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The Soul of Prayer

Oct 10th, 2011 by

Between 1877 and 1926, the Cenacle had only one Superior General: Mother Marie-Aimée Lautier.  Imagine! 49 years leading the congregation.  (Today twelve years is the limit.) Many changes took places during her time, including opening thirty Cenacles in several countries. Several of these communities were in the United States.

One thing that did not change, however, was the emphasis on prayer.  I would like to share with you a passage from the letter on prayer she wrote to all the Sisters in 1884.

In the Cenacle all is done, all is obtained by prayer; it begins, accompanies, and concludes all our actions…

If I hold my life in my hands (Ps 119:109) before God; if, living by faith, things of time are for me as already passed and things of eternity as already begun; if I have found the spring of “living water”; if I possess the one thing needful (Lk 10:42), what more can stir my desires, what struggle will be beyond my courage, what difficulty can arrest my course, what error or prejudice can weaken my faith? Closely united to God, loved by the Lord of all things, terrible to the devil, the prayerful soul accomplishes perfectly the divine will.  She fulfills her vocation as a Religious of the Cenacle, and can cry out with the Prophet-King, “Funes ceciderunt mihi in praeclaris”: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places” (Ps 16:6).

Although Mother Marie-Aimée’s reflections are addressed to the Cenacle Sisters, surely all of us may find our fulfillment by becoming as joyfully docile to God as the “prayerful soul” she describes.

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Padre Pio

Sep 23rd, 2011 by

This is the feast day of Padre Pio (1887 – 1968), the Capuchin saint who received the stigmata, the marks of Christ’s wounds, on his own body. A wondrous gift this was, but Padre Pio was not overjoyed to have it bestowed on him. He wrote to Padre Benedetto, his Capuchin superior, “Dear Father, I am dying of pain because of the wound and the resulting embarrassment. I am afraid I shall bleed to death if the Lord does not hear my heartfelt supplication to relieve me of this condition.”

Although God did not remove the wounds, many stories are told about the miracles performed by Padre Pio. One of my favorites is recounted by Ron Hansen in A Stay Against Confusion:

In World War II an American Army Air Corps squadron leader disobeyed the order to bomb San Giovanni Rotondo [the town where Padre Pio's friary was located] because he saw the gigantic form of a friar in the sky, fiercely diverting the aircraft, and was chagrined to have to write that in an official report. Worried that he had lost his faculties, the pilot found out about Padre Pio through offhand inquiries, and after the war visited Santa Maria delle Grazie, becoming one of Pio’s “children.”

My own far less dramatic (and unmiraculous) Padre Pio story took place in a hospital in Rome, where I had just had surgery. Groggy and feeling sick to my stomach, I opened my eyes to find a stranger in my room holding a picture and saying something to me in Italian. I think it was a picture of Padre Pio. I couldn’t tell whether the woman (or man—I’m not quite sure which it was) wanted to pray over me, give me the picture, or sell it to me. In any case I didn’t feel capable of coping with whatever it was.  So I mumbled in my best pidgin Italian, “Sono malata” (I’m sick). When next I looked, the apparition with the picture had vanished.

Soon after leaving the hospital I recounted the incident. One of my sisters said to me, “If you had taken the picture, you might have walked home from the hospital.”

Who knows? Perhaps I missed an opportunity.

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“Successful” Prayer

Sep 14th, 2011 by

Do you ever feel as if your prayer is clumsy and inadequate? I do, so I was consoled to run across the following passage by Michael Casey:

Prayer is strange in being an activity where no success is possible. There is no perfect prayer — except insofar as it corresponds to one’s real situation and represents a total turning toward God. The ecstatic prayer of a mystic is in no way superior to the agonized stumbling of a sinner weighed down with guilt and deformed by a lifetime of estrangement from God. Both attempts represent the upward striving of created nature to find rest in God; both are real, both are “successful.” Both remain imperfect, too, because perfection does not belong in this life; it is to be expected in the next. And when God’s judgment turns everything upside down and exalts the lowly, who can say which of these prayers has the greater capacity to be raised?” (Toward God: The Ancient Wisdom of Western Prayer, 24)

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

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Prayer for Uncertain Times

Sep 5th, 2011 by

Cracked earth
O God,
in whom we live and move
and have our being,
O Love,
who embraced our sorrows
and took away our sins on the cross,
hear us now who come to you,
sometimes trusting,
sometimes fearful,
sometimes falling.
O God, O Love,
draw us to your loving heart,
where our fears may be quieted
and our tears wiped away
and where we, with your Son Jesus Christ
may embrace the sorrows of the world
and answer your call to forgive,
in your most merciful heart.
Amen.


 

Though the fig tree does not blossom,
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
God, the Lord, is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,
and makes me tread upon my heights.

Habakkuk 3:17-19

 - – - – -

Photo: cracked earth of Lake Pontchartrain levee, Metairie, Louisiana (July 2011)

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Dignity and a Splashing Hawk

Aug 17th, 2011 by

As I was going through my exercises for sciatica at physical therapy this morning—going through them reluctantly, as I would have much preferred to be at home quietly pondering the Blessed Trinity—I thought about the hawk I watched taking a bath in the rain a few weeks ago.

The hawk was both amazing and amusing: the mighty raptor who had been harassing crows until the rain started was now splashing on the roof outside my window like a sparrow in a birdbath.  His feathers were fluffed and disheveled; his positions were sometimes comical.

Why did the hawk come to mind during therapy? Although at therapy I was not fluffed and disheveled (neither am I a raptor, since I don’t eat meat and I do try not to harass anyone), dignity was out of the question in the contorted and goofy-looking body-positions that were required of me.

Anyhow, bodily creatures that we are and often in need of humility, I came to the not-so-profound conclusion that there is a time for pondering the Trinity, and there is a time for tending to the body.  There is also a time for dignity and a time for just forgetting self and getting with the program.  And there is a time for simply having a good time with what God has provided—which the hawk seemed to be doing.  (But if you’ve ever been to physical therapy, you’ll agree that fun is not the goal there.)

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.

Psalm 139:14

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