I like very much Sister Donna’s insight that Lectio Divina and prayer of the heart go hand-in-hand; that we immerse ourselves in sacred reading and then offer ourselves to God and He to us, exactly in the same way as when we participate in the two parts of the Mass, first through the Liturgy of the Word and then through the Liturgy of the Eucharist. I have never heard anyone make this particular comparison before.
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There are some souls and minds so scattered they are like wild horses no one can stop. Now they’re running here, now there, always restless…. This restlessness is either caused by the soul’s nature or permitted by God. I pity these souls greatly, for they seem to be like very thirsty persons who see water in the distance, but when they want to go there, they meet someone who prevents their passing from the beginning through the middle to the end.
[The Way of Perfection, Chapter 19, Paragraph 2]
O Sisters, those of you who cannot engage in much discursive reflection with the intellect or keep your mind from distraction, get used to this practice! Get used to it! See, I know that you can do this; for I suffered many years from the trial – and it is a very great one – of not being able to quiet the mind in anything. But I know that the Lord does not leave us so abandoned; for if we humbly ask Him for this friendship, He will not deny it to us. And if we cannot succeed in one year, we will succeed later. Let’s not regret the time that is so well spent. Who’s making us hurry? I am speaking of acquiring this habit and of striving to walk alongside this true Master.
I had a very peculiar experience coming home from work yesterday. I was on the bus coming from downtown to home, when about three-quarters of the way through my commute the back door of the bus started acting up. The open-shut mechanism wasn’t working properly; people would get off and the door wouldn’t fully shut, etc., and the driver was trying to fix it with his controls from the front for quite a while.
As we approached my neighbourhood he pretty much gave up trying to do anything about it. He closed it for good, but opened the front door and left it open (I don’t know why, but this is what he did.) Anyway, then he turned around and said, very seriously: “Please don’t anybody jump out the front door while the bus is still moving.”
Now at this point, since it was nearing the end of the route, there were only four of us left on the bus; myself, a teenager and two men in suits with briefcases. I had stopped after work to do some errands, so besides my large purse, I had two fairly heavy shopping bags. The thing is, when the driver said: “Please don’t anybody jump out the front door while the bus is still moving”, he looked straight at me, and very insistently.
Now I ask you, do I seem like a candidate for hurling myself out the front door of a bus while it is careening through the city streets? Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I’ve thrown myself out of a moving vehicle. Granted, in my younger days I was once told that I darted through traffic “like a gazelle”, but really, these knees haven’t produced gazelle-like movements for quite some time. I can barely genuflect, let alone throw myself off a bus, drop and roll.
I guess I’ll never know what he was thinking. Maybe I just look a tad impulsive.
Wondrous truths, and manifold as wondrous,
God hath written in those stars above;
But not less in the bright flowerets under us
Stands the revelation of his love.
I spent nearly twenty years on that stormy sea, often falling in this way and each time rising again, but to little purpose, as I would only fall once more. My life was so far from perfection that I took hardly any notice of venial sins; as to mortal sins, although afraid of them, I was not so much so as I ought to have been; for I did not keep free from danger of falling into them. I can testify that this is one of the most grievous kinds of life which I think can be imagined, for I had neither any joy in God nor any pleasure in the world. When I was in the midst of worldly pleasures, I was distressed by the remembrance of what I owed to God; when I was with God, I grew restless because of worldly affections.
From: Selected Writings of St. Teresa of Avila, Revised, Adapted and Modernized by Monsignor Wm. J. Doheny, C.S.C., pgs. 220-221. [This particular quotation was taken from St. Teresa of Avila's "Life", Vol. 1, pgs. 48-49]
“If no one told me who I was, who would I be? Quietly meditate on this by spending some time in the spaciousness of not knowing. Imagine that your subconscious mind is nonexistent and there is no storage receptacle for excuses during your life. There’s just an open and inviting clear space inside of you – a tabula rasa, or blank slate, with a magical surface that nothing adheres to. You might imagine that your everyday conscious mind simply doesn’t absorb the opinions of the folks you grew up with. In this little fantasy, there’s never been anyone telling you who you are. So who are you?”
In Chapter XI of Contemplative Prayer (by Thomas Merton, with an Introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh), Merton writes:
What is the purpose of meditation in the sense of “the prayer of the heart”?
In the “prayer of the heart” we seek first of all the deepest ground of our identity in God. We do not reason about dogmas of faith, or “the mysteries.” We seek rather to gain a direct existential grasp, a personal experience of the deepest truths of life and faith, finding ourselves in God’s truth….
We wish to gain a true evaluation of ourselves and of the world so as to understand the meaning of our life as children of God redeemed from sin and death. We wish to gain a true loving knowledge of God, our Father and Redeemer. We wish to lose ourselves in his love and rest in him. We wish to hear his word and respond to it with our whole being. We wish to know his merciful will and submit to it in its totality.
Sister Donna has recently discovered prayer of the heart, and her joy and enthusiasm is contagious, as you will see in this video. She has put together a 6-part YouTube series (the introduction to which is the second video in this post), based on St. Teresa of Avila’s The Way of Perfection. [Note: Although she mentions St. Therese of Lisieux's 'little way' in the first video here, her series is actually based on St. Teresa of Avila's writing.] So we will be taking a little journey here at Contemplative Haven with Sister Donna! If you would like to read the chapters that Sister Donna is highlighting in her videos but do not have a copy of The Way of Perfection, you can read it online at Catholic First.
Should we strive for perfect love, you ask? Absolutely. For this we were created. [Perfect love] will be our eternal life, and here we have to seek to come as close to it as possible. Jesus became incarnate in order to be our way. What can we do? Try with all our might to be empty; the senses mortified; the memory as free as possible from all images of this world and, through hope, directed toward heaven; the understanding stripped of natural seeking and ruminating, directed to God in the straightforward gaze of faith; the will…surrendered to God in love.
This can be said very simply, but the work of an entire life would not attain the goal were God not to do the most essential. In the meantime we may be confident that he will not fail to give grace if we faithfully do the little we can do.
Edith Stein. Self Portrait In Letters. 1916-1942. Translated by Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. pgs. 318-319
