Today, for a number of reasons, we struggle to be generous and prodigal with God’s mercy.

As the number of people who attend church services continues to decline, the temptation among many of our church leaders and ministers is to see this more as a pruning than as a tragedy and to respond by making God’s mercy less, rather than more, accessible. For example, a seminary professor whom I know shares that, after forty years of teaching a course designed to prepare seminarians to administer the sacrament of penance, today sometimes the first question that the seminarians ask is: “When can I refuse absolution?”  In effect, how scrupulous must I be in dispensing God’s mercy?

To their credit, their motivation is mostly sincere, however misguided. They sincerely fear playing fast and loose with God’s grace, fearing that they might end up dispensing cheap grace.

Partly that’s a valid motive.  Fear of playing fast and loose with God’s grace, coupled with concerns for truth, orthodoxy, proper public form, and fear of scandal have their own legitimacy.  Mercy needs always to be tempered by truth. But sometimes the motives driving our hesitancy are less noble and our anxiety about handing out cheap grace arises more out of timidity, fear, legalism, and our desire, however unconscious, for power.

But even when mercy is withheld for the nobler of those reasons, we’re still misguided, bad shepherds, out of tune with the God whom Jesus proclaimed. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad and the good, the undeserving and the deserving, the uninitiated and the initiated. One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God, like the light and warmth of the sun, cannot not go out to everyone. Consequently it’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, and has a reach beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology, and even sin itself.

For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy, as if it were ours to spend; dole out God’s forgiveness, as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love, as if God were a petty tyrant or a political ideology; or cut off cut access to God, as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds.

It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow stain his purity. So they perennially tried to prevent children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds from coming to Jesus.  However, always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come! I want them to come.”

Early on in my ministry, I lived in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I fully expected that there would be no regrets. So his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. I fear I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”

I was struck by this because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “don’t be soft. Only the truth sets people free. Risk truth over mercy.”

As I age, I am ever more inclined to the old priest’s advice: We need more to risk God’s mercy. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free.

But, like the apostles, we, well-intentioned persons, are forever trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is offered in word, sacrament, and community. But God doesn’t want our protection. What God does want is for everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.

George Eliot once wrote: “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

Thirty years ago, before the airline hijackings of September 11, 2001, before the shoe-bomber and others like him, it was simpler to travel by air. You didn’t need to take off your shoes to pass through security, you could carry liquids with you, laptops and other electronic devices, if you had any, did not have to be brought out of your carry-on bags, the door to the cockpit wasn’t barricaded with steel, and there was much less paranoia in general about security. You even got to see the pilot occasionally.

I remember such an occasion thirty years ago when I did see the pilot, and heard him engage in conversation with a particular passenger. It was an early morning flight from Dublin to London in a small, commuter-type plane with no business-class section. I was seated in the aisle-seat in the first row and directly across the aisle from me, in the first row of seats, sat a middle-aged woman who, very soon, made it clear that she had a phobia about flying.  Shortly after we were seated she called the airline attendant over and told her that her family had talked her into taking this flight but that she was terribly frightened and was having second thoughts about staying on the plane. The attendant gently tried to reassure her that everything was safe; indeed statistically she was safer in the air than on the ground. But logic doesn’t so easily quiet a phobia. The woman was reassured for the moment, aided no doubt by the fact that she was sitting ten feet from the door which was still wide open and that our plane was, for the moment, obviously not going anywhere.

But she began to be more progressively more panicky after the doors were closed and the plane began to back away from the gate. The airline attendant reappeared to calm her and, for a few moments again, her reassurance worked. The woman grew calm and our plane took its place in the queue of planes waiting to take off. Suddenly, the woman broke out in a full-scale anxiety-attack, shouting to the airline attendant that she needed to get off the plane. The attendant, having already twice failed to effectively calm her, opened the door to the cockpit to talk to the pilot and, within a minute, the pilot emerged and began to speak to the panicked woman.

He might have been a professional counselor, given the patience and empathy with which he treated her. He took her hand and gently gave her reassurances: “It’s okay to feel like this! Lots of people have these fears. You’re perfectly safe here. I have flown this route countless times in this very airplane; I guarantee it’s safe. Your family will be waiting for you in London, think of how happy they’ll be! And once you’ll have done this, you’ll be free from this fear for the rest of your life. I will personally escort you off the plane in London! “

His words seemed to work a magic, the woman calmed down and nodded to him that she was ready. Yes, she was going to do this. The pilot returned to his seat in the cockpit, and I sat in awe of his patience.

But a phobia is what it is. After several minutes, just as it was our turn to move out for takeoff, the woman went into another anxiety-attack, worse than the first. The airline attendant got up and quickly opened the cockpit door, sharing the situation with the pilot. The door closed without a word and our plane turned round and slowly taxied back to our gate. Upon arrival, the pilot announced that we had returned to the gate because a passenger was experiencing “an emergency” but that we wouldn’t be too long at the gate. A jetway bridge came out from the gate and the door of the plane opened. The airline attendant opened the door to the cockpit and I could hear the pilot’s voice clearly.  Irritated, angry, sharp in tone, he said to the attendant: Get her off! Just get her off this plane! Gone were his patience, gentleness, warmth, and empathy. He had already tried these, to no avail. The woman had had her chance.  It was time to move on: Get her off! Just get her off this plane!

We all sympathized with his loss of patience. We’d run out of patience too. We needed to get on with our trip. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. He’d just run out of patience, got worn-down, had had enough. That’s understandable and forgivable. He’d had done well, pretty well in fact … but, in the end, not well enough.

Ultimately he had given in to weariness and scripture tells us that we must never grow weary of doing what’s right. Of course, we mostly we don’t have the strength to do that. Mostly we do the right thing until our patience runs out, and then it’s: Just get her off this plane!

The lusts of the flesh reveal the loneliness of the soul.

Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote those words and they highlight part of the deeper intentionality of sexual desire. And this insight was more than just a theoretical one for Hammarskjold. He knew loneliness and unfulfilled desire.

As more and more of his journals are published in English, we are becoming more aware that Dag Hammarskjold was both a man of extraordinary moral integrity and extraordinary spiritual depth. And he came by it legitimately. His father, at one time the Prime Minister of Sweden, had been a great statesman of uncompromising integrity and his mother had been a woman of great warmth and spiritual depth. Hammarskjold inherited the best of both, and it made him both a rare statesman and a great spiritual writer. However not everything was whole in his life.

While in his professional life he dealt with issues of world importance and was taxed for every ounce of his energies, the rest of his life was not nearly so complete. As a young man, he had lost a woman he deeply loved to another man, and this was a wound that never left him. He never dated or pursued marriage again. He longed to be married, but, for all kinds of reasons, as is the case for millions of people, it just never happened. He was, in the words of his biographer, Walter Lipsey, “checkmated rather than mated.”

Hammarskjold, in his journals, often reflects on this “checkmate” and upon the lacuna it left in his life. There’s a searing honesty about its pain and about how he tries to grapple with it. On the one hand, he is clear that this is a pain that cannot be denied and which never goes away; on the other hand, he is able to redirect it somewhat, sublimating it into a wider embrace, into a different kind of marriage bed.

“I feel pain, a longing to share in this embrace [of a husband and wife], to be absorbed, to share in this encounter. A longing like carnal desire, but directed toward earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light.”  Was this satisfying? Not quite, but it brought a certain peace: “Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested, while waiting.”

In this, both in how he experienced the pain of his inconsummation and in how he tried to redirect those longings, his feelings parallel those of Thomas Merton. Merton was once asked by a journalist how he felt about celibacy. Merton replied that “celibacy was hell”, that it condemned one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned (“It is not good for the man to be alone”), and that it was in fact a dangerous way to live since it was an abnormal way of living. But Merton then went on to say that, just because it was anomalous and dangerous, didn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully generative and life-giving, both for the one living it as well as for those around him or her. And that was no doubt true in Merton’s own case, just as it was true for Hammarskjold. Both infused more oxygen into the planet.

Moreover, Merton tried to sublimate his desire for a marriage bed in much the same way as Hammarskjold did: “I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.”

Both Hammarskjold and Merton longed for that deep, highly individualized, intimate and sexual, one-to-one embrace which was denied them by their place in life and which is denied to millions of us by every sort of circumstance and conscription. Merton chose to forego sexual consummation deliberately, to embrace religious vows; Hammarskjold had it chosen for him, by circumstance. At the end of the day the effect was the same. Both then tried to sublimate that need and desire for congenital intimacy by, in their own words, somehow marrying the world and making love in a less-particularized way.

Many married persons who enjoy that unique depth of one-to-one intimacy that Hammarskjold and Merton longed for, must, I suspect, inchoately also long to find within their sexual intimacy that wider embrace of which Hammarskjold and Merton speak, knowing that they want that too in their sexual embrace.

Thinkers have forever mulled-over the problem of the one and the many, the interrelationship between the particular and the universal, because this isn’t just a theoretical issue in metaphysics, something to entertain philosophers, it’s also something that lies inextricably entangled within the powerful pressure of sexuality in lovers in their beds all over the world.

Nature, desire, and soul – we rarely integrate these well. Yet they are so inextricably linked that how we relate to one deeply colors the others; and, indeed, spirituality itself might be defined as what we each do in terms of integrating these three in our lives.

More recently notable spiritual authors such as Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Bill Plotkin, and Belden Lane have argued persuasively that physical nature profoundly affects the soul, just as how we manage our private desires deeply influences how we treat nature. Spirituality is naïve when it is divorced from nature and desire. In a book just released, The Road Is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul, Canadian writer Trevor Herriot joins these voices in calling for a better integration between nature, desire, and soul.

The flow of the book follows its title. Herriot does a walking pilgrimage across part of Saskatchewan’s prairies, a land roamed for centuries by the buffalo, and lets nature and desire speak to his soul as he does this prairie Camino. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book.

As a naturalist, Herriot is involved in various conservation projects from saving grassland birds to preserving the historic grass upon which the buffalo once roamed. Thus it’s no surprise that one of his central themes is the connection he intuits between nature and spirit: “I worry about what happens when we separate spirituality from bodily life and culture, both of which are profoundly connected to soil, climate, and the other givens of place.” And we should worry too: “These days, we watch truckloads of grain pass by and sense that something in us and in the earth is harmed when food is grown and consumed with little intimacy, care, and respect. The local and slow food movements are showing us that the way we grow, distribute, prepare, and eat food is important for the health of our body-to-earth exchanges. The next step may be to realize that the energy that brings pollen to ovary and grows the grain, once it enters our bodies, also needs to be husbanded. The way we respond to our desire to merge, connect, and be fruitful – stirrings felt so deeply, but often so shallowly expressed – determines the quality of our body-to-body exchanges.”

From there it’s a short step to his reflections on sex and desire. Herriot submits that “there is a sadness that comes of misappropriating sexual energy, a kind of functional despair that hums away in the background for most men if they stop long enough to listen to it.” In brief, for him, how we treat our bodies, our spouses, and the other gender greatly helps determine how we treat nature. And the reverse is just as true; how we treat nature will help determine how we treat our own bodies, our spouses, our lovers, and the other gender: “In a world bathed in industrial and impersonal sex, where real connection and tenderness are rare, will we sense also that something in us and in the earth is being harmed from the same absence of intimacy, care, and respect? Will we learn that any given expression of our erotic energies either connects us to or divides us from the world around us and our souls?  We are discovering that we must steward the energies captured by nature in the hydrocarbons or in living plants and animals, and thereby improve the ways we receive the fruits of the earth, but we struggle to see the primary responsibility we bear for the small but cumulatively significant explosions of energy we access and transmit as we respond to our own longings to connect, merge, and be fruitful. Learning how to steward the way we bear fruit ourselves as spiritual/sexual beings with a full set of animal desires and angelic ambitions may be more important to the human journey than we fully understand.” This is not a language that’s easily digested by either the right or the left.

Like Allan Bloom’s book a generation ago, The Closing of the American Mind, Herriot’s book is poised to have equally strong critics on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. Religious conservatives will be upset about some of his views on sexuality, but I fear that many secular liberals will be just as upset by those views as their right-wing counterparts. The same holds true for some of Herriot’s views on soul, church, historical Christianity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, homosexuality, and global warming. Conservative Christians will find themselves stretched in ways that they would prefer to not think about and strident secularists will find themselves constantly incredulous that someone like Herriot, whom they consider an ally, will speak of soul, spirituality, lust, and chastity in ways that they have long-considered naïve; but holding very complex truths often creates precisely this kind of tension.

James Hillman used to quip: “A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.”  The Road Knows How tells us where many, many of our symptoms belong.

The poet, Rumi, submits that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not.

That can be very helpful in understanding our faith. One of the reasons why we struggle with faith is that God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, something impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence, much to our frustration and loss of patience sometimes, is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash.

Because we are not sufficiently aware of this, we tend to misunderstand the dynamics of faith and find ourselves habitually trying to ground our faith on precisely something that is loud and dramatic. We are forever looking for something beyond what God gives us. But we should know from the very way God was born into our world, that faith needs to ground itself on something that is quiet and undramatic. Jesus, as we know, was born into our world with no fanfare and no power, a baby lying helpless in the straw, another child among millions. Nothing spectacular to human eyes surrounded his birth. Then, during his ministry, he never performed miracles to prove his divinity; but only as acts of compassion or to reveal something about God. Jesus never used divine power in an attempt to prove that God exists, beyond doubt. His ministry, like his birth, wasn’t an attempt to prove God’s existence. It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and that God loves us unconditionally.

Moreover, Jesus’ teaching about God’s presence in our lives also makes clear that this presence is mostly quiet and hidden, a plant growing silently as we sleep, yeast leavening dough in a manner hidden from our eyes, summer slowly turning a barren tree green, an insignificant mustard plant eventually surprising us with its growth, a man or woman forgiving an enemy. God, it seems, works in ways that are quiet and hidden from our eyes. The God that Jesus incarnates is neither dramatic nor splashy.

And there’s an important faith-lesson in this. Simply put, God lies inside us, deep inside, but in a way that’s almost non-existent, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored. However, while that presence is never overpowering, it has within it a gentle, unremitting imperative, a compulsion towards something higher, which invites us to draw upon it. And, if we do draw upon it, it gushes up in us in an infinite stream that instructs us, nurtures us, and fills us with endless energy.

This is important for understanding faith. God lies inside us as an invitation that fully respects our freedom, never overpowers us; but also never goes away. It lies there precisely like a baby lying helpless in the straw, gently beckoning us, but helpless in itself to make us pick it up.

For example, C.S. Lewis, in explaining why he finally became, in his words, “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom”, writes that, for years, he was able to effectively ignore a voice inside him, precisely, because it was almost non-existent, almost unfelt, and largely unnoticed. On the other hand, in retrospect, he realized it had always been there, a gentle, incessant nudge, beckoning him to draw from it, something he eventually recognized as a gentle, but unyielding, imperative, a “compulsion” which, if obeyed, leads to liberation.

Ruth Burrows, the British Carmelite and mystic, describes a similar experience in her autobiography, Before the Living God.  Chronicling her late adolescent years, Burrows describes both her religious flightiness and her lack of attraction to the religious life at that time in her life. Yet she eventually ends up not only being serious about religion but becoming a Carmelite nun. What happened? One day, in a chapel, almost against her will, triggered by a series of accidental circumstances, she opened herself to voice inside her that she had, until then, mainly ignored because it lay inside her precisely as a voice that was almost non-existent, almost unfelt, and largely unnoticed. But once touched, it gushed up as the deepest and most real thing inside her and set the direction of her life forever afterwards. Like C.S. Lewis, she too, once she had opened herself to it, felt it as an unyielding moral compulsion opening her to ultimate liberation.

Why doesn’t God show himself to us more directly and more powerfully so as to make faith easier? That’s a fair question for which, partly, there is no fully satisfying answer. But the answer we do have lies in understanding the manner in which God manifests himself in our lives and in our world. Unlike most everything else that’s trying to get our attention, God never tries to overwhelm us. God, more than anyone else, respects our freedom. For this reason, God lies everywhere, inside us and around us, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored, a quiet, gentle nudge; but, if drawn upon, the ultimate stream of love and energy.

Several years ago, Mel Gibson produced and directed a movie which enjoyed a spectacular popularity. Entitled, The Passion of the Christ, the movie depicts Jesus’ paschal journey from the Garden of Gethsemane to his death on Golgotha, but with a very heavy emphasis on his physical suffering.  The movie shows in graphic detail what someone who was being crucified might have had to endure in terms of being physically beaten, tortured, and humiliated.

While most church groups applauded the film and suggested that, finally, someone made a movie the truly depicted Jesus’ suffering, many scripture scholars and spiritual writers were critical of the movie. Why? What’s wrong with showing, at length and in graphic detail, the blood and gore of the crucifixion – which, indeed, must have been pretty horrific?

What’s wrong (or better, perhaps, amiss) is that this is precisely what the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death don’t do. All four Gospels take pains to not focus on the physical sufferings of Jesus. Their descriptions of his physical sufferings are stunningly brief: “They crucified him with the two criminals.” “Pilate had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified.”  Why the brevity here? Why no detailed description?

The reason that the Evangelists don’t focus us on what Jesus was enduring physically is that they want us to focus something else, namely, on what Jesus was enduring emotionally and morally. The passion of Jesus is, in its real depth, a moral drama, not a physical one, the suffering of a lover, not that of an athlete.

Thus we see that, when Jesus is anticipating his passion, the anxiety he expresses is not about the whips that will beat him or the nails that will pierce his hands. He is pained and anxious rather about the aloneness he is facing, how he will be betrayed and abandoned by those who profess to love him, and how he will, in the wonderful phraseology of Gil Bailie, be “unanimity-minus-one”.

That the passion of Jesus is a love-drama is also evident in its setting. It begins with him sweating blood in a garden – and ends with him being buried in a garden. Jesus is sweating blood in a garden, not in an arena. What’s significant about a garden?

In archetypal symbolism, gardens are not for growing vegetables or even for growing flowers. Gardens are for lovers, the place to experience delight, the place to drink wine, the place where Adam and Eve were naked and didn’t know it, the place where one makes love.

And so the Evangelists place the beginning and the end of Jesus’ passion in a garden to emphasize that it is Jesus, as lover (not Jesus as King, or Magus, or Prophet) who is undergoing this drama. And what precisely was the drama?  When Jesus is sweating blood in the Garden and begging his Father to spare him having to “drink the cup”, the real choice he is facing is not: Will I let myself die or will I invoke divine power and save my life? Rather the choice was: “How will die? Will I die angry, bitter, and unforgiving, or will I die with a warm, forgiving heart?”

Of course, we know how Jesus resolved this drama, how he chose forgiveness and died forgiving his executioners, and how, inside all that darkness, he remained solidly inside the message that he had preached his whole ministry, namely, that ultimately love, community, and forgiveness triumph.

Moreover, what Jesus did in that great moral drama is something we’re supposed to imitate rather than simply admire because that drama is also ultimately the drama of love within our own lives, presenting itself to us in countless ways. Namely:

At the end of our lives, how will we die? Will our hearts be angry, clinging, unforgiving, and bitter at the unfairness of life? Or, will our hearts be forgiving, grateful, empathic, warm, as was the heart of Jesus when he said to his Father not my will but yours be done?

Moreover this is not just one, major choice we face at the hour of death; it is also a choice we face daily, many times daily. Countless times in our daily interactions with others, our families, our colleagues, our friends, and with society at large, we suffer moments of coldness, misunderstanding, unfairness, and positive violation. From the indifference of a family member to our enthusiasm, to a sarcastic comment that is intended to hurt us, to a gross unfairness in our workplace, to being the victim of a prejudice or abuse; our kitchen tables, our workplaces, our meeting rooms, and the streets we share with others, are all places where we daily experience, in small and big ways, what Jesus felt in the garden of Gethsemane, unanimity-minus-one. In that darkness will we let go of our light? In the face of hatred will we let go of love?

That’s the real drama of the Passion of the Christ – and the ropes, whips, and nails are not the central drama.

When we no longer know how to pray, the Spirit, in groans too deep for words, prays through us.

Saint Paul wrote those words and they contain both a stunning revelation and a wonderful consolation, namely, there is deep prayer happening inside us beyond our conscious awareness and independent of our deliberate efforts. What is this unconscious prayer? It is our deep innate desire, relentlessly on fire, forever somewhat frustrated, making itself felt through the groaning of our bodies and souls, silently begging the very energies of the universe, not least God Himself, to let it come to consummation.

Allow me an analogy: Some years ago, a friend of mine bought a house that had sat empty and abandoned for a number of years. The surface of the driveway was cracked and a bamboo plant, now several feet high, had grown up through the pavement. My friend cut down the bamboo tree, chopped down several feet into its roots to try to destroy them, poured a chemical poison into the root system in hopes of killing whatever was left, packed some gravel over the spot, and paved over the top with a thick layer of concrete.  But the little tree was not so easily thwarted. Two years later, the pavement began to heave as the bamboo plant again began to assert itself. Its powerful life force was still blindly pushing outward and upward, cement blockage notwithstanding.

Life, all life, has powerful inner pressures and is not easily thwarted. It pushes relentlessly and blindly towards its own ends, irrespective of resistance. Sometimes resistance does kill it. There are, as the saying goes, storms we cannot weather. But we do weather most of what life throws at us and our deep life-principle remains strong and robust, even as on the surface the frustrations we have experienced and the dreams in us that have been shamed slowly muzzle us into a mute despair so that our prayer-lives begin to express less and less of what we are actually feeling.

But it is through that very frustration that the Spirit prays, darkly, silently, in groans too deep for words. In our striving, our yearning, our broken dreams, our tears, in the daydreams we escape into, and even in our sexual desire, the Spirit of God prays through us, as does our soul, our life-principle. Like the life forces innate in that bamboo plant, powerful forces are blindly working inside us too, pushing us outward and upward to eventually throw off whatever cement lies on top of us. This is true, of course, also of our joys. The Spirit also prays through our gratitude, both when we express consciously it and even when we only sense it unconsciously.

Our deepest prayers are mostly not those we express in our churches and private oratories. Our deepest prayers are spoken in our silent gratitude and silent tears. The person praising God’s name ecstatically and the person bitterly cursing God’s name in anger are, in different ways, in radically different ways of groaning, both praying.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this. First, from this we can learn to forgive life a little more for its frustrations and we can learn to give ourselves permission to be more patient with life and with ourselves. Who of us does not lament that the pressures and frustrations of life keep us from fully enjoying life’s pleasures, from smelling the flowers, from being more present to family, from celebrating with friends, from peaceful solitude, and from deeper prayer? So we are forever making resolutions to slow down, to find a quiet space inside our pressured lives in which to pray. But, after failing over and over again, we eventually despair of finding a quiet, contemplative space for prayer in our lives.  Although we need to continue to search for that, we can already live with the consolation that, deep down, our very frustration in not being able to find that quiet space is already a prayer. In the groans of our inadequacy the Spirit is already praying through our bodies and souls in a way deeper than words.

One of the oldest, classical definitions of prayer defines it this way: Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God. Too often in our efforts to pray formally, both communally and privately, we fail to do that, namely, to actually lift our hearts and minds to God. Why? Because what is really in our hearts and minds, alongside our gratitude and more gracious thoughts, is not something we generally connect with prayer at all. Our frustrations, bitterness, jealousies, lusts, curses, sloth, and quiet despair are usually understood to be the very antithesis of prayer, something to be overcome in order to pray.

But a deeper thing is happening under the surface: Our frustration, longing, lust, jealousy, and escapist daydreams, things we are ashamed to take to prayer, are in fact already lifting our hearts and minds to God in more honest ways that we ever do consciously.

Some day you will have to face your Maker!  We’ve all heard that phrase. The hour will come when we will stand alone before God with no place to hide, no room to rationalize, and no excuses to offer for our weaknesses and sin. We will stand in a searing light, naked and exposed, and all we ever did, good and bad, will stand with us in that light. That prospect, however vaguely felt, makes for a dark corner in every person’s mind.

But we can go through our daily lives with that prospect mostly consigned to the back of our minds. We know that someday we will have to face it all, but that day is a long ways off and, for now, we can peacefully accommodate ourselves to our procrastinations and weaknesses. The time to radically face ourselves and our Maker, to stand in the searing light of full judgment, will only come at the time of death.

But, why wait until death? Why live with so much unnecessary fear? Why hide from God’s judgment? Why delay throwing ourselves into God’s mercy and peace?

Searing judgment of our souls is meant to be a daily occurrence, not a single traumatic moment at the end of our lives. We are meant to bring ourselves, with all our complexities and weaknesses, into God’s full light every day. How?

There are many ways to do this, though all of them are predicated on the same thing, namely, on bringing ourselves before God in searing honesty. In essence, we face the light of God’s full judgment every time we pray in real honesty. Genuine prayer brings us into that searing light. And, in the great prayer traditions, one particular form of prayer, contemplative prayer, is singled out as being most helpful in doing this, that is, prayer without words, without images, the prayer of quiet, centering prayer.

There are various methods for praying in this way. From the Desert Fathers, through the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, through Thomas Merton, through John Main, through Thomas Keating, through Laurence Freeman, among others, we have been invited to supplement our other methods of prayer with contemplative prayer, that is, prayer without images, without words, without concentrating on holy thoughts, and without looking for affective, faith-filled feelings in our prayer.

How do we pray in this way? We pray in this way by wordlessly bringing ourselves into God’s presence in a way that we hide nothing of ourselves. Perhaps a description of how this kind of prayer differs from other kinds of prayer might best serve us here.

Normal, meditative types of prayer essentially work this way: You set off to pray, find a quiet place, sit or kneel down, make a conscious act to center yourself in prayer, focus on an inspiring text or thought, begin to meditate on those words, try to hear what is being said inside you, articulate the challenge or insight that is making itself heard there, and then connect this all to your relationship to God, through gratitude, love, praise, or petition.  In this kind of prayer, your focus is on an inspiring word or insight, the response this creates in you, and your own response to God in the light of that.  But, and this is its shortcoming, the words, images, and feelings in that kind of prayer, for all their goodness, can still act as a camouflage that protects you from being fully exposed and naked before God, akin to what we can do in a conversation with another person when we can talk about all kinds of things, good things, but avoid talking about what is really at issue.

Contemplative prayer, by way of contrast, is prayer without words or images. It works this way: You set off to pray, find a quiet place, sit or kneel, and make a conscious act to simply place yourself before God. Then you simply stay there, naked and unprotected by any words, images, conversations, rationalizations, or even by any holy feelings about Jesus, his Mother, some saint, some icon, or inspirational idea. All of these, good as they are, can help you avoid having to be there naked before God. Contemplative prayer brings you into God’s presence without protection, with no possibility of hiding anything. The silence and absence of prayerful conversation is what leaves you naked and exposed, like a plant sitting in the sun, silently drinking in its rays.

We are meant to face God like this every day of our lives, not just at the moment of our death. So, each day, we should set aside some time to put ourselves into God’s presence without words and without images, where, naked, stripped of everything, silent, exposed, hiding nothing,  completely vulnerable, we simply sit, full face, before God’s judgment and mercy.

By doing this, we will preempt any traumatic encounter at the time of our death and, more importantly, we will begin, already here and now, to enjoy more fully God’s empathic embrace.