ADVENT: Prayer is the answer

 

ADVENT PRAYER

 Richard G. Malloy, S.J., Ph.D.

“Spiritually we seem to be in an enormous vacuum.  Humanly speaking there is the same burning question - what is the point of it all?  And in the end, even that question sticks in one’s throat.  Scarcely anyone can see or even guess at, the connection between the corpse-strewn battlefields, the heaps of rubble we live in and the collapse of the spiritual cosmos of our views and principles, the tattered residue of our moral and religious convictions as revealed by our behavior.  And even if the connection were fully understood it would be only a matter for academic interest, data to be noted and listed.  No one would be shocked or deduce from the facts a need for reformation.” - from The Prison Meditations of Alfred Delp, S.J.  Fr. Delp was executed by the Nazis Feb. 2, 1945.

 Some think our world has become insane and inhumane: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, an evermore unjust distribution of the world’s goods, systemic racism and sexism, global warming, on and on.  We feel the tug of the abyss in our hearts, much like Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J., who was executed by the Nazis in the Spring of 1945, and who describes well both his and our times.  Advent is a time to slow down and quiet down and listen for the small whisperings of God’s love and presence amidst the pains and confusions of life.

Sometime during Advent, see if you can find Paradise Road.  This movie about a group of women held in concentration camps by the Japanese during WWII is an extraordinary story of human courage, care and compassion.  It shows how even the simplest practices of beauty and art (in Paradise Road the formation of a human voice orchestra) can counter and transform even the most horrific situations, and counter the most bestial acts humans can perpetrate against one another.  Like those abused and mistreated women, we also are called to be human and loving in a too often brutalizing and bruised world.

If I told you that doing “X,” one simple practice, will guarantee that you do better in confronting the insanities of ours and every age, will help you feel less stressed out throughout December, and actually appreciate, even enjoy, life in our days, despite all the problems and pain, would you want to know what “X” is?  You already do.  It is prayer.

The answer is prayer, that simple yet difficult practice of paying attention to God.  Prayer is a way of allowing God to grace us with inner harmony and outer peace.  Prayer is a practice that helps us reach our heart’s deepest and truest desires: our heartfelt search for meaning, and our ultimate origin and destiny, i.e., God.  Prayer is that discipline of slowing down, breathing, getting quiet, feeling the rhythms of life, and touching (and being touched back by) our infinite source of joy and jubilation, respect and renewal, hope and healing: the Lord of love and life.  Prayer is looking at Jesus, contemplating what the Gospels tell us of him, and paying attention to what the Risen Christ present and active in our lives is doing here, now, today!  Prayer is sacraments and singing, loving and listening, inspiring and imagining.  Prayer is an evermore fascinating adventure, the most challenging task in life, and the most incredible experience available to us.

So why don’t we pray?  We live in a time that finds belief in God difficult.  We have seen the past century knee deep in blood and know the violence of our times.  Murder rates are down in Baltimore and other places, but still way too high. We have felt, deep down in our dark, quiet nights, the fear and fragility of being a mere human being.  We don’t pray because slowing down and listening brings us face to face with the difficulties and dangers of our human experience.

Advent is for people who have felt the need of a God who cares, a God who will come to us in our weakness and save us.  Advent is a time of waiting, a time to wait anxiously and see if the dark days stop getting shorter and once again increase in light.  Fr. Alfred Delp and The women in Paradise Road knew this waiting.  Advent is a time to know that God comes to us as we are, in all our confusion and chaos, tragedy and tension.  Truth be told, God comes to us in our stale, stinking, sinful condition.

“Unless a man has been shocked to his depths at himself and the things he is capable of, as well as the failings of humanity as a whole, he cannot understand the full import of Advent.” - Alfred Delp, S.J.

 Once we reach out in prayer for a way through the morass of the human condition, we meet a God who is here with us, Emmanuel.  This God comes to us.  This God saves us.  This God promises peace.  Can we believe it?  Will we believe it?

Thomas Merton, writing in an introduction to Fr. Delp's prison meditations, notes, "In effect, the temptation to negativism and irrationality, the urge to succumb to pure pragmatism and the massive use of power, is almost overwhelming in our day."

Our times can tempt us to prostitute ourselves to pure pragmatism and block out the deep and haunting questions of human existence.  But such blocking out also will dampen and extinguish the ability to feel exhilaration and joy.  Then we can sink into negativity and irrationality.  Still, the practice of prayer will keep us from being overwhelmed and open us to the grace of sanity.

Advent Prayer is waiting prayer.  If we wait attentively, we will feel less stress, less pain, less lack of purpose.  As we pray, we can begin to feel the quickening of hope in our and the whole world’s soul.  Sitting in a church chapel 15 to 30 minutes a day, reading the Bible each night before sleeping, going to daily Mass, praying a rosary daily, or reading a good spiritual book, will give us inner strength, and energize us for the tasks ahead.  Life will be seen more as promise and possibility deep within the paradoxes.  Once again God will be born: in our hearts, through our prayer.

Have a Blessed Advent Season.