Touching God in Prayer
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that You are here, that You see me, that You hear me. I adore You with profound reverence. I ask Your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
We are told by Our Lord in the Gospel, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).
We can be more convinced all the time of the essential place of prayer in the Christian life.
What the world needs most today are people who are in real and profound communion with God through prayer.
One saint has said, in prayer, the soul cleanses itself from sin, charity is nourished, faith is strengthened, hope is made secure, the spirit rejoices, the soul grows tender, and the heart is purified.
Truth discovers itself, temptation is overcome, sadness takes flight, the senses are renewed, failing virtue is made good, tepidity disappears, the rust of sin is rubbed away.
In it are brought forth lively flashes of heavenly desires, and in these fires rises the flame of divine love.
The Church and the world are passing through difficult times.
But God is faithful. He reveals Himself and communicates Himself to those who seek Him and want Him.
Saint John of the Cross wrote, the Lord has always revealed to mortals the treasures of His wisdom and His spirit. But now that the face of evil bares itself more and more, so does the Lord bare His treasures more.
If St. John of the Cross said those things during his time in the sixteenth century, what would he say today?
Prayer is faith, hope, and love.
What is needed to have a fruitful prayer life? One that really allows for an encounter with God and transforms our life little by little.
St. John of the Cross said there are people who think they pray well but pray poorly, and others who think they pray poorly but pray very well.
Where does the difference lie?
What puts us truly in communion with God in prayer?
In the time we devote to prayer, mental prayer, we can do diverse things.
We can meditate on a passage of Scripture.
We can ruminate slowly on a psalm.
We can dialogue freely with Our Lord.
Or we can also just remain silently in His presence.
What is decisive in the end is not this or that method, such and such an activity, but the deep disposition of our hearts while we are in prayer.
These profound dispositions are nothing other than faith, hope, and love.
All the rest is included in these attitudes, expressing them, nourishing them, maintaining them.
We are told in Scripture, the greater is the faith of the soul, the more closely it is united to God.
Sometimes while praying, we can have agreeable feelings of peace and happiness, a sensation of the presence of God.
We also may receive enlightenment regarding some aspect of the mystery of Christ or intuitions of what God expects from us.
These graces that move our senses or enlighten our intelligence are very precious. And we must welcome them in recognition that they are a kind of food and an encouragement for faith and love.
Even so, they are not of the essence of what brings us closer to God and places us in communion with Him.
In fact, God is infinitely beyond all we can know with our senses or perceive with our intelligence.
When the senses are in a dry spell and the intelligence is darkened, we should never be discouraged or feel far from God.
What ensures, what gives rise to contact with God, are neither feelings nor rational knowledge, but an act of faith.
“I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord” (Hos. 2:20), says the Book of Hosea.
From the moment I make a sincere and real act of hope, a loving, confident hope, desiring to give myself to God, I can be certain of being in touch with God, no matter what positive or disagreeable emotions I may happen to be feeling, or what thoughts, whether light or dark, may fill my mind.
St. John of the Cross often insisted that faith suffices for someone united to God. A great consolation indeed.
Sometimes when we feel very low, we can have the sense of being far from God, even though a simple act of faith would be enough to stir up absolute certainty of being in profound communion with Him.
Communion that sooner or later will bring the fruits of interior transformation.
A faith simultaneously consisting of both total confidence in God and full adherence to what He reveals to us of Himself through the Scriptures of the Church.
One spiritual writer says, this is given to me like the wings of the great eagle of the Apocalypse, which carries me, as it were, to the limit of faith, towards what the eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor heart felt.
Nor do I see, hear, experience, but the gift of faith goes infinitely further, leading to the reality that infinitely surpasses any humanly accessible reality.
Faith leads us to Him who gives it, well beyond all experience or personal conviction, beyond even what love would dare if God were not present at the very mystery of His own love.
I saw that faith imbued with love makes us attain this other side, the profound depth of the life of the Trinity, not through Christ and in Him, but drawing us into it as He Himself resides in it.
And I was there myself through His mercy, and in faith embedded with love, and I saw how near at hand it is.
One could make an interesting connection between the role of faith in the spiritual life and the role of the sense of touch in the life of the senses.
Among the five senses at our command, touch is the first to be developed, starting even at our mother’s bosom. And it forms a point of origin for all the others.
It doesn’t have the richness of some of the other senses, like vision, with all the diversity of images that we can ponder, or hearing, encountering the variety of sounds and melodies.
It is the most primordial, but the most essential sense in life and in communication. And it possesses an advantage other senses don’t have, that of reciprocity.
We can see without being seen. We can hear without being heard.
But we can’t touch an object without being touched by it at the same time.
The contact that comes with touching something is more intimate and immediate than that created by any other sense. It is, par excellence, the sense of communion.
In a similar way, faith has certain obvious limitations. One does not have faith in what is seen or heard or otherwise apprehended by the senses.
Yet it is also what is most vital in the spiritual life.
Through faith, we can, in a mysterious but real way, touch God and let ourselves be touched by Him, establishing ourselves in intimate communion with Him and allowing ourselves to be transformed little by little by His grace.
In the first letter of St. Peter, we find an exhortation addressed to the elders of the Church. In Greek, these were called presbyters, which gives rise to the word priest.
It says, “So I exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is to be revealed. Tend the flock of God that is your charge, not by constraint but willingly, not for shameful gain but eagerly, not as domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:1–3).
One idea in this beautiful exhortation of St. Peter seems particularly interesting. When the head of the apostles refers to himself in his own quality as an elder, he doesn’t first define this in terms of function or task in the community.
First, he evokes a spiritual experience. He, an elder, is witness of the sufferings of Christ and is to participate in the glory that will be revealed.
The role of the elder appears first of all to have a double spiritual link: to the passion of the Lord and to the future glory of the kingdom.
Within this double spiritual link, those with responsibility in the Church find the strength needed to be good shepherds in Jesus’ image, full of care, humility, and disinterested love towards those entrusted to them.
Here is where one acquires pastoral charity. It has relevance for all Christians alike.
The elder is the witness of the sufferings of Christ. Even if not a visual witness, as Peter, the elder had been, someone who has attained true spiritual maturity deeply understands the mystery of the Lord’s passion.
He or she has grasped the idea that what drove Jesus to accept the sufferings and outrages of the cross was love beyond all speaking.
He or she has understood what an unending richness of mercy, of grace, of healing of hearts is contained in the wounds of the Lord.
In the same letter, Peter evokes those wounds, “by whose stripes you were healed” (1 Pet. 2:24).
The elder is someone who remembers Christ, who constantly reminds us of Christ’s suffering and passion, and who brings together in this memory the desire to imitate Christ in giving his or her life for friends, and the necessary courage, despite weakness and poverty, to let himself or herself little by little be clothed in the very righteousness of Christ Jesus, as St. Paul indicates to the Corinthians.
The elder is someone who lives in the perspective of the future glory, who reminds us not only of the past but also of the future, which is certain, thus providing a foretaste of the happiness and glory that will be revealed when Christ returns.
Peter did so in his second letter, evoking the day of the Transfiguration when he was with the Lord on the holy mountain as an eyewitness of divine majesty, an experience that filled him with confidence in the power of Our Lord Jesus Christ and in His coming again.
Filled with the hope for the kingdom, the elder inhabits, as it were, a new world, crying out to be realized in splendor and beauty. And from this, he receives a powerful interior force.
Having pierced with the eyes of the heart this inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, he says he trembles with joy.
Thus, the activity of every minister of Christ is rooted in a double contemplation, a double communion, we might say, with the passion of the Lord and with the glory of the world to come.
This double contemplation occurs and is deepened in a very special way in the liturgy of the Church.
Meditating on the word of God revives in us Christ’s memory, which was announced by the prophets and the psalms and revealed in the Gospels.
It also moves us to see the splendor of the heavenly Jerusalem, prepared, as we are told in the Book of Revelation, “as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev. 21:2).
This sort of contemplation is at its maximum intensity in the celebration of the Eucharist, memorial of the passion of the Lord and guarantee of the glory to come.
At Mass, it is as if time is suspended. In faith, we are made contemporaries of Christ’s cross in a way hidden, yet absolutely real. Just like those who were present at the event, we can take part in the sufferings of Christ and can be beneficiaries of the rivers of forgiveness and peace that spring from the cross.
Like the good thief, we can be purified by the blood of the Lamb without blemish. We can find our nourishment and our life in the mercy and love of God.
At each Eucharistic celebration, we are invited to take part in this kingdom to come.
In the bread and wine consecrated on the altar, the kingdom of God is mysteriously but truly present in all its fullness and its richness, and we have access to it through faith.
An anticipation of the heavenly glory, the Eucharist makes present here below this kingdom of peace, of harmonious love, of sweetness and beauty, which is the object of all our peace.
That new world to which we aspire, receiving it as a foretaste, we desire it all the more and say, Maranatha, come Lord Jesus. Let grace come and let this world pass away, as is prayed in the old prayer of the Didache.
Each Eucharist, lived with lively faith and fervent prayer, makes us taste how the Lord is good, how sweet it is to praise Him and to love Him, to live in His presence and share all together the same life and same love.
It makes us yearn to manifest to all the world the glorious reality hidden in the humility of the sacramental species, veiled by appearances from our bodily eyes.
The Eucharist truly transports us to the heavens, not in order to flee the realities of this world, but to give us a firm hope, to nourish our charity, and so give us the courage needed to assume the responsibility of this life and enter into its struggles.
Here is the real condition for being an elder. Here is real spiritual maturity. A deep faith that makes us share intimately in the passion of the Lord and the glory of the world to come.
It is this sharing that gives our present life all its fruitfulness. This was strongly experienced by the first Christian generation.
They were still very close to the events of Our Lord’s life and were waiting for His imminent coming in glory, which they knew could be hastened through their prayers and desire.
So the celebrations were marked with extraordinary fervor, which gave the Church great apostolic zeal.
After 2,000 years, and a certain dimming of the eschatological sense, all this may be more difficult for us.
Yet the Spirit today invites us to regain this same spiritual intensity, this same mystical identification with the cross and with glory, especially in our liturgies.
May our celebrations move us to share with intense faith in the mystery of Christ handed down to us and in the splendor of the kingdom to come, so that hope and charity may be renewed in us.
We are told in St. Matthew that “where there are two or three gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20).
It’s very difficult to fight against one’s concupiscence and against the snares and temptations of the devil and the selfish world if we are isolated.
Such is the bombardment that seduces us that if we are too alone, we easily lose the sense of reality, the inner clarity, and succumb.
Sanctification is a community journey, two by two.
This is reflected in some holy communities. On several occasions, the Church has canonized entire communities that heroically lived the Gospel or that offered the lives of all their members to God.
For example, the seven holy founders of the Order of the Servants of Mary, or the seven blessed religious of the first monastery of the Visitation in Madrid. Saint Paul Miki and companion martyrs in Japan. Saint Andrew Kim Taegon and companion martyrs in Korea. Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez and companion martyrs in South America.
Also the recent testimony of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine in Algeria, who prepared together for martyrdom.
Likewise, there are many holy marriages where each was an instrument of Christ for the sanctification of the spouse.
Living or working with others is certainly a path of spiritual development.
St. John of the Cross said to a disciple, you are living with others that they may work and exercise you.
The community is called to create that theological space in which the mystical presence of the risen Lord can be experienced.
Sharing the word and celebrating the Eucharist together makes us more brothers and sisters and makes us a holy and missionary community.
This also gives rise to true mystical experiences lived in community, as was the case of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, or that sublime spiritual encounter that St. Augustine and his mother St. Monica lived together.
When the day of his death was drawing near, a day known to You and which we did not know, it happened, by Your hidden designs, as I firmly believe, that she and I were alone, leaning against a window that looked out onto the garden of the house where we were staying.
And we opened the mouth of our hearts, eager for the streams of Your fountain, the fountain of life that is in You.
And while we were talking and sighing for it, we came to touch a little with all the impulses of our heart, so that it was the everlasting life for which we sighed.
As another writer says, but these experiences are not the most frequent nor the most important. Community life, whether in the family, in the parish, in the religious community, or in any other, is made up of many small details.
This was the case of the holy community formed by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, where the beauty of trinitarian communion was reflected in a paradigmatic way.
It is also what happened in the community life that Jesus led with His disciples and with the simple people.
We can remember how Jesus invited His disciples to pay attention to details: the small detail that the wine was running out at a party, the small detail that a sheep was missing, the small detail of the widow who offered her two coins, the small detail of having to spare oil for the lamps in case the groom is delayed, the small detail of asking His disciples how many loaves they had, the small detail of having a fire prepared and a fish on the grill while waiting for the disciples at dawn.
The community that preserves the small details of love, where the members care for one another and constitute an open and evangelizing space, is the place of the presence of the risen One who sanctifies it according to the Father’s plan.
Sometimes, by a gift of the Lord’s love, in the midst of these small details, we are given consoling experiences of God.
One writer says, “One winter afternoon, I was carrying out, as usual, my sweet task. Suddenly, I heard in the distance the harmonious sound of a musical instrument. Then I imagined a very well-lit room, all resplendent with rich gilding, and in it elegantly dressed young ladies lavishing mutual compliments and worldly courtesies. Then I looked at the poor sick woman whom I was holding, and instead of a melody, I listened from time to time to their plaintive moans. I can’t express what went through my soul. All I know is that the Lord illuminated her with the rays of truth, which so surpassed the gloomy brightness of the feasts of the earth that she could not believe in my happiness.”
Contrary to the tendency towards consumerist individualism that ends up isolating us in search for well-being apart from others, our journey of sanctification cannot fail to identify us with the desire of Our Lord, “that all may be one, as you, Father, in me and I in you” (John 17:21), as we are told in St. John.
I thank You, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that You have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask Your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW