Let me continue my blueprint for prayer. I have already used each letter of the word OUR to help us with Morning Prayer. I will now use each letter of the word FATHER to help us with evening prayer.
An Act of Faith
The letter ‘F’ can remind us to start by making an act of Faith. I do not mean by reciting some traditional formula of faith, or even professing belief in every article of the creed or in every dogma that the Church teaches. There is a time and place for that, but this is the time for something else. Our faith is not firstly a belief in a body of truths, but in a body full of love that was filled to overflowing on the first Easter day.
Ever since the first Pentecost day, God’s love has been pouring out of Jesus and into all who freely choose to receive it, to draw them into the fullness of life that is fully embodied in his Risen Body. It is here alone ‘since it is in him that we live, and move, and exist’ (Acts 17:28), that we experience something of the ecstatic bliss that Jesus experiences now and to all eternity. This is another reason why the fish became a symbol of a Christian in the early Church. They came to see and understand that the love of God was for them what the sea is for the fish, the living environment outside of which they could not exist. St Augustine takes this analogy one step further, substituting a living sponge for the fish to show that we are not only surrounded at all times by the love of God, but are penetrated through and through by his all-pervading presence.
Once all the sublime truths of Christ’s continual and abiding presence within us are realised, then there seems to be only one thing that a person can do and that is to make an act of total abandonment of themselves to God. To a nominal Catholic this might seem a bit extreme, but to a devoted Catholic it seems the very least that we can do.
Abandonment to God.
The trouble is we have grown up in a world where nominal or part-time Christians abound, and the truth is, we are probably numbered amongst them. The early Christians had no problem abandoning themselves to God totally, as the man to whom they committed themselves did throughout his life on earth. They knew what was being asked of them from the beginning. While they were under instruction several times a week, and praying five times a day, they were seeing the Christians who they were being prepared to join, giving their lives for their belief in Jesus.
Indeed, you would not become a Christian unless you had counted the cost, and that cost might mean losing all your property, all your wealth and your health too, in terrible prison conditions. Here torture was to be expected, followed by the most hideous forms of death imaginable at the end of it. In short, no one became a Christian without deciding to abandon their life to God totally, no matter what the cost.
Thanksgiving
The next letter the letter ‘T’ in the memory jog is a reminder to make an act of thanksgiving to thank God for all that has been given to us and what is continuing to be given to us. However, if we only thank God for what He has done for us, or for what we have managed to get out of Him, then we have not thanked him as we should. He should be thanked for being God, for being goodness, justice, truth and beauty, for displaying His own inner glory in the glory of creation that surrounds us. And for the masterpiece of creation, our Risen Lord, in and through whom we are continually being drawn up to share in his own inner life and love, beginning even in this life and then in his everlasting glory in the next.
Take your favourite prayer or hymn of thanksgiving or praise, like the Gloria from the liturgy for instance. Recite it slowly and prayerfully and you will find you are taken out of yourself, out of your world and into God’s world where you praise him, thank him and give him glory with all those who have learned to thank God just for being God.
Thanking God for being God leads into the heights of prayer where thanksgiving leads to praise, and praise to glorifying God. Then glorifying God leads to adoration, when we just want to gaze upon him with a profound reverence and awe that takes us out of ourselves if only for a time into brief moments of bliss.
Without us realising fully what has been happening, our thanksgiving, praising, glorifying and adoring has paved the way, for a sublime spiritual highway for our love to enter into God and His love to enter into us, in a way and on a level that has not happened in quite the same way before.
Holy Communion
This leads us on to the next letter in the blueprint which is the letter -‘H’ for Holy Communion. Perhaps the most holy and all absorbing and spiritually fulfilling moment in the Mass for us, is that sacred moment after we have received Christ into us. It is then that we silently reflect on what, ‘He who is mighty has done for us’.
This moment can be replicated each day at the moment in our daily prayer when we pause, after giving our heartfelt thanks to God, to relish what he continually gives us, in what has come to be called a spiritual communion. Now is the time to ruminate on and relish the profound mysteries that are at work deep down within us, and to digest and assimilate their sublime meaning and importance for us now and for our future.
It is time too, to allow these truths to percolate through, to penetrate our hearts and minds, and then gaze for as long as possible at the indescribable mysteries that Jesus came to share with us. This profound prayer came to be called contemplation and it gradually becomes the highest and most powerful form of prayer possible, because it takes place not just in Christ, in his mystical body, but because it is united with Christ’s own mystical contemplation of his Father. Christ’s love rose up to his Father at every moment of his life on earth, while simultaneously enabling his Father’s love to descend onto and into him. It was his Father’s love then, that inspired and animated all that he said and did.
It is now, as we try to follow his example. As we are already in his mystical body, we are able to enter into his mystical loving of his Father now, that continued with even greater depth and intensity after his Glorification. In short, our contemplation enables us to enter into his mystical contemplation of his Father, enabling us to receive the fruits of this contemplation, not just for ourselves , but for the world, over which Christ now wants to reign over, through us.
In order to develop the prayer that can continually help us to raise our hearts and minds to God as we practise the asceticism of the heart, please follow the Podcast on prayer on this web-site entitled The Hermit – Wisdom from the Western Isles
Thank you David. Your writing was very helpful. I have thought I am a bit mad reciting in my mind the Holy Communion or singing a hymns before I sleep.
You have shown me that I am on the right track – thank you for helping me to understand God, Jesus, the holy Spirit and myself. Anneli