Prayer

by Hans Urs von Balthasar

the canon of the Mass the Church observes the Lord’s command to remember him at th...

“When the fullness of time was come, thou spoke to us in thy only-begotten Son, through whom thou created the ages; Since he is the splendour of thy glory and the image of thy substance, and bears up all things through the word of thy power, he thought it not robbery to be equal to thee, God and Father. But, eternal God though he is, he appeared on earth, associated with men, took flesh from a virgin, emptied himself . . . to pass judgment on sin in his flesh through being himself subject to the law, so that they who die in Adam might live again in this thy Christ.

To fill all things with, his being, he went down from the cross into the kingdom of death and tasted himself the pangs of death. On the third day he rose, and opened up in his flesh the way to resurrection from the dead.

To be our forerunner in all things, he returned up to heaven, and took his seat on the right ...

us that which we have now offered according to his commandment. For, when he decided to go to his voluntary, ever-memorable and vivifying death, on the night when he gave himself for the salvation of the world he took bread into his holy and immaculate hands, offered it to thee, God and Father, gave thanks, blessed, sanctified and broke it,...

there is in the Roman Mass a painful lack of this recalling of Pentecost and of the Spirit’s perfecting activity in Church, sacrament and contemplative anamnesis.

Only the Spirit can create the unity of hearts (of “spirit”) which obliterates the distinction between the Son’s self-offering and that of the Church. Now we can see, at a deep level, the really spiritual nature of Holy Mass, at work in the innermost Spirit-womb of the Church. It is a rational act of remembrance, springing from a human decision whose freedom is guaranteed by grace: in other words it is an act of contemplation. Thus prayer and sacrament form an indissoluble unity which is of the very nature of the Church.

Christians who are dissatisfied with the way Mass is presented in practice, because they do not seem to reap the benefits it claims to bestow, are all the more obliged to supply what is missing through private prayer, that is, by uniting themselves to the spirit of the Church’s

lit...

“Per evangelica dicta deleantur nostra

“Ask our Lord God for the grace to direct my thoughts, activities and deeds to the service and praise of His Divine Majesty”

The man who concentrates on himself in the attempt to know himself better and thus, perhaps, to undertake some moral improvement, will certainly never encounter God;

he will have to start again, from a totally different angle, if he wants to find God’s will. But if he earnestly seeks God’s will in his word, he

will—incidentally, as it were—realize himself and find himself...

since

Without contemplation it would scarcely be possible to unite the two, for the simple reason that, practically and psychologically, the effect of the Church’s liturgy fades as the day proceeds, and the world’s work is for the most part remote from it. Some link is necessary if they are to be drawn together in a lived, spiritual unity. In contemplation, however, liturgy becomes Spirit, and this Spirit can become incarnate in everyday life.

If a man opens himself to the light, the light pours into him; it reveals his darkness and changes it into brightness.

“When anything is exposed by the light it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is (itself) light” (Eph

5...

He must be confronted with the entire kingdom of God in all its concreteness if he is to find his rightful place within it. Thus he confesses his guilt before the whole company of heaven, “to Blessed Mary, ever Virgin, the Blessed Archangel Michael, Saint John the Baptist, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and all the Saints, and to you, Father”. The sinner’s glimpse of heaven, as he comes to acknowledge his most grievous fault, is an element of the Church’s liturgy, in the Mass as in penance.

he will know that, just as this Word nourishes him as the Bread of Heaven, so too, as the word of absolution, it purifies and absolves him. He needs this assurance because he can never measure up to the immense demands made of him. God will always have to supply the substance, the greater part; He will always have to support him in his inability, his failure, and overlook his penchant for slipping back; He will look at man’s feeble goodness in the light of the Son’s perfect goodness. This, then, is the state of the redeemed in this world. It is meant to spur him on to simple gratitude to his divine Savior, not to dialectical speculation. His life is a service, λειτουργἰα, of the gracious God, lived out in full personal responsibility, but also as part of the entire company of the saints, which gives his service value in God’s sight.

The servant is under the law, but the child of God is free to speak to his Father as his heart dictates. He can accept advice; he can rely on the experience of others whose prayer is more free. But in all this, he himself is free. God’s Spirit is in his

heart and prays within him, giving testimony of the love of the Father in the Son, who is the love of God which is poured out in him.

The word of God before which he kneels in adoration is God’s word to him; he has been summoned, called forward by this word; it belongs to him and he can rightly take hold of it with both hands and press it to himself, feeling it pulsate mysteriously with the very heartbeat of God. No externally imposed rule can restrict his communion with the Beloved. Often he will be confused, like someone who has unexpectedly come into a great fortune and does not know what to do with it, and so he looks for advice from various people. From those who (surely) have a better understanding than he. Like a bride prior to her wedding, listening to older women or to her own mother. Soon afterward, however, she is on her own all the same, and she will pay less attention to the good advice than to what her own heart tells her of the bridegroom’s love,

For example, without noticing it, he can be using love to seek his own ends, his own pleasure, making his partner into a mere means; he

can be seeking his own advantage by enriching and heightening his own self with his partner’s intellectual and material goods. Then, one day, it becomes clear that love is dead. Covertly, he has always been looking after himself. That is why the simple warning signs (so often ignored) are set up along the paths of love: love makes us free if it is selfless, and it is selfless if is ready to sacrifice pleasure, advantage and independence for the sake of the beloved. And since no earthly love is initially perfect, it must go through these purifications. Moments and times must come when love is tested through sacrifice, when it becomes clear whether the enthusiasm of the first encounter was love at all, when the naive first love—if it really was love—is refined and deepened in the fire of renunciation.

Everything that takes place in contemplation does so within the framework of God’s presence.

Love desires to have the beloved before its eyes. Thus the contemplative will employ the powers of his soul to summon up the image of the Beloved, the powers of his “inner senses” and his imagination to call forth the image of the incarnate Word. He will contemplate Jesus as he dwelt bodily on the earth, the things he said, the sound of his voice, the way he treated people, his appearance when at prayer, at the Last Supper, in his Passion. This picture is not meant to be a realistic photograph, but love’s picture, solely concerned with love, the divine love of the Father, which is here manifested in the Son and in the concreteness of his whole earthly life. This is the only reason why, in prayer, we seek out the Lord’s earthly form. We do not use it as a crutch for our weakness because we are not yet ready to soar into the realm of pure spirit: we do so in order to seek for the love of God, to see, hear and touch it in the humble form in which it offers itself to man. In prayer, our love seeks love, divine love, through the earthly image (with which it cannot dispense). So it is continually drawn on by the historical Jesus to the Christ who died, descended into hell, rose again and ascended into heaven, who has put his whole self eucharistically into the Church, and to whose return in glory we look forward. He alone is the whole, living Christ over whom death has no power; he is the “Christ of faith” who gives and reveals himself to the believer who loves and prays, enabli...

So the contemplative is advised not to be restlessly searching turning over new ideas and aspects, as if contemplation were a matter of achieving a specified quantity, or of reaching some kind of end result.

It is rather a matter of lovingly dwelling upon the depth-dimension of each aspect as it presents itself.

There is in love an eagerness which wants to get to know the beloved, to explore him, observe him from all sides. And that is one reason why the Word of God becomes flesh—to allow himself to be gazed upon and touched in this way, out of love for the Father.

What is possible is the fruit of Christian love, namely, a walking along the path taken by the disciples and the women, in simple and humble obedience; the kind of imitation possible is that whereby the Holy Spirit implants the mind of the Son of God into our hearts so that we may fashion our lives accordingly.

it must surely be one of the most amazing things in the gospel that, even before

he himself has suffered, he speaks so freely of the cross which everyone who desires to fo...

But the grace of the Lord permits us to put our whole lives under the law of his life, which means that we can include our own lives in

the loving contemplation of his, to be transformed in that light right down to the level of everyday decisions.

Prayer must never be seen as carrying out a program, fulfilling a quota.

Something similar applies to the other structure for the seeing-hearing-doing sequence expresses the increasing animation of divine revelation as it confronts me: seeing corresponds to an “image”, an object (ob-jectum) at some distance from the eye, whereas in “hearing” a sound comes from the image and reaches me; I do not turn to it and survey it: it strikes me and has me in its power, since I cannot ward it off. Finally, this sound is a deed, an action of God’s part, seizing and transforming me by its challenge and grace. So these structures are far less external than it might seem. All the same, to the extent that they aim to provide a total framework for the time

of contemplation (for example, spending the first quarter of an hour on “seeing”, the second on “hearing” and the last on a consideration of “doing”), they must be regarded as utterly provisional, to be superseded by freedom.

The normal, usual thing, especially in the case of beginners, will be to start with a method that seems suitable and then let go and venture forth into personal encounter and discovery. Then, just when this autonomous impulse begins to slow down and, wearied, one starts to fall, the framework is still there to hold on to. What was my starting point? What was the context? But much

contemplation never returns to its starting point, like a rocket which penetrates beyond the earth’s gravity and soars off into space.

after the few months or years of initial enthusiasm, contemplation enters a stage of testing. Have we really based our lives on the word of God, drawing sustenance from it as earthly men are sustained by earthly food? Do we really do it as a reverent service offered to divine love, and not out of a spiritual egoism which is trying to enrich itself or amass spiritual pleasures?

Have we

really entered into a new and eternal covenan...

quick as we are to speak of the damage inflicted by divorce in secular life, do we act in the spiritual life as if the covenant with God is only a temporary arrangement, lasting as long as we find it agreeable? Are we still immature children who have never been faced with a crucial and finally binding life-choice? Shall we never understand that it is this very ultimate, freely given faithfulness which cannot be shaken by the hardness of everyday life, nor by aridity, nor even, perhaps, by our being far from God, that constitutes the essence of Christianity?

Wherever love, unveiled, lives out its mysterious exchange, wherever its richness is manifested in the lovers’ becoming “poor”, each to the other, there is always a “watchman”, a guardian’s lodge, a firm, solid framework. In God this third party is the Holy Spirit who witnesses and guarantees the love of Father and Son.

Contemplative prayer is work. It is performed out of love for the Beloved, who is “at work, in every created reality” for my sake (Exercises no. 236), who has spared himself no ill-treatment, even unto the cross, to bring his love to me.

Contemplation is a conversation in which I am at pains not to be boring, not to say and think the same thing every day; I use my imagination and creativity to offer God at least something of myself, some gesture of love which he can recognize, some attempt at an answer to the never-failing, inventive love of the Holy Spirit,

The Holy Spirit always proceeds quietly and softly, manifesting himself, not to the one who makes a dramatic show of disputing with God, but to him who is ready to follow the slightest and most discreet indication of where love is to be practiced; our hearts must cultivate this same approach if they are to become sensitive to the hidden radiance of the Spirit.

The Church lives in the “last time”; therefore, from the point of view of salvation history, nothing “new” can happen. Everything has been “accomplished”, brought to completion, and the Victor waits “until his enemies should be made a stool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified”