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The Breath of the Soul

St. Augustine tells us that "prayer is the soul's breathing." Two fundamental aspects emerge from this image: First, prayer, like breathing, is extremely natural to the human person; second, those who cease to breathe automatically die. In a word, prayer is both natural and indispensable. Let us begin by analyzing the first characteristic, "natural." When Teresa of Avila affirms "that souls who do not practice prayer are like people with paralyzed or crippled bodies; even though they have hands and feet they cannot give orders to these hands and feet,"(9) she attests to the "natural" reality of prayer. Thus, if a healthy person would not dream of saying that breathing is difficult, impossible, or boring, how can one be justified in saying, "I cannot pray" or "Prayer is difficult"? If it were true [if breathing were difficult], the person would be sick. It is the same with prayer. To admit that it is difficult to pray, or that prayer is difficult or tiresome, is to reveal a suffering soul. Just as breathing is a perfectly natural function of the body, so prayer is natural to a spiritually healthy soul. But how does one define a healthy soul? In a word that is both simple and clear: Love. Love has been defined in many ways. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, "To love is to want the happiness of others,"(10) or better still, "Is not making others happy the best happiness?"(11)

And this desire constitutes the greatest of all beatitudes; their happiness becomes ours, their misfortune our own. For such persons, the words "you" and "me" are one. According to the Buddhist maxim, "it is singing in tune with the other's melody." "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends" (Jn 15:13). Love knows only how to love and thinks only of giving itself. "Those who want to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake will find them" (Mt 16:25). From a heart capable of loving that much, prayer flows spontaneously. Even in ordinary everyday greetings such as "Good health!" "Good luck!" and "Safe trip!" one finds expression of this desire for the welfare of others. When natural catastrophes occur, people in that country observe together a minute of silence for the blessed repose of the dead victims. In such tragic moments there is not the least doubt that even atheistic Communists or those who live without regard either for God or for Buddha pray in their own way for the happiness of others. According to a Latin maxim, Anima potius est ubi amat quam ubi animat, that is, the soul is more fully present where it loves than where it simply lives [i.e., the body]. In other words, true life is love. For human beings, to live is to love; not to love is to die. In Japanese, "to die" is nakunaru, which means literally "not to be" or "to cease to exist." Our only reason for existing is to love. Not to love is to lead a life of suffering worse than death. St. Augustine expresses this very precisely when he defines the pain of the damned as "self- contradiction" (contradictio sui ipsius). It is said that among the mentally ill, some break glass and then cut themselves with the broken pieces, leaving themselves covered with blood. "Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones" (Mk 5:5). When we detest or despise others, do we not feel the pain of being in tragic contradiction with ourselves? This pain is death; it is hell, for hell does not exist only after death. On the contrary, it is the hell we experience during our lifetime that reveals its true nature.

Prayer is the breath, the warmth of love; hell, the frozen loveless place of suffering. From this we understand that prayer is absolutely indispensable; without it we cannot love, and without love we can only pretend to pray, for prayer and love are inseparable. True prayer consists neither in the number of words nor in the length of time we spend in meditation. If we wish to know whether our prayer is authentic, let us first examine our love for our neighbor. Is it not rather fickle?

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