Circle of life

Daniel Mitsui's artwork is amazing. Check out his website for more. This is an image used on the cover of my book All Things Made New. (Click here to get a clearer view.) But it doesn't much look like a circle. Or does it? It struck me that the image of Mary and John at the foot of the Cross is a circle of giving and receiving, each to the others. This followed on from reading the Meditation of the day from yesterday's Magnificat, by John Tauler. It included these words, referring to those who follow the Spirit and are lifted above time. "From God they accept instinctively all that happens to them, and in the same spirit they offer up all to him again, and so they abide in sweet tranquility of mind." It is a circle that we need. We receive everything from him, and we give everything that we have to him. That is why our burden is light. Most often, though, there is a blockage along the way, either in the receiving or the giving, and then grace doesn't flow. We are holding on to things.

The other interesting thing that Tauler goes on to say immediately afterwards is this. "And this is true of them even while their outward man is much disturbed and sorely pained." So we may look as if we are in pain, we probably even feel it, but inwardly (and many people have not yet discovered the "inward" he is talking about) we feel joy not suffering, hope not despair. May God help us to reach this state and dwell there.

Faith to faith

I have become convinced that what is largely missing from the Catholic scene is a serious engagement with other religions and spiritualities in the name of an uncompromising quest for the greatest possible truth. Such an endeavor is risky but necessary. I attempted such an engagement in The Radiance of Being, published by Angelico Press in May 2013. Some readers will be disturbed by the book – especially by the sympathy with which it treats Islam, not to mention problematic Christian thinkers such as Meister Eckhart, Jacob Boehme, Valentin Tomberg, and the Russian Sophiologists. I wrestle with many of the questions I know are of great concern to others of the present generation – many of them still outside the Catholic Church, and unwilling even to consider its claims as long as these questions remain unaddressed.

The methodology is somewhat unusual for an orthodox Catholic. Whilst firmly believing that Catholic Christianity is true, I also perceive other traditions to be rich in elements of goodness, beauty, and truth. I believe that wherever

The Mary Prayer

Today being the Memorial of the Most Holy Name of Mary, it is appropriate to reflect on the Marian prayer that complements the Jesus Prayer, and is based around the name of Mary, though it contains both. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. The following thoughts are based on the section on the Rosary in my book All Things Made New.

Every time we repeat the words of this prayer we are trying to approach Jesus through Mary. The first words of the Hail Mary are those that were spoken by the Angel Gabriel when he appeared to her to announce the imminent conception of Christ. The words "the Lord is with thee" recall the Prologue to the Gospel of John: "the Word was with God, and the word was God." In the second sentence of this Trinitarian prayer the name of Jesus is invoked directly, so that the Mary Prayer can be said to enfold the Jesus Prayer in something like the way the Christ Child is borne in the arms of his Mother in the most familiar icons of Madonna and Child. Thus you could say the icon is a visual translation of the Hail Mary. In the third sentence, Mary's motherhood is invoked, and along with it the entire Church whose soul is the Holy Spirit.

There comes a time in the life of many Christians when the Hail Mary, brief as it is, suddenly expands until it encompasses the whole of life. It becomes possible to meditate upon it constantly. Each phrase contains a mystery that we never grow tired of gazing at. 

Hail Mary – we address her from out of our darkness; or is it that we are called by the Angel’s words into her presence? 

Full of grace – Mary’s title: she is what all of us should be, a creature brimful of her Creator.

The Lord is with thee – He is always with her, and in this "with" are the secrets of what it is to be a person.

Blessed art thou among women – a blessedness that marks her out, yet brings all other women along with her. 

Blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus – the hub of the mysteries, the Creator encompassed by the creature, the tree bearing fruit that contains the seed of all things.

Holy Mary, Mother of God – God has become a single cell, growing to be a child, and wakes in her arms.

Pray for us sinners now – for we are sinners now, lost in the woods, and we need her to find us.

And at the hour of our death – since death approaches all of us, and we will struggle to be born from the womb of the world.

Illustration: "Salus Populi Romani" from the Basilica of St Mary Major. See here.

Fasting

Important notes and thoughts on fasting in connection with the Pope's call to pray and fast for Syria on Saturday 7 September here.

The Jesus Prayer

What we normally mean by “prayer” is talking to God (albeit silently) about things we need or things that worry us – or praising him and thanking him for this and that. Much of that kind of prayer involves thinking, imagining, conceptualizing. It is takes place in a mind full of echoes and mumblings of conversation, memories of things that have happened or fears of what may be about to, or simply random words rattling around in our head – traces of thoughts that have not quite died away. Prayer in that context often feels a bit like writing a message in a bottle, and consigning it to the sea addressed to the God we hope will find it. God’s actual presence is at best assumed, but it is hardly tangible.

The aim of the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, constantly repeated) is to lead our constantly changing thoughts and feelings into a single conduit. The clearing of the mind is the result of a long struggle that the Fathers describe in the Philokalia. It doesn’t come easily to anyone: we have to keep trying. “External things and the content of thought, with one word objects, stop the subject from returning to itself; they draw it to everything except itself. Only with great effort, by discipline, does the subject become capable of getting loose for a few moments in succession, from the slavery of contents, which hold it far from home and constrict it as much as they can” (Staniloae, Orthodox Spirituality, p. 286, my emphasis).

If we achieve it, this state of emptiness or purity reveals God to us, or makes the mind transparent to God, like a mirror that, once cleaned, reflects the light of the sun (ibid., p. 287). We stand astonished in front of an abyss, the infinite but personal presence of the supreme Subject that transcends us utterly and on which we depend, before which we can only submit and offer adoration in humility. The Fathers refer to this as a state of “prayer beyond prayer” (ibid., p. 296).

Then it is the Spirit who prays in us (Rom. 8:26-8). “When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15-16). Through our prayer in the Spirit – that is, through in a sense our becoming prayer, becoming a “word” carried by the Spirit – we enter into eternal life. Already in this life we enter into the “we” of God by becoming Church.

“Now the world is totally transfigured into God; its totality rests within the inner realm of God’s totality, its unity encounters the primordial unity. The radiance of God’s glory streams over it, as the splendour of the sun overpowers the light of the stars” (Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy, p. 353).