PRAYER OF THE HEART

I have read in the writings of Saints Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross about the ‘Dark night of the Senses’, and the ‘Dark night of the Soul’. I don’t want to talk here about the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ The ‘Dark Night of the Senses’ is where people walking the path of contemplation experience a dissatisfaction and boredom with sensual gratification; things that once seemed vital for our comfort and well-being may seem boring, even pointless. This experience is disorientating; we can even think we are becoming depressed. I believe I am experiencing this at the moment. Depression has a multitude of causes, which I don’t pretend to be an expert in, but I have noticed in people that it is often where a new growth is laboriously taking place. Many people who have had ‘a breakdown’ really came to a stop because the way they were living was inadequate, and a new and more enhancing state of life was urgent to develop within them. So depression and breakdown are not necessarily destructive. They can in fact be breakthroughs. The Dark Night of the Senses is where the desire for God is battling for first place with the desire for the good things that God has given us. One hymn puts it like this: “The things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace” (Cast your eyes upon Jesus: Hillsong). I have enjoyed many things in life, and much of my sense of feeling OK is caused by what I believe is a healthy balance of work and play, but mostly that balancing act happens in a part of myself which has little consciousness of God. But, once the divine lover gets under your skin, other ‘likes’ seem less attractive. Then the enjoyment of sensual things experience a ‘dark night’, but, really, the deepest desire of my heart, my longing for the Father, is claiming its rightful first place. It is important to state that this dark night gives way to more light. In my readings about the spiritual Dark Nights of the Senses and the Soul, it always seemed to me that they were long periods of discomfort and even suffering, and maybe for some people they are, but I think it comes to me in bits - sometimes more powerful, sometimes less. I don’t think I am depressed, but that love is being matured within me. I have prayed to love the Lord God above all else, and I think that he is answering my prayer. This awakening of my innermost self is purely under the caress of his hand; it is his gift, but it is a bit disorientating. I know that it will all work out well, though, because God is love, and I want to be filled with love. I also believe that he will gradually lead me to enjoy the things of the world shot through with his presence. I expect that that will entail a gradual adjustment of what I think I need and don’t need. I think I will become content with less, and appreciate the ‘less’ more. We’ll see. Spiritual writers keep talking about using our wills . This faculty seems of extreme importance in growing spiritually. Sometimes I have to cling on wilfully when I have doubts or lose a sense of consolation; sometimes I have to cling for a long time. That is when I am working with God on my own development. I have to say that, whenever I will myself to cling to God in darkness, there is a developing inner appreciation that this is the right course of action. I suppose that is the gift of faith at work. It is not a feeling but an increasing conviction. Don’t get the impression that this is all a smooth progression inside me. It is full of bumps and wrong turns, and attempts to turn back. But he loves me and does not give up on me, no matter how many headaches I give him and myself. I repeat: It is important to state that this dark night gives way to more light. People today have gadgets which count their steps. If you had one that gave you the sum total of all the choices you have made in your life, you would be looking at millions, possibly billions. At all times we are convinced we are making the right choices, the consequences of which will be ups or downs. There are far less downs when we choose to make the journey into the family life of God. Also the ups well up inside us, and become a living stream to nourish ourselves and the world. Any thoughts? Please share!

Our book is called ‘ A Message For Its Own Time’ (AMOT). In Chapters 9 & 10 of our book, I attempted to give a description of Contemplation, or the Prayer of the Heart and how it effects our spiritual and personal development and that of the whole world. I thought it might help if I gave an outline of how I have experienced its development in my own life. I have been a priest for 55 years. I have been praying official Church prayers since I started in seminary at the age of 11, so I have been steeped in it. I have also prayed privately and there I expect my prayer has been largely like everyone else’s. It is only since I retired from parish work that I have found time to think more deeply about the heart of prayer and to allow my understandings to come together. It is taking a long time and awareness only comes through actually practicing contemplation. I do not set myself up as an expert, and I am certain that much of what I will write will be inadequate as a serious treatment of the enormous reality of the praying heart, but I offer my thought and experiences as one pilgrim speaking to another, and hope that you will give me your thoughts so that we can learn and grow together. We need to see the journey of contemplating our Father as something normal for Christians and become used to humbly sharing our experience of it. It is a basic necessity of our Christian life. I call this series of chapters about contemplation a stream of thought , because I hope it we will develop it together as we explore and experience this prayer of love. The Glory be Things took a surprising new turn for me with the Glory Be to the Father prayer. You know: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen" We say this prayer a lot. It is at the end of each decade of the Rosary, and it is constantly repeated in the Office, the official prayer of the Church that Priests are instructed to pray daily. That is made up of set Morning, Evening and Night Prayer, as well as Mid-day Prayer and a section called the Office of Readings. I have to confess that my saying of the Office has been ragged. This is partly because the other duties of a Parish Priest have increased so much, and also because I have the habit of stopping and meditating on bits of it when I am struck by a thought. Since I retired from parish work, I have found more time for the Office. The biggest element in the Office is reciting parts of the Psalms. Each part of a Psalm ends with the Glory be to the Father . A few years ago, I found myself being stuck on this prayer. It was like I couldn’t get past it. It seemed as though the Trinity was demanding my attention - knocking on my door. I did some reading to find out what was going on, and I turned to a book about St Elizabeth of the Trinity, a Carmelite nun who died in 1906 aged 26. She was gifted with a profound understanding of the Holy Trinity. Reading some of her thoughts deepened my awareness that the whole of reality is rooted in the indescribably loving unity of the Three Persons in one God. Because it is hard to put into words the reality of the Trinity, we can see it as only remotely connected to the reality we experience every day, but that is like trying to walk without the earth being beneath our feet – it doesn’t work. We are only really alive when we ‘live and move and have our being’ inside the Trinity (Acts 17: 28). The loving family of the Trinity is the real world. All other worlds were created because that family of infinite joy and unity wants to share. We human beings are fondly created by God so that we particularly can live inside that family. But something happened early in human history where we chose to love ourselves more than God - the Original Sin. We all inherit this brokenness within. It is a self-inflicted blindness that makes the things of God obscure. Yet all through history that lost harmony haunts us and human beings have yearned to see the face of God. Contemplation is the simple seeking for the Face of God through love. All religions have tried to achieve this, but they get lost because only God can show us the way. Praise his great goodness! The Son from within the Trinity has becoming human and he shows us the way - he is the way. To contemplate is to know consciously the ‘great light’ which Isaiah prophesied would shine upon ‘the people who walked in darkness’ (Isaiah 9: 2). But how do you do this consciously?

The Cloud of Unknowing At the end of chapter 1, I posed the question of how we can consciously "live and move and have our being" within the Trinity. I can’t say that I found the answer to this question swiftly; it was similar to how cyclists gradually move forward by turning the peddles of a bike. In fact, I can’t chart the course of this growing awareness; I was just led to read The Cloud of Unknowing written by an anonymous mediaeval English writer. He wrote: ‘God’s grace restores our souls and teaches us how to comprehend him (God) through love. He is incomprehensible to the intellect. Even angels know him by loving him. Nobody’s mind is powerful enough to grasp who God is. We can only know him by experiencing his love’. So we cannot experience God by knowing things about him. There is a great difference between knowing about a person and knowing them personally. When I know someone personally, a different dynamic takes place to just knowing facts about them. They affect me and I affect them. At our deepest level we long to move from estrangement to loving people. Maybe we keep most people we know at a distance, but as Christians, we are called to love everyone. In fact the first commandment is that we love God first. The second is to love our neighbour as our self. Can I say that I love God? What the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing points out is that we have to come humbly before God, and that we have to downplay our feelings and our ideas, and just enter the cloud of unknowing. It's hard to set aside emotions and thoughts and images which can never grasp God, and just long for God’. But I tried to do this. What helped me was some advice I had from a priest friend who recommended I read Open Heart Open Mind , by Thomas Keating, which is really helpful. Open Heart Open Mind Following Keating’s advice, I began to just sit before God, just seeking a loving encounter on a deeper level than thoughts, feelings and images. I just sought to experience God’s love. The apparent result was a stream of a thousand distractions. I say apparent, because with time I realised that something was happening deep within me. I wasn’t acquiring knowledge of God. I was acquiring knowing . It wasn’t ideas or feelings, but a sense of God within me and an underlying knowing of his love. Occasionally, I was lost in it for a few seconds. I was encouraged to persevere because I heard Jesus asking me hundreds of times “do you love me?” That kept me focusing on seeking the loving relationship, which he wants so dearly to form with me. In this way, I am building a practice of contemplation, even though many people would think I am mainly swimming in a sea of distractions. Our spirits It's like how we learnt to swim. We had to forget our notions of standing and moving on dry land, and acquire the very different skills of moving in water. Deep inside we had that capacity, but we had to launce ourselves into the new world of water. Likewise, each of us has the capacity to know God in our spirit, which is the deepest part of our being, deeper than our feelings and our intellects. Our feelings are notoriously changeable. Also we can lose our minds, but the core of our person, our spirit, can never die. Original sin has weakened it but Jesus has sent the Holy Spirit to awaken our spirits. That means you and me. But to swim in the love of God we have to wade into the water of the Spirit. The danger of intellectualism Please don't think that, because I am a priest, I must have a higher sensitivity to the Holy Spirit - more than you do. In fact priests run the danger of intellectualism. We can be stuck in the mind which is never satisfactory. Jesus blessed the Father "because you have hidden these things from the learned and the clever and revealed them to mere children " (Matthew 12; 25). Clergy can resist becoming little children. It is only when I come to you as a little brother that we can be in a position to learn together the wonders of God. Do you experience contemplation sometimes, or regularly? Do you find yourself quietly resting in God's love, and have never really thought about it? I am convinced that Jesus wishes us to develop this heart-to-heart with God until we are praying always as he tells us to. I am trying to open up this conversation about what I am learning. Can you share what you are finding? Don't get embarrassed because you don't know much. Let's be like some beggars discussing how to locate the best meal.

As time has gone on, another development took place in my prayer of contemplation. I don’t know how it happened; it was like an itch that needed scratching, but something made me sense that I am loved by our Father . I know now that it was Jesus who was teaching me. Over the years, I have normally prayed to Jesus and, more vaguely, to God. I have known the work of the Holy Spirit, sometimes in striking ways, but I had really not known the Father’s love – I just knew about it in my head. But it was dawning on me gradually that all divine love comes from our Father. Jesus was shining a light on this in my spirit. It is different to praying to Jesus. With him I talk and listen and worship, but that is a very human experience. With the Father it was more of a knowing through unknowing. Does that sound strange? All I know about God is nothing compared to knowing him. When Jesus was transfigured in glory on the mountain top talking to Moses and Elijah, St Peter wanted to build three shelters for them, because he was hoping to just say there. But the Cloud of the Father's Presence came down and the apostles fell on the ground in awed worship. (Matthew 17: 1-6) I am not surprised that the presence of the Father is often described in the Bible as a ‘cloud’. But it is a cloud which reaches down to the very depths of our being. It defies words, and comes and goes into our consciousness as it wills. Under its influence, we develop a subconscious attitude of receiving love . The attitude of receiving love We only sporadically realise that we have this attitude inside us. It seems to me that the main way to facilitate its growth is to actively give time to contemplation. Great saints seem to reach the stage where this attitude becomes the continual focus of their minds and hearts. It is perfectly right to want to be like them, which we will with time. But be content with how the Father leads you in his own good time. Let the desire grow, but avoid impatience! Centering prayer Thomas Keating calls Contemplation ‘Centering Prayer’. He advises beginners to just keep repeating a word or a phrase and leave all other notions to fade away. I myself have been led to just keep repeating the word ‘Father’. As we persevere, over time, we will become increasingly aware of this attitude of receiving God's love growing in our souls. It does come and go. We will sometimes find that we doubts its existence. Then we have to cling to the belief that it is there. Human lovers find love strengthens as they overcome their doubts. That is how love sends down deeper roots. Contemplatives are like athletes who, through practicing, develop and train their muscles. Doing the same exercise again and again can be a tedious slog, but we get into a rhythm and find we miss it when we don't do it. After all, it is simply going to our Father for love. Keep it up! Jesus said: "when you pray, go to your private room and, when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:6). How are you finding these thoughts of mine? Any questions you would like to ask? Any thought you would like to offer? If we share, we will grow. We will be led by God. Jesus tells us that when two or three share in his name, he is with us. Let's share in his name!

In Chapter 3, I described how I am becoming increasingly aware of the presence of Our Father. As the Spirit was making me more aware of the Father, I began to understand that I was actually joining in the conversation which Jesus himself continually has with the Father. In fact I now try to begin contemplation by entering into the presence of Jesus and becoming aware that he is inviting me to take my place in his prayer to the Father. Jesus' own prayer to the Father Jesus always found time to go away to a quiet place to converse with his Father. What took place in those time of prayer is a deep mystery. We have some insights into it, like his Priestly Prayer at the last supper (John Chapter 17), and his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26: 36-46). Jesus' prayer is profoundly human, but his is a humanity maturing with extraordinary speed as it is impregnated by his identity as the Second Person of the Trinity. Therein lies deep mystery! I am like a little brother doing what the apostles failed to do in Gethsemane - staying awake, watching and praying. Just as on that occasion he needed their involvement, now he needs mine, meagre as it is. I am a unique part of his mystical body with my own song to sing and prayer to make. But it is only authentic when it is his prayer as well. And, surprisingly, my small part in his prayer is essential for the whole process of transfiguring the world into the glory of God. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. We usually end our prayers with the phrase ‘through Christ our Lord. Amen’. For years, I have known theoretically that all our prayers are through Jesus, but the words were just a routine to me. Now I am beginning to experience that I am really praying in him and with him. It is real. He is the channel of all prayer to the Father. Or, rather, all prayer to the Father is his; we are privileged because he invites us to take part in his prayer. Even non-Christians who pray to God are doing it unwittingly through Christ. Meditation and contemplation are different but complementary. Contemplating does not stop me meditating. Meditation is where I ponder in my intellect and feelings about the things of God. Faith always seeks to understand. I find myself agreeing with St Paul when he says: "All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection" (Philippians 3: 10). But meditation is the prayer of the mind, and it should lead us to the prayer of the heart - the prayer of contemplating our Father with Jesus in love. We are told twice by St Luke that Mary "pondered things in her heart" (Luke 2: 19). When she was doing that, she was allowing herself to grasp and be filled with wonder as the loving plan of the Father unfolded. The Holy Spirit was leading her mind and heart and spirit into the utter fullness of God's light. One day, in heaven, each of us will be filled with the "utter fullness of God" (Ephesians 3: 19). Scripture I find studying the scriptures a most effective tool for meditation. Scripture is the Word of God, through which the Son of God speaks to us. It is ‘alive and active’ (Hebrews 4, 12), and, through it, Jesus is present and speaking individually in our minds and hearts. A good way to study scripture is to start with each day’s readings at Mass , and asking Jesus to explain the scriptures to us. He will guide your thoughts to deep meanings. You can find the daily Mass Readings on this website: Go to 'Our Mission' and press the 'Today's Word' button. There are other great ways to use the Scriptures, which we will recommend on other pages of this website. We contemplate with our spirits Although contemplation and meditation are complimentary, the Knowing which comes through contemplation is deeper than prayer on the intellectual and emotional level. It is an activity of the far deepest human self, our spirit. Our intellect can be feeble a lot of the time, and our feelings can be wayward, but when our spirits are joined to the Holy Spirit of God, there is within us a continual conversation through Jesus with the Father, even though we may not be aware of it for much of the time. St Paul says ‘The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness. For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit himself expresses our plea in a way that could never be put into words’ (Romans 8: 27). Elsewhere in the same chapter, he says ‘the spirit of sons... makes us cry out, "Abba, Father!’ (Romans 8: 15). 'Abba' is the Hebrew word for 'Daddy'. All this activity of the Spirit is going on deep in the Christian's soul. Contemplation is where we deliberately go into that private place within, and seek the face or our Abba. It enables the Holy Spirit's prayer to break to the surface of our mind and feelings as we live our everyday lives. This might last minutes or hours or days – perhaps longer; I know it lasted longer for the great saints, but I am not on their level – yet. Have you ever thought that your prayer is in fact your personal share of the prayer of Jesus? It's a wonderful thing. Through baptism, I am really and truly incorporated into the risen Lord. And I don't have to do anything to make that present. I just have to relax enough to let the deep awareness of the special Jesus prayer within me well up and build until I am full of him. What do you think?

A sense of the Communion of Saints has been developing in my heart as well, as I pray the prayer of contemplation. Again this is a knowing. It is not there all the time yet, but every so often I sense that my prayer is not private. As I become more aware that my communication with our Father is part of Jesus’ prayer, I sense that it is the prayer of everyone else as well. I am beginning to experience the knowing that, when I stand in the presence of Jesus facing the Father, I am surrounded by all my brothers and sisters of the whole human race. We are all there together. My salvation is bound up with all of theirs. I cannot know peace until they also have come home into the joy of the Trinity. That is a daunting thought and would be too much for me to accept if it did not arise from closer contact with the burning heart of Christ. There I find absolute determination and sureness that it will be accomplished. Hell and Purgatory Here I am puzzled by all the teaching about Hell in the Scriptures and teaching of the Church. I don’t know how to synthesise my sense of Christ’s burning desire that all human beings come home into the Trinity, and the dreadful possibility that some will be eternally dammed. I place my hope in Christ’s words, ‘With God all things are possible’ (Matthew 19: 26). I also find the Church’s teaching about Purgatory extremely powerful. Is it possible that the personal judgment, which each of us will face, will be such a clear vision of the utter beauty of God’s love that even those with the most hideous sins will respond positively? I deeply hope that it is. I pray daily for the souls in Purgatory. I pray also that others will pray for me when I die. I find today that people tend to stress their appreciation when somebody dies. That is good because people mostly live lives of quite goodness which should be celebrated, but, compared with the glory intended for us, their goodness is in need of enormous development in Purgatory under the shelter of the wings of Christ. The people living in the world now But it is all my brothers and sister living now that I am more aware of. I get a sense when I am with Jesus before our Father that, while I seek to open up to his love, I am opening floodgates for his divine grace to pour on my brothers and sisters. How and where I do not know - it doesn't matter. Somehow in a lovely way my contemplation and all my prayer is helping some others move forward to glory. This awareness is so insistent that I have been writing a document on this effective intercession. It will come onto the website soon, and I may make it into a succession of videos. I will let you know when it is ready. Nuns and Monks As I become more aware of this intercession effect of contemplation, it makes a lot more sense to me of how contemplative nuns and monks work. Theirs is probably the greatest service to God and our world. The Ligurgy It also underlines the vital necessity of the whole liturgical activity of the Church which is made up of the Mass, the Sacraments and the Divine Office. All over the world, in thousands of Churches, monasteries and personal places of prayer this activity proceeds each day. There is a continual outpouring of love to our Father. It is the personal prayer of Jesus which he gladly shares with his people. We can never overestimate the floods of grace that our Father pours out in response What do you make of this?

I experience two types of restlessness of heart, and often confuse them. Normal restlessness The first is caused by my own insecurity which causes me to seek signs of hope in the world around. That either leads to fixating on things that inspire me superficially while avoiding the rest of reality (like following my football team). I see this happening in others, especially in social media where questionable ideas gain massive ‘likes’. Or I find myself determinedly studying the news for signs of hope. But that can lead to exhaustion and disenchantment, sometimes downright pessimism about the world. I think I see signs of these symptoms in many other people I know and hear about. So many people today stress how instable the world is. Of course these feelings can come from something peptic in my body, but that is easy to spot with a bit of self-diagnosis. Spiritual restlessness The second form of restlessness of heart that I experience is the thirst for God. Sometimes I feel like the woman searching for her lover in the Song of Songs – no peace until I rest in God. This urgency is far from permanent. Sometimes I just have a calm seeking of his face in contemplation, at other times there is a blank and I have to make myself seek his face. I wish I had the urgency of a lover all the time, but as I seek God’s face in contemplation this fervour is becoming a bit more frequent. When I study the saints, though, I am aware that it is not right to only want this fervour to be permanent. They are gradually led to seek a share in the love of Christ which causes Jesus intense suffering until all are saved. In chapter 4 above, I quoted what St Paul wrote in Philippians 3: 10. He says ‘All I want is to know Christ and the power of his resurrection’ ; what I did not quote is the rest of what he says in that verse: ‘and to share his sufferings by reproducing the pattern of his death’. Here I hesitate. I think that I am going to have to go round and round a lot of times to reach that generous attitude. I am sure that Jesus wants to lead us deeply into letting his love so burn in our hearts that we are not daunted by the prospect of pain, but are increasingly eager to pay any price for the healing of humanity. I have come across people who have shone with light and joy in the midst of horrendous suffering. They have been graced with love far greater than mine. I think they are examples of what the Holy Spirit can do in willing souls. All I know is that I can be like that, but it seems to be a slow development. There seems to be so much brokenness in me that Jesus wants to heal first. Jesus says in the Beatitudes ‘blessed are the pure in heart they shall see God’ (Matthew 5: 8). My heart needs much purifying until I am transfigured by Christ’s love. The battery that charges the Church Forgetting myself now, I have throughout my priestly life visited and taken Communion to hundreds of sick and housebound people. It still causes me awe how the vast majority bore great suffering in deep faith and trust. In our ministry, Anne and I have always believed that the main battery that charges the parish is the prayer of these people and the elderly. Do you suffer and feel all is a waste of time and useless? Or has our loving Lord inspired you with a sense that it is all being used to lift the world into the goodness of his Kingdom? Don't let your suffering be wasted. I know people with no faith often suffer with great stoicism, but that takes a great effort and is characterised by pessimism. Christian, you are being invited to have a special ministry in the Royal Priesthood of the baptised! Let us not forget the cosmic nature of the prayer of Jesus that we share in. In the wonderful Chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans, St Paul tells us: "The whole creation is eagerly waiting for God to reveal his sons (and daughters)... creation still retains the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence, to enjoy the same freedom and glory as the children of God. From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth" (Romans 8: 19-22). Later in the same chapter, he writes: "all things work together for the good for those who love Him" (Romans 8: 28). Every bit of sacrifice that is offered by the faithful is part of the coming to birth of the new creation. If you are like me, you will be praying that God will send the courage and generosity we need, should he send suffering our way. As for the prayer of saints like St Paul, who actively prayed to share in the suffering of Christ, we must hope that, should Jesus call us to that heroic love, we will accept his call with grace. This topic is huge. Have you any comments or queries about it? Use the "Comment on this article" button below.

Fr Brian continues his sharing on the Prayer of the Heart