Transcript

Prayer, at its height, is this very deep personal encounter with God.

Now, I'm not always ready to move from the ordinary, workaday world right into that experience.

I need some rhythm, some discipline, some practice to get me to that point.

That's why Thomas Merton, one of the great spiritual masters, said that prayers like the Our Father and the Hail Mary are often a great way to lead you to prayer.

They're a way to dispose the mind.

I'll give you a good example, especially with the Hail Mary in mind, the Rosary.

We repeat that prayer over and over again.

You say, Well, what's the point of that?

The Buddhist tradition talks about the calming of the monkey mind.

The mind's always leaping around from tree to tree, branch to branch, thinking about this and about that.

The mind's always rolling.

Well, that mind is not ready for communion with God; it needs to be calmed.

That's why the praying of the Rosary can be just that sort of calming of your consciousness to prepare you for this union with God.

People pray all the time.

Studies show that even non-believers pray.

What precisely is this activity that so many of us engage in?

Prayer has taken on myriad forms and expressions over the centuries: singing, dancing, processing, reading sacred texts, keeping silence, emptying the mind of all imagery—all have been construed as types of prayer.

But is there a common denominator, something that all these expressions have in common?

St. John of Damascus said this: prayer is the raising of the mind and the heart to God.

I know no other place on the face of the earth that evokes this sense of prayer more than where I'm standing now.

I'm in the great Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.

It was built by St. Louis, King Louis IX, as a kind of reliquary for the relic of the Crown of Thorns.

Lord Kenneth Clark, the great art historian, said that when the light pours through these stained glass windows, it sets up a kind of vibration in the air.

What I sense in this place is that electricity—the electricity that comes from the meeting of two spirits: the human longing for God that meets, if I can put it this way, the even more passionate divine longing for us.

That electric coming together of these two passions—that's prayer.

Prayer is born of that awareness, felt as much as thought, that the transcendent realm impinges on our world.

It is the passionate desire to reach it, to communicate with it, to touch it.

With the help of some of the greatest figures in the Catholic spiritual tradition, I would like to explore the nature of prayer.

I realize that speaking of prayer, mysticism, and spiritual life often puts us in mind of rather alien figures—medieval monks in their fire stalls or perhaps hermits whirled away in the desert.

Now, I think monks and hermits have a lot to teach us.

I want to begin with someone much closer to our own time and experience—someone who walked the streets of Manhattan in the mid-20th century, someone who probably tramped right here through Times Square.

That man was Thomas Merton.

Merton played a decisive role in the recovery of the Catholic mystical and contemplative tradition in the 20th century, perhaps more than any other figure in modern times.

He taught an anxious and increasingly secularized society how to pray.

Thomas Merton was born in the south of France in 1915, the son of a New Zealander father and an American mother who had met at art school in Paris.

Merton's mother died when he was only a boy of six, and he wandered the world with his painter father, living for short periods in New York, Bermuda, France, and England.

When Thomas was 16 and a boarding school student in England, his father died, and the boy found himself alone in the world.

As a freshman at Cambridge, he lived a life of debauchery—too much carousing, too much drinking, too much sex.

In fact, Merton fathered a child during that year, and after certain financial and legal arrangements were made, he was sent out of the country to America.

He landed here in New York at Columbia University, a place he described affectionately as a great sooty factory.

Merton was something of a big man on campus; he joined lots of student organizations.

He was, for a time, the arts and humor editor of The Jester, which was the student literary publication.

That in itself tells you a good deal about Merton's personality.

One of his teachers was Lionel Trilling, the novelist.

The one, though, who influenced him the most was Mark Van Doren, the great Shakespeare scholar, and Merton's friends were among the most intelligent and creative people here at the time.

Robert Lacks, who became an avant-garde poet, and Robert Giroux, who became a great book publisher, were in his circle of friends.

Thomas Merton certainly flourished here at Columbia, but still, he was leading the life of a secular modern, seeking experience and, above all, pleasure.

In the spring of 1938, Thomas Merton was walking down Fifth Avenue when he came to Scribner's Bookstore.

It's gone now, but you can see right behind me where it was.

In the shop window, he saw this book: *The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy* by the French philosopher Étienne Gilson.

Merton was taking a course in French poetry and thought the book might be helpful.

He bought it, got on the subway train, and then he opened it up.

He saw on the frontispiece this little Latin word: Imprimatur, meaning let it be printed.

It was a sign that it was officially approved by the Catholic Church—a Catholic book.

Merton thought, and wanted to throw it out the window of the train, but instead, he said by a special grace he actually read it, and it revolutionized his life.

What he found in that book was a clear presentation of the subtle and sophisticated understanding of God characteristic of Catholic thought.

He had assumed, like most of his peers and friends, that God was a noisy mythological figure and that religion was the stuff of neuroses and projections.

He had never imagined that people could speak of God in such a compelling and intellectually satisfying way.

What he found most specifically was the idea of God's aseity—God's capacity to exist through Himself.

He found what we explored in an earlier episode of the series, namely that God is not one being among many, but Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the sheer act of being itself.

This God began to pull and tug at Merton with great power.

In the wake of his encounter with Gilson's book, Merton's life began to change.

He wanted to commune with the God whom he had discovered intellectually.

He first attended some Protestant services; his mother had been a Quaker, but he found himself unmoved.

Then, one Sunday morning, he woke up with an intense desire to go to Mass.

Merton came here to the Church of Corpus Christi on 121st Street on the Upper West Side.

He entered the place nervously, knowing very little about the Mass, not knowing how to behave, and he slipped into a side pew.

But he made it through the liturgy, and again, though he half-understood it, when he walked out of this church, he said he felt as though he had entered a new world.

Even the ugly buildings of Columbia, he said, were transfigured.

Then he sat down for breakfast at a crummy little diner on 111th Street, and though he was in that simple place, he said it was as though he was sitting in the Elysian Fields.

Later that year, Thomas Merton was walking here down 6th Avenue with his friend Robert Lacks.

Lacks turned to him and said, “Tom, what do you want out of life?”

Merton said, “Well, I suppose I want to be a good Catholic.”

Lacks replied, “No, no, that’s not enough.

You should want to be a saint.”

That comment convinced Merton he had to think in a much more radical way about his spiritual life.

He began to explore different religious orders in the hopes that they would accept him as a candidate for the priesthood.

He was initially accepted by the Franciscans, but when he revealed the story of his past, they let him go.

He became a professor of English at the small Franciscan college of St. Bonaventure's. While on break from St. Bonaventure's, he sat down in New York with his good friend Daniel Walsh, who was a professor of philosophy at Columbia.

Walsh encouraged him to make a retreat during Holy Week at the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky.

Merton said what he discovered there was the still point around which the whole country revolves—without knowing what he sensed was the power of adoratio, adoration: the ordering of one's life around the proper praise of God.

The following December, just days after Pearl Harbor, Merton entered the monastery himself, commencing a 27-year career as monk, poet, and spiritual writer.

Most fundamentally, he became a man utterly absorbed in prayer.

God addresses people in different ways.

Some are drawn into the spiritual life in very ordinary ways—nothing extraordinary happens.

Others have things even beyond what Merton had: people have extraordinary visions and encounters with Jesus.

His was kind of somewhere in the middle.

I call it a vivid mystical experience—God calls people in different ways.

Some wouldn't respond to that; they wouldn't know what to do with it.

It wouldn't fit their psyche, their personality, their background.

Some people are kind of natural mystics, the way people are natural baseball players.

That kid is a natural—he just knows how to throw that ball without being told.

Some people, and I think Merton's one of them, are natural mystics, and they just kind of respond to the divine in this natural way.

But it's different.

There are many mansions in the Father's house and many different ways to approach God.

Now, Merton's great spiritual master, the teacher to whom he consistently looked, was a 16th-century Spaniard named Juan de Yepes y Alvarez, better known by his religious name, John of the Cross.

John of the Cross was born in 1542 and became a Carmelite friar in 1563. Under the influence of St. Teresa of Avila, John dedicated himself to the reform of his order, returning it to its Gospel simplicity and zeal.

Like most reformers, John was unpopular among those whom he wished to reform.

In December of 1577, a group of his Carmelite brothers arrested him, bringing him here to Toledo, where they imprisoned him in the Carmelite monastery that stood right behind the wall you can see behind me.

They placed John in a tiny cell, six feet by ten feet, and removed him from that place only to have him kneel in the refectory, where he was beaten by his brothers.

While holed up in that tiny room, John began to compose in his mind poetry that constitutes some of the gems of Spanish literature and the high point of the Catholic spiritual tradition, because in those poems he talks about the life of intimate union with God.

Nine months after he was imprisoned, John, in a rather dramatic way, made good his escape, clambering down over that wall you can see behind me.

What stands at the heart of John's teaching?

In his treatise called *The Living Flame of Love*, John offers a powerful image for the human soul.

We human beings, he says, have within us great caverns that are infinitely deep and unfathomable.

These are intellect, will, and feeling.

They are infinite and unfathomable precisely because they are ordered to God.

The mind wants to know everything about everything; it won't rest until it is illumined by the divine truth.

The will wants infinite goodness; it will not rest until it rests in the absolute good of God.

The feelings ache with an infinite longing because they are ordered to the infinity of God.

This is why, by the way, most of us are so restless and dissatisfied most of the time.

John diagnosed a fundamental spiritual disorder this way: we try to fill these infinitely deep caverns with the petty goods of this world—pleasure, sex, power, honor.

This leads, as we've already seen, to addiction as we try more and more of these unsatisfying goods.

Or else, he said, we cover the caverns over, pretending they're not really there.

We live life in a completely superficial way, ignoring the depths within.

If we want to fulfill these longings, we have to go through a purging process.

All the spiritual teachers talk about the purgative way—the process by which we rid ourselves of these attachments, these substitutes for God, what John would call idols.

John of the Cross delineates this as a two-step process involving the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the soul.

It's very important to point out that this has nothing to do with Puritanism and nothing to do with the repudiation of the goodness of the world.

John affirms the goodness of the world at every turn.

Secondly, though these two steps are painful, they have nothing to do with psychological depression; they are, if you will, practical antidotes to idolatry.

During the dark night of the senses, I learn not to seek my ultimate satisfaction in sensible and sensual things.

I let go of them; I fast from them.

During the dark night of the soul, or of the spirit, I let go even of those rarefied substitutes for God, which are the concepts and images of the mind.

When these purgations are complete, the soul is ready for the journey into God—or, better, it's ready for the gift that God wants to give.

Consider these gorgeous lines from John's poem on the dark night: One dark night, fired with love's urgent longings—ah, the sheer grace!

I went out unseen, my house being now all still.

A stilled house is a symbol of the soul having passed through the dark night, and now it's ready to journey forth, illumined only by the light of its purified desire.

Then come these verses, evocative of the high point of mystical union.

Upon my flowering breast, which I kept holy for Him alone, there He lay sleeping, and I caressing Him.

These lines speak the language of a soul in love.

And then this: I abandon and forgot myself, laying my face on my beloved.

All things cease; I went out for myself, leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.

Is there anywhere in the literature of the world a more compelling and beautiful description of contemplative prayer?

John presents the mystical marriage between Christ and a human soul in language as erotically evocative as anything in the Song of Songs.

Notice how in John’s poetic imagination, the soul and Christ are literally mouth to mouth.

Picture an aura in the stance of adoration.

Think of an athlete who goes through all kinds of tough experiences in practice, and maybe through injuries and all of that, but then he lives for those moments, those ecstatic moments when he plays the game with such grace and panache and excitement that he’s fully alive.

An athlete's life has to have both; a great tennis player has to go through a kind of dark night to reach the point where he can play with reckless abandon and great joy.

The same is true in the spiritual order.

You have to go through this purification process, this ascetic dark night, to come to the point where you can fall dramatically in love with God and you can live the spiritual life at a very high pitch.

So, I would see John—though maybe that’s the common perception of this sort of dour, dark figure—I read his poetry, and it’s just dripping with love and life and ecstasy and enthusiasm.

So, it’s the great both/and; it’s one because of the other.

Perhaps the most important figure in the life of John of the Cross was Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite nun who inaugurated the reform movement in which John took part.

A few decades older than John, she was the daughter of nobility and enjoyed a fairly pampered childhood.

She entered the Carmelite monastery at Avila and lived a decent but unheroic spiritual life for many years.

As Teresa entered her 40s, her spiritual life became more intense and more serious, and she began to receive a series of mystical visitations.

She would see Christ, the Blessed Mother, and the saints—not so much with her bodily eyes as with the eyes of her mind and imagination.

During these intense experiences, she was sometimes in an ecstatic trance, lying motionless for upwards of a half an hour.

Other times, she was known during these experiences to levitate.

There are even stories told about some of the stronger nuns being called upon to pull her back down to the ground.

The most famous of these mystical encounters was what came to be called the Transverberation.

Teresa described this vividly in her autobiography.

She experienced an angel piercing her heart repeatedly with a gold-tipped arrow.

It was that scene, of course, that was immortalized in marble by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

But these mystical experiences, as extraordinary as they were, don't really get to the heart of Teresa's spiritual teaching.

To understand what she was trying to communicate, I think it's best to look at the title of her most famous work: *The Interior Castle*. Teresa of Avila found at the very depth of her soul Christ dwelling in her, and she found that to be a castle.

Now imagine what that meant for a 16th-century Spaniard.

A castle was a keep; it was a place of power and safety.

To be grounded in Christ, she realized, was to be grounded in that very power which here and now creates the cosmos— that power which lies beyond the vagaries of space and time.

St. John of the Cross referred to this central place, by the way, as the interior wine cellar, the place where the spirits are kept.

Teresa of Avila found Christ dwelling within her as a castle: a place of power, a place of peace.

Now recall one of Teresa's most famous prayers: Let nothing disturb you, let nothing trouble you; everything passes; God alone remains.

That's a prayer uttered from the security of the interior castle.

It’s from this center that one can live a life of detachment and carefree acceptance of God's will.

Whether I have a long life or a short life, whether I'm sick or healthy, whether I'm rich or poor, I dwell in the safety of the interior castle.

Levitations, visions, locutions, and the kind of freaky supernatural elements can turn people off.

They can say, Well, it just seems like a lot of nonsense.

One perspective on that is, I don't care, or Who cares if you believe it or not?

That's not the essence of the faith.

We never get up on Sunday and recite the Creed and say, I believe in the levitation of St.... Teresa or I believe in the visions of St. John of the Cross.

So, our faith does not depend upon these things.

In some ways, on the other hand, there is a scientific reductionism that says the real is simply what I can empirically verify.

Well, who said it?

Our little world that we can measure with our empirical scientific instruments?

Go back to Shakespeare's great line in *Hamlet*: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophies of ratio.

It was a mock of that early rationalism.

Instead of saying that what science and philosophy can measure and name is the real—come on!

I mean, God's power stretches way beyond what we can possibly measure.

So, who's to say God can't do extraordinary things at times to get the attention of the Church?

I'd be very impatient with that scientific reductionism, as I would be impatient with a hyper-stress on it that says, Oh my, my whole faith depends on these things.

Somewhere beyond those two poles, you find the truth.

I think when most people think of prayer, they're probably not spontaneously thinking about the more rarefied forms that we've been considering.

What they probably have in mind is asking God for something.

Indeed, petitionary prayer is one of the most fundamental ways that we raise our minds and hearts to God.

It's also the most common form of prayer found in the Bible.

Think of the Our Father as nothing but a series of petitions.

I don't know any other place on earth where more petitionary prayer is offered than here at Lourdes, the shrine to which millions come every year seeking God's healing grace.

There's just something elemental and primal about petitionary prayer: Oh God, help me!

Please, God, do something!

Oh Lord, give her good health.

If we could place a net that could catch such prayers over hospitals and churches, we would capture millions upon millions of them.

Jesus Himself tells us often to persevere in prayer: Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find.

Knock, and it will be opened to you.

Yet dilemmas emerge—anomalies that have puzzled religious thinkers for centuries.

If God can't change, what's the point of asking Him for anything?

And if God is omniscient, what's the point of telling Him what we need?

Keep in mind the same Jesus who said ask, and ask, and ask also said, Your Father knows what you need before you ask.

Here are some perspectives on this dilemma.

God is consistently portrayed in the Bible as a parent.

Parents hear petitions from their children all the time—persistent requests for things, some good and some bad.

Good parents know, even before their children ask, what they need, but this doesn't lead parents to quiet the requests of their children.

On the contrary, they want to hear them, but they don't always respond positively.

Well, God knows everything about everything; of course, He knows what we need even before we ask.

But still, like a good parent, He delights in hearing our requests, and like a good parent, He doesn't always respond the way we want Him to.

Here’s a perspective offered by St. Augustine: God invites us to ask and ask and ask again so that our hearts might expand to receive the gift that God wants to give.

It’s not as though we’re petitioning a stubborn pasha or a big city boss whom we hope will eventually be persuaded.

No, rather, it’s God who changes us by this invitation to pray persistently.

Here’s another take, this one offered by St. Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas says our prayer doesn’t move God; God, after all, is the unmoved mover.

Rather, our prayer, at its best, is God already praying through us—God, as it were, prompting us to ask for the right thing, thereby bringing our lives into line with His own will.

That’s why all of our prayers should end the way that Jesus' great prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane ends.

Thy will be done.

A very good example of this dynamic is in the prayer for the Feast of St. Monica.

The prayer reads: Lord, you graciously received the tears of Monica for the conversion of her son Augustine.

It's not as though the tears of Monica moved God to convert her son, but rather, those tears themselves were the sign that God was, as it were, praying in her, prompting her to ask, and God coordinated His grace with that petition.

Now, God, of course, is a parent in the Bible—that's the great metaphor for God.

Little kids ask their parents all the time for things: Give me!

Give me!

Give me!

Very often, they're asking for the wrong things.

I mean, they're asking for things that aren't really good for them, but given their very small minds and limited experience, they think, Oh, that's what I need!

That's what I want!

So they beg their parents and then they're often just mortified when their parents don't give them immediately what they want: My father doesn't love me!

My mother doesn't care about me!

When, in fact, your father and mother do care about you more than you care about yourself.

They know you better than you know yourself, which is why they're not giving you what you want.

So we can ask God all the time: Give me!

Give me!

Give me!

We have these little, tiny, inexperienced minds, so we think, Sure, that's what I want!

That's what I need!

But God knows what we need before we ask, as Jesus said.

He knows better than we know what we need.

So is God being distant and difficult, or is God being a loving parent precisely in not giving us what we're asking for?

Think of the picture that God sees—what God is provident over is all of space and all of time.

We are one tiny little fraction, one little corner of that picture.

And I say, This is what's good for me.

How do I know?

How do I possibly know what's good for me in the grand scheme?

God knows what's good for me and wills that for me.

It might correspond to my will; it might not.

So that's always the space we're in when we pray.

Thomas Merton spent the last 27 years of his life here at Gethsemane.

He wrote a stunning autobiography, *The Seven Storey Mountain*, which galvanized the country when it appeared in 1948. He wrote a number of books attempting to characterize contemplative prayer.

Even at Gethsemane, Merton was a restless soul; he was seeking ever more intense expressions of the spiritual life.

What he wanted above all was solitude.

In the mid-1960s, his abbot gave him permission to live in a hermitage on the grounds of the monastery.

I’m standing in it now.

In this simple, humble place, Merton lived and worked the last few years of his life.

He probably best summed up the nature of contemplation when he said, To contemplate is to find that place in you where you are here and now, being created by God, or, It is to awaken to that deepest center, what Merton called the virginal point, where you could say with St. Paul, It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Merton saw so clearly that contemplation is not the concern of a few spiritual athletes alone; rather, it stands at the heart of the Christian thing, for contemplation is the reorganization of one's life around the divine center.

In the mid-1950s, after some 15 years in the monastery, Thomas Merton made his way into Louisville on some practical business.

He found himself in the center of the city at the corner of 4th and Walnut.

As he stood there watching the crowds of ordinary people go by, he was struck by how much he loved them, how connected to them he felt.

It was, he said, like waking from a dream of separateness.

What he had discovered, of course, was the consequence of contemplation.

Once one has found the place where he is here and now being created by God, he finds the place that connects him to everyone else and everything else in the cosmos.

As a mystic and a contemplative, Merton could see this.

His account reaches its emotional climax when he says, There's no way of telling people that they're all walking around shining like the sun.

Thank you.

O Lord of light, who art on high, our daily prayer is that there be honor—that there be honor in Thee.