I
WE are to consider in the course of these addresses some
of the problems most intimately concerning that which
is generally known as the 'inner life'; and this in their
special relation to the needs of the parish priest and
religious teacher. And by the term 'inner life' we shall
here mean all that conditions the relation of the individual
soul with God; the deepening and expansion of the
spiritual sense; in fact, the heart of personal religion.
I feel a great diffidence in coming before you, as an
ordinary laywoman, to speak of such matters as these;
since they are, after all, your peculiar and professional
concern. Indeed, I only presume to do so because I
care about these things very much, and have some leisure
to think about them; and so venture to put at your service
certain conclusions to which I have come. If many of
these are already familiar to you, as they probably are,
you must forgive me.
We start from the obvious fact, that as persons professionally
concerned to teach and demonstrate the truths
of religion, to spread the knowledge of God, and to work
in souls, the problems of the personal spiritual life are
of the most transcendent importance to you: indeed, that
they concern you more certainly and directly than they
do Christians of any other type. The very first requisite
for a minister of religion is that his own inner life
should be maintained in a healthy state; his own contact
with God be steady and true. But just because you are
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ministers of religion, and therefore committed to perpetual
external activities, this fostering and feeding of the inner
life is often in some ways far more difficult for you, than
it is for those for whom you work and whom you teach.
The time which you have at your disposal for the purpose
is limited; and the rest of your time is more or less fully
occupied with external religious and philanthropic
activities, often of a most exacting kind. There is a
constant drain on your spiritual resources, which you
simply must make good : while the relief and change so
necessary for all of us if our spiritual lives are to remain
keen, vivid, real, is often lacking in your case, going
incessantly as you do and must from one form of religious
activity to another.
This being so, it does become immensely important,
doesn't it? for you to have a clear view of your own
spiritual position and needs, a clear idea of the essentials
of your situation; and to plot out the time which you have
at your own disposal as well as you possibly can. The
clergyman above all other men needs to learn, and
raise to the level of habit, George Fox's art of 'seeing
all things in the Universal Light'. Yet it very often
happens that the busy and driven parish priest entirely
loses sight not merely of his own spiritual position, but
also of this great spiritual landscape in which he is placed;
by concentrating all the while on those details of it that
specially concern him. He cannot see the forest, because
he is attending so faithfully to the trees. It is surely a
first charge on his devotional life, to recover that sense
of the forest, which gives all their meaning to the trees.
For this purpose, it seems to me, neither a hard and
fast liturgic scheme,- nor the most carefully planned
theological reading, nor any sort of dreamy devotionalism,
is going to be of use to you. The primary thing, I
believe, that will be of use is a conception, as clear and
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rich and deep as you are able to get it, first of the Splendour
of God; and next of your own souls over against that
Splendour of God; and last of the sort of interior life
which your election of His service demands. God—the soul—its election of Him—the three fundamental
realities of religion. If these realities do not rule the
mind and heart of the priest, how is it conceivable that
he can do the work of God in the souls of other men?
I said: 'the sort of interior life which your election
demands.' Because that will be, or should be, distinct
in kind from the inner life of the average Christian. The
soul of a priest—in fact, the soul of every religious worker
stands in a special relation towards God and other
souls. He has spiritual problems which are special to
himself. He is one of the assistant shepherds, not one
of the sheep. He has got to stick it out in all weathers;
to be always ready, always serving, always eager to feed
and save. An unremitting, patient, fostering care, the
willing endurance of exhaustion, hardship, and risk:
all these things may be asked of him. He is constantly
called upon to give out spiritual energy and sympathy.
And he has got to maintain his own supplies, his own
religious health and suppleness, in a manner adequate
to that demand; so to deepen his own life, that he is
capable of deepening the lives of others. In the striking
phrase of St. Bernard, if he is adequately to fulfil all his
obligations, he must be a reservoir and not a canal.
Now there is only one way in which it is possible for
the religious teacher to do all this ; and that is by enriching
his sense of God. And that enrichment of the sense of
God is surely the crying need of our current Christianity.
A shallow religiousness, the tendency to be content with
a bright ethical piety wrongly called practical Christianity,
a nice, brightly-varnished this-world faith, seems to me
to be one of the ruling defects of institutional religion
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at
the present time. We are drifting towards a religion
which consciously or unconsciously keeps its eye on
humanity rather than on Deity—which lays all the stress
on service, and hardly any of the stress on awe: and that
is a type of religion, which in practice does not wear
well. It does little for the soul in those awful moments
when the pain and mystery of life are most deeply felt.
It does not provide a place for that profound experience
which Tauler called 'suffering in God'. It does not
lead to sanctity: and sanctity after all is the religious goal.
It does not fit those who accept it as adequate for the
solemn privilege of guiding souls to God and is not
guiding souls to God the object of the pastoral life?
In fact, it turns its back on the most profound gifts made
by Christianity to the human race. I do not think we
can deny that there is at present a definite trend in the
direction of religion of this shallow social type; and it
will only be checked if and in so far as the clergy are
themselves real men of prayer, learning to know at first
hand more and more deeply and so more and more
humbly the ineffable realities to which they have given
their lives. Therefore to become and to continue a real
man of prayer, seems to me the first duty of a parish
priest.
What then is a real man of prayer? He is one who
deliberately wills and steadily desires that his intercourse
with God and other souls shall be controlled and actuated
at every point by God Himself; one who has so far developed
and educated his spiritual sense, that his supernatural
environment is more real and solid to him than
his natural environment. A man of prayer is not
necessarily a person who says a number of offices, or
abounds in detailed intercessions; but he is a child of
God, who is and knows himself to be in the deeps of his
soul attached to God, and is wholly and entirely guided
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by the Creative Spirit in his prayer and his work. This
is not merely a bit of pious language. It is a description,
as real and concrete as I can make it, of the only really
apostolic life. Every Christian starts with a chance of
it; but only a few develop it. The laity distinguish in
a moment the clergy who have it from the clergy who
have it not: there is nothing that you can do for God or
for the souls of men, which exceeds in importance the
achievement of that spiritual temper and attitude.
Consider. As Christians we are committed, are we
not? to a belief in the priority of the supernatural world;
the actual presence, and working within visible appearance,
of the Creative Spirit of God. For the parishes
to which you are sent you are, or should be, the main
links with that supernatural world; the main channels of
God's action on souls. You are those in whom the hope
of a more intense spiritual life for those parishes is centred:
those in whom for this purpose God has placed His trust.
An abasing thought, isn't it? Even individuals among
the laity who are used in such a way as that find it an
overwhelming experience; and this gives some clue to
the profound humility and sense of awe which their
vocation must produce in priests; the constant and
delicate susceptibility to the pressure of the Spirit which
is required by their work.
There you are, moving through life: immersed in the
world of succession and change, constantly claimed by
the little serial duties and interests of your career, and
yet ringed round by the solemn horizon of eternity,
informed by its invisible powers. And because you are
priests even more than is the case with other men, all that you do, feel and think as you move through this
changing life, is going to affect all the other souls whom
you touch, and condition their relation with that unchanging
Real. Through you, they may be attracted
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to or repelled by the spiritual life. You are held tight
in that double relationship; to those changing other souls,
and to that changeless God. What you are like, and
what your relation to God is like; this must and will
affect all those whom you visit, preach to, pray with,
and to whom you give the sacraments. It will make the
difference between Church services which are spiritual
experiences to those attending them, and Church services
which consist in the formal recitation of familiar words.
We, the laity, know instantly the difference between the
churches which are served with love and devotion and
those which are not. And we know from this, what
their ministers are like. And what you are like, is going
to depend on your secret life of prayer ; on the steady
orientation of your souls to the Reality of God. Called
upon to practise in their fullness the two great commandments,
you can only hope to get the second one
right, if you are completely controlled by the first.
And that will depend on the quality of your secret
inner life.
Now by the quality of our inner lives I do not mean
something characterized by ferocious intensity and strain.
I mean rather such a humble and genial devotedness as
we find in the most loving of the saints. I mean the
quality which makes contagious Christians; makes
people catch the love of God from you. Because they
ought not to be able to help doing this, if you have
really got it : if you yourselves feel the love, joy and
peace, the utter delightfulness of the consecrated life
and this to such an extent, that every formal act of
worship in church is filled with the free spontaneous
worship of your soul. That is what wins people above
all. It raises the simplest vocal prayer, the most commonplace
of hymns, the most elaborate ceremonial action,
to the same level of supernatural truth. People want to
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see and feel this in those who come to them with the
credentials of religion: the joy, the delightfulness, the
transfiguration of hard dull work and of suffering, which
irradiate the real Christian life. You can't do more
for anybody than give them that, can you? for that
means real redemption here and now; the healing of
all our psychic conflicts, all our worries and resistances
and sense of injustice.
You are sent to a world full of tortured, twisted, overdriven
souls: and sometimes nowadays you are told,
that in order to help them better, you ought to study
psychology by which is usually meant morbid psychology.
I do not deny that this may be very useful knowledge
for the clergy, and save them from many disastrous
mistakes. But all the same, I think it would be much
more practical, more use to your people in the end, to
spend that time and strength in deepening and increasing
your own love of God : for it is only through adoration
and attention that we make our personal discoveries
about. Him. How are you going to show these souls,
who need it so dreadfully, the joy and delightfulness of
God and surrender to God, unless you have it yourselves?
But that means giving time, patience, effort to such a
special discipline and cultivation of your attention as
artists must give, if they are to enter deeply into the
reality and joy of natural loveliness and impart it in their
work. Do you see the great facts and splendours of
religion with the eye of an artist and a lover, or with the
eye of a man of business, or the eye of the man in the
street? Is your sense of wonder and mystery keen and
deep? Such a sense of wonder and mystery, such a living
delight in God, is of course in technical language a grace.
It is something added, given, to the natural man. But,
like all other graces, its reception by us depends very
largely on the exercise of our will and our desire, on our
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mental and emotional openness and plasticity. It will
not be forced upon us. And we show our will and desire,
keep ourselves plastic, in and through the character of
our prayer. You remember Jeremy Taylor's saying:
'Prayer is only the body of the bird—desires are its
wings.'
All this means that the secret prayer of the priest
must have a certain contemplative colour about it: that
one of its main functions must be to feed and expand
his sense and desire of God. We will consider later some
of the ways in which he may best achieve this. Now,
let us only get this supernatural orientation firmly fixed
in our minds, as the central character of a fruitful inner
life. The English mystic, Walter Hilton, said that the
City of Jerusalem, the city of the love of God, was built
'by the perfection of a man's work, and a little touch
of contemplation'. And by contemplative prayer, I
do not mean any abnormal sort of activity or experience,
still less a deliberate and artificial passivity. I just mean
the sort of prayer that aims at God in and for Himself
and not for any of His gifts whatever, and more and
more profoundly rests in Him alone: what St. Paul, that
vivid realist, meant by being rooted and grounded. When
I read those words, I always think of a forest tree. First
of the bright and changeful tuft that shows itself to the
world, and produces the immense spread of boughs
and branches, the succession and abundance of leaves
and fruits. Then of the vast unseen system of roots,
perhaps greater than the branches in strength and extent,
with their tenacious attachments, their fan-like system
of delicate filaments and their power of silently absorbing
food. On that profound and secret life the whole
growth and stability of the tree depend. It is rooted
and grounded in a hidden world.
That was the image in Paul's mind, I suppose, when
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he talked of this as the one prayer he made for his converts
and fellow workers; and said that he desired it for
them so that they could 'be able to comprehend what
is the breadth and length and depth and height'— a
splendour of realization unachieved by theology—and
be *
filled with all the fullness of God': in other words,
draw their spiritual energy direct from its supernatural
source. You know that St. Bernard called this the
'business of all businesses'
; because it controls all the
rest, and gives meaning to all the rest—perpetually
renews our contact with reality. Ought not our devotional
life to be such as to frame in us the habit of such
recourse to God as the Ground of the soul? Should it
not educate our whole mental machinery, feeling, imagination,
will and thought, for this?
St. Ignatius Loyola based the whole of his great
Spiritual Exercises on one fundamental truth :
'Man was
created for this end to praise, reverence and serve the
Lord his God.' This sounds all right, indeed almost
obviots, when one says it. It slips by, like so many
religious phrases, almost unchecked. But if we stop
and look at it, and especially at the chosen order of the
terms which that great saint and psychologist employed,
what does it mean? It means that man's first duty is
adoration; and his second duty is awe; and only his
third duty is service. And that for those three things
and nothing else, addressed to God and no one else, you
and I and all the other countless human creatures evolved
upon the surface of this planet were created.
We observe then, that two of the three things for
which our souls were made are matters of attitude, of
relation: adoration and awe. Unless those two are
right, the last of the triad, service, won't be right. Unless
the whole of your priestly life is a movement of praise
and adoration, unless it is instinct with awe, the work
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which that life produces won't be much good. And if
that be true, it follows that the Christian revelation, the
work done by Christ in men's souls, has also as its main
object the promotion of God's glory, the shining out of
His Reality more and more fully through our acts:
the increase of our wide-open, loving, selfless adoration,
the deepening of our creaturely awe, the expanding of
our consecration in service. And all this must happen
in you, before you can give it to your people, mustn't
it? You have to show them in your own person the
literal truth of the other great Ignatian saying: 'I
come from God—I belong to God—I am destined for
God!'
This, then, seems the first consideration which should
be before the mind of the priest, in planning his personal
devotional life. It means that attention to God must be
your primary religious activity, and this for the strictly
practical reason that without that attention to God, all
other religious activities will lose their worth; that the
life of the minister of religion depends almost entirely
for its value on the extent in which it is bathed in the
Divine Light. This is the first term of all religious life
and thought; and probably the term to which most
modern Christians give least undivided attention.
Yet how necessary it is, isn't it? for you, kept perpetually
on the move, incessantly distracted by the
countless details of parochial life, and exposed too to the
dangers of monotony and spiritual deadness that lurk
in the perpetual recitation of set forms, to form early
and to feed regularly the habit of recourse to the changeless
Eternity which supports that life. It is the ultimate
object of all those devoted, ceaseless and changeful
activities of yours, to bring into the lives of those for and
with whom you work, something of that changeless
temper of Eternity. If you, with your special facilities
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and training, do not manage to do this, it is not particularly
likely that anyone else will do it; and your power
of doing it depends upon your possession of it. There
is a beautiful prayer which is often said at the end of the
Office of Compline, asking that those who are wearied
by this changeful world may repose on the Eternal
Changelessness. Are these mere words to us, or do they
represent a vivid fact? We can almost test the healthiness
of our own inner lives by the answer we give to that
question. The writings of the saints and of many lesser
lovers of God prove to us again and again that the sense
of the Eternal as a vivid fact can become so integrated
with the life of the soul, that it can reach the level of
habit. In you at least it has got to reach that level of
habit, if you are completely to fulfil your vocation;
because that vocation consists, when we get down to
fundamentals, in bringing the eternal realities of God
to the souls of men, and thus participating in the continued
redemptive action of Spirit on the world.
A priest is or should be an agent of the supernatural.
We ordinary people hustle along; trying to get through
the detailed work of each day, and respond reasonably well to its demands, opportunities, and obligations. We
are obsessed by the ceaseless chain of events, and forget
for the most part the mystery that surrounds us; the
overplus of spiritual reality and power, far beyond anything
that we are able to conceive, and yet constantly
and intimately conditioning us. But you cannot afford
to do that. Your supernatural status matters supremely
to every soul that is in your charge; and will be the main
factor in bringing other souls into your charge. And
one of the chief things that will help you to develop a
sense of that supernatural status, will be to keep steadily
in view the great central truths of religion; training
yourselves to their realization, and forming the habit
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of constant recourse to their healing and purifying
influences.
The beginning, then, of a strong and fruitful inner life
in the clergyman or religious worker, seems to me to
depend on the thorough realization of these facts. It
requires, not merely the acceptance but the full first-hand
apprehension, of the ruling truth of the richly living
spaceless and unchanging God; blazing in the spiritual
sky, yet intimately present within the world of events,
moulding and conditioning every phase of life. The
religion of the priest, if it is to give power and convey
certitude, must be from first to last a theocentric religion ;
and it must be fed by a devotional practice based upon
that objective Power and Presence, and neither on your
own subjective feelings, cravings, and needs, nor on the
feelings, cravings, and needs of those among whom you
work. Once you have made that utter independence
and given-ness of God your point of departure, your
whole conception of life will be affected ; and many little
fusses about the details of that life, caused by the extraordinary
degree of importance we attach to our mere
active service, will vanish away.
I feel more and more convinced that only a spirituality
which thus puts the whole emphasis on the Reality of
God, perpetually turning to Him, losing itself in Him,
refusing to allow even the most pressing work or practical
problems, even sin and failure, to distract from God—only this is a safe foundation for spiritual work. This
alone is able to keep alive the awed, adoring sense of the
mysteries among which we move, and of the tiny bit
which at the best we ourselves can apprehend of them
and yet, considering that immensity and our tininess,
the marvel of what we do know and feel.
A great woman of the last century, Mother Janet
Stuart, was accustomed to say to her novices: 'Think
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glorious thoughts of God and serve Him with a quiet
mind!' And it is surely a fact that the more glorious
and more spacious our thoughts of Him are, the greater
the quietude and confidence with which we do our
detailed work will be. Not controversial thoughts, or
dry academic thoughts, or anxious worried thoughts, or
narrow conventional thoughts. All these bring contraction
instead of expansion to our souls; and we all
know that this inner sense of contraction or expansion
is an unfailing test of our spiritual state. But awed and
delighted thoughts of a Reality and Holiness that is
inconceivable to us, and yet that is Love. A Reality
that pours itself out in and through the simplest forms
and accidents, and makes itself known under the homeliest
symbols; that is completely present in and with us,
determining us at every moment of our lives. Such
meditations as these keep our windows open towards
Eternity; and preserve us from that insidious pious
stuffiness which is the moth and rust of the dedicated
life.
The inner life means an ever-deepening awareness of
all this: the slowly growing and concrete realization of
a Life and a Spirit within us immeasurably exceeding
our own, and absorbing, transmuting, supernaturalizing
our lives by all ways and at all times. It means the
loving sense of God, as so immeasurably beyond us as
to keep us in a constant attitude of humblest awe and
yet so deeply and closely with us, as to invite our clinging
trust and loyal love. This, it seems to me, is what
theological terms like Transcendence and Immanence
can come to mean to us when re-interpreted in the life
of prayer.
Surely such a personal re-interpretation is a deeply
important part of your pastoral work; a part of the
apostolic process of sanctifying yourselves for the sake of
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other souls, of making yourselves fit to attract and win
other souls. For you will only bring men to the love of
God in so far as you yourselves have got it ; and can only
help them to make sense of that world of time and events
which so greatly bewilders them, in so far as you are
able to bring into it the spirit of Eternity. That is what
you are for. That is the spiritual food which you are
charged to give to the sheep. It is that Love of God and
that Peace and Presence of Eternity for which souls are
now so hungry ; and your power of really feeding them
depends absolutely on your own secret life towards God.
Again, the world is full of jangling noises. You know
that there are better melodies. But you will never
transmit the heavenly music to others unless you yourselves
are tuned in to it: and that, once more, means
giving to it careful and undivided attention during part
of each day. Do you feel sure, as you move about among
your people, as you take services, administer sacraments,
preach, and so forth, that you bring with you and impart
to them an absolute spiritual certitude? Because if you
are not doing that, you are not really doing your job,
are you?
Now if you are to convey that spiritual certitude, it is
plain that you must yourselves be spiritually alive. And
to be spiritually alive means to be growing and changing ;
not to settle down among a series of systematized beliefs
and duties, but to endure and go on enduring the strains,
conflicts and difficulties incident to development. 'The
soul,' said Baron von Hügel, 'is a Force or an Energy:
and Holiness is the growth of that energy in love, in
full Being, in creative, spiritual Personality.' One chief
object of personal religion is the promoting of that
growth of the soul; the wise feeding and training of it.
However busy we may be, however mature and efficient
we may seem, that growth, if we are real Christians, must
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go on. Even the greatest spiritual teachers, such as St.
Paul and St. Augustine, could never afford to relax the
tension of their own spiritual lives; they never seem to
stand still, are never afraid of conflict and change. Their
souls too were growing entities, with a potential capacity
for love, adoration and creative service ; in other words,
for holiness, the achievement of the stature of Christ.
A saint is simply a human being whose soul has thus
grown up to its full stature, by full and generous response
to its environment, God. He has achieved a deeper
bigger life than the rest of us, a more wonderful contact
with the mysteries of the Universe; a life of infinite
possibility, the term of which he never feels that he has
reached.
That desire and willingness for growth at all costs, that
sense of great unreached possibilities which await the
fully-expanded human soul, is important for us all;
but surely specially important for priests? It is imperative
that those who are to teach religion and guide souls
should steadily enlarge their conception of and capacity
for God; yet how many adult Christian workers go on,
as they should do, steadily expanding towards Eternity?
The one thing, I suppose, which more than any other
testifies to our spiritual vitality? If we do not grow thus,
the origin of that defect is and can only be in the poverty
of our own inner lives of prayer and mortification, keeping
that spiritual vitality at low ebb. Prayer and mortification
are hard words; but after all that which they involve
is simply communion with God and discipline of self.
They are the names of those two fundamental and inseparable
activities which temper the natural resources
of man to his supernatural work; and every Christian
worker must have in his life the bracing and humbling
influences of such continuous self-surrender and selfconquest.
They involve a ceaseless gentle discipline;
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but being a disciple means living a disciplined life, and
it is not very likely that you will get other disciples,
unless you are one first.
The saintly and simple Curé d'Ars was once asked the
secret of his abnormal success in converting souls. He
replied that it was done by being very indulgent to others
and very hard on himself; a recipe which retains all its
virtue still. And this power of being outwardly genial
and inwardly austere, which is the real Christian temper,
depends entirely on the use we make of the time set
apart for personal religion. It is always achieved if
courageously and faithfully sought; and there are no
heights of love and holiness to which it cannot lead,
no limits to the power which it can exercise over the
souls of men.
We have the saints to show us that these things are
actually possible: that one human soul can rescue and
transfigure another, and can endure for it redemptive
hardship and pain. We may allow that the saints are
specialists; but they are specialists in a career to which all
Christians are called. They have achieved, as it were, the
classic status. They are the advance guard of the army;
but we, after all, are marching in the main ranks. The
whole army is dedicated to the same supernatural cause;
and we ought to envisage it as a whole, and to remember
that every one of us wears the same uniform as the saints,
has access to the same privileges, is taught the same drill
and fed with the same food. The difference between
them and us is a difference in degree, not in kind. They
possess, and we most conspicuously lack, a certain
maturity and depth of soul; caused by the perfect flowering
in them of self-oblivious love, joy and peace. We
recognize in them a finished product, a genuine work of
God. But this power and beauty of the saints is on the
human side simply the result of their faithful life of
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prayer; and is something to which, in various degrees,
every Christian worker can attain. Therefore we ought
all to be a little bit like them; to have a sort of family
likeness, to share the family point of view.
If we ask of the saints how they achieved spiritual
effectiveness, they are only able to reply that, in so far
as they did it themselves, they did it by love and prayer.
A love that is very humble and homely; a prayer that is
full of adoration and of confidence. Love and prayer,
on their lips, are not mere nice words; they are the names
of tremendous powers, able to transform in a literal sense
human personality and make it more and more that which
it is meant to be the agent of the Holy Spirit in the
world. Plainly then, it is essential to give time or to get
time somehow for self-training in this love and this
prayer, in order to develop those powers. It is true that
in their essence they are 'given', but the gift is only fully
made our own by a patient and generous effort of the
soul. Spiritual achievement costs much, though never
as much as it is worth. It means at the very least the
painful development and persevering, steady exercise of
a faculty that most of us have allowed to get slack. It
means an inward if not an outward asceticism: a virtual
if not an actual mysticism.
People talk about mysticism as if it were something
quite separate from practical religion; whereas, as a
matter of fact, it is the intense heart of all practical
religion, and no one without some touch of it is contagious
and able to win souls. What is mysticism? It is in its
widest sense the reaching out of the soul to contact with
those eternal realities which are the subject matter of
religion. And the mystical life is the complete life of
love and prayer which transmutes those objects of belief
into living realities: love and prayer directed to God for
Himself, and not for any gain for ourselves. Therefore
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there should surely be some mystical element in the inner
life of every real priest.
All our external religious activities—services, communions,
formal devotions, good works—these are either
the expressions or the support of this inward life of loving
adherence. We must have such outward expressions and
supports, because we are not pure spirits but human
beings, receiving through our senses the messages of
Reality. But all their beauty is from within; and the
degree in which we can either exhibit or apprehend that
beauty depends on our own inward state. I think that
if this were more fully realized, a great deal of the hostility
which is now shown to institutional religion by good and
earnest people would break down. It is your part, isn't
it? to show them that it is true: to transmute by your love
those dead forms of which they are always complaining,
and make of them the chalice of the Spirit of Life.
In one of the Apocryphal Gospels of the Infancy there
is a story of how the child Jesus, picking up the clay
sparrows with which the other boys were playing, threw
them into the air, where they became living birds. As a
legend, we may regard this as an absurdity. As a spiritual
parable it is profoundly true.
page 19
II
WE have considered in a general sense the supernatural
situation of the worker for God; his total and direct
dependence upon spiritual resources, and the duty of self-sanctification which lies upon him, so that he may
become a fit agent and tool of the Spirit. We have seen
that a gradual and steady growth is demanded of him:
and this growth must be in two directions—in depth, and
in expansive love. He is called to an ever-deepening,
more awe-struck and realistic adoration of God, which
shall be the true measure of his spiritual status. He is
also called to an ever-widening and more generous
outflow of loving interest towards his fellow men. It was
Ruysbroeck, one of the greatest of contemplatives, who
declared the result of a perfected life of prayer to be 'a
widespreading love to all in common'. But it is only
in so far as he succeeds in achieving the deepness, that
man can hope to win and maintain that expansiveness.
We come therefore to the practical means by which this
can be attained, and the practical aims which we should
put before us.
There are features in the situation of the modern religious
worker which are peculiar to our own times. The
pace and pressure of life is now so great, the mass of
detail supposed to be necessary to organized religion has
so immensely increased, that it has created an entirely
new situation. It is more difficult than ever before for
page 20
the parish priest to obtain time and quiet of soul for the
deepening of his own devotional life. Yet if it is true
that the vocation of the clergy is first and foremost to
the care of souls, and if only persons of prayer can hope
to win and deal with souls in an adequate and fruitful
way, then surely this problem of how to obtain time and
peace for attention to the spiritual world, is primary
for each of you. It is, indeed, a problem which everyone
who takes religion seriously is obliged to face and to solve.
Everyone must decide, according to his circumstances,
how much time each day he can spare for this ; and then
further decide what in his position, and with due regard
to his needs and nature, is the very best way of using that
time. The amount of time which can be given and the
way that it is used will vary between soul and soul;
and the first snag to avoid is surely that of adopting a
set scheme because we have read about it in a book, or
because it suits somebody else.
We shall find, when we look into our own souls, or
study those with whom we have to deal, that there is an
immense variation among them; both in aptitude, and
in method of approaching God. We shall discover that
only certain devotional books and certain devotional
symbols and practices truly have meaning for us; whilst
others will appeal to other men. Some of us belong predominantly
to the institutional, some to the ascetical
and ethical, some to the mystical type; and within these
great classes and types of spirituality, there is an infinite
variety of temper and degree. The first thing we have
to find out is the kind of practice that suits our souls:
yours, not someone else's, and now, at this stage of its
growth. You have to find and develop the prayer that
fully employs you and yet does not overstrain you; the
prayer in which you are quite supple before God; the
prayer that refreshes, braces and expands you, and is best
page 21
able to carry you over the inevitable fluctuations of spiritual
level and mood. But in thus making up your minds
to use that method towards which you are most deeply
and persistently attracted, and to feed your own souls
on the food that you can digest, you must nevertheless
retain an entire and supple willingness to give others, if
desirable, a quite different diet, encourage in them
another sort of practice. More than this, you must for
their sakes try to learn all you can about other methods
than your own. The clergy are the very last people in
the world who can afford to be devotional specialists.
And the way to avoid being a devotional specialist is to
keep one's eye on the great objectives of prayer; never
forgetting that these great objectives belong to Eternal
Life, while all forms and methods without exception belong
to the world of change, and only have value as expressing
and improving the communion of the soul with God.
Look now at the aim which should condition your
inner life. This aim, in your case, cannot and must not
be that of becoming a contemplative pure and simple.
It must rather be to transfuse your whole life of action
and service with the spirit of contemplation. The vocation
of the Christian minister is to the mixed life of prayer
and service of which the classic pattern is seen in Christ:
the highest, the most difficult, the most complete human
life that we know. It is a life of looking and of working,
which unites the will, the imagination and the heart;
concentrates them on one single aim. In the recollected
hours of prayer and meditation you do the looking; in
the active and expansive hours you do the working.
Such a regime, faithfully followed, will slowly but surely
transform the personality of those pursuing it. Therefore
the time that you give to private devotion must
always be thought of as contributing to this: feeding and
expanding your spirit, making you more and more
page 22
capable of
being to the Eternal Goodness 'what his own
hand is to a man',—a supple and living tool. It must be
such a period of concentrated attention as will gather
the spiritual energy which afterwards overflows into your
liturgic and pastoral work. It must form in you such an
ever-deepening spiritual communion, as shall establish
and feed in you an adherence to God, which you can
carry right through the external tasks of your day: shall
warm and illuminate your ministry whether of services
or of teaching.
Especially, I think, these times of secret prayer should
train the priest to live more and more intensely towards
God in his conducting of liturgic prayer. You do far
more for your congregations, for helping them to understand
what prayer really is, and to practise it, for quickening
their religious sensitiveness, by your un-self-conscious
absorption in God during services, than you can hope to
do by any amount of sermons, instructions, introduction
of novel and attractive features, etc. These congregations
are probably far too shy to come and tell you what it is
that helps them most in the things that you do; but there
is no doubt at all that your recollectedness, your devotional
temper, will be one of the things that do help them most.
For very many of them, the time that they spend with
you in church is the only opportunity which they have of
seeing what prayer is; and it is your great opportunity
to show them what it is. It is wonderfully impressive
to see a soul that really loves God, and really feels awe
and delight, speaking to Him; and therefore learning to
do that is surely a pastoral act? You remember what
Penn said of George Fox: 'The most awful, living,
reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, was his in prayer,—
a tiny vivid picture of a human soul concentrated upon
the supernatural world. If you are to help your people
thus, you must obtain in your hours of solitude the
page 23
material for sych a super-naturalization of your outward
religious life.
All this means that the integration of the whole life,
and not any separation of devotion from action—still
less a virtual opposition between them—ought to be the
priest's ascetic aim; and that the time which you definitely
set apart for devotion is to be regarded as contributing
to something more than your own personal support and
advancement. It is an essential part of your apostolic
work. The gentle penetration of every circumstance of
life with supernatural values is the mark of the really
persuasive type of religion; and this comes neither from
a multiplication of suitable services, nor from the promulgation
of Christian political ideas, nor yet from the
deliberate cultivation of hearty good fellowship of the
clerical kind, excellent though all these things may be.
It comes always and only from a very pure, child-like
and continuous inner life of prayer.
Psychologists tell us that the health and balance of our
mental life depend upon the due proportion in it of
introversion and extroversion. Now the life of a clergyman
in these days is usually and inevitably extroverted to
excess. His attention is incessantly called outwards
towards the multitude of details and demands; the clubs
and scouts and guides, the weekly social, the monthly
magazine, and the whole network of parochial administration.
And the result of this, unless he is very careful, is
a lack of depth, a spiritual impoverishment, and with it
an insidious tendency to attribute undue importance to
external details, whether of cultus or of organization;
to substitute social and institutional religion for devotional
religion. This tendency is now at work right through
the ranks of organized Christianity; and, by depriving
that organized Christianity of its due supply of supernatural
energy, inevitably reduces its redemptive effect.
page 24
The remedy is to make the private religious life of all such
over-busy persons aim at more introversion; and so get
the psychic balance right. Their prayer should be of a
meditative and recollective type, thus enabling them to
give depth and inwardness to their institutional exercises:
and as their inner life matures helping them to develop
that priceless art of prompt recollection at odd times
which is unequalled in its power of restoring and stabilizing
our adherence to God. Such a scheme need not and
should not mean any feverishly intense form of piety.
But it does mean such a wise feeding of your souls as will
enable you to meet all the demands made upon you
without dangerous spiritual exhaustion.
St. Bonaventura in a celebrated passage divides men
of prayer into three main types: first, those who attend
chiefly to supplication; next, those who attend chiefly
to speculation; and last, those who rise beyond both
these to ecstatic communion with God. The classification
is obviously based on the threefold promise of Christ,
respecting the prayer that asks, the prayer that seeks,
and the prayer that knocks at the door: and, like that
promise, it exhibits under symbols a profound psychological
and spiritual truth—namely the power and range
of the soul's effective desire. It is the opinion of Bonaventura
that all three types the intercessor, the theologian,
and the contemplative taken together, are needed
to form the Church's life of prayer. I think it is true
to say, in a smaller degree, that something of each of
these elements is needed too in every complete spiritual
life: giving as they do a supernatural objective to the will,
the intellect, and the heart. Some effective desire and
petition, some intellectual seeking, some non-utilitarian,
adoring love, are asked of every one of us; and specially
of priests. The proportion of each will vary between
soul and soul; but it is surely good, in forming our own
page 25
devotional rule, to keep this complete conception in our
minds.
So much, then, for the general aim. What about the
means by which we shall secure it? It seems to me that
there are four main things which must have a place in
any full and healthy religious life: and that a remembrance
of this will help us to make our own inner lives
balanced and sane. We require, first, the means of gaining
and holding a right attitude; secondly, right spiritual
food real, nourishing food with a bite in it, not desiccated
and pre-digested piety. 'I am the food of the full grown,'
said the voice of God to St. Augustine: 'Grow and feed
on Me.' Thirdly, we need an education which shall help
growth; training our spiritual powers to an ever greater
expansion and efficiency. Fourthly, we have or ought to
have some definite spiritual work, and must see that we
fit ourselves to do it.
Now each of these four needs is met by a different type
of prayer. The right attitude of the soul to God is secured
and supported by the prayer of pure adoration. The
necessary food for its growth is obtained through our
spiritual reading and meditation, as well as by more
direct forms of communion. Such meditation will also
form an important stage in the education of the spiritual
faculties; which are further trained in some degree by
the use of such formal, affective, or recollective prayer
as each one of us is able to employ. Finally, the work
which can be done by the praying soul covers the whole
field of intercession and redemptive self-oblation.
Take first then, as primary, the achievement and
maintenance of a right attitude towards God; that profound
and awe-struck sense of His transcendent reality,
that humbly adoring relation, on which all else depends.
I feel no doubt that, for all who take the spiritual life
seriously and above all for the minister of religion this
page 26
prayer of adoration exceeds all other types in educative
and purifying power. It alone is able to consolidate
our sense of the supernatural, to conquer our persistent
self-occupation, to expand our spirits, to feed and quicken
our awareness of the wonder and the delightfulness of God.
There are two movements which must be plainly present
in every complete spiritual life. The energy of its prayer
must be directed on the one hand towards God; and on
the other towards men. The first movement embraces
the whole range of spiritual communion between the
soul and God: in it we turn towards Divine Reality in
adoration, bathing, so to speak, our souls in the Eternal
Light. In the second we return, with the added peace
and energy thus gained, to the natural world; there to
do spiritual work for and with God for other men. Thus
prayer, like the whole of man's inner life, 'swings between
the unseen and the seen'. Now both these movements
are of course necessary in all Christians; but the point
is that the second will only be well done where the first
has the central place. The deepening of the soul's
unseen attachments must precede, in order that it may
safeguard, the outward swing towards the world.
This means that adoration, and not intercession or
petition, must be the very heart of the life of prayer.
For prayer is a supernatural activity or nothing at all;
and it must primarily be directed to supernatural ends.
It too acknowledges the soul's basic law: it comes from
God, belongs to God, is destined for God. It must begin,
end, and be enclosed in the atmosphere of adoration;
aiming at God for and in Himself. Our ultimate effect
as transmitters of the supernal light and love directly
depends on this adoring attentiveness. In such a prayer
of adoring attentiveness, we open our doors wide to
receive His ever-present Spirit; abasing ourselves, and
acknowledging our own nothingness. Only the soul
page 27
that has thus given itself to God becomes part of the mystical
body through which He acts on life. Its destiny is
to be the receiver and transmitter of grace.
Is not that practical work? For Christians, surely,
the only practical work. But sometimes we are in such
a hurry to transmit, that we forget our primary duty is
to receive: and that God's self-imparting through us,
will be in direct proportion to our adoring love and
humble receptiveness. Only when our souls are filled
to the brim, can we presume to offer spiritual gifts to
other men. The remedy for that sense of impotence,
that desperate spiritual exhaustion which religious workers
too often know, is, I am sure, an inner life governed
not by petition but by adoring prayer. When we
find that the demands made upon us are seriously
threatening our inward poise, when we feel symptoms of
starvation and stress, we can be quite sure that it is time
to call a halt; to re-establish the fundamental relation
of our souls with Eternal Reality, the Home and Father
of our spirits.
'Our hearts shall have no rest save in Thee.'
It is only when our hearts are thus actually at rest in
God, in peaceful and self-oblivious adoration, that we
can hope to show His attractiveness to other men.
In the flood-tide of such adoring prayer, the soul is
released from the strife and confusions of temporal life;
it is lifted far beyond all petty controversies, petty worries
and petty vanities and none of us escape these things.
It is carried into God, hidden in Him. This is the only
way in which it can achieve that utter self-forgetfulness
which is the basis of its peace and power; and which can
never be ours as long as we make our prayer primarily
a means of drawing gifts to ourselves and others from
God, instead of an act of unmeasured self-giving. I am
certain that we gradually and imperceptibly learn more
about God by this persistent attitude of humble adoration,
page 28
'than we can hope to do by any amount of mental exploration.
For in it our soul recaptures, if only for a moment,
the fundamental relation of the tiny created spirit with
its Eternal Source; and the time is well spent which is
spent in getting this relation and keeping it right. In
it we breathe deeply the atmosphere of Eternity; and
when we do that, humility and common sense are found
to be the same thing. We realize, and re-realize, our
tininess, our nothingness, and the greatness and steadfastness
of God. And we all know how priceless such a
realization is, for those who have to face the grave spiritual
risk of presuming to teach others about Him.
Moreover, from this adoring prayer and the joyous
self-immolation that goes with it, all the other prayerful
dispositions of our souls seem, ultimately, to spring. A
deep, humble contrition, a sense of our creaturely imperfection
and unworthiness, gratitude for all that is
given us, burning and increasing charity that longs to
spend itself on other souls all these things are signs of
spiritual vitality: and spiritual vitality depends on the
loving adherence of our spirits to God. Thus it is surely
of the first importance for those who are called to exacting
lives of service, to determine that nothing shall interfere
with the development and steady daily practice of loving
and adoring prayer ; a prayer full of intimacy and awe.
It alone maintains the soul's energy and peace, and
checks the temptation to leave God for His service. I
think that if you have only as little as half an hour to
give each morning to your private prayer, it is not too
much to make up your minds to spend half that time in
such adoration. For it is the central service asked by
God of human souls; and its neglect is responsible for
much lack of spiritual depth and power. Moreover, it is
more deeply refreshing, pacifying, and assuring than any
other type of prayer. 'Unlike, much unlike,' says à
page 29
Kempis, 'is the savour of the creator and the creature,
of everlastingness and of time, of light uncreate and
light illuminate.' But only those know this who are
practised in adoring love.
You may reasonably say: This is all very well, and on
general religious grounds we shall all agree about the
beauty and desirability of such prayer. But how shall
we train ourselves, so persistently called off and distracted
by a multitude of external duties, to that steadfastly
theocentric attitude? This brings us to the consideration
of the further elements necessary to the full maintenance
of the devotional life—its food and its education. If we
want to develop this power of communion, to correspond
with the grace that invites us to it, we must nourish our
souls carefully and regularly with such noble thoughts
of God as we are able to assimilate; and must train our
fluctuating attention and feeling to be obedient to the
demands of the dedicated will. We must become, and
keep, spiritually fit.
We shall of course tend to do this feeding and this
training in many different ways. No one soul can hope
to assimilate all that is offered to us by the richness of
Reality. Thus some temperaments are most deeply
drawn to adoration by a quiet dwelling upon the spaceless
and changeless Presence of God; some, by looking at
Christ, or by meditating in a simple way on His acts and
words, as recorded in the Gospels, lose themselves in
loving communion with Him. Some learn adoration
best through the sacramental life. We cannot all feel all
these things in their fullness; our spiritual span is not wide
enough for that. Therefore we ought to practise humbly
and with simplicity those forms of reflective meditation
and mental prayer that help us most; and to which, in
times of tranquillity, we find ourselves most steadily
drawn. We grow by feeding, not by forcing; and should
page 30
be content in the main to nourish ourselves on the food
that we can digest, and quietly leave the other kinds for
those to whom they appeal. In doing this, however, we
shall be wise if we do not wholly neglect even those types
of spirituality which attract us least. Thus the natural
prayer of the philosophic soul, strongly drawn by the
concept of Eternal and Infinite Spirit, becomes too thin,
abstract and inhuman if he fails to balance this by some dwelling on the historic and revealed, some sacramental
integration of spirit and of sense; the born contemplative
drifts into quietism without the discipline of vocal or
liturgic prayer; while Christocentric devotion loses depth
and awe, unless the object of its worship is seen within
the horizon of Eternity. Therefore it is well to keep in
mind some sense of the rich totality out of which our little
souls are being fed.
There is, however, one kind of prayer which all these
differing types and levels of spirituality can use and make
their own: and which is unequalled in psychological and
religious effectiveness. This is the so-called 'prayer of
aspirations': the frequent and attentive use of little
phrases of love and worship, which help us, as it were, to
keep our minds pointing the right way, and never lose
their power of forming and maintaining in us an adoring
temper of soul. The Psalms, the Confessions of St.
Augustine, the Imitation of Christ, are full of such
aspiratory prayers; which range from the most personal
to the most impersonal conceptions of God, and are fitted
to every mood and need. They stretch and re-stretch
our spiritual muscles; and, even in the stuffiest surroundings,
can make us take deep breaths of mountain air.
The habit of aspiration is difficult to form, but once
acquired exerts a growing influence over the soul's life.
Think of St. Francis of Assisi repeating all night :
' My
God and All! What art Thou? and what am I?' Is
page 31
not that a perfect prayer of adoration? The humble cry
of the awed and delighted creature, gazing at its Creator
and Lord. Think of the exclamation of the Psalmist :
'Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And what is there
on earth that I desire beside Thee?' Do not all the
tangles and tiresome details fall away and vanish when
we dwell on such words? And do they not bring us back
to the truth, that the most important thing in prayer is
never what we say or ask for, but our attitude towards
God? What it all comes to is this: that the personal
religion of the priest must be theocentric. It must conform
to the rule laid down by the great Bérulle: that man's
true relation to God consists solely in adoration and
adherence, and that these two moods or attitudes of soul
cover the whole range of his inner life and must be evoked
and expressed by his prayer.
The question of the proper feeding of our own devotional
life must of course include the rightful use of spiritual
reading. And with spiritual reading we may include
formal or informal meditation upon Scripture or religious
truth: the brooding consideration, the savouring—as it
were the chewing of the cud—in which we digest that
which we have absorbed, and apply it to our own needs.
Spiritual reading is, or at least it can be, second only to
prayer as a developer and support of the inner life. In
it we have access to all the hoarded supernatural treasure
of the race : all that it has found out about God. It
should not be confined to Scripture, but should also
include at least the lives and the writings of the canonized
and uncanonized saints : for in religion variety of nourishment
is far better than a dyspeptic or fastidious monotony
of diet. If we do it properly, such reading is a truly
social act. It gives to us not only information, but
communion ; real intercourse with the great souls of the
past, who are the pride and glory of the Christian family.
page 32
Studying their lives and work slowly and with sympathy;
reading the family history, the family letters; trying to
grasp the family point of view; we gradually discover
these people to be in origin though not in achievement
very much like ourselves. They are people who are
devoted to the same service, handicapped often by the
very same difficulties; and yet whose victories and insights
humble and convict us, and who can tell us more and
more, as we learn to love more and more, of the relation
of the soul to Reality. The Confessions of St. Augustine,
the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, Tauler's Sermons,
Gerlac Petersen's 'Fiery Soliloquy with God', the Revelations
of Julian of Norwich, the Life of St. Teresa, the little
book of Brother Lawrence, the Journals of Fox, Woolman,
and Wesley—the meditative, gentle, receptive reading
of this sort of literature immensely enlarges our social
and spiritual environment, it is one of the ways in which
the communion of saints can be most directly felt by us.
We all know what a help it is to live amongst, and be
intimate with, keen Christians ; how much we owe in our
own lives to contact with them, and how hard it is to
struggle on alone in a preponderantly non-Christian
atmosphere. In the saints we always have the bracing
society of keen Christians. We are always in touch with
the classic standard. Their personal influence still radiates,
centuries after they have left the earth, reminding
us of the infinite variety of ways in which the Spirit of
God acts on men through men, and reminding us too of
our own awful personal responsibility in this matter.
The saints are the great experimental Christians, who,
because of their unreserved self-dedication, have made
the great discoveries about God; and, as we read their
lives and works, they will impart to us just so much of
these discoveries as we are able to bear. Indeed, as we
grow more and more, the saints tell us more and more:
page 33
disclosing at each fresh reading secrets that we did not
suspect. Their books are the work of specialists, from
whom we can humbly learn more of God and of our own
souls.
So the books in constant use in the priests' devotional
library might include some at least among those which
I have just mentioned; unequalled in their power of
widening horizons, taking us away from the spiritual
potato-fields in which many of us have to labour, and
reminding us of the mountains and the sea. And
beyond these, our reading should also extend to those
expert manuals of spiritual direction in which is condensed
the whole experience of deep and saintly souls
such books as the Imitation of Christ, Augustine Baker's
Holy Wisdom, that wonderful old pilot-book of the
interior life, or Grou's Hidden Life of the Soul. These
books are never finished and done with. They are to be
read and re-read, incorporated into the very texture of
our minds; thus building up a rich and vital sense of all
that is involved in the Christian spiritual life the deep
entrance into reality which it makes possible to ordinary
men.
Such reading, if properly done, is really a form of prayer.
Not only does it give spiritual culture and information,
but, what is far more important, it also induces contrition.
As we dwell more and more on the spiritual perfection
and heroism which is demanded by Christianity, and so
quietly and meekly achieved by the great creative servants
of God; so does our sense of our own imperfection inevitably
deepen. Perhaps the best approach to meditation
on one of the great positive Christian virtues—Charity, Patience, Humility—is first to see that virtue
in heroic action in the life of one of the saints. And it is
always good to meditate on these qualities, because of
that law of mental life by which we tend to become that
page 34
which we behold. We grow best, in fact, not by direct
and anxious conflict with our difficulties and bad qualities,
but by turning to and gazing at the love, joy and peace of
the saints; accepting their standard; setting our wills and
desires that way. This is one of the directions in which
reading of the type that I have been suggesting can be
used to pave the way to the meditation or mental prayer
in which we make its lessons our own.
Now meditation not only feeds, it also disciplines the
mind and soul ; gradually training us to steady our attention
upon spiritual things, an art specially difficult to
those beset by many responsibilities and duties. It
helps us to conquer distractions, and forms with most of
us an essential prelude to that state of profound recollection
in which the soul dwells almost without effort on the
things of God. It is generally and rightly regarded as
one of the principal elements in an ordered devotional
life. Most people, I suppose, who have taken the trouble
to learn it, get their spiritual food very largely by this
deliberate exercise of brooding, loving thought; entering
into, dwelling on, exploring and personally applying the
deeds and the words of Christ or of the Saints, or the
fundamental conceptions of religion. It is needless to
speak here of the various methods by which it can be
learnt and practised: they are well known and often
described. They resemble each other in training to
spiritual ends our chief mental qualities; requiring and
teaching the use of visual imagination, feeling, thought,
and will.
There are people, however, who find that they simply
cannot practise these formal and discursive meditations:
the effort to do so merely stultifies itself. Where this
inability is genuine, and not a disguised laziness, it
generally co-exists with a strong attraction to a more
simple and formless communion with God; that loving
page 35
and generalized attention which is sometimes called
'simple regard' or 'affective prayer', and has been
beautifully described as 'the prayer which articulates
nothing but expresses everything: specifies nothing and
includes everything'. I think those in whom this tendency
is marked and persistent should yield to it, abandon their
own efforts, and move with docility towards that form
of communion to which they feel drawn: remembering
that anything we may achieve in the world of prayer only
represents our particular way of actualizing one tiny
fragment of the supernatural possibilities offered to the
race, and that any attempt to reduce the soul's intercourse
with the Transcendent to a single system or formula is
condemned in advance.
The obstinate pursuit of a special state of meditation
or recollection always defeats itself: bringing into operation
the law of reversed effort, and concentrating attention
on the struggle to meditate instead of on its supernatural
end. Yet it is not uncommon to find people forcing
themselves from a mistaken sense of duty to develop or
continue a devotional method which was never appropriate
to their nature, or which they have now outgrown.
They deliberately thwart a genuine though as yet unformed
attraction to silent communion by struggling
hard to perform a daily formal meditation, because they
have made this a part of their rule of life ; or desperately
get through a routine of intercessions and vocal prayers
to which they have been injudiciously bound, and which
now limit the freedom of their access to God. On the
other hand, persons whose natural expression is verbal,
and who need the support of concrete image, make violent
efforts to 'go into the silence' because some wretched little
book has told them so to do. True silent prayer is full
of power and beauty; but I suppose few things are more
stultifying in effect than this deliberate and artificial
page 36
passivity. It is not by such devices that we feed the soul;
their only result must be spiritual indigestion. Once more,
everyone is not nourished by the same sort of food, or
invited by God to the same kind of spiritual activity:
the rightful variety of Nature is paralleled in the supernatural
life. The important thing is to discover what
nourishes you, best expands and harmonizes your spirit,
now, at the present stage of your growth.
We have thought a little about the way in which we
can use our times of private devotion to confirm us in a
right attitude; to nourish our souls; to enlarge our horizons,
and deepen our sense of the richness and mystery
of God. Now what about our education in prayer? This
is a need which presses intimately on each one of us, and
from which we are never completely liberated in this life.
Here we come to that debatable region where religion
and psychology meet. We have to use for our spiritual
lives and our spiritual contacts a mental machinery
that has been evolved for dealing with the problems
and necessities of our bodily lives, and for setting up
contacts with the physical world. And that mental
machinery, as we all know, is often rebellious and hard
to adjust. It is on much more intimate terms with our
sensory and motor reactions than it is with our spiritual
desires and beliefs. It has a tendency, produced by long
habit, to respond easily to every stimulus from the outside
world. It has an inherent difficulty in gathering itself
together and remaining attentive to the internal world
in technical language, in being recollected. We all have
to teach it and persuade it to do that: and even so, this
side of its training is never completely achieved. I need
not go on about this; it is a fact which every practising
Christian knows too well. One great function of regular
prayer consists in this training of our mental machinery
for the duties asked of it in the devotional life.
page 37
It is one of the most distressing aspects of personal
religion that we all waste so much of the very limited
time which we are able to give to it. The waste can be
classified under two main heads : distraction and dryness.
No one escapes these, but it concerns us all to reduce
them as much as we can. Of dryness I will speak later.
As to distraction, this is of two kinds, which we might call
fundamental and mechanical. Fundamental distraction
is really lack of attention ; and lack of attention is really
lack of interest. We are seldom distracted where we are
truly keen—where the treasure is, the heart is sure to be.
St. Teresa's advice to her nuns, to 'get themselves some
company when first they go to prayer' is one prescription
for the cure of fundamental distractedness. Another,
particularly suitable for those who find it impossible to
forget the pressure of external cares and legitimate interests,
consists in making those very cares and interests
the subject-matter of the prayer, thus conquering the
distraction by absorption instead of by conflict. Mechanical
distraction, on the other hand, seems to be connected
with the element of reverie which is present in meditation
and mental prayer; and the difficulty, inherent in this
type of thinking, of maintaining complete concentration.
In such mechanical distraction the deeper soul remains
steadfast in prayer, the will and intention do not vary;
but recollection is disturbed by involuntary thoughts and
images which perpetually pass across the field of consciousness.
The remedy for this is a steady, patient
training of the mind; the gradual formation of channels
along which our devotional energies can flow.
Vocal prayer, rightly used, is particularly valuable
here. Vocal prayers, as we know, give no information
to God: but they do give to us that temper of mind in
which we can approach Him. They are the ways in
which we tune our wireless in. If anyone objects that
page 38
this is tantamount to saying that vocal prayer is a self-suggestion,
I reply that a very great deal of it is self-suggestion; and, moreover, that we ought thus to suggest
to our reluctant and wandering minds such devotional
ideas. It is a method which has been given to us by
God. It has always been used by religious persons;
and we ought not to be afraid of doing that which has
always been done with profit, merely because psychology
has given to it a new and ugly name. Formal prayer is a
practical device, not a spiritual necessity. It makes
direct suggestions to our souls; reminding us of realities
which we always tend to forget. It harnesses attention
to the matter in hand : captures our psychic machinery,
and directs it to a spiritual end. This is not merely the
impious opinion of psychology. It is also that of the
great masters of prayer. 'It is not necessary,'
says Grou,
' in order that we may be heard of God, that we should
have recourse to formal acts, even those of a purely
interior kind: and if we produce these in our prayer, it
is less for Him than for ourselves, in order to maintain
our attention in His presence. Our weakness often
demands the help of such acts but they are not of the
essence of prayer.'
If this principle were grasped, the supposed unreal and
mechanical character of regular vocal prayer, which
worries some people, would cease to trouble us. Properly
used, it can gradually train us to a continuous sense of the
Presence of God. Especially valuable for this purpose
is that practice of aspirations, or short acts, to which I
have already referred. Many of these 'acts', when we
dwell on their meaning, are jewels of devotion, wonderful
in their claim and demand, and capable of opening up
to us the great world of contemplation. They give the
mind something to hold on to, quiet it, and persuade us
to feel the love, penitence, or joy which they suggest.
page 39
They lull distracting thoughts and gradually train our
mental life to run, more and more, in the channels they
mark out. Such habits when formed—and the formation
does take time—are for the busy worker an immense
source of security and peace.
I would go further than this, and say that what is known
as the James-Lange law, has a direct bearing on the
devotional life. That is to say, that our emotions are very
closely connected with, and often even evoked by, the
appropriate gestures and muscular movements which
have become associated with them. Thus, for instance,
kneeling does tend to put us in a prayerful mood; and
many other more elaborate ritual actions, which persons
of common sense too easily dismiss, are psychologically
justified on the same count. That instinctive psychologist,
St. Ignatius, who leaves nothing to chance, gives
very careful and exact directions for the bodily behaviour
of those who are going through the Spiritual Exercises.
Before beginning a meditation, for instance, he recommends
the retreatment to stand still, a few paces from
the spot where the meditation is to be made, and there to
recollect himself; raising his mind to God, and considering
Christ as present and attentive to that which he is about
to do. Only after this pause, which is to be long enough
for the recital of the Lord's Prayer, may the retreatant
advance, and 'take up the attitude most suitable to the
end proposed'
. This may all sound very artificial; but
I think that anyone who gives it a trial for a week will
have to acknowledge at the end that St. Ignatius knew
a good deal about how to control the human mind. We
shall never become spiritual until we acknowledge the
humbling fact that we are half-animal still, and must suit
our practices to our condition.
Finally I want to say something about a factor which
is always present in every developed life of prayer: the
page 40
liability to spiritual dryness and blankness, painful to all
fervent Christians, but specially distressing to those whose
business it is to work in souls. The times when all your
interest and sense of reality evaporate; when the language
of religion becomes meaningless and you are quite unable,
in any real sense, to pray. Everyone is so off-colour
from time to time; and it is one of the great problems of
the priest and religious teacher, to know how, under these
conditions, he can best serve God and other souls. Now
first of all, it is possible to reduce the intensity of such
desolations—to use the technical term—by wise handling
of yourselves; and here prudent self-treatment is plainly
your duty—the dictates of grace and common sense
coincide. The condition is largely psychological. It is
a fatigue state; a reaction sometimes from excessive
devotional fervour, sometimes from exacting spiritual work, which has exhausted the inner reserves of the soul.
It almost always follows on any period of marked spiritual
progress or enlightenment. In either case, the first
point is, accept the situation quietly. Don't aggravate it,
don't worry, don't dwell on it, don't have contrition
about it; but turn, so far as you can, to some secular
interest or recreation and 'wait till the clouds roll by'.
Many a priest ends every Sunday in a state of exhaustion
in which he cannot possibly say his own prayers; in which,
as one of them observed, the only gift of the Spirit in
which he is able to take any interest is a hot bath. That
is a toll levied by his psycho-physical limitations. Effort
and resistance will only make it worse.
But it is a toll that can be turned into a sacrifice. It
is one of the most painful obligations of the life of the
religious worker, that he is often called upon to help
other souls when he is in desolation himself. He has
got to put a good face on it to listen to their raptures
or their despairs to give himself without stint in serving
page 41
never to betray anything of his own inner state. And
this is one of the most purifying of all experiences
that can come to him; for it contains absolutely no food
for self-satisfaction, but throws him completely back upon
God. I think it is above all in work done in times of
aridity and desolation that the devotional life of the priest
shows its worth.
page 42
III
THE saying of St. Ignatius which we took as a text
when considering the essential character of the inner
life, declared that 'man was created to praise, reverence
and serve the Lord his God'. Not to try to be something
which he is not, or strain after that which is inaccessible
to him: but here and now, with the means
provided, completely to fulfil this destiny of humanity.
If we have indeed begun to do this, if the praise and
the reverence of God, the awed delight in His realness,
do indeed dominate our inner life, and are conditioning
the development in us of a spiritual personality; then
surely the result must issue in some form of spiritual
service. Because man is partly spirit, and already possesses
something of the creative character of spirit, his
delight and his awe must be expressed in work; spiritual
work accomplished by spiritual means. As his supernatural
life expands, so must his supernatural effectiveness
increase. This brings us to the last of the four
implicits of a healthy life of prayer. It must maintain
the human soul in adoration, must nourish it, and educate
its faculties, and must produce creative work.
The first obvious meaning which religious persons
instinctively attach to spiritual work is of course intercession.
But spiritual work can and surely, especially
in priests, it should cover a much wider range than
intercession as we commonly conceive of it. We said
that the healthy expansion of the spiritual life depends
page 43
on the balance struck between two movements; the
direction of the soul's love and energy first towards God,
and then tr wards other men. We have dwelt specially
on the characters of its initial movement towards God;
the total surrender and confidence which are demanded
of it, and then the feeding, deepening and stabilizing
of that communion, and the education of the soul for
and in it in fact the nature and the nurture of man's
supernatural life. What is the ultimate object of all
this process? Surely not mere spiritual self-cultivation;
a horrible idea for any soul, but especially for a minister
of religion. The object can only be to make the soul
more creative, more effective, more useful to God: to
increase in it spiritual energy, genuine and fruitful personality.
To make it, in fact, more and more capable
of work: all those devoted activities, not merely of body
and mind but also of the spirit, which are demanded of
a shepherd of a spiritual flock. You remember how St.
Teresa, one of the greatest of contemplatives, insisted
that the one real object of the spiritual marriage—a
term which means on her lips, not an emotional
rapture, but the completely transfiguring and creative
union of the soul with God—was simply the production
of work.
There is a wonderful chapter in Ruysbroeck's Book of
the Twelve Béguines in which he describes the life of one
who has achieved this state, as 'ministering to the world
without in love and in mercy; whilst inwardly abiding
in simplicity, in stillness, and in utter peace'. Reading
it, we remember that it was said of Ruysbroeck himself,
that supreme mystic, that during the years in which he
was a parish priest in Brussels, he went to and fro in the
streets of the city 'with his mind perpetually lifted up
into God'. He was ministering to the world without
in love and mercy; whilst inwardly abiding in simplicity,
page 44
stillness, and utter peace. Action, effort and tension,
then, are to be the outward expression and substance of
such a life of spiritual creativeness ; yet all this is to hang
on and be nurtured by an inward abidingness in simplicity,
stillness and peace. We are called upon to
carry the Eternal and Unchanging right through every
detail of our changeful active life, because and by means
of our daily secret recourse to and concentration upon
it. Is it not in practising this lovely and costly art,
gradually getting at home with it, that we more and
more transmute and deify the very substance even of
our temporal life? thus more and more doing the special
work of the human soul, as a link between the worlds
of spirit and of sense.
If we elect for such a career, join up thus with the
Divine activities of the universe, almost at once we begin
to find that the supernatural energy acts not only on us
but through us. Our contact with other people is
changed. Our spirit touches and modifies theirs, often
unconsciously. We find ourselves more and more able
to use, expand, and share the supernatural power received
in our own prayer; and this for the most part in very
simple and unpremeditated ways. This power will show
itself in you, in your quickened sense of the needs and
character of the souls that have been put into your
charge; and in the conflict with evil, not merely in its
expression but at its very source, to which also you are
committed. All this concerns you in your vocation as
priests very specially; and all this you will inevitably
long to do more and more, as the life of adoration deepens
in your soul. The effect of that life is bound to be the awakening of an ever more widespreading, energetic,
self-giving and redeeming type of love.
Now intercession is such a love as that, acting and
serving in the atmosphere of prayer; and in it we do
page 45
actually reach out to, penetrate and affect other souls.
That we should do this, seems to be implicit in the mysterious
economy of the spiritual life. It is a feeble imitation
on the part of our small, derivative and growing
spirits of the way in which the Holy Spirit of God reaches
out to and acts on us; moulding and guiding us, both
secretly within the soul and outwardly by means of persons
and events. When we think of what the greatest
spiritual personality we have ever known did for us, in
harmonizing us and compelling us to feel reality, and if
we multiply this to the nth degree, it gives us a hint of the
intensity and subtlety of the workings of the eternal and
living Spirit in and through men on other men; and the
volume of supernatural work which is waiting for us,
when we have sufficient love, courage and humility to
do it.
Such a view of the obligation laid upon us centres on
the fundamental religious truth of the Divine prevenience:
of the Supernatural, of God, seeking men through natural
means, and disclosed to them above all through personality.
It is hence above all in trying to work thus for and with
God, that the soul grows ; and as the soul grows, so more
and more it craves to do such work. The command to
Peter, 'Feed my sheep', was just as good for Peter as it
was for the sheep. The saints are our great exemplars
of this dual life of adoration and intercession; that complete
and balanced Christianity involving the extreme of industrious and disinterested love, which seeks to
spread and incarnate in the time-world the changeless
Spirit of Eternity.
'
Put in that way, spiritual work sounds very transcendental,
and seems to demand a degree of power and of
sanctity beyond the common Christian range. But St.
Teresa, with her marked instinct for coming down to
brass tacks, pointed out that the guarantee of that union
page 46
with God in which alone such work can be done, was not
to be found in any lofty or abnormal type of experience.
It was to be found above all in the combination of an
ever-deepening personal lowliness, an ever more vivid
love of our neighbour, and an ever keener sense of the
holy character of daily work—getting, so to speak, Divine
perfection into our little daily jobs. These three qualities
involve, first, that sense of our creaturely status, that meek,
child-like dependence which is the only source of peace;
next the perfect and equal charity which is the sweetener
of every relation of life, and 'loves the unlovely into
lovableness'; last, that unlimited devotedness, that unfastidious
joy in service perfectly achieved, which transforms
the whole daily routine, religious and secular, into
a spiritual activity. They require of us that quiet doing
of our job, in sun and in fog, which distinguishes generosity
from emotion, and gives backbone to the dedicated life.
Her test means that until the life of prayer flowers in this
perfect integration of the outward, and the inward, it is
not functioning rightly, and we are not doing the full
work to which the human soul is called—we are stopping
half-way.
This can only mean that the first concern of a fully
Christian life is with the realm of Being; with God Himself,
to whom each one in our ceaseless series of outward
acts and experiences must be related. And its second
concern is with the bringing of the values of that world of
Being into the world of Becoming, the physical world of
succession and change. That, of course, is putting the
situation in a roughly philosophic way. We put it in a
more religious way if we say that such a scheme of life
commits us to carrying on in our own small measure the
dual redemptive and illuminating work of Christ; and
this by such a willing and unlimited surrender, such love,
humility and diligence, as shall make us agents of
page 47
the
Eternal within the world of time. All this means once
more, that when in our own practice we really develop
a creative Inner life, we are sure to find that it involves
us in a twofold activity; an activity directed both to
God and to other souls.
Thus the complete life of the Christian worker is and
must be, in more than a metaphorical sense, a continuous
life of prayer. It requires a constant inward abiding in
God's atmosphere; an unhesitating response to His
successive impulsions; a steady approximation to more
and more perfect union with His creative will. We can
test the increase of our souls in depth, strength, and reality,
by the improvement in our ability to maintain this state.
Formal prayers, corporate or solitary, are merely the
skeleton of this life; and are largely intended to tune us
up and educate us for it. It has of course always been
the Christian view, that every bit of work done towards
God can be a prayer: and every action of life directly
related to Him. The holy woman who was accustomed
to boil her potatoes for the intentions of those people for
whom she had not time to pray, was merely putting this
principle into practice. Such a direction of desire in
and through the sensible to the very heart of the suprasensible
is close to the central secret of the sacramental life.
But this perfect harmony of inward and outward is the
privilege of spiritual maturity; and no one will achieve it
who does not make a definite place each day for the feeding
and deepening of direct communion, the stretching and
strengthening of the soul.
How then are you, in your special circumstances, going
to weave together prayer and outward action into the
single perfect fabric of the apostolic life? I just mention
three among the many ways in which it seems to me
that the clergy can do this: making their inner life of
prayer continuously and directly useful to those to
page 48
whom they are sent, incorporating it with their pastoral
activities.
I put first a very simple thing; a thing which I imagine
that almost everyone can do, and which I have never
known to fail in its effect. It is this. Make time to
pray in your own churches as much as you possibly can.
That is the first move towards making these churches
real houses, schools, and homes of prayer, which very
often they are not. I do not mean by this merely saying
Matins and Evensong in them. I mean, let at least part
of the time which is given to your real and informal
communion with God be spent in your own church.
That is the best and most certain way in which to give
our churches the atmosphere of devotion which we all
recognize so quickly when we find it, and which turns
them into spiritual homes ; and I believe it is one of the
most valuable forms of Christian witness which can be
exercised by the clergy in the present day.
It seems to me that it is very little use to keep a church
open, unless its own priest does care to go into it and pray
in it. You might just as well, in most cases, keep a waiting
room open. Surely it is part of your business to make
your church homely and lovable, and especially, if you
can, to give it a welcoming aspect at those hours when the
working people who so greatly need its tranquillizing
atmosphere can inconspicuously slip in. It is useless to
talk at large to those working people, mostly living without
privacy in noisy streets, about the reality and necessity
of prayer unless you provide a quiet place in which they
can practise it. It must be a place which does not receive
them with that forbidding air of a spiritual drawing-room
in dust sheets, peculiar to many Anglican churches during
the week; but which abounds in suitable suggestions,
offers an invitation which it helps them to accept. A place
in fact, to which your own prayers have helped to give
page 49
the requisite quality of homeliness. This creation of a
real supernatural home, and steady practice of a real
supernatural hospitality, is the first point, it seems to me,
in which a clergyman can hardly fail to make his inner
life directly serve his flock.
The next direction in which it is possible for you to
make your self-training in prayer useful to those in your
charge falls under the general head of intercession.
That will of course include all that you can do for your
parish and for individuals in the way of support, in the
way of tranquillizing and healing influences, in the way
of supernatural guidance, by the loving meditations and
prayers which you spend upon them. Those who deal
much with souls soon come to know something about the
strange spiritual currents which are at work under the
surface of life, and the extent in which charity can work
on supernatural levels for supernatural ends. But if
you are to do that, the one thing that matters is that you
should care supremely about it; care, in fact, so much
that you do not mind how much you suffer for it. We
cannot help anyone until we do care, for it is only by
love that spirit penetrates spirit.
Consider for a moment what is implied in this amazing
mystery of intercession; at least in the little that we understand
of it. It implies first our implicit realization of God,
the infinitely loving, living and all-penetrating Spirit of
Spirits, as an Ocean in which we all are bathed. And
next, speaking still that spatial language to which our
human thinking is tied down, that somehow through this
uniting and vivifying medium we too, being one with
Him in love and will, can mutually penetrate, move and influence each other's souls in ways as yet unguessed;
yet throughout the whole process moulded and determined
by the prevenient, personal, free and ever-present God.
The world He has been and is creating is a world infused
page 50
through and through with Spirit ; and it is partly through
the prayerful and God-inspired action of men that the
spiritual work of this world is done. When a man or
woman of prayer, through their devoted concentration,
reaches a soul in temptation and rescues it, we must
surely acknowledge that this is the action of God Himself,
using that person as an instrument.
In this mysterious interaction of energies it seems that
one tool is put into our hands: our love, will, interest,
desire four words describing four aspects of one thing.
This dynamic love, once purged of self-interest, is ours
to use on spiritual levels; it is an engine for working with
God on other souls. The saints so used it, often at
tremendous cost to themselves, and with tremendous
effect. As their personality grew in strength and expanded
in adoration, so they were drawn on to
desperate and heroic wrestling for souls; to those exhausting
and creative activities, that steady and generous
giving of support, that redeeming prayer by which
human spirits are called to work with God. Especially
in its most mysterious reaches, in its redemptive, self-immolating
action on suffering and sin, their intercession
dimly reproduces and continues the supernatural work of
Christ. Real saints do feel and bear the weight of the
sins and pains of the world. It is the human soul's
greatest privilege that we can thus accept redemptive
suffering for one another and they do.
'God enabled me to agonize in prayer,' said the saintly
Evangelical, David Brainerd. 'My soul was drawn out
very much for the world. I grasped for a multitude of
souls.' Does not that give to us a sense of unreached
possibilities, of deep mysterious energies; something not
quite covered by what are usually called 'intercessions'?
So too St. Teresa says that if anyone claiming to be united
to God is always in a state of peaceful beatitude, she simply
page 51
does not believe in their union with God. Such a union,
to her mind, involves great sorrow for the sin and pain
of the world; a sense of identity not only with God but
also with all other souls, and a great longing to redeem
and heal. That is real supernatural charity. It is a
call to love and save not the nice but the nasty; not the
lovable but the unlovely, the hard, the narrow, and the
embittered, and the tiresome, who are so much worse.
To love irrespective of merit or opinion or personal preference; to love even those who offend our taste. If you
are to love your people thus, translating your love, as you
must, into unremitting intercessory work, and avoid being
swamped by the great ocean of suffering, sin and need to
which you are sent; once again this will only be done by
maintaining and feeding the temper of adoration and
trustful adherence. This is the heart of the life of prayer;
and only in so far as we work, from this centre can we
safely dare to touch other souls and seek to affect them.
For such intercession is a sacrificial job ; and sacrificial
jobs need the support of a strong inner life if they are to
be carried through. They are rooted and grounded in
love.
The third obvious way in which the priest's life of
prayer reacts upon his flock, is in the personal advice and
guidance which he is able to give to those who consult
him—to use a technical word, in direction work. What
is direction? It is the guidance of one soul by and through
another soul. It is the individual and intensive side of
pastoral work. God comes to and affects individuals
very largely through other individuals; and you, in your
ordination, all offered yourselves for this. The relation
of discipleship is one that obtains right through and down
all stages of the spiritual life; giving to it a definite social
structure, protecting it from subjectivism and lawlessness
and ensuring its continuity. Hence all that we may
page 52
have been given or gained we ought ever to be ready to
impart.
Such direction work is surely one of the most sacred
of human duties; and as your inner life becomes stronger
and your spiritual sensitiveness increases, so more souls
will inevitably come to you for it, and more and more of
its difficulties and possibilities will be revealed. Therefore
a solemn obligation rests on the priest, doesn't it?
to train his mind as well as his soul for this work; to learn,
for instance, something of the mental peculiarities of
man, especially as they affect his religious life; to recognize
the various stages and types of spirituality, and find out
how best to deal with them; to discern spirits, and to
distinguish their different aptitudes and needs. In its
fullness such discernment is a special gift; but something
of it is surely possible to all of us, if we take enough
interest in souls. Direction work can of course be done
only and all the time in absolute interior dependence on
God ; and all the most valuable part of it will be done
silently, by the influence of your prayer on the souls that
you are called upon to guide. You will find it a perfectly
possible and practicable thing to reach out to them and
mould them in that way ; and if they are at all sensitive,
they will probably become aware that you are doing it.
Amongst those who are likely to come to a clergyman
for spiritual advice are three outstanding classes. First,
quite young people, including Confirmation candidates,
who are at the beginning of their spiritual, mental and
emotional lives, and wish for guidance in religion.
Secondly, adults who have lost their faith, or have never
had it, but who now want to be helped to find God.
Thirdly, adults who are still Christian, but who are tortured
by doubts, or over-tried by life; and who want
to be helped not to lose God. Here the first principle
surely is that in each class each person must be envisaged
page 53
separately; and in each case the directing soul must
think first not of its own point of view, not of any set
doctrinal scheme, any 'Catholic' or 'Evangelical' principles,
but of that one inquiring soul in its special needs,
its special stage of advancement, its special relation to
God.
You are face to face with a living, growing, individual
spirit ; not a lump of wax on which to stamp the Christian
seal. And you are responsible to God, not for giving that
soul a bit of orthodox information, which it probably
won't understand: but for helping it to see its own whereabouts,
actualize in its own way its particular spiritual
capacities, that it may gradually become more real, and
fulfil its latent genius for sanctity. Hence the first
temptation which the director must conquer at all costs,
is the inclination to generalize, to apply stock ideas. Even
with the young and untried, routine instructions and
methods are often dangerous; for already, at the very
beginning, soul differs immensely from soul. A great
respect for every type and size, homely patience, humble
self-oblivion, a sense of the slowness of real spiritual
growth; these are the qualities which make the good
director. The teacher is often inclined to force the pace
with the ardent; whereas wise moderation in direction,
a gentle willingness to wait, is perhaps the one thing that
is always safe with everyone all the time.
With the second and third class of souls it is of course
even more imperative to be self-oblivious, slow and tentative
; for here you are dealing with more or less developed
but troubled minds, alertly awake to the least hint of
unreality, suspicious of theological formulas, and probably
unwilling to accept without criticism anything that
you say. Moreover, you are necessarily only partly
acquainted with their mental furnishing and outlook;
and therefore it is never possible for you to be certain
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what exact meaning your words will convey, and what
effect they will produce. The emotional aura surrounding
religious ideas is of all things most difficult to estimate.
Your pet symbols may turn out to be those which are most
calculated to put your pupils off. In dealing with such
cases, you are or should be perpetually thrown back on
God You can only hope to deal with them at all in a
spirit of prayer; and in constant remembrance that the
one thing which really matters is the contagious character
of your own certitude, never the argument by which it
is expressed. So done, the result of your work will
often surprise you, and seem to bear little relation to
anything that you have been able to say.
Even with those persons who are or seem most impressionable
and most sympathetic to you, it is a help to
realize from the first that you will never be able to make
another soul see reality from exactly the same spiritual
angle as yourself. You will not, indeed, be able to
transfer even the most fundamental of your convictions
to them with no change of colour or meaning. Nor
should you wish to do so ; for a good deal of that colour
and emphasis is your personal contribution, and has little
to do with absolute truth. Your pupils inevitably bring
to their encounter with God a psychic content which is
entirely different from yours; hence, in psychological
language, their apperceptive mass will be peculiar to
themselves, coloured by their education, tastes, character,
past history, and social environment. Now apperception
controls all our religious insights and experiences ; which,
so long as we are in the body, cannot by any possibility
be pure. The result of this psychological law is that
your most careful and precise teaching often fails to find
acceptance; or else comes back to you in an unrecognizable
form. This, if you attribute absolute value to the
particular terms in which you gave it, may be a very
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disheartening experience, and administer a sound slap
to professional self-esteem.
But in proportion as your interior life of prayer grows
deep, tender and selfless, in proportion as you value forms
only as the clothing of inwardly perceived realities, so
will you be able to get away from the conventional
phraseology which now puts many people off so terribly,
and adapt your language to the particular circumstances
of each soul. It is a remarkable note of the Gospels that
they make clear to us how many different ways our Lord
had of saying the same thing; how He met each type on
its own ground, and was satisfied to ask some to find the
Father through contemplation of the lilies, whilst of
others was demanded self-stripping and the Cross. And
it still remains true that the most saintly teachers are
always the most varied, winning, unrigoristic, and
persuasive in their methods; however hard and costly
the demands which they may ultimately make.
This means seeing all such work from a really pastoral
angle; keeping your eye steadily on the size, sort, appetite,
and future development of each particular sheep, trying
to help each to achieve their sort of perfection, not yours,
refusing the temptation to 'form a type', and aiming all
the time at life, more abundant life for each, and the
giving and fostering of it. Not at imparting information,
but providing suitable food which can and must be
digested; and changed, as real food must be in the
process, in order that it may nourish the life of the creature
fed. When you see the situation in this way, you cease
to mind the fact that those bits which you think the very
best are often ignored, and your most careful suggestions
and instructions are apparently misunderstood. After
all, the spiritual personality you are helping to form, is
probably quite different from your own; and perhaps
even different from your own secret ideal for it. Hence
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the very things that may seem to you most essential or
most excellent must not always be pressed. Mangelwurzels
do not suit every sheep at every stage of its
growth. It needs a great deal of self-abandonment to
do all this with simplicity it means learning from those
who come to you, as well as trying to teach and that is
the purifying part of personal religious work.
Moreover, those who do this work are commonly
themselves growing and changing; they have not arrived,
but are travelling and exploring as they go. It is generally
a case of one more or less dusty pilgrim helping another
in via; not of an established professor, who knows all about
it, administering stock teaching to a docile student. It
may very well happen that someone will come to you for
advice, who has had or seems to have had spiritual
experiences far beyond your present range; or who had
been called to a form of prayer of which you know
nothing at first hand. What is to be done about that?
How are you going to distinguish the victims of nervous
illness or of religious vanity from those who have a genuine
drawing to religion of the mystical type? And how, in
this latter case—the case of those drawn by God to the
mystical degrees of prayer, often to their own great
bewilderment—are you going to give just the help and
guidance their souls need, in regions where you yourself
have never been? This humbling duty may be laid at
any moment on any clergyman; and it will be an awful
thing, won't it? if you have concentrated so entirely on
the parochial, ethical and humanitarian side of religion
that you have nothing to give souls that are called to
practise its deeper mysteries.
This is where a strict personal training in mental prayer
and spiritual reading abundantly justifies itself. You
may not yourself be called to the mountains; but you
will be more able to advise and understand prospective
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mountaineers if you have at least put on heavy boots
and tried a little hill climbing, than if you have merely
spent all your time on the level, growing nice little patches
of devotional mustard and cress. And those who thus
form and maintain in themselves the disciplined habit of
attention to God, who exercise their spiritual muscles,
quicken their spiritual senses, and try to learn their business
from the saints, do develop the power of discriminating
the self-deluded from the genuine mystical type;
by no means an easy thing to do. They recognize the
real thing when they meet it; and have access to sources
of information which they know how to apply, and
which do enable them to help it, There is no doubt
at all that human souls can be and are thus used by God,
to help other souls more spiritually advanced than themselves; but only if they are in touch through surrendered
prayer with the sources of spiritual light. It is useless,
indeed dangerous, to read works on mystical prayer and
presume to apply them, unless we have to some extent
sought to practise the discipline of recollection ourselves.
We think that we understand them, and we don't; we
try to apply them, and come hopelessly to grief. Spiritual
books are written in the language of the spirit; and must
be spiritually discerned. They yield a new sense at
every reading; and it is only after many years that most
of us begin to realize the colossal nature of our own
initial mistakes. Hence it is imperative that those called
to guide the souls of others, should themselves be humble
pupils in the school of interior prayer.
This idea of the call of God to one soul to be the
director, support, and light-giver to another soul, has
rather fallen out of our English religious life. It is at
present only practised in one branch of the Church;
and there very often in what seems to be an unnecessarily
hot-housey way. The detailed and personal work in
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souls done in past ages by the numerous men and women,
both lay and religious, who transmitted the science of
the spiritual life, is now forgotten. We are much concerned
about various kinds of education; but we leave
wholly on one side this parental, patient and expert
training and cherishing of the spirit. And yet how beautiful,
how Christian, and how natural an idea it is! The
work of the great French directors Fénelon, Boussuet,
Francois de Sales, Vincent de Paul shows what it can
do, and what gentle wisdom, moderation, flexibility,
psychological insight, selfless patience, and spiritual
firmness it demands. Their letters of direction, which
ought surely to be read and re-read by every priest, are
full of that sanctified common sense which weaves together
with a firm hand the worlds of nature and of
grace ; and helps the pupil soul to find, in all the ordinary
circumstances of life, material for prayer and discipline
and an opportunity of getting nearer to reality. I think
the revival, in a form adapted to our times, of such personal
direction work would do much to renew the life
of prayer within the English Church; and it cannot be
restored without a sufficiency of clergy able to undertake
it. Those who are able are not likely to lack pupils
very long: they are easily recognized, and the present
widespread hunger for the things of the spirit does
the rest.
Now let us sum up the substance of what we have been
considering. First, the obvious truth that the servant
of God cannot do his best unless he is his best: and
therefore self-deepening and self-improvement are the
very heart of his job. Secondly, that being one's best,
for Christians, depends on and requires the active cooperation
and close union of God's grace and man's will:
docility and effort both at once. That this union of
serene docility and costly effort, then, must rule in the
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priest's life of prayer: for the object of that life of prayer
is the deepening and expanding of his own inner life,
an ever more perfect self-oblation, in order that he may
be able to apprehend, receive, and pass on to others more
and more of the abundant secrets of Eternal Life. Out
of your struggles and temptations, your tentative glimpses
of reality, your generous acts of utter self-abandonment
to the purposes of God out of all these different kinds
of purification taken together, something has to be made,
with which the Holy Spirit can do His work on other
souls. Because that is the way in which He does do His
work on other souls.
In other words: Our deepest life consists in a willed
correspondence with the world of Spirit, and this willed correspondence, which is prayer, is destined to fulfil
itself along two main channels; in love towards God and
in love towards humanity—two loves which at last and
at their highest become one love. Sooner or later, in
varying degrees, the power and redeeming energy of
God will be manifested through those who thus reach
out in desire, first towards Him and then towards
other souls. And we, living and growing personalities,
are required to become ever more and more spiritualized,
ever more and more persuasive, more and more
deeply real; in order that we may fulfil this Divine
purpose.
This is not mere pious fluff. This is a terribly practical
job; the only way in which we can contribute to the
bringing in of the Kingdom of God. Humanitarian
politics will not do it. Theological restatement will not
do it. Holiness will do it. And for this growth towards
holiness, it seems that it is needful to practise, and practise
together, both that genuine peaceful recollection in which
the soul tastes, and really knows that the Lord is sweet,
inwardly abiding in His stillness and peace; and also
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the suffering, effort and tension required of us unstable
human creatures, if we are to maintain that interior
state and use it for the good of other men. This ideal
is so rich, that in its wholeness it has only been satisfied
once. Yet it is so elastic, that within it every faithful
personality can find a place and opportunity of development.
It means the practice of both attachment and
detachment; the most careful and loving fulfilment of all
our varied this-world obligations, without any slackening
of attachment to the other-worldly love.
And if we want a theoretical justification of such a
scheme of life, surely we have it in the central Christian
doctrine of the Incarnation? For does not this mean the
Eternal, Changeless God reaching out to win and eternalize
His creatures by contact through personality? that
the direct action of Divine Love on man is through man;
and that God requires our growth in personality, in full
being, in order that through us His love and holiness can
more and more fully be expressed? And our Lord's
life of ministry supported by much lonely prayer gives
us the classic pattern of human correspondence with this,
our two-fold environment. The saints tried to imitate
that pattern more and more closely; and as they did so,
their personality expanded and shone with love and
power. They show us in history a growth and transformation
of character which we are not able to grasp;
yet which surely ought to be the Christian norm? In
many cases they were such ordinary, even unpromising
people when they began; for the real saint is neither a
special creation nor a spiritual freak. He is just a human
being in whom has been fulfilled the great aspiration of
St. Augustine:
'My life shall be a real life, being wholly
full of Thee.' And as that real life, that interior union
with God grows, so too does the saints' self-identification
with humanity grow. They do not stand
aside, wrapped
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in delightful prayers and feeling pure and agreeable to God. They go right down into the mess; and there, right down in the mess, they are able to radiate God because they possess Him. And that, above all else, is the priestly work that wins and heals souls.
