March 26, 2007 VOL. 45, NO. 6Oakland, CA

COMMENTARY

• Learning to pray with St. Teresa of Avila as our guide

• Two grumpy old men offer insights into spiritual maturity

Learning to pray with St. Teresa of Avila as our guide

By Julie McCarty

At certain points in our lives, God leads us into new ways of praying. Perhaps we feel a hunger to spend more time meditating on the mysteries of the rosary than praying the Hail Marys. We may discover the only prayer we know is “Give me!” and decide to dig deeper into reading the Gospels. Our time of Eucharistic Adoration, formerly filled with litanies, becomes mostly a time of loving God in silence.

The Spanish mystic St. Teresa of Avila often regretted not making more of a commitment to prayer earlier in her life. Once she gave her entire self to finding God in prayer, however, Teresa grew by leaps and bounds. As a 16th-century woman, she could not enter a college school of theology, but she read everything she could get her hands on about prayer.

Teresa consulted many spiritual directors and “learned men” (as she called them). Most of all, she prayed. She put her mind and heart into the search to be completely one with “Her Majesty” (one of her names for God).

Teresa’s insights about the spiritual life have helped Christians for centuries, and showed such wisdom that in 1970 she was the first woman to be given the title “Doctor of the Church.”

Teresa often found it difficult to find the right words to explain what she knew to be true about prayer. Because of this, she often used simple comparisons. Teresa sometimes commented that her own analogies made her smile because of their inability to fully communicate the ideas—but she hoped her readers would understand.

One of her famous analogies is found in her spiritual autobiography, in which she compares four ways of watering a garden to four phases of one’s prayer life. Teresa compares the soul of a person who is ready to get serious about praying to a garden bed that has been stripped of its weeds by God, who then plants good seeds (of virtue). The soul is ready to begin prayer “for real.”

The garden (the soul) must be watered with prayer. For beginners, the effort demanded is like that of one who lowers a bucket into a deep well, draws it out with a rope, and carries it to pour on the garden. Faithful prayer takes effort, determination, and perseverance.

In time, prayer eventually becomes a little bit easier. It is like using a “water wheel” tool of Teresa’s time to crank the water by hand, drawing it from an aqueduct system. The gardener, that is, the person who prays, gradually finds prayer a more peaceful activity. Teresa speaks here of the “prayer of quiet.”

A third type of prayer is like a garden that is watered by an irrigation system or a stream channeled off a river. One opens a gate, and the water floods the garden of the soul with very little effort. Because of the flooding, the water soaks deeper and remains longer. The flowers, Teresa says, are blossoming.

Finally, Teresa speaks of a fourth type of “water,” the rain that falls from heaven upon the garden of the soul. The person may experience a deep union with God at special times of the Lord’s choosing. One can prepare the garden for this great gift, but one does not make it rain. Only God can do that.

Lent is the perfect time to discover new ways to feed and water the garden of our souls. We can learn more about prayer by reading classics such as St. Teresa’s “The Interior Castle,” St. Francis de Sales’ “Introduction to the Devout Life”, or Brother Lawrence’s “The Practice of the Presence of God.”

A practical, user-friendly new book called “50 Ways to Pray” (Abingdon Press, 2006) is a great way to learn about a wide range of ways to pray. The author, Teresa A. Blythe, gives straightforward explanations of traditional Christian prayer forms such as lectio divina (sacred reading), the Jesus Prayer, praying with icons, Ignatian prayer methods, and others. Newer prayer methods are also offered, such as doing lectio with a musical piece or reflecting on images of God found in the media.

For a truly blessed Lent this year, allow your heart to open to God in prayer. Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal ways of praying that draw you closer to the Divine One who loves you immensely, thereby also leading you into deeper love of others and all of God’s creation. For love—genuine Christ-like love—is the real goal of prayer.

(Julie McCarty, M.A.T., is a freelance writer and author of “The Pearl of Great Price: Gospel Wisdom for Christian Marriage,” Liturgical Press, forthcoming July, 2007.)

Two grumpy old men offer insights into spiritual maturity

By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

Two of the better books I’ve read lately come from secular authors, James Hillman and Kurt Vonnegut. What these writers have in common, beyond common sense and great insight, is the fact that they’re both senior citizens, elders, at that age where one is free enough to say what is needed without having to apologize.

Vonnegut’s book, “A Man Without a Country,” is a series of essays all loosely held together under the umbrella of the thoughts and feelings of an outsider, an exile, a man who can’t find a home even when he is supposedly at home.

Here are a couple of examples:

On creativity, he writes: “The arts are not a way to make living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

“Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Reading this, one is reminded of a challenge that the poet William Stafford once threw out to an audience. He told them: “Get up each morning and write a poem before you do anything else!”

“How can you do that?” someone asked. “You don’t always feel inspired!”

“Lower your standards!” said Stafford.

Creating anything, even if it isn’t up to professional standards or up to our own fantasies, makes the soul grow.

Vonnegut also offers some insights on marriage.

What women and men are really looking for, he contends, is someone to talk to. But two people alone in a room or in a marriage don’t always add up to enough people, particularly if one is a woman and one is a man. More people need to be around, lots more.

Big families, he says, have this figured out, and that is why marriage works best in extended families where there are more people to talk to. What really happens when a man and a woman are struggling in a marriage is that no matter what their actual words, they are really saying to each other, “You are not enough people!” That’s the real inadequacy in most marriages

James Hillman’s book, “The Force of Character,” is on aging.

Hillman begins with a question: “Why? Why is it ordained, by nature and God, that just when we reach the age when our mental capacities are at their greatest that our bodies begin to fall apart and no amount of doctoring can keep us glued together?”

His answer: “The best wines need to be aged in cracked old barrels. So too the soul. It needs to be aged in a cracked old barrel. The physical infirmities and humiliations of old age are what mellow the soul.”

He then writes a series of chapters, each of which reflects on one of the physical challenges of aging, showing how that peculiar challenge is meant to shape and mellow the soul in a needed way.

For example, he asks why nature has arranged it so that, at a certain age, you have to get up at night to go to the toilet? Why this indignity and cruelty?

Monks know the answer. They ring a bell at night and get up to pray a particular set of prayers called vigils. Vigils are properly done in darkness. Their mood and purpose are only served at night.

Nature too knows this and it turns us all into monks before we die. It makes us get up to attend to a humbling bodily imperative, but, once up, we don’t so quickly get back to sleep because Nyx, the goddess of night, pays us a visit and brings along her children -- phantoms of fate, death, guilt, despair, blame, revenge, lust -- and they keep us awake and force us to deal with them because we won’t deal with them during daylight.

Awakening in the dark has always been seen spiritually as helping open one’s eyes to the other world and as a way of building character beyond selfishness.

All religious traditions have the idea that night is the time we can gain the most insight from the other world.

Monks have secrets worth knowing. They pre-empt nature and get up voluntarily at night to deal with these things. We don’t and so Nyx and her children, perhaps angry at us for avoiding them during the day, make their unwelcome appearance and force us to deal with them.

When we can’t sleep at night, we are forced to recognize that our lives in the light have not been shadow-free.

Another nugget: Healthy sexuality, Hillman says, “lies less in controlling lustful fantasies than in understanding their transpersonal nature as a cosmic dynamic.”

James Hillman and Kurt Vonnegut, a couple of grumpy, brilliant old men who do what
elders are supposed to do, dispense wisdom to the young!

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)

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