by James Martin
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I was horrified. Surely Ron would accuse me of wasting time. I waited for the inevitable reproach. And I wondered if he would tell me that I was unfit to be a Jesuit.
Instead, Ron leaned back in his rocking chair and asked me to talk more about what I felt about having Jesus as a friend. After I did, he smiled and said, “I think you’re beginning to pray.”
It was a liberating moment, one in which I realized the possibility of a different kind of relationship with God. Ron wasn’t saying that this was the right way, or the wrong way, or the only way, to pray. Rather, he was saying that thinking about Jesus as a friend was a kind of prayer. That it was okay to have feelings about God in addition to thinking about God. And that using your imagination in prayer was also okay.
Ron’s words implied something else, too. Through these highly personal thoughts, feelings, and desires—being attracted to the idea of Jesus as a friend, thinking about what it was like for the apostles, wondering if Jesus could be my friend, hoping that I might someday experience this friendship—God was communicating with me. That was revelatory.
Strange as it sounded, God apparently wanted to be in a relationship with me.
For the beginner, that’s a key insight about prayer. God desires to communicate with us and can use all sorts of means to do so.
In Chapter Two we talked about how we become aware of the desire for God. During this retreat my desire manifested itself in the simple attraction to the idea of Jesus as friend. For others their first memorable experience of prayer may arrive as they contemplate a weird-looking insect making its way across a leaf or as they listen to a Mozart concerto. But this insight—that God wants to communicate with us—is central to the way of Ignatius.
WHAT IS PRAYER, ANYWAY?
A few weeks after my retreat at Campion Center in the summer of 1988, I entered the Jesuit novitiate. At the time, the novitiate for the New England region was housed in a grand old brick house next to an even grander brick church in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, then a neighborhood comprised primarily of poor Latino and African American families. In past decades the house had served as a convent for the sisters who taught at the elementary school next door. As a result, the common rooms were huge, the bedrooms tiny: a twin bed and a desk barely fit. “You have to go into the hall to change your mind,” one novice said, only half-jokingly.
The first month in the novitiate was glorious: I was overjoyed to be a Jesuit. And I relaxed instantly into the daily schedule, which included studying Jesuit history and spirituality and working outside the house (which for me, that fall, was in a hospital for the seriously ill).
It also meant lots of prayer.
The day began with morning prayer in common, at 7:00 a.m., every day except Saturdays (when we cleaned the house in the morning) and Sundays (when we were expected to attend Mass in a local parish).
Traditionally, one of the novices led the morning prayer, which took a variety of forms. One day it might be the standard prayer for Catholic priests and brothers (called the Daily Office and contained in a book called a breviary). It consists mainly of psalms and readings from the Old and New Testaments.
Another day, morning prayer might be a simpler version of the Daily Office, with a novice choosing a single psalm, leaving more time for silent meditation. The psalms were prayed antiphonally, with one side of the room speaking one stanza, and then the other side, and back and forth, much as they do in monasteries.
As much as I disliked getting up early, I loved that part of the day: praying with the rest of the community while the early-morning sunlight poured through the clear windows of our plain, airy chapel. (Or often didn’t pour in, since this was Boston, not Florida.) Morning prayer centered me for the remainder of the day.
At 5:15 p.m. we attended Mass, the central prayer of the church, which was celebrated by one of the priests in the novitiate. This was absolutely my favorite time of the day. Before entering the Jesuits, I had never been to a daily Mass and so didn’t know what to expect. What did people do during a weekday Mass, anyway? Was it the same as Sunday Mass? Did they sing? Was there a homily? Were the prayers the same?
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 Burg
hardt, because it is done in a quiet, unhurried way. “Loving” because it happens in a context of love. Prayer is a “look” because it has to do with being aware. “I do not analyze or argue it, define or describe it,” wrote Burghardt. “I am one with it.” Finally, prayer is “real” because our spiritual life is primarily about what happened in our daily life. His superb definition emphasized the groundedness of prayer.
But that still seemed to leave out God’s role. What was God doing while we were looking lovingly at the real? It seemed too static, as if we were just looking and not much more.
St. Teresa of Ávila said that prayer is conversation with God. That definition seemed to fill in some of the gaps, since it emphasized the relational aspect of things: prayer was a two-way street.
But St. Teresa’s definition raised almost as many questions as it answered. If it was a conversation, was I supposed to hear voices? How was I supposed to listen to God? How was I supposed to converse with God? That might work for a mystic like Teresa, but what about an average believer like me?
In essence, my question about prayer was the same as it is for many newcomers: what happens when you close your eyes? Thanks to some wise Jesuits, I would soon find out.
Chapter Six
Friendship with God
Father Barry’s Insight
WHEN MY CONFUSION PEAKED, David gave me a short book called God and You: Prayer as a Personal Relationship by William Barry, the popular spiritual writer and former provincial superior of the Jesuits in New England. The key insight of this marvelous book is that prayer is like a personal relationship with God, which can be fruitfully compared to a relationship with another person.
Obviously that’s an imperfect analogy. After all, none of our friends created the universe ex nihilo. And prayer is not simply the relationship itself, but also the way that the relationship is expressed. Perhaps you could say that prayer is the conversation that happens in a personal relationship with God.
But Father Barry’s general point was revelatory: the way you think about friendships can help you think about, and deepen, your relationship with God.
At first blush Barry’s insight sounds strange. But if we look at what makes a healthy friendship, we’ll see that some of the same traits help make for a good relationship with God. So I’ll use Barry’s work as a jumping-off point to talk about prayer. What makes for a good friendship makes for a good relationship with God, and that makes for good prayer. So what are we invited to do in our relationship with God?
SPENDING TIME
A friendship flourishes when you spend time with your friend. So also with your relationship with God. You wouldn’t say that you are someone’s friend if you never spend any time with her. Yet some people do that with God. Some believers say, “God is the most important thing in my life!” But when you ask how much time they spend with God in an intentional way, they will admit that it’s not much.
What kind of relationship do you have if you never carve out time for the other person? One that is superficial and unsatisfying for both parties. That’s why prayer, or intentional time with God, is important if you want a relationship, a friendship, with God.
That’s not to say that the only way to spend time with God is through private prayer. As you know by now, one hallmark of Jesuit spirituality is “finding God in all things.” You can find God through worship services, reading, work, family—everything, really.
But, as with any friendship, sometimes you need to spend time one on one with God. Just as sometimes you need to block out time to spend with a good friend, you need to do the same with God, and to let God do this with you—assuming you want to sustain and deepen your relationship. As the Book of Amos says, “Do two walk together unless they have made an appointment?” (3:3).
Seeing friends on the fly or at work or in groups is fine, but from time to time you need to give a friend undivided attention. Prayer is like that: being attentive to God. How much time are you willing to spend, one on one, with God?
LEARNING
One of the most enjoyable parts of a new friendship is finding out about a friend’s background—discovering his hobbies and interests, hearing funny stories about his childhood and getting to know his joys and hopes. When two people fall in love, there is an even more intense desire to know the other person, which is another way of being intimate.
The same holds true in your relationship with God. Particularly in the early stages, you may feel a powerful desire to learn as much about God as possible. You find yourself thinking about God and wondering: What is God like? And how can I learn about God?
One of the easiest ways to discover answers to these questions is to listen to other people talk about their own experiences of God.
A few years ago, when I edited the book How Can I Find God? I received a beautiful essay from Sister Helen Prejean, the author of Dead Man Walking. She wrote, “The most direct road that I have found to God is in the faces of poor and struggling people.” Sister Helen talked about how working with the poor, specifically men and women on death row, had led her to places “beyond the part of us that wants to be safe and secure and with the comfortable and the familiar.”
Later in her essay Sister Helen offered the analogy of a boat on a river. When you begin to seek God, your sails fill up with wind, and your boat is taken to places that you may not expect. But prayer is an essential part of that journey. Your boat, she says, needs not only sails but a rudder, too. Sister Helen’s answer reminded me how much there is to learn about God through other people’s experiences of God.
Each essay taught me something new about God—for instance, I had never thought of God as a rudder. Letting others tell us about their experiences of God is like having a friend introduce us to one of her friends. Or like discovering something new about an old friend.
Another way of learning about God is through Scripture. One of my favorite essays in that same book is by Daniel J. Harrington, S.J., who teaches New Testament at Boston College and was one of my favorite professors during theology studies. In his essay he told a moving story about coming to know God.
When Harrington was a little boy, he stuttered. At age ten, he read in a newspaper that Moses stuttered, too. He looked it up in the Book of Exodus, and, sure enough, Moses says to God, “I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” The boy read the rest of the story in Exodus (chap. 4), which tells how God promised to be with Moses and ultimately liberated the people of Israel.
“I read that story over and over,” wrote Harrington, “and it gradually worked upon me so that it has shaped my religious consciousness to this day. As a boy of ten or eleven years of age I found God in the Bible, and I have continued to do so ever since.”
But there was more to the story than that. As a Scripture scholar, Harrington now spends a great deal of time studying and teaching the Bible. As a priest, he preaches on the Bible. And sometimes, “in the midst of these wonderful activities . . . I occasionally stutter.”
Then he makes this connection:
And this brings me back to where my spiritual journey with the Bible began. Though I am slow of speech and tongue like Moses, I still hear the words of Exodus 4:11–12: “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.”
Scripture is an ancient path to knowledge of God. First, reading Scripture helps to inspire us, in the literal sense of that word—placing God’s spirit into us. Second, Scripture tells us about the history of God’s relationship with humanity, and therefore it tells us something about God. Third, it tells of the ways that people throughout that history—from the Old Testament prophets to the apostles to St. Paul—related to God. In Scripture you see God relating to you, to humanity and to individuals. In all these ways Scripture helps you to come to know God better.
Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.
—Karl Rahner, S.J. (1904–1984)<
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For Christians, knowing God also means knowing a person: if you want to know more about God, learn more about Jesus. One reason that God became human was to show us more clearly what God was like. Jesus literally embodied God, and so anything you can say about Jesus you can say about God.
Here’s another way of looking at that, through the lens of the parable, a story from everyday life that opens up your mind to new ways of thinking about God.
The parable form is one of the primary ways in which Jesus of Nazareth communicates his understanding of elusive but important concepts. In Luke’s Gospel, for example, Jesus tells the crowd that one should treat one’s neighbor as oneself. But when he is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus offers not a precise definition but instead spins out the story of the Good Samaritan, where the Samaritan man helps a neighbor in distress (Luke 10:29–37). When asked to explain what he means by the “Kingdom of God,” the central message of his preaching, Jesus offers short stories about mustard plants, wheat and weeds, and seeds falling on rocky ground (Mark 4).
Where a strictly worded definition closes down thought and can be shallow, a story opens the hearer’s mind and is endlessly deep. Stories carry meaning without having to be converted into a rigid statement. Parables also went against the normal expectations of the audience, as when the Samaritan, hailing from a hated ethnic group (at least for Jesus’ crowd), was ultimately revealed as the good guy who cares for the stranger.
In a sense, Jesus of Nazareth was a story told by God. As Jesus communicated spiritual truths through parables, you might posit the same about God the Father. In order to communicate an essential truth, God offered us a parable: Jesus.
Jesus is the parable of God. So for the Christian, if you want to learn about God, get to knowJesus.
You can also learn about God through the lives of holy men and women, and witness how God leads them to fulfill God’s dreams for the world.
