(1. Soul of Christ, sanctify me.)

(2. Body of Christ, save me.)

(3. Blood of Christ, inebriate me.)

(4. Water from the side of Christ, wash me.)

(5. Passion of Christ, strengthen me.)

(6. Within thy Wounds, hide me.)

(7. Let Me Never Be Separated from Thee.)

- – - – -

From the wicked foe defend me.
Ab hoste maligno defende me.

Because there are forces in life – both in our own hearts and also outside of us – that would try to draw us away from the peace and harmony of God, we pray, “From the wicked foe defend me.”  We are reminded of the prayer that Jesus teaches us, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

In John Garvey’s essay, “Something Does Not Love Us: The Reality of Evil” (Commonweal, April 22, 2005, 7-8), we read:

…to deny that evil is real is to deny something we really do experience, out there – that is, in our suffering world – and in here, in our own hearts. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and it is essential for us to keep this before us every time we use the word.

Ignatius calls the personification of this something that does not love us “the enemy of our human nature.”

All it takes is to look around us to be aware of the power of evil, and news reports can make us feel as if danger lurks behind every bush, and around every corner an enemy is waiting.  But the foes that make the news may not be the most dangerous ones.  Although it is certainly legitimate to pray for protection from hurricanes and terrorists and home invasions, we might also need to pray for protection against some more destructive foes, those that would pull us away from Christ.

Defend me, O Christ, from discouragement, from loss of hope, from paralyzing fear, from soul-weariness, from bitterness, from a heart that lacks compassion.

In face of the seeming omnipresence of forces contrary to God, the resurrection of Jesus Christ assures us that good is stronger than evil – either the evil within or the evil outside ourselves. Therefore it is not in cringing but in confidence that we pray:

From the wicked foe defend me.
Ab hoste maligno defende me.

- – - – -

Fractal image created with Apophysis.

The long corridor brought back with a vengeance the terror of war.

Then something else came back to her, something she had read – that the early desert monks had walked about all day reciting the first verse of Psalm 70: “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.”*  She began to follow their example.

Descending into the corridor, Sister Elizabeth prayed, over and over, “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.”  Walking through the corridor, she prayed, “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.”  And eventually, throughout the day, she would pray, “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me.”

Gradually, the terror dissipated.

Here is a brief portion of what John Cassian (ca. 360 – 435) says about this verse:

And so for keeping up continual recollection of God this pious formula is to be ever set before you. “O God, come to my assistance; O Lord, make haste to help me,” for this verse has not unreasonably been picked out from the whole of Scripture for this purpose. For it embraces all the feelings which can be implanted in human nature, and can be fitly and satisfactorily adapted to every condition, and all assaults. It contains an invocation of God against every danger, it contains humble and pious confession, it contains the watchfulness of anxiety and continual fear, it contains the thought of one’s own weakness, confidence in the answer, and the assurance of a present and ever ready help. For those who call constantly on their protector are sure of having him always at hand.

John Cassian (ca. 360 – 435), Conferences, X

For a helpful reflection on the same verse, see Father Pat Collins, CM, “Learning to Pray at All Times.”

_____
* Douay-Rheims version.  This is the translation of Psalm 70:1 used at the beginning of each hour of the Divine Office (the Liturgy of the Hours).

O God, Master of this passing world, hear the humble voices of your children.
The sea of Galilee obeyed your order and returned to its former quietude; You are still the Master of land and sea.

We live in the shadow of danger over which we have no control; the Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant, can awake from its seeming lethargy, overstep its conventional boundaries, invade our land and spread chaos and disaster.

During this hurricane season we turn to You, O loving Father. Spare us from past tragedies whose memories are still so vivid and whose wounds seem to refuse to heal with passing time.

O Virgin Mary, Star of the Sea, Our Beloved Mother, we ask you to plead with your Son in our behalf, so that spared from the calamities common to this area and animated with a true spirit of gratitude, we will walk in the footsteps of your Divine Son to reach the heavenly Jerusalem where a stormless eternity awaits us.
Amen.

Out of the dark came the sound of airplanes. As they approached, they flew so low and so close that the soldiers on the deck could see the swastikas on the rudder. The ship was being strafed.
 
Sister Elizabeth remembers the experience as one of stark terror. Other than that, she is not clear on the details. After the planes had flown off into the night and calm was restored, her friend Clare turned to her and asked, “What was that you praying?”

“I don’t know,” Sister Elizabeth replied. “What was I praying?”
 
“You were praying grace before meals,” came the answer.
 
While the words, “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive…” may not seem quite fitted to the situation of being shot at, still Sister Elizabeth’s story illustrates two points related to prayer:

1. The benefit of memorized prayers

2. The relative unimportance of the words

The benefit of memorized prayers

A better term, perhaps, is learning “by heart,” so that the prayers are not just rote, but are continually present to us whether or not we are consciously aware of them, and available when we need to pray and may not have words of our own. Jesus learned prayers by heart. On the cross he called upon two of them: psalms he had memorized, probably at his mother’s knee:

Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Psalm 31:5, “Into your hand I commit my spirit.”

The relative unimportance of the words themselves
 
I have spent a good part of my life studying and working with language, so I am not one to denigrate the value of beautifully crafted words. After all, in prayer as in the rest of life, we want to give God our best.
 
Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that God was displeased with Sister Elizabeth’s prayer simply because the words were unsuited to the circumstances. I believe that the simple act of crying out to God was far more important than the words used.

So we must pray, with words or without words, in season and out of season, in crisis or in times of tranquility. And we learn prayers by heart, so that prayer may be always with us and may break through our fear or seep through our sadness, emerging into God’s blessed light.

Rejoice in your hope,
be patient in tribulation,
be constant in prayer.
 
(Romans 12:12 RSV)

Coming back to earth, I ask what it would be like to turn our attention toward our own “empty” space — not for several months, but for a few minutes at a time, and not with a view toward analysis, but simply with a loving gaze?

It is unfortunately true, however, that our society does not encourage the honoring of our empty space. It is both easier and more acceptable to fill up every vacant nook, every idle moment, with purposeful activity, or (still easier) with television or surfing the internet.

Are we afraid of being swallowed up in the void? Perhaps. I believe this is a natural fear. Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées, expressed succinctly what we may feel:

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.
(Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.)

The Hubble directed its focus toward the vastness of outer space and revealed thousands of galaxies. Is it possible that as we gaze peacefully into our interior space, we will find that the silence and the emptiness are filled, not with galaxies, but with God?

Near the end of one trip the flight attendant approached her and asked if she was a Catholic Sister. “Yes,” she replied, “how could you tell?”

“Your personality,” responded the flight attendant, leaving Sister to ponder the image of religious women in popular culture.

Lightning and Miss Layona

Many years ago, when I was a young teacher, I had the privilege of meeting Miss Layona Glenn, 102 years old at the time. A retired Methodist missionary to Brazil (in fact, by that time, she had been retired for nearly thirty years), Miss Layona still wrote a newspaper column and traveled about giving talks to church groups. That is how I met her: she had come to speak at the local Methodist church and was spending the night at the house where I lived.

Miss Layona was an intrepid woman who, however, confided at supper that she was afraid of lightening.

“I don’t understand why I’m afraid of lightning,” she said. “I know God will take care of me. But I’m still afraid.”

The Christian and besetting weakness

Neither Sister nor Miss Layona let her fear stop her, but neither was the fear taken away. I imagine that there will always be areas of our lives in which we are not totally free — even if we die in the odor of sanctity at the age of 106, like Miss Layona — or at least not totally free until we obtain the wondrous healing and freedom of heaven.

God works to heal us and free us all through our lives, and we must cooperate with the means God provides, sometimes ones that we can see (such as doctors or psychologists), other times ways that are mysterious and unseen. Perhaps you have had the experience of realizing that a particular weakness had been removed, and could attribute it only to the grace of God.

But even as we are led toward healing, we keep in mind that weakness is not contrary to the Christian life. “My power,” Paul hears God say, “is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

If one is afraid to fly (or afraid of lightning or snakes or computers), it does not mean that holiness is lacking. No, even the holiest among us are not finished yet. Our freedom will continue to be partial until our journey of transformation in Christ is complete in heaven. What is more, the “real ‘wound,’” according to Iain Matthew in The Impact of God, “is our need for God, and God himself must be the cure.”

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
(Psalm 27:1)

The first Noel the angel did say
Was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay;
In fields where they lay keeping their sheep,
On a cold winter’s night that was so deep.

But at that age I understood “to certain” as an infinitive. That is, there were these shepherds tending their sheep on a cold, dark night, and they felt uncertain and afraid. So the angel came and sang, “Noel!” to “certain” them, to reassure them, so they would no longer be afraid.

It wasn’t until I grew up that I realized “certain” wasn’t a verb at all, but just meant “some” shepherds. However, I still prefer my childhood interpretation, because we all need those words of reassurance. We need to hear “Noel” far beyond the date of Christmas — into our dark nights of January and beyond. We need to hear the messengers of God who come to “certain” us, to give us the assurance that we have nothing to fear, because God is indeed Emmanuel, God-with-us.

The poor creature was miserable, hobbling about on three legs, but every time Rosalie tried to reach him to pull the spine out, he backed away. He knew that what she was going to do would hurt.

At that point Rosalie was powerless to help him. But as she watched him, something happened. Black Bart became very still, and she could see him come to a decision. He then hobbled over to her and went totally limp in her arms. Rosalie was able to remove the prickly pear spine, and all was well.

Loving God,
when I am anxious,
when I am in pain,
when I fear loss of control,
may I go limp in your arms,
trusting your wisdom,
and surrendering myself entirely to your loving care.
Amen.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time on and forevermore.

(Psalm 131)

So it was with some astonishment that I recently experienced life for several days without any sense of smell at all, due to a respiratory infection going around Gainesville. To be completely honest, astonishment is probably too weak a word. Although I know this sounds overly dramatic, I was very nearly in a state of panic. I realized for the first time how much I rely on scent to know the world around me, and I found myself asking repeatedly and pitifully, “What am I going to do if my sense of smell doesn’t return?”

In the spiritual life, there can be a comparable experience in the loss, not of a favored manner of connecting with our physical surroundings, but of our familiar way of relating to God — for example, when the form of prayer with which we are comfortable no longer seems to “work.” Feeling bereft, we can begin to panic, even to feel as if we have lost God.

Going Deeper

My sense of smell did return to normal. However, the loss of our manner of apprehending God’s presence is a different matter. Instead of returning to what we consider normal, we may find ourselves called to a new form of prayer or to a deeper way of being with God than what we formerly knew. In this case, to go back to how things were would be neither helpful nor possible. God calls us forward, drawing us closer through what sometimes feels like absence.

There is no need to panic when we find our spirits deprived of the tried and true. Trust God, talk to someone skilled in the spiritual life — and whatever you do, don’t stop praying, even if prayer appears for now to be leading nowhere.

Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him. (Psalm 37:7a)

Day by day in fear
my heart collapses on itself.
My hours are gray with forgetfulness.
See — the coals of my love have already settled into ash.

Breathe me into new life,
that I may expand
in the amplitude of your love.
And, You who are all in all,
be all to me.
Amen.

__________

Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.
(Psalm 51:10-12)