Christian Prayer: reflections from a Catholic perspective (3)

by Fr Ian

In Parts 1 and 2 I tried to give a basic definition of Christian prayer and I claimed that prayer is a necessary activity, and the primary activity, for Christian believers. In the next two posts I'll say more about these two aspects of prayer. 

'Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, 

left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed' (Mark 1:35).

The necessity of prayer

As human beings we need prayer because we need God.

We don’t have to be religious-minded to conclude that human beings are driven by a kind of ‘hunger of the heart’, made up of various needs or longings that overlap and connect with each other. We have a longing for happiness and fulfilment in our lives. We seek purpose and meaning in our activities and our relationships, and we have a need for love - a need to give love to others and to receive love from them.

These different facets of our inner hunger often make themselves known to us by their absence: we experience feelings of dissatisfaction, incompleteness, emptiness and pointlessness when our existence lacks meaning and purpose, when we fail to attain a certain minimal level of contentment, and when our relationships feel somehow superficial and lacking in love and commitment. 

This is true even when, as often happens, individuals can’t put their finger on the precise causes of their unhappiness, when they don’t know exactly why they feel dissatisfied or empty.

It’s worth mentioning also that the prospect of ageing and eventual death, if reflected on seriously, and not simply avoided or endlessly pushed out of conscious awareness, focuses our attention on our human hunger for meaning and happiness. 

The depressing sense of the shortness and transience of earthly life, the conclusion many people reach that all purely human achievements, and even our most cherished relationships, end in the sadness and futility of extinction, actually express in a negative way the intuition that we yearn for immortality, for permanence, for the continuation of life beyond death, and, maybe most important of all, for some kind of assurance that love doesn’t die.    

Our vocation to transcendence and its denial

Of course in the Christian perspective this quest for happiness, for meaning and for eternity is really a manifestation of our search for God. The psychological, emotional and spiritual hunger that we experience, and its negative expression in feelings of incompleteness and futility, point us towards God and can only be fulfilled in relationship with God. Earthly life alone, finite objects, human relationships, mundane purposes and goals can’t and won’t satisfy our longing. 

Ultimate happiness, and the ultimate purpose of human life and love, all lie beyond the realm of the finite. To fulfil our true vocation as human beings we need to rise above the realm of present experience and open ourselves to the infinite, the transcendent, the uncreated - the realm of God.   

Contemporary Western culture - liberal, democratic, capitalist culture - denies this Christian conviction and in fact is founded on its denial. Its architects reject all notions of a transcendent end of human life. 

The dominant assumption now is that if human beings need meaning, happiness and love in their lives then they must find them solely on the horizontal level and within the realm of the natural, mundane, the transient. There is no vertical, super-natural end-point for any of our inner longings: that idea is the product of wishful thinking. 

Western culture has therefore become a kind of walled city. God has been cast out and its citizens are self-enclosed within a sphere that is purely secular, human and one-dimensional.

Conformism vs conversion

Different individuals negotiate this reality in different ways.

First there are the contended conformists as we might call them - men and women who ask for no more than a certain level of security and success in their lives, materially and emotionally. They concentrate on their immediate relationships and everyday activities; they accept the majority values of society and rarely question them. 

Their attitude, more or less, is: ‘we’re born, we work and play and love, we get older and die, and maybe we leave behind some happy memories in the minds of those who knew us’. They never seriously consider the possibility that there may be another, higher reality beyond the horizon of this world, and that our lives might have another, higher purpose. 

So contented conformists are those who live their whole lives without ever embarking on the search for God. And we can ask the question: how many church members and professed Christians today are really no more than contended conformists, behind the veneer of a shallow and merely social ‘faith’?

Second there are what we might call the discontented conformists. These individuals are emotionally restless and unhappy, but they attempt to rid themselves of their discomfort by changing their personal life circumstances (work, home, relationships), by therapy or medication, even by adopting the odd ‘spiritual’ practice like meditation or some other technique of self-improvement. The consumer capitalist economy offers many such ‘solutions’ .

At the present time especially, in my view, many discontented conformists, particularly the young, seek resolution of their inner restlessness by involving themselves in social and political causes. Reforming the conventions and structures of society, they believe, will remove the causes of unhappiness.

 

  Is today's identity politics a frustrated longing for God?

But in this response again there’s a failure to progress beyond a one-dimensional mentality that denies the transcendent aspect of human existence and of the world we live in. In fact there are many men and women who, in spite of considerable introspection, never move beyond the confines of the self, who stubbornly and even angrily refuse to open the question of God, despite persistent feelings of alienation and anxiety.

Finally there’s a third group of people, the individuals we can accurately label the converts. These are the spiritual non-conformists, the men and women who have come to reject, in a kind of positive disillusion, today’s horizontal and self-enclosed concept of human life.   

By a process of reflection, intuition and gradual awakening to truth the converts have come to recognise the diminished view of persons and relationships prevalent in modern society. 

They’ve seen through the bogus gratifications of consumerism and the inane distractions of commercial entertainment. They’ve observed and experienced the atomisation of a culture dedicated to sovereign individualism. They’ve identified the fraudulent assumptions embedded in mainstream political commentary and the will to power lurking within today’s grand projects of technological betterment.

But their disillusion, as suggested a moment ago, is a positive thing. In keeping with the Gospel summons to metanoia the converts are those who have taken the first steps in turning their backs on today’s false values and attitudes, and the lifestyles based on them, and have begun moving towards the true, transcendent end of life - towards God.

Of course the Gospel affords no glib optimism that the majority will take this path. Jesus himself encountered many contented and discontented conformists, in whom, for various reasons, the seed of his word failed to take root (Mk 4:1-20). These individuals far outnumbered those who received the seed, tended it in good soil and produced a rich harvest.  

Towards the true and living God

What this means for us, as Christians, is that our current task is to lead the converts forward from their initial disenchantment, which is only a kind of preamble to faith, to the discovery of the true and living God. 

Vague religiosity, arising from personal whims and preferences, isn’t enough; worse than that, it leads people astray. We have to undermine confidence in the rulers of this present age and their bogus wisdom (1 Cor 2:6), and bring people face to face with the God who has made his plan of love known to us, beginning in Old Testament times, culminating in the mission of his Son and available now to ‘all who have ears to hear’ through the community of the Church. 

And this is where prayer becomes necessary. To come face to face with the God who has created us and redeemed us, who sanctifies us and makes us holy, who guides us towards the fulfilment of our own God-given vocation in this life, and who finally draws us into everlasting life with him, each of us needs to open a line of personal and individual communication with him.

It’s only by developing a habit of prayer that we can experience God and communicate with him person-to-person, rather than simply amassing information about him. It’s only through prayer that we can create a fertile environment in which all the other elements of Christian spiritual life can bear fruit. 

So to be Christian today means to be men and women who pray, who direct the inner longing of our souls to God, asking him on his part to come to us, transform us by his grace, and lead us into his divine life:

‘Hear, O LORD, when I cry aloud, 

 be gracious to me and answer me! 

Thou hast said, “Seek ye my face.” 

My heart says to thee, 

“Thy face, LORD, do I seek.” 

Hide not thy face from me.’ 

(Ps.27:7-9.)