The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [51]
As it turned out, daily Mass was nearly the same as Sunday Mass, but more austere: the same prayers, always a homily, not as much singing. Instead of sitting in pews, we sat on simple wooden chairs, and during the Liturgy of the Eucharist (the time when the priest consecrates the bread and the wine) we stood silently around the plain wooden altar.
My favorite part of Mass was the readings from the Old and New Testaments. Since I had had little formal religious education, I was familiar with only a few of these stories. While most of the other novices knew by heart the story of, say, Joseph in Egypt, I had no idea what was going to happen. For me, it was like following an exciting novel or a movie.
And during the feast days of the Jesuit saints, I was introduced to the lives of the men whom we were encouraged to emulate. How wonderful to hear these stories during the Mass, during a time of prayer with my new brothers.
Catholics mark the feast day of a saint—the day of his or her death, or entry into heaven—with special readings and prayers. For the well-known saints, like Peter or Paul, the entire church marks the day. A few Jesuits, like Ignatius and Francis Xavier, are included in this elite group.
But often the feast days of Jesuit saints are celebrated only in Jesuit communities. On these days the homilist would tell stories of priests and brothers who had slogged through Amazon jungles to work with indigenous peoples, or risked martyrdom in England for ministering to Catholics, or paddled with Native Americans through the rivers of New France to spread the Gospel. Listening to those stories was itself like prayer.
Besides morning prayer and the Mass, we were to give one hour each day to contemplative prayer. “At least one hour,” said Gerry, our novice director. We were asked to develop a personal relationship with God. But we were free to pray any way we liked. Without fail, though, at the end of the day we were to pray the examen.
Even with all this time for contemplative prayer, for Mass and for the examen, and even with all the encouragement from the novitiate staff, I began to feel frustrated about my spiritual “progress.” Perhaps because of the focus on prayer, I was anxious about any possible “failures” in my spiritual life.
And despite my positive experiences during the eight-day retreat at Campion Center, I began to worry in the novitiate: How would I know if I was praying well? Or praying at all? How would I know if it wasn’t all in my head? How did I know if God was communicating to me in prayer? What was the best way to pray? How did one go about praying?
All these confusing questions seemed to coalesce into one question about prayer: What is it?
There are many definitions of prayer. A traditional one, from St. John Damascene in the seventh century, is that prayer is a “raising of one’s mind and heart to God.” He also says prayer is the “requesting of good things from God.” (That’s petitionary prayer.) St. John’s “raising of the mind and heart” reminds us that prayer is not simply an intellectual exercise, but an emotional one, too.
But that seemed too one-sided. It described what I was trying to do, but it left out God. What was God doing? Waiting for me to lift my mind and heart to him? It seemed too passive an image of God. This is what Mark Thibodeaux, S.J., characterizes in his book Armchair Mystic, as the first stage of prayer: “Talking at God.” (His others are talking to God, listening to God, and being with God.)
Karl Rahner, the twentieth-century Jesuit theologian, wrote that prayer is “God’s self-communication, given in grace and accepted in freedom.” While I liked that idea, it still felt one-sided, but on the other side—as if all we did was sit around and wait for God. It left out our part of the relationship.
David’s favorite definition, which I’ve already alluded to, was Walter Burghardt’s: prayer is “a long, loving look at the real.”
Prayer is “long,” said