asking for when we ask for the Kingdom: it is important that we should understand this.

His Majesty saw that because of our weakness we could not hallow or praise or magnify or glorify the holy name of the Eternal Father in a way adequate to its greatness. We could not, that is, do it by ourselves, if His Majesty did not help us by giving us his kingdom here on earth.

And so the good Jesus places these two petitions – Hallowed be thy name and Thy kingdom come next to each other, so that we can understand what we are asking for and why it is important to beg for it and to do all we can to please the one who is able to give it to us. Let me explain how I understand it.

Now, then. The greatest joy in the kingdom of heaven (the greatest among many) seems to me to be that we will no longer be tied up with earthly concerns but will have rest and glory within us – rejoicing that gives joy to everyone, peace that lasts for ever – satisfaction in ourselves, a satisfaction that comes from seeing how everyone is praising the Lord and blessing and hallowing his name, while no-one offends him.

Everyone loves him. Each soul has no wish other than to love him: it cannot stop loving him because it knows him truly.

If only we knew him like that even here on earth, we would love him in the same way – not with that degree of perfection, of course, but in a very different way from the way we love him now.

St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection

Reflection – Well, isn’t this lovely. I’m writing this just before going into poustinia for my usual Friday prayer day (hence posting Friday’s blog Thursday evening), and what better meditation could I personally have before going in.

It is good to ask ourselves, periodically, just how much do we love God, really. We celebrated today the feast of St. Thomas, apostle, and I preached at the MH Mass on the famous Gospel of St. Thomas, ‘unless I put my fingers in the holes…’ etc.

My own sense is not that Thomas was some skeptical cold fish here, demanding to have the resurrection proved to him. I think Thomas really loved Jesus (just a few chapters earlier, he was saying ‘Let’s go [to Judea] and die with him!’). And because he really loved Jesus, he really, really wanted to see Him, touch Him, be close to Him… just one more time.

This desire, this yearning for intimacy with Christ – we need to pray for that, I think. It is so easy for our hearts to grow cold, isn’t it? So easy to get kind of mediocre, kind of blah, kind of… well, Jesus is a nice guy… or a Lord… or God… or… and well, that’s all very good, and…

Yeah, we have to look at our love of God. ‘Thy kingdom come’ indeed. And hallowed be thy name – that our actual life, our destiny, our greatest joy and greatest glory is going to consist in acclaiming the holiness of beauty of God’s name and bearing, reflecting, being taken up into that name, making that name our name, and glorifying the name perpetually.

This requires, for most of us, such a radical re-configuration of our whole being inner and outer. Most people are, basically, kind of self-centred. I don’t mean that in any nasty or mean-spirited way, and I certainly include myself in the crowd.

But we do tend to gravitate around ourselves, don’t we? And that just ain’t heaven, just is not how things are in reality, and heaven is reality, you know. So Teresa throws down quite a challenge for us, quite a call to conversion, really, but in that, such a note of joy and delight, beauty and love. She really got it (and gets it, of course), and so be assured as I head to poustinia that I will pray for all of us to ‘get it’, and I count on your prayers for me to get it, too.

The Main Business of God

What person, however careless, who had to address someone of importance, would not spend time in thinking how to approach him so as to please him and not be considered tedious? He would also think what he was going to ask for and what use he would make of it, especially if his petition were for some particular thing, as our good Jesus tells us our petitions must be. This point seems to me very important. Could you not, my Lord, have ended this prayer in a single sentence, by saying: “Give us, Father, whatever is good for us”? For, in addressing One Who knows everything, there would seem to be no need to say any more.

Eternal Wisdom! Between you and your Father this was quite sufficient. This is how you made your request of him in the garden of Gethsemane. You showed him what you wished for and what you feared, but left it all in his hands. But you know us, my Lord, and you know that we have not given ourselves up to the will of your Father as completely as you did.

For us, it is best to pray for specific things, so that as each of them comes to mind we can pause to consider whether it is something good that we are asking for; so that if it is not, we should refrain from asking for it. Otherwise (being what we are, free will and all) we will not accept what God chooses to give us even if it is far better than what we asked for, simply because it is not exactly what we asked for. We are the sort of people who cannot feel rich unless we feel the weight of the actual coins in our hand.

St. Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection

Reflection – I apologize for my lack of blog yesterday – it was a combination of power outages in the early morning (caused by violent storms and tornadoes in the local area), some stubborn technical difficulties with my browser, and a very full schedule otherwise.

Meanwhile, this lovely text from Teresa of Avila popped up in the Office of Readings yesterday, so I thought we could look at it for a couple of days. Teresa, John, and Therese have always been my personal teachers in the spiritual life.

This is a great teaching, in the context of commenting on the Lord’s Prayer, on just why it is that God wants us to pray for our specific needs. He does know what we need, after all, so why does He ask us to ask Him for this or that—healing, material provision, wellbeing of those we love, and so forth?

We always have to remember that God’s primary concern for us, while it touches upon all these things (since He is a loving Father who cares for us in all matters) is for our innermost being, our soul and not our bodies. God’s first priority with us is the healing of our person, not simply in our bodily health but in our spiritual soundness.

In other words, God’s first business with us is to transform us into lovers—lovers of Him and lovers of one another. He is mainly concerned with healing us of our selfishness in all its manifestations and conforming us to His own divine self through the gift of the Holy Spirit conforming us to the man Jesus Christ who is God.

So the point of our praying for our specific intentions lies in the divine shaping, the divine pedagogy. The Father wants us to have the same intimacy with Him as Jesus had with Him, the same absolute conviction that He is real, that He cares, that He is present to us and attending to us.

And this even holds when we pray for something and it is not granted. Then we are called, not to cynicism and despondency, but to reflection. Maybe that wasn’t the best thing to pray for. Maybe God has something else in mind. Maybe there is a deeper healing, a deeper blessing being bestowed. Maybe we should try to grow in trust and faith. We are all just little children who don’t know what we really need, what we should really pray for, and what is the best thing, and it is the struggle to pray rightly and all that comes with that which makes us grow up spiritually.

Those are the reflections that should come from the seemingly ungranted prayer, as praise and thanksgiving and joy should flow from the granted prayer. But the point of it all—our petitionary prayer, its granting, its non-granting—is to further in us the real divine work, which is the shaping of our innermost beings into faithful reflections of the Son, who is eternally turned towards the Father, receiving everything from Him and returning everything to Him.

That’s how we’re supposed to live, and in this imperfect broken-down world, prayer and petition is one of the ways God works this turning in us.