When the Well Runs Dry: Prayer Beyond the Beginnings

by Thomas H. Green

What emerges from the authors cited is that his way is essentially the same-because it is always the same Lord of love working-in all the diverse temperaments and cultures on the face of the earth. Once we realize this, the primary need is not for more extensive reading about prayer, but for more intensive living of the life of prayer. In fact, at the risk of hurting the sales of my own book, I must say that the time eventually comes to stop reading and to start living.

John of the Cross says: In matters pertaining to the soul, it is best for you, so as to he on the safe side, to have attachment to nothing and desire for nothing, and to have true and complete attachment and desire for him who is your proper guide, for to do otherwise would be not to desire a guide. And when one guide suffices, and you have one who suits you, all others are either superfluous or harmful.,-

The first stage is getting to know the Lord.

We are not meant to spend our entire lives merely getting to know the Lord, any more than human lovers would spend their whole lives just seeking to know each other better."

I have characterized this as the move from knowing to loving, and it is the topic of the first part of the present book. Like human lovers, the center of the relationship between the one who prays and the Lord gradually moves from the head to the heart.

Praying becomes much more affective and much ...

What I try to spell out concretely and in some detail there is really an "unpacking" of the great test of authentic prayer which we find in the first epistle of John: Whoever says, "I know him" without keeping his commandments, is a liar.... Whoever claims to he in light but hates his brother is still in darkness.... Anyone who says "I love God" and hates his brother, is a liar, since whoever does not love the brother whom he can see cannot love God whom he has not seen (1 In 2:4, 9 and 4:20).

the time will come when our intellects, our imaginations, our feelings dry up and cease to be of help.

One sure mark of genuine spiritual growth, I think, is a growing preference for the ordinary days of our life with God.

The beginner must realize that in order to give delight to the Lord he is starting to cultivate a garden on very barren soil, full of abominable weeds. His Majesty pulls up the weeds and plants good seed. Now let us keep in mind that all of this is already done by the time a soul is determined to practice prayer and has begun to make use of it. And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow and take pains to water them so that they don't wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance to provide refreshment to this Lord of ours. Then he will often come to take delight in this garden and find his joy among these virtues.

Similarly we do not seek the experience of God in prayer merely for its own sake but in order that the virtues in our lives may live and grow.

Thus, Teresa can say: "And with the help of God we must strive like good gardeners to get these plants to grow and take pains to water them so that they don't wither but come to bud and flower and give forth a most pleasant fragrance to provide refreshment to this Lord of ours. Then he will often come to take delight in this garden and find his joy among these virtues."

The Lord is the gardener; we are the assistants or "tenants"; the plants are the virtues and the water is that experience of God in prayer which we call "consolation."" Our task is to water the garden which God has planted.

Drawing by Hand

all good prayer is based on honest self-knowledge, and it is painful for us to confront ourselves honestly; also, it takes real effort to get to know Christ, particularly since we do not encounter him (see him and touch him and hear him) as we encounter another human being.

More Water, Less Labor

It is the springtime of our interior life, rich with the promise of discoveries to be made.

Teresa calls it the prayer of quiet,

All the labor of "getting to know" begins to bear fruit in the joy of "being with."

How the Understanding and the Imagination Help the Will

"Remember with joy":

conviction that it would be very difficult for a Democrat, especially a Democratic politician, to reach heaven.

When our prayer becomes more "quiet," when we begin to draw water from the well in this second way, our understanding and our imagination become the organs of remembering

The labor at the pump is largely the labor (if we can really call it that) of remembering, and it starts the flow of the "waters of joy."

Distracting Children at an A...

In the prayer of quiet, where God works directly on the will, the understanding and the imagination are like restless children.

Streams and Rains: Better Ways of Watering

At each succeeding stage of the interior journey, God does more and more of the work, and we do less and less.

"The Lord is now pleased to help the gardener, so that he may almost be said to be the gardener himself, for it is he who does everything."24 This means that, more and more, our prayer becomes the time we give the Lord to shape us, to transform us. The art of praying, as we grow, is really the art of learning to waste time gracefully-to be simply the clay in the hands of the potter.

Peter finds the demands of Jesus as difficult as any of those who walked with him no longer. He stays with Jesus not because he has found his words reasonable, but because he has found God in him.

If he is our only hope, it is foolish, unreasonable, to abandon him.

The call of God to die is never, either for Jesus or for his disciple, reasonable by human standards.

It is elitist because it demands real and total commitment to a cross and to death. It is not a mass phenomenon, a cult of mediocrity-and whenever it is lived or preached that way, the good news of Jesus Christ is betrayed. Peter had to learn that lesson painfully ("Get behind me, Satan!"), and so must we.

The real conflict, I believe, is not "God vs. no God," but rather love vs. hate. Marxism is grounded in a deterministic view of history, where persons are sacrificed to the ideal state (the "god") and where progress is achieved by conflict between opposing social classes. It is the Darwinian idea of "the survival of the fittest," transposed to human society. The competition, the struggle between persons and social classes is simply nature's way of evolving toward the ideal Marxist society. Progress is achieved by struggle and destruction.'

"progress by hate" has no place in a genuine Christianity.

I was trapped and was happy to be trapped.

The first was that there is a real difference between a call to a life of contemplative prayer and a call to life in a contemplative community.

The call to contemplative prayer, to Teresa's second way of drawing water, is the Lord's invitation to begin eternal life now and not to wait until we die.

There are, then, not only Marys and Marthas in the church, but also Martha-Marys.

the water is for the flowers. The joy of experiencing God in prayer is not an end in itself, but is the water by which the virtues are strengthened and brought to full flowering.

Seek the Flowers, Not the Water