Contemplative Prayer in the Desert

“Give me strength that waits upon you in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest...And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love...You alone.” ~~ Thomas Merton

When we retreat into the desert place to be with Jesus in meditation and contemplative prayer, what do we do? People want to practice meditation and contemplative prayer but they don't know how to begin; what to do. 

In an astonishing passage of his book New Seeds of Contemplation (1) , Thomas Merton laid out the entire process of meditation that leads, from the beginning to the end of the most profound state of contemplative prayer.

The steps, one by one, are:

* “Withdraw from illusion and pleasure…”

* “Keep the mind free from confusion…”

* “Entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God:”

* “Cultivate an intellectual free from images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love.

* “Love all men.”

* “Rest in humility and find peace in withdrawal.”

* “Have a will that is ready to fold back within itself and draw all the powers of the soul down from its deepest center to rest in silent expectancy for the coming of God, poised in tranquil and effortless concentration upon the point of my dependence on Him.

* “Gather all that I am, and have...and abandon them all to God, in the resignation of perfect love and blind faith and trust in God to do His will.”

* “Then wait in peace and emptiness and oblivion of all things.”

Bonum est praestolari cum silentio salutare Dei. 

- It is good to wait in silence for the salvation of God.

“We can, in love, experience in our own hearts, the intimate personal secret of the Beloved. And Christ has granted us His friendship so that in this manner he may enter our hearts and dwell in them as a personal presence...”, Merton (2)

Like a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun like a burning point of heat that sets fire to paper, Jesus concentrates the light of love on us and we feel the burn – love bursts into flames in our hearts.

Merton says that Jesus dwells within us in a way similar to the incarnation within the body of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

“Dwelling in us… [Jesus] has united and identified our inmost self with Himself. From the moment that we have responded by faith and charity to his love for us, a supernatural union of our souls with His indwelling Divine Person gives us a participation in His divine sonship and nature...It is a mystical union in which Christ Himself becomes the source and principle of divine life in me.”

“Christ Himself ...’breathes’ in me divinely in giving me His Spirit. The mystery of the Spirit is the mystery of selfless love...” (3) 

Little Brother of Jesus Carlo Caretto offers further insight on how to practice contemplative prayer.

Caretto suggested: “Choose one word or a little phrase which will express your love for Him: and then go on repeating it in peace, without trying to form thoughts.”

Especially, the holy name of Jesus is an appropriate word for meditation.

“And with this word or phrase transformed into an arrow of steel, a symbol of your love, beat again and again at God’s thick Cloud of Unknowing.

“Don’t become distracted whatever happens. Chase away even good thoughts; they serve no purpose now.”

“Put yourself in front of Jesus as a poor man: not with any big ideas, but with loving faith. Remain motionless in an act of love before the Father. Don't try to reach God with your understanding; that is impossible. Reach him in love: that is possible.”

“After some hours, or some days of this exercise, the body relaxes. As the will refuses to let it have its way it gives up the struggle. It becomes passive. The sense go to sleep. Or rather, as Saint John of the Cross says, the Night of the Senses is beginning. Then prayer becomes something serious, even if it is painful and dry.” (4)

In order to bear fruit, this prayer of quiet must last over a prolonged period of time over hours, days, even weeks, Caretto said.

“True prayer demands that we remain more passive than active: it requires more silence than words, more adoration than study, more faith than reason. We must understand thoroughly that true prayer is a gift from heaven to earth, the Father to the child; from the bridegroom to his bride, from he who has to him who has not, from Everything to nothing.” (5)

(1) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation p. 45.

(2) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation p. 54

(3) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation p. 159

(4) Carlo Caretto, Essential Writings, p. 166

(5) Carlo Caretto, Letters from the Desert, p. 56

Desert Spirituality in Downtown Seattle

Charles de Foucald is a good model for us today, how to live as a monk in the world, without a monastery.

We must find a way to develop inwardness and solitude, a “desert”, wherever we are. We must withdraw from the world, to inward stillness and silence.

“To receive the grace of God you must go to a desert place and stay awhile. There you can be emptied and unburdened of everything that does not pertain to God. There the house of our soul is swept clean to make room for God alone to dwell...We need this silence, this absence of every creature, so that God can build this hermitage within us.” – Charles De Foucald

“...to live alone with God...one must cross the desert and dwell in it to receive the grace of God. It is here one drives out everything that is not God.

“The soul needs to enter into this silence, this recollection, this forgetfulness of all created things by which God establishes his rule in it, and forms within it the life of the spirit, the life of intimacy with God, the conversation of the soul with God in faith, hope, and charity…

“It is in this solitude, in that lonely life alone with God, in profound recollection of soul in forgetfulness of created things, that God gives himself to the soul that thus gives itself whole and entire to him.” ~~ Charles de Foucald

Brother Charles imagined Jesus teaching him: “Make for yourself a desert where you will be as much alone with me as Mary Magdalene was alone in the desert with me. It is through detachment that you will attain in this, by driving out all mean [petty] thoughts, all littleness which are not evil in themselves, but which succeed in scattering your mind from me, when you should be contemplating me from morning until night.”

“Fix your mind on me as your work, as you pray; contemplative me unceasingly and give all the time you can to prayer and holy reading, which will unite you to me and though which I will speak to you as I spoke to my parents and Mary Magdalene at Nazareth and Bethany.

“He who loves has his beloved always in mind; that time to him well spent that is spent in contemplating him, and that time to him is wasted when he is out of sight.

“Let your soul melt into mine, immerse yourself into me.

“Think of how often I have told you to hope for the day when you will lean forever on my breast. And since I allow it to you, now to begin to live this sweet life, in silence with Mary Magdalene and my mother and Saint Joseph, lay your head upon my breast and so accomplish your pilgrimage.” de Foucald wrote. 

Thomas Merton said that in our time, the desert is everywhere, especially in the city, filled with howling desolation of loneliness.

“The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of god precisely because it had no value to man…

“Yet look at the desert today. What are they? The birthplace of a new and terrible creation, the testing ground of the power by which man seeks to uncreate what God has blessed… Man no longer needs God, and he can live in the desert on his own resources…

“When man and his money and machines move out into the desert, and dwell there, not fighting the devil as Christ did, but believing in his promises of power and wealth, and adoring his angelic wisdom, then the desert itself moves everywhere. Everywhere is desert. Everywhere is solitude in which man must do penance and fight the adversity and purify his own heart in the grace of God.”

“This then is our desert: to live facing despair, but do not consent. To trample it down under hope in the cross...That war is our wilderness.” [Thoughts in Solitude, p. 20]

Carlo Caretto, a follower of de Foucald’s desert way, said, “If you cannot go into the desert, you must nonetheless ‘make some desert’ in your life. Very now and then leaving others and looking for some solitude to restore in prolonged silence and prayer, the stuff of your soul. This is the meaning of ‘desert’ in your spiritual life…

“You must leave everything and everybody and retire, alone with God.. If you don’t look for this solitude, if you don’t love it, you won’t achieve real contemplative prayer.” 

CONTEMPLATION IN THE STREETS

“Contemplation in the streets. This is tomorrow’s task not only for the brothers of Jesus, but for all the poor.” ~~~ Carlo Caretto

In the time of overwhelming speed and flood of information and sensation, people crave a spiritual path of silence and stillness, the prayer of quiet.

The most important need for our own time is to be contemplatives, and help others learn the way of contemplative prayer, especially to help the young people who are eagerly looking for mentors and guides.

It seems that the saints and theologians of our times have emphasized the importance of contemplation and personal experience in concrete circumstances of everyday life.

Thomas Merton, Mother Teresa, Charles de Foucald, Dorthy Day, Karl Rahner – these have all emphasized that contemplation is for everyone, and have modeled for us that the way of deepest contemplation is possible for everyone right in the  heart of the world today.

They teach us that we can change hell into heaven if we have enough heart; if we have enough love in our hearts. Peace is possible.

Jesus wants the “prayer of quiet” to be known in the world today, and therefore he himself puts us among the people in the streets, in marketplaces. Zen is breaking out everywhere.

Our task is to defend humanity. Keep human beings human in this most inhuman of times.

We live in scary times, with overwhelming violence, ignorance, and technological power. Pope John Paul II referred to our time as the “culture of death.”

But the saints and holy ones of the 20^th century, have insisted that we must not be afraid to engage the world. The very horror of the modern world is an invitation, an opportunity, for a decision for faith, a metonia, a change of mind – a decision for peace.

This means an openness to the possibility of God, of grace, and the possibility of opening our hearts to the infinite horizon of faith in love. And opening of our hearts to Jesus.

The young people of the world today are looking for an alternative future to the one offered to them by the emerging technological society. When I walked with the young people in the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, I heard them chanting the dreadful words: “If this is the future, then to hell with the future!”

But who can speak to them of an other, more human future, a future of hope and of faith; a future of a civilization of love?

Pope John XXIII said, “Today the church is confronted with the immense task of giving a human and Christian note to the modern civilization; a note that is almost asked for by that civilization itself for its further human development and even its continued existence.”

When Edith Stein was first interred in the Nazi concentration camp in Westerbork Holland, she found the little children running around unsupervised, dirty and neglected by their mothers, who had lost their minds in fear. Edith took it upon herself to feed and clean and comfort the children. A survivor who had witnessed Edith ‘s presence int eh camp at Westerbork later recalled that Stein had been a presence of peace and strength in their midst. Fully aware of the tragedy engulfing her and all the Jewish camp inmates, she sat as a serene presence amidst the children - “as a pieta without a Christ”, the witness remembered.

Edith Stein was modeling for us the way to be present in this modern world – contemplation in hell is possible.

Thomas Merton spent his entire life calling all people everywhere to deepen their interior spiritual lives, insisting that contemplative prayer was accessible to all, not only to cloistered contemplative monk specialists. Contemplative prayer is not a rare mystical experience restricted to Trappist monks behind cloister walls.

“The urgent need for courage to face the truth of untruth, the cataclysmic presence of an apocalyptic lie that is at work not only in this or that nation, but in all of us, everywhere,” Merton said.

Merton chopped wood and planted trees and sang psalms, showing us how to be human, and his crazy hermit life in a cinder-block shack in the woods as a silent witness has inspired countless millions to deepen their interior lives.

Dorthy Day made soup for the poor hungry people during the depression,. She prepared bunks for homeless people to rest.

Mother Teresa picked up the unwanted, uncared for and abandoned outcasts dying in the streets of India. But, she said, the suffering she saw in America was far greater – the suffering of being unwanted, lonely, abandoned to the cruel reality of heartless individualism. Her example of kindness and care were models for us to be “something beautiful for god.”

When Nazi police came to the Carmelite Monastery to take Edith Stein into custody, she consoled the other nuns: “Today is good to reflect on the fact that poverty also includes the readiness to leave our beloved monastery itself …. If we are faithful and are then drive out into the street, the Lord will send his angels to encamp themselves around us, and their invisible pinions will enclose our souls more securely than the highest and strongest walls.”

Catherine de Heuck Doherty told us how to actually do it:

“Solitude in the mids of the people is the Jesus Prayer, the prayer of the presence of God.

It is holding of God

in what may sometimes be a land of total despair

a real desert

like the desert waste around Mount Sinai…"

In former times, people thought it was a miracle to walk on the water. In our time, it is a miracle to walk on the earth. Our mission is to help people remain human in this most inhuman of times.

Jesus is present not only in church buildings, or in far away Jerusalem. Jesus is found where our feet walk down the street with love in our hearts.

Those who walk with us learn to walk with Jesus.

The pure of heart will see Jesus, right here in the streets where we walk.

“We should imitate as faithfully as possible the hidden life of Jesus of Nazareth,” Charles de Foucald said.

The spirituality of Nazareth is the simple and hidden life, that reveals God’s closeness, Jesus’ intimacy to us in our everyday lives, of silent and dedicated service.

Jesus is hidden, close, here in plain sight.

The Kingdom of God is not far from here.