A GREAT SYMPHONY OF PRAYER IN JUBILEE OF THE CHURCH - 3. “WHOEVER LISTENS TO MY WORDS”

Prayer and life

The whole of Scripture is abundant in affirming that God is concrete and wants us to be concrete, that it is not just enough to know but also to live. Meanwhile Jesus, Himself, is the ‘Way, Truth and Life’: this already means that in the relationship with God, it is not enough just to have a method (way), nor just knowledge (truth), but we need to practice it (life)! And it is Jesus who told us that “he who lives the truth comes to light”, who rebuked the Pharisees for ‘only talking and not doing’, who urged us to ‘put the word into practice’. And then there are the resonances of St. Paul: “certainly man is justified by faith regardless of the works of the law” (Rom 3:28), but what then counts is ‘the faith that works through charity’ (Gal 5:6). Finally, there is the clarity of St. James: “just as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is also dead” (Jas 2:17). Therefore, “he who fixes his eyes on the perfect law, the law of freedom, and remains faithful to it, not as a forgetful hearer but as one who puts it into practice, he will find his happiness in practising it” (Jas 1:25).

The clearest parable on the necessity of putting the word into practice is in the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the house on the rock. The idea is that we only truly know what we experience, especially with regard to God, who is a mystery of love, and who we can therefore only know if he is shared with us, not only if he is enunciated: God is neither an object nor a subject of the world, but the foundation, the heart and the fulfilment of the world! One cannot know God from the outside, but only within a loving relationship with Him. The idea that follows from this is that listening and putting the Word into practice makes the difference between a wise man and a foolish man!

To go deeper, unparalleled is Chapter 5 of the Epistle to the Galatians, where St. Paul presents the Christian life as life in the Spirit, as the battle between flesh and spirit, as the maturing of the fruits of the Spirit. The suggestions are very concrete and very rich.

1. “Christ has set us free that we might remain free”. In Christ, whoever believes the Word knows the truth, the truth makes one free, and freedom makes one able to love. And all this is the work of the Spirit, who pours out and infuses hearts with the features of Jesus.

2. Freedom must not become an excuse for living according to the flesh. Of course, the Spirit is freedom, provided one understands well what true freedom is. And this is where the logic of the flesh and the logic of the spirit, the carnal man and the spiritual Christian man clash. Now, there are two traps of the flesh, and they are opposite. Let us put it in simple terms: he who yields to the logic of pleasure or the logic of duty, remains trapped in the flesh, does not access the life of the Spirit.

The first snare of the flesh is this: under the pretext of freedom, instead of following the inspirations of the spirit, instead of putting oneself in love at the service of the other and thus seeing the fruits of the spirit manifest themselves, one indulges in the evil passions. It is a classic teaching that libertinism is not freedom, but it is unnecessary to repeat it in the age of ‘free love’. It is not difficult to see that behind arbitrary freedom are bad inclinations and often worse bondage. Here, St. Paul teaches that we must beware of two things: The first is that our efforts alone will not suffice, and only the grace of Christ can achieve victory: his main battle must consist in prayer, patience and hope. The second is that a passion can only be cured by another passion, a deviant love only by a greater love, a negative behaviour by a positive behaviour.

Like libertinism, law is also a trap for freedom. It is a different manifestation of the flesh, which takes the form not of moral disorder (indeed it can take on the guise of the strictest morality!), but in which the regime of grace is replaced by that of law. Let us be clear: in itself the law is good. It prescribes good things and helps to discern good from evil. But there is a trap: by making the practice of the law the condition of salvation, one puts oneself into a logic whereby salvation comes not from the free love of God manifested in Christ, but from the works that man does. This logic of the law, which leads to pride and despair, can take on many variants: It can be the rigid piety of those who do everything out of duty, as if one had to pay a debt to God, whereas Christ fulfilled all human's debts to God on the cross and calls us to give him everything in love and gratitude, and not on the strength of some debt. It can be the fear of those who always feel guilty and have the feeling that they never do enough for God. It can manifest itself in the business mentality of those who calculate their merits, measure their progress, and spend their time expecting God to reward them for their efforts.

3. But if you allow yourselves to be led by the Spirit, you are no longer under the law. It is the passage from calculation to gratuitousness. Here the teaching of Jesus is fundamental: “Freely you have received, freely give”. Learning to love then means learning to give freely and to receive freely. But this simple thing is terribly difficult for us, since sin has made us so complicated. It does not come naturally to us to give freely; we have a strong inclination to give in order to receive in turn. The gift of ourselves is always more or less motivated by an expectation of gratification. It is no less difficult to receive gratuitously.

We suffer from a lack of gratuitousness whenever the good we have done becomes a pretext for claiming a right, for demanding recognition or gratification from another. But also, more subtly, whenever, because of this or that limitation of ours, of this or that personal failure, we are afraid of not receiving love: as if love had to be paid for or deserved.

We could say that the irruption of the divine revelation of the Gospel into the world is like a ferment of evolution that proposes to change our psychism towards a logic of gratuitousness. And we cannot enter into this new way of being except by detaching ourselves amid tears and weeping. But once we pass through the ‘narrow door’ of conversion, the universe we enter is splendid!

Basically, our spiritual maturation consists in moving from pride to humility. One of man's deepest needs is the need for identity: man needs to know who he is. On the most superficial level, the need for identity often seeks satisfaction in having, in the possession of material goods, in a certain lifestyle, identifying with wealth, physical appearance, objects. There is a confusion between being and having. On a slightly higher level, the need to be will try to satisfy itself in the attainment and exercise of some talent (sporting, artistic, intellectual). This is already better, but even in this case one must realise that there is a great risk of confusing being and doing. On a third level, the same problem can be found in the field of spiritual life. A good spiritual profile needs to identify with having and doing. But we are still in a risky setting: if one does not go further, one tries to realise oneself by exploiting the virtues, the spiritual qualities, and identifies with them. It is dangerous to identify ourselves with the spiritual good that we are capable of doing. We must say this emphatically: man is more than the good he is capable of doing. Our Father in heaven does not love us for the good we do; He loves us gratuitously, for ourselves, because he has forever adopted us as his children. This is not to say that it is indifferent whether we behave well or badly, but we have no right to identify ourselves with the bad or the good we do.

4. If you allow yourselves to be led by the Spirit, the Word and the Spirit have to do a difficult work of spiritual purification. The trials that one must undergo in the Christian life have no other meaning than that of a work of dismantling what is artificial in our personality so that our authentic being, that is, what we are for God, may emerge. Spiritual nights, we might say, are as a rule sometimes brutal impoverishments, which in the most radical manner sweep away from the believer any possibility of basing on oneself, on his human or spiritual gifts, and that on his talents, abilities and even his virtues. But they are beneficial, because they induce him to seek his identity where it authentically is. It can be a painful experience, as when a person who loves the Lord goes through a phase in which he no longer perceives in himself even an iota of fervour, but rather a deep disgust for spiritual things. But here is the benefit of this trial: to make it impossible for man to focus on the good of which he is directly capable, so that the sole foundation of his life remains Divine Mercy. It is a true inner revolution: to make me not strong in the love I have for God, but exclusively in the love God has for me.

We note that what God works in the souls of some by plunging them into the trial of spiritual lukewarmness, He actually wants to do in everyone, in a more normal and progressive way, so to speak, through the sufferings of life: failures, powerlessness, falls of all kinds, illnesses, depressions, psychological and affective fragility. In the end, one becomes free to love when he has nothing left to lose. The free man, the spiritually mature Christian, is the one who has experienced his radical nothingness, his absolute misery, the one who has been as if ‘zeroed out’, but at the bottom of that nothingness has ended up discovering an ineffable tenderness, the absolutely unconditional love of God. No longer does he allow himself to be distressed because of his weaknesses, nor does he become irritated with others because they do not always correspond to his expectations. The support he seeks in God alone shelters him from all disappointment and gives him a great inner freedom, which he places all at the service of God and his brothers and sisters, with the joy of responding to love with love.

Roberto Carelli, sdb