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THE
prayer of adoration must end on the cry
of St. Augustine:
'Lord, I seek not to
penetrate thy lofty nature, for in no way
do I compare my understanding with it.' For the
more deeply we enter the worshipping life, the more
profoundly we experience the transcendence and the
otherness of That which we adore: and the more
deeply purifying is the failure of our understanding
before the reality of God. And were this meek,
objective worship the beginning and end of our
relation with Reality, the note of ceaseless joy on
which the Golden Sequence closes could never be
heard in human prayer. But all is not over, because
the Radiance that attracts also daunts us, and one
side of our response to Spirit must always be a
humble acknowledgement of our ignorance and
nothingness before the rich simplicity of God. For
that rich simplicity has a certain kinship with the
creature, which It is ever moulding and creating
both from without and from within. Spirit indwells
and penetrates the soul's very fabric as a quiet
Love; and it is here, in our ground, that we are to
experience the most intimate and transforming
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realities of Prayer. Here we may come to know by
the penetration of the heart, that which we can
never understand by the exercise of the mind.
For the life of prayer, in its full and balanced
development, unites a width and depth of vision with
a great interior dependence and intimacy. The
vision of God and the love of God complete each
other; one expands and enlightens, the other
humbles, deepens and enslaves the soul. So long
as we are human, both thought and feeling must
enter into our response to surrounding realities;
and in the life of prayer this thought and feeling,
touched by the Supernatural, become transformed
into a great awe and a great love. Thus the prayer
of adoration passes almost insensibly into the prayer
of communion and self-offering, as worship becomes
more realistic, more deeply coloured by love.
Indeed it has sometimes been said that adoration
and self-giving together cover the whole ground of
human prayer.
But this description is only adequate to prayer
as seen from our side, and expressed within our
poor categories. In its wholeness, it is something
at once more subtle, more rich and free than this.
It is a give-and-take, a conversation, between Spirit
and spirit.
'May thy treasuries be laid open to
me', said St. Ethelwold,
'and my mind laid open
to thee'. We only give, or want to give, because
He gives first; are only driven towards Him because,
as the old mystic says, He already
'has his sail in
our ship'.
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Veni, pater pauperum,
Veni, dator munerum,
Veni, lumen cordium.
Of this generous coming of the Spirit is born all
human prayer. Hence that which is adoration
when it turns toward God Infinite, deepens to the
sacred wonder of communion, when it turns towards
God Intimate.
Dulcis hospes animae!
This too represents or suggests under human symbols
a most real and clear experience, a real relationship
between the eternal Father of Spirits and the childlike
praying soul: a loving intercourse with That
which is far beyond us, and yet is found to be
divinely near.
And here it is that penitence enters most fully
into prayer. For when we thus recognize the gentle
touch of the Holy and the Perfect on our smudged
imperfect selves ; then contrition, because our
response is so impaired by slackness, self-indulgence
and sin, overwhelms and humbles us. And in so
doing it opens our souls to the purifying action of
Spirit, softens and tranquillizes, and increases our
capacity for God. 'How delicately thou teachest
love to me!
'
says St. John of the Cross. If we are
ever to learn it, we must be ready to move with
suppleness between the most unearthly and most
personal recognitions. We must recognize our own
poverty over against the generous Divine richness;
our own guilt in respect of the crucifixion of Divine
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Love. We must by turns ascend to the spire-top
of the spirit, and sink into the deeps of the soul's
ground. For all the resources of poetry, and all the
contrasting images and experiences of man's emotional
life, can only suggest but never give the
content of this simple yet incredible intercourse between the fugitive in its weakness and instability,
and the Abiding in its infinite power.
In this developed prayer of communion, however
simple and inarticulate its form may be, a strange
sympathy is set up between the soul and its Home
and Father. Dimly yet quite truly, we begin to be
conscious of a steady supple pressure, felt both
within and without the soul ; and a loving peaceful
joy in the great purposes of Spirit, swamping all personal
anxiety and desire.
'For God', says Malaval,
'who has created the soul, and is himself pure Spirit,
knows better than any one else can know how to
speak to the spirit: which is, in reality, to act upon
it, not with tumult, trouble or agitation but in solid
peace and profound tranquillity.' And because of
this sympathy, this deep and tender communion
which is the consummation of self-giving, we find
we possess a certain dark but real understanding of
the Will, Desire, Direction, of the Mind of God;
we have a sure sense of being taught and disciplined
through all the events that come to us, and through
His touches felt in our very substance; overshadowed
and guided in choices and moments of
crisis, in giving guidance to others, in distinguishing
the real and false issues of life. And although we
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must still
'direct our wills vigorously towards God',
maintaining our adherence with steadiness and
courage, as the baby monkey clings with all its
might ; still, more and more all that matters seems
to be given us, we share more and more fully the
generous and life-giving Life.
In labore requies,
In aestu temperies,
In fletu solatium.
Perhaps the simple contemplation to which many
souls are drawn, is best understood as a dim realization
of this status. For if, outside prayer, the soul
interrogates her own experience, and asks what it is
that so firmly stops or else so quietly absorbs her
own activity, it is surely the sense of all being done
by Another, to whom she adheres a Presence which
has absolute priority within her life. St. Patrick in
his
' Confession '
tells how one night he saw in vision
Christ praying within his soul ; and he heard a voice
which said 'I am that Spirit, which prays in thee and
above thee'. So too we know ourselves at last to
be gathered into a greater Life, at once personal and
infinite, in us and above us, and there feel at home;
as, on natural levels, we feel at home in our ordinary
objective world.
Mystics, trying to tell us of their condition, often
say that they feel
'sunk in God like a fish in the
sea'. We pass over these phrases very easily, and
forget that they are the final result of a struggle to
find the best image for an admittedly imageless truth.
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Yet prayer is above all the act in which we give ourselves
to our soul's true Patria; enter again that
Ocean of God which is at once our origin and our
inheritance, and there find ourselves mysteriously
at home. And this strange, home-like feeling kills
the dread which might overcome us, if we thought of
the unmeasured depths beneath us, and the infinite
extent and utter mystery of that Ocean into which
we have plunged. As it is, a curious blend of confidence
and entire abandonment keep us, because of
our very littleness, in peace and joy: content with
our limited powers and the limitless Love in which
we are held. Nothing in all nature is so lovely and
so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment,
as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a
beauty, quality, and power which is not its own.
We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing,
fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul
sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported,
filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a
power which are not its own. The souls of the
saints are so powerful because they are thus utterly
immersed in the Spirit: their whole life is a prayer.
The Life in which they live and move and have their
being gives them something of its own quality. So
long as they maintain themselves within it, they are
adequate to its demands, because fed by its gifts.
This re-entrance into our Origin and acceptance of
our true inheritance is the supernatural life of
prayer, as it may be experienced by the human soul.
Far better to be a shrimp within that ocean,
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than a full-sized theological whale cast upon the
shore.
In our own small practice this deep and simple
communion may be given to us under the most
personal or impersonal symbols. For some it is
centred on Christ's person; and experienced as a
still abiding in the aura of the beloved Presence.
All the poetry of Christocentric devotion is born of
this type of prayer. Sometimes, as in sacramental
communion, the soul is aware of a positive inflow
of the Divine Charity and Peace. Sometimes the
quiet brooding on a word, a phrase, a mystery a
tranquil chewing of the evangelical cud though it
does not seem to give fresh food or knowledge, does
give or revive in us the very flavour of God 'having
in itself all sweetness and all savour', and draws us
into a communion that is beyond speech. Sometimes
the 'rapt spright'
is subdued to an Action
which has no image, and of which we can say nothing
at all.
Or this prayer may be realized by way of a general
and increasing tendency of the soul to recollect
itself in God, entering at last a silence of peculiar
quality, sometimes dry and costly, sometimes
deeply joyful ; when we hardly know where we
are or what is done to us, or why it is imperative
that our own activity should cease. Whatever its
form, we need not hope to maintain this state for
long periods, at least as a conscious experience. It
should be accepted and relinquished, humbly and
without strain: for it always appears to the self as
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something
'given', which cannot be procured by
any exercise of the will and only presupposes the
readiness of the heart.
Here variety in method and in attrait seem to
matter very little. In all one Spirit works, adopting
and overruling the fragmentary contributions, movements
and stimulations of memory, sense and
thought. Bérulle, who has spoken most deeply,
and yet most simply, of the life of prayer, describes
it as a threefold relation of the soul with God;
adoring, adhering, and co-operating. Thus adoration
is the root, communion the flower, intercessory
action the fruit, of that divine-human love which
binds in one the total life of prayer. And these three
responses of spirit to Spirit, all of which must enter
into the full prayer of the awakened creature, are
simultaneous not successive: even though they will
be present in varying proportions within each life,
and at each stage of the soul's growth. For they
mean the surrender and satisfaction of mind, of heart,
and of will; and each depends for its full and perfect
exercise on all. Only the heart and mind purified
by the rigours of bare faith, and disciplined to
adoration, can accept the wonder of a Reality which
meets it within its own frontiers, is already present
in every fibre of its being, and asks only for its self-giving
love ; and only a soul in which that deep
communion is established can co-operate with the
Divine energy at work within the world of souls
and things.
So even this deep and satisfying communion of
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spirit with Spirit, which more and more dominates
those lives that are becoming sensitive to God, is
found to point beyond itself. It may never be
accepted and enjoyed as a private satisfaction. It
looks towards some creative goal ; general or
particular, remote or immediate. It has a definite
place within the eternal purpose, because it puts the
half-grown soul at the disposal of the moulding
Spirit in a way that nothing else can do. If we give
a sufficiently wide and deep meaning to our terms,
this is true even of the most apparently passive and
formless prayer of contemplation; which seems to
the praying soul to be no more than the, expression
of its own thirst for self-abandonment, and merely
to place it in the Hand of God. For since the aim
of the immanent Divine Will is the supernaturalization
of all life, and prayer is a sovereign means by
which the Divine immanence works on, in, and
through the heart and will of man, we cannot deny
creative purpose even to such passive and generalized
prayer. It is indeed always declared by the mystics
to have profound effects, which are not limited by
its transforming action on personality. They regard
it as the medium of an actual conveyance of life,
and hence the direct cause of their powers.
'In this
prayer', says Grou,
'stripped of image and apperception
. . . the soul unites herself to God in her ground;
the created intelligence to Uncreated Intelligence,
without the intervention of imagination or reasoning
or anything else but a very simple attention of the
mind and an equally simple application of the will.'
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And by this simple union and this tranquil application of a self-abandoned love, the soul becomes the
tool and channel of the Creative Love.
Thus communion and intercession, adherence and
collaboration, can never be separated in experience.
They are completing aspects of that total life of
prayer, of which the key-word is to be fiat voluntas
tua. Even while it moves, within the action of
God, towards that complete surrender which puts
it, in action and in contemplation, wholly at the
disposal of the
Creative Will, this life moves also
to a discovery and fulfilment of its own unique task
within the mystical body of praying souls.
