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Christ's Prayer

Socrates: Would not asking the gods to give us what we need be the right way to pray?

Euthyphro: What else could it be?

Socrates: On the other hand, the right kind of offering would be to give them whatever they may need from us?

Euthyphro: You are right, Socrates.

Socrates: If you look at it like that, Euthyphro, religion strikes me like a business deal, controlling the commerce between the gods and humans.

Without going as far as this, it is nonetheless quite possible that we pray only to seek consolation. In that case the central core of prayer shifts little by little from God to us. Tasting ecstatic joy to the beating of drums and the singing of psalms, or savoring the revelation of the eternal in the calm and silence of the zendo (a room where zen is practiced); in a Christian context, enjoying deep contemplation in a monastic setting, or experiencing the gifts of the Spirit in a prayer meeting; even supposing that these mystical experiences are not pursued as ends in themselves, still shouldn't they still be regarded with a critical eye, as only a kind of spiritual recreation, after all?

"They would be very foolish," says St. John of the Cross, "who would think that God is failing them because of their lack of spiritual sweetness and delight, or would rejoice, thinking they possess God because of the presence of this sweetness. And they would be more foolish if they were to go in search of this sweetness in God and rejoice and be detained in it."(40)

Before anything else we must kneel before the transcendent God, and never lose sight of the fact that this same awesome God is the one we call "Abba, Father." On our knees we are wrapped in the transcendence of divine Love, for to pray is to seek God, to discover God in oneself, and even more, to discover oneself in God, to be known by God and in God, as we read in the letter to the Galatians: "You have come to know God or rather to be known by God" (Gal 4:9; cf. 1 Cor 8:3).

If we humble ourselves before God in the awareness of our own nothingness, we die to self and find ourselves "raised up in God." In this way we share in Christ's paschal mystery. Our poverty and our humble self-knowledge in the face of God's transcendence give birth to love and draw God to us, so that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. The Oriental sages climb the lofty mountain of detachment from the world; they breathe the pure air of the heights and compare the noises that reach them from below to the cricket's shrill cry in summer. But shouldn't they transcend their own enjoyment of peace and realize that there is an infinite beyond, and that this visible world will one day disappear at God's command? The universe that seems to us eternal, God will fold away like a garment.(41)

"Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." We ask for these in the Lord's Prayer before praying for our daily bread, thus acknowledging that the most important thing is seeking God, communion with God. This makes us wholly God's, and at the same time, wholly for others. Thus Zarathustra, after his retreat on the mountain, comes down to preach, and the Buddha, after reaching supreme enlightenment, becomes the Bodhisatva (the one whose first concern is others' salvation). The motto "God alone" does not mean that people are excluded, but that in God alone is salvation, that everything finds its being and its fulfillment in God.

Anyone who would seek God in the solitude of the monastery only because of misanthropy, fear of social ties, or unfitness for life with others would meet nothing but emptiness and tedium. Of course, even here God could make use of human weakness and turn it to good divine mercy knows no laws but normally speaking, contemplative life in these circumstances would breed nothing but self-centeredness and selfishness, like a well-guarded fortress. The contemplative, on the contrary, should burn with love for others. "My inner quiet blessed be God has never really isolated me. I feel all human-kind can enter'."(42) As in the case of the country priest of Bernanos's book, love of God and love of others deepen and feed each other day by day; if we pray unceasingly for our neighbors we become all the more authentically contemplative.

There is nothing more dangerous than to think of contemplative life as directed to God and apostolic life as directed to neighborly love. The one thing that matters, either in contemplative or in apostolic life, is the love of God. It is only the way this love is encouraged to grow that is different in each case. In the one case we fix our eyes on God's transcendence; in the other, we seek God's love as immanent in our neighbor. Again, if it is ridiculous to say that we can love God only in the stillness of the monastery, it is also foolish to maintain that we cannot love our neighbor unless we are covered with the dust of the world.

We do not have to live in the same house or eat at the same table in order to love one another. In fact, all too often we find that those living under the same roof and sharing the same bread draw storm clouds down on themselves in their miserably ruined love, while others who have never met and are oceans apart are marvelously united in love. The Holy Spirit who is love "blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes" (Jn 3:8).

True Christian prayer goes beyond all personal concerns and joins the movement of the human family on the pilgrimage to the Parousia, to Christ's return in glory. Those who say "I love God but I don't love my neighbor" are liars. Similarly, those who pray for themselves alone and not for others are liars. Jesus' last prayer before his passion was "that they may be one, as we are one" (Jn 17:11), a petition that John repeats as many as five times in chapter 17. God's absolute oneness of nature in the Blessed Trinity is the perfect model of the union that should exist among humans.

Just as the Son cannot be Son without the Father, and the Father cannot be Father without the Son, Jesus offers us as an ideal the love that unites the Father and the Son. This was his prayer, "that they may be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us" (Jn 17:21). He seems to grieve over, and appeal to us to end, the divisions and oppositions among his followers. The Blessed Trinity is not only a model for us; it is the guarantee of our unity.

For if the world does not believe in Christ, isn't this because we are not sufficiently united to Christ's love and joined in family charity? Instead of reproaching others for not believing in Christ, we must admit that we bear very poor witness to the bonding love that is the sign that Christ has been sent by the Father: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn 13:34 35).

When we fail to love one another, we are no longer disciples of Christ, and people can no longer discover his image in us. Whether or not we are Christians, real love is never easy. Every day we feel the pain of our inadequacy in loving. We must stress that to say "I cannot love" does not mean "I don't want to love." On the contrary, to feel unable to love as one longs to do is love's great sorrow. We must not let the consciousness of our failures to love lead us to say with Dostoyevsky that "to love our neighbor is impossible. We should learn to despise others, even when they are good." Such a reversal of Gospel teaching is like Sartre's cry, "hell is other people."

Before becoming a helpful and sympathetic neighbor, the other often seems to us an adversary who watches us with a critical eye and interferes in our affairs.

Christ certainly knows our poor human nature, and he knows that we all share it, not only those of us who hate him, but also those of us who love him and believe in him. The radiant example of Christians united among themselves did not last very long after the death of Christ. Today Christ's blood continues to be poured out to save us from our wretchedness. "The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me" (Jn 17:22 23). This is how Christ concludes his great prayer at the Last Supper. Christ is not only in the Father; he is in us in spite of our miserable divisions and antipathies. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us." He is Emmanuel, "God with us." In spite of our divisions and our rebellions, God continues to be with us from the height of the cross. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing" (Lk 23:34). Such is the love of a God who can go on loving us even though we scorn him and nail him to the cross. This same love of God is still present in the Body of Christ, as he promised: "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Mt 28:20). He goes on loving, waiting, bearing with those who do not know love, and who pass by in cold indifference. Only in Christ can we hope for the unity for which Jesus longed so ardently as he washed the feet of his disciples on the eve of his death. As we sing in the Holy Thursday liturgy:

O Sacramentum pietatis! O Sacrament of faithful love!

O Signum unitatis! O Sign of unity!

O Vinculum caritatis! O Bond of charity!

St. Augustine saw in the Blessed Sacrament the symbol of love's union. Christian redemption is nothing but the victory of love over the antipathies and hatreds that separate humankind. We cannot unite ourselves to God until we are one in love.

"So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift" (Mt 5:23 24). So strong is the requirement for fraternal love that we might be tempted to ask whether it takes precedence over the love of God: "All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them" (1 Jn 3:15). What a terrible sentence! The love in question is not merely generosity of heart, which could be described as pity or compassion. It is divine Love, which agonizes over our violent human divisions. When someone suffers because of a failure to love, it is Christ himself, God and man, who is nailed again to the cross. To hate one's brother or sister is to hate God. According to the Gospel, fratricide is synonymous with deicide.

Here on earth we meet many highly cultured, wise, and venerable people and religious, but very few who have really experienced love and who know how to love. The sorrow of being unloving and unloved is spread throughout the earth. I quote here the sad lament of the Chinese poet, Tu-Fu (712 770):

I stretch forth my hand, like a cloud.
I turn it over: it is rain.
Human friendship is like that
As changeable as the cloud that dances across the sky.
The human heart is not to be trusted,
It is too shallow.
Friend, behold the pure friendship between Kouan and Pao,
Which their life of want never altered....
Nowadays, an affection like theirs
Would be swept away like dust before the wind.(43)
Human friendship is often nothing more substantial than flotsam stirred by the waves, and we keep building barriers of hatred or dislike between us. If they are broken down in one place, they are raised in another, and life slips by without our ever attaining deep union of heart. In the history of the church and of religious orders, wherever people come together, we always have to struggle with the same human problem. It might be said that life in religious orders or dedicated Christian communities, like the church itself, is an image of heaven on earth; but let us never forget that it is a "paradise where we struggle," a heaven to be won at swordpoint. The crowning act of God's love for humanity is the Cross of Calvary. In this immense and cruel paradox of love, Christ's prayer is buried like a seed that is destined to grow:

That they may be One as we are One.