Courage to Pray

Prayer is the search for God, encounter with God, and going beyond this encounter in communion. Thus it is an activity, a state and also a situation; a situation both with respect to God and to the created world. It arises from the awareness that the world in which we live is not simply two dimensional, imprisoned in the categories of time and space, a flat world in which we meet only the surface of things, an opaque surface covering emptiness. Prayer is born of the discovery that the world has depths; that we are not only surrounded by visible things but that we are also immersed in and penetrated by invisible things.

And this invisible world is both the presence of God, the supreme, sublime reality, and our own deepest truth. Visible and invisible are not in opposition neither can they be juxtaposed like in an addition sum. They are present simultaneously, as fire is present in red hot iron. They complete each other in a mysterious way which the English writer Charles Williams describes as 'co-inherence': the presence of eternity in time and the future in the present, and also the presence of each temporal moment in eternity, past present and future all-at-once eschatologically, the one in the other as the tree is in the seed.

Living only in the visible world is living on the surface; it ignores or sets aside not only the existence of God but the depths of created being. It is condemning ourselves to perceiving only the world's surface. But if we look deeper we discover at the heart of things a point of balance which is their finality. There is no inwardness to geometric volume. Its finiteness is complete. The world of such forms is capable of being extended but cannot be deepened. But the heart of man is deep. When we have reached the fountainhead of life in him we discover that this itself springs from beyond. The heart of man is open to the invisible. Not the invisible of depth psychology but the invisible infinite, God's creative word, God himself. Returning to ourselves is thus not a synonym for introversion but for emerging beyond the limits of our limited selves.

Saint John Chrysostom said 'When you discover the door of your heart you discover the gate of heaven.' This discovery of our own depths goes together with the recognition of the depths in others. Each has his own immensity. I use the word 'immensity' on purpose. It means that the depth cannot be measured, not because it is too great for our measurements to reach it, but because its quality is not subject to measurement at all. The immensity of our vocation is to share the divine nature, and in discovering our own depths we discover God, whom we could call our invisible neighbour, the Spirit, Christ, the Father. We also discover God's immensity and eternity in the world about us. And this is the beginning of prayer, the recognition of a three-dimensional world of time, space and a stable but ever changing depth.

A TRIPLE RELATIONSHIP
Prayer is the relationship between man the visible and the invisible x. This is why I said that prayer is a search, an exploration of this invisible world of our own depths which God alone knows and he alone can reveal to us. And it is by prayer, gropingly at first, in the dawn of a new vision, that we seek and find God and ourselves in a co-relative way. Then later, when a clearer light has shown us what we can see of the invisible and the visible transfigured in the light of its own immensity and the eternity in God, prayer becomes a state. It also constantly remains a situation, as I said at the beginning.

While we are seeking, part blind with partly restored sight, our first steps in prayer take the form of astonishment, reverent fear and a sense of sadness. We are astonished at the discovery of ourselves which is also the beginnings of knowledge of God; we are astonished to see the world open out towards God's infinity. We are afraid, glad and terrified when we come into the presence of God's holiness and beauty. We are also sad, both for ourselves and the world. It is sad to be blind, it is sad to be unable to live the fulness of our vocation, to be trapped again and again in our own limitations. It is sad to see our world without God, vacillating between life and death and unable to choose life once and for all or to escape once and for all from death. Wonder and sadness are thus the two sources of our prayer. Both arise from our encounter with the world's depths, which have begun to be revealed to us in their totality. Without this encounter, our world and the forces at work in it are incomprehensible and often monstrous; we are bewildered and afraid.

ENCOUNTER
Thus encounter is central to prayer. It is the basic category of revelation, because revelation itself is an encounter with God who gives us a new vision of the world. Everything is encounter, in scripture as in life. It is both personal and universal, unique and exemplary. It always has two poles: encounter with God and in him with creation, an encounter with man in his depths rooted in God's creative will, straining towards fulfilment when God will be all in all. This encounter is personal because each of us must experience it for himself, we cannot have it second-hand. It is our own, but it also has a universal significance because it goes beyond our superficial and limited ego. This encounter is unique because for God as for one another when we truly see, each of us is irreplaceable and unique. Each creature knows God in his own way. Each one of us knows God in our own way which no one else will ever know unless we tell them. And at the same time because human nature is universal, each encounter is exemplary. It is a revelation to all of what is known personally by each.

AS THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
We should try and analyse this encounter carefully, because if we do not know the laws it follows we may let it slip away. It is always a mutual encounter. It is always a discovery not only of the other but of ourselves. It is always a relationship. Perhaps the best image for it is a stained glass window. The light shining through it shows up its design, its colours, its beauty and its meaning. But at the same time the window itself by its design, colours, beauty and meaning reveals for us the invisible light beyond it. Thus the window and the light are discovered in relationship to one another. Discovering God in his serene eternity and in the man of sorrows who was the incarnate word, is also a discovery of the greatness of man. When we discover the depths in man, we go beyond the front he presents to us and discover his destiny which is not individual but personal. This destiny makes him more than an example of humankind; it makes him the member of a mysterious body, the whole of mankind, which is where God's presence is.

From: Courage To Pray by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom and Georges LeFebvre OSB, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY 2002