Meditatio TALKS SERIES 2018 B · APR– JUN
Praying with the Masters Today BERNARD McGINN
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The very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and to let God work and speak within. Meister Eckhart
Published 2018 in Singapore by Medio Media www.mediomedia.com, mmi@wccm.org Transcript of Bernard McGinn, Praying with the Masters Today 2, Meditatio Talks 2018 B, Medio Media, ISBN 978-981-11-7644-9. (Talks at John Main Seminar 2017, Houston, Texas, USA) © The World Community for Christian Meditation 2018 THE WORLD COMMUNITY FOR CHRISTIAN MEDITATION
www.wccm.org
CONTENTS The Carthusians and the Cistercians 2. Lectio Divina 3. Meditatio and Oratio 4. Contemplatio 5. Meister Eckhart 6. Julian of Norwich 7. The Our Father as Mystical Prayer 8. Origen on the Our Father 9. Cassian on the Our Father 10. Teresa of Avila on the Our Father 1.
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The most powerful prayer and the strongest of all to obtain everything is that which proceeds from an empty spirit… The empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to nothing. For it’s all sunk deep down into God’s dearest will and has forsaken its own will. Meister Eckhart
1 The Carthusians and the Cistercians The Cistercians and the Carthusians, tried to create a system of Christian prayer. So we’ve got four rungs on the ladder: lectio, meditatio, oratio and contemplatio.
The late 11th century and the 12th century in Western Europe was a time of the reform of monasticism. Over the course of centuries, since the time of Benedict in the 6th century, monasticism had flourished in Western Europe and it had been very important in the early mediaeval period when things had kind of collapsed with the downfall of the Roman Empire. Monks and the great monasteries were central to the political power in those days, but monasticism itself had suffered under barbarian invasions and from internal kind of strife. So most of Western monasticism by, let’s say, the 9th century was kind of a mess – the Rule of Benedict was not well observed, monasteries were often taken over by lay lords. Why? Because monasteries were very wealthy and the lay lords wanted the money; and because the lay lords weren’t very interested in the good observance of the Rule of Benedict. At the end of the 10th century, throughout the course of the 11th century, and into the 12th century, monastic leaders arose and said: We have to clean up: we have to reform monasticism; we have to get back to the original vision that Benedict and others had. So you have monastic reforms beginning all over Europe – Italy, France, England, present-day Spain. It’s a great era of monastic reform. And out of that, at the end of the 11th century and the early 12th century, come what we could say two great reform movements – the Carthusians and the Cistercians. I’m going to talk about the contribution of the Cistercians and the Carthusians, two of the great monastic reform orders of the 12th century, who tried to create a system of Christian prayer. We are going to look at two representatives. One is Guigo1, a Carthusian prior, and a book he called The Ladder of Monks. The second one will be the Cistercian William of Saint Thierry2 and his little book 5
called The Golden Epistle. They are very representative of monastic prayer and monastic contemplation. I am reading a quotation from Guigo: Reading [lectio], is the careful study of the scriptures, concentrating all one’s powers on it. Meditation [meditation], is the busy application of the mind to seek help with one’s own reason for knowing hidden truths. Prayer [oratio, petitionary prayer] is the heart’s devoted turning to God to drive away all evil and to obtain what is good. Contemplation [contemplation], is when the mind is in some sort of way lifted up to God and held above itself so that it tastes the joys of everlasting sweetness. So we’ve got four rungs on the ladder: lectio, meditatio, oratio and contemplatio. That’s one of the most popular roadmaps in the history of Christian mysticism. ______________ 1Guigo, also known as Guigues du Chastel, Guigo de Castroand Guigo of Saint-Romain, was a Carthusian monk and the 5th prior of Grande Chartreuse monastery in the 12th century. 2William
of Saint Thierry (French: Guillaume de Saint-Thierry) was a 12th-century French Benedictine abbot of Saint-Thierry, theologian and mystic who became a Cistercian monk and writer
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2 Lectio Divina Lectio Divina is a technique of prayer and a guide to living. It’s a means of descending to the level of the heart and finding God. I want to talk about each of the rungs in the ladder that begin from lectio divina and then move on to meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. The importance of lectio divina is actually rooted in the monastic tradition, especially in the Rule of Benedict. In chapter four of the Rule of Benedict, which is a chapter on daily manual labour, Benedict says, ‘The brothers ought to have specified times for manual labour, and also set hours aside for sacred reading.’ Set hours, particular hours. And this setting aside of time for sacred reading is especially true in the time of Lent when he says that in Lent, at least, each one of the brothers is to receive a book from the library and to read the whole of it straight through – finish the whole book during the course of Lent. So Benedict made lectio divina central to the Benedictine tradition. So we start with reading, lectio divina, as the first rung on the ladder. The image of the ladder here is another one of the great symbols in the history in Christian mysticism – ascending the ladder up to God. The monks and others who used that image often pointed to the famous text in the Book of Genesis Chapter 28, when Jacob has a dream and sees angels going up and down the ladder between heaven and earth. And the four terms on the ladder – Lectio, Meditatio, Oratio, Contemplatio – these are traditional. They weren’t invented by Guigo, they weren’t invited by William. They were something the monks had talked about for many, many centuries. These steps are distinct steps, but you could never separate them. They fit together, they are integrated; and in a certain sense, you could move up and down. You may be able to move up to contemplatio, but you can’t stay at the level of contemplatio; you have to go back down to lectio. So you have to integrate all of them, and they’re all necessary. I quote Guigo: 7
These steps are joined together in such a way, each one serving the other in mutual fashion, that the earlier stages are little or no use without the later ones and those later ones can scarcely or never be attained without the former. So you can almost never get to contemplation unless you start with lectio. Fifty or sixty years ago hardly anybody would have heard of lectio divina, and its recovery in the kind of contemplative movement of the last half century. Much has been written on this. I strongly recommend the Australian Cistercian Michael Casey’s book Sacred Reading: The Ancient Art of Lectio Divina. A couple of quotations from Michael Casey: Lectio Divina is a technique of prayer and a guide to living. It’s a means of descending to the level of the heart and finding God. We should see lectio divina, [he goes on] not only as a technique of prayer but as a preparation for contemplation. This from another place in his book: Sacred reading involves reflection on the meaning of the text, application to our own situation, and the willingness to be led into prayer. It is, fundamentally, slow reading. We are all concerned with speedreading today; the monks were exactly the opposite. They wanted slow reading – slow, meditative, ruminative reading. Lectio divina is a return to the emphasis on the necessity for slow reading. It’s a prayerful reading of texts. For many people, these may be the liturgical readings of the day. Casey emphasises (going back to the Rule of Benedict) slow reading of an entire biblical book over a period of time, or also some classic of the mystical tradition – you know, half an hour a day. It is also very obvious in what William of Saint Thierry has to say about lectio in his Golden Letter. According to William, lectio divina needs to be fixed – fixed times: At fixed times you should give yourself to some definite reading. You should concentrate on certain authors and let your mind grow accustomed to them. It’s fixed; it has to be faithful and persevering. He says: The scriptures need to be read and understood in the same 8
spirit in which they were written. You will never enter into Paul’s meaning until, by constant application to reading him, and by giving yourself to constant meditation, you have imbibed his spirit. So you have to stick with it and try to get the spirit of the author of the book of the bible that you are reading. It is repetitive slow reading that spills over into the day. It’s chewing the text. The monastic authors often talked about ruminatio. Ruminatio is what a cow does. The cow ruminates; it chews its cud over and over again to get out the full possibility of nourishment. Quote: Some part of your daily reading should each day be stored in the stomach of memory and left to be digested, and at times it should be brought up again for frequent rumination. You should select something that is in keeping with your calling, and in line with your personal orientation, something that will seize hold of the mind and not allow it to think over alien matters. It should be in accordance with your calling, whether you are a monk or a lay person, but also should be something that’s in line with your personal orientation. You are going to get more out of the books that you are interested in, even books of the bible. There may be some books of the bible you feel a kind of sympathy with that you don’t feel with others. When you say you ‘choose’ the ones that are like your orientation, really study them. Read them slowly, ruminate on them, think of them during the course of the day. And finally, such lectio, lectio divina, is going to provide the opening to the further stages – meditatio, oratio and contemplatio. William says these higher stages will begin to erupt into your practice of lectio. Again I quote: The reading should also stimulate the feeling and give rise to prayer, which should interrupt your reading; an interruption that should not so much hamper the reading as restore it to a mind more purified for understanding. So meditatio, and oratio, if you are doing your lectio divina, are going to be coming into it as you begin the reading, and you should be willing to stop the reading at that stage and take the fruit from meditation and from oration. 9
3 Meditatio and Oratio As you meditate, you begin to get the sense of something good out there [and it] kind of leads you on. Then, oratio is what comes as a result of that experience of meditatio and beginning sense of the divine sweetness that you sense a gap between. So you turn to God and you pray [for] more of this experience. So meditatio leads on to oratio. These two broad terms, meditatio and oratio, are very closely related. One gives rise to the other – meditatio gives rise to oratio and oratio comes back to meditatio. One way to understand it would be to say that meditatio and oratio are what we contribute to prayer, contemplatio is what God does. We have to make the effort of meditatio and oratio, and if we do make that effort, we begin to get the kind of grace that is contemplatio that comes to us from God. So those two middle terms, and the final goal of contemplation, are intimately related – it’s what we do and then it’s what God does. Guigo gives a good example of meditatio. He takes one of the classic texts of Christian mysticism, ‘Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God’ (Mt 5:8), and he says you should meditate on that text. You should meditate on that text like putting a grape in your mouth and crushing the grape and tasting it, and tasting all the implications of it; chewing on it to get out the full meaning of it. And how do you chew on the grape of that text? He devises other texts from scripture that shed some light on what it means to be pure of heart. Of course, he is talking to monks who know the bible because they are praying the bible day after day after day, and so they have a kind of memory bank of scriptural texts that they’ll be able to bring to this work of chewing away on what this particular text might mean. And the series of biblical texts that you think of will set the soul alight and begin to give it its first intimation of what he calls ‘divine sweetness’. The example he uses here is smelling good food and tasting 10
good food. As you meditate, you begin to get the sense of something good out there – I can smell it. But you are not yet tasting it. The tasting of that food is going to come in contemplatio. But the smelling of the good odour kind of leads you on. That’s what the practice of meditatio should lead one to. And according to Guigo then, oratio is what comes as a result of that experience of meditatio and beginning sense of the divine sweetness that you sense a gap between. You know that there is something very good out there and yet you have not had a full experience of it, and so you turn to God and you pray to God, oratio – a petition to God in which you say ‘please God give me more of this experience’. This is a prayer that you might make from your meditatio as you move into oratio. Quote: So give me Lord some pleasure while I hope to inherit, at least one drop of heavenly rain with which to refresh my thirst, for I am on fire with love. So meditatio leads on to oratio. What does William of St Thierry say about meditation? William emphasises meditation on the life of Christ, in very good Cistercian fashion. He says the best and safest subject matter for meditation for the beginner newly come to Christ, to train him in interior life, is the outward actions of our Redeemer. In them he should find an example of humility, stimulant to charity and to sentiments of piety. So William here is emphasising meditation on the events of Christ’s life, Christ as the loving Redeemer, because we have to start at that level. We can’t start at the spiritual level, we have to start at that fleshly level of Christ, the man who comes to redeem us. And William says that’s the primary form of meditatio. William emphasises Christ’s passion as the highest form of pre-contemplative prayer that we can make. He talks about the soul now gazing towards the loving face of God, but it’s the loving face of God as revealed in the passion. The soul seems to see you as you are while she ponders your goodness towards her in the wonderful sacrament of your passion. The goodness is as great as you are. It is what you are. She seems to see you as you are, face to face, when as the face of supreme goodness you appeared to her on the cross in the midst of your saving work. The meditation on the face of Christ in the passion actually gives you a face to face vision of God in this life. 11
4 Contemplatio Oratio is closely tied to contemplatio. As you’re practising your meditatio and your oratio, God breaks in on his own initiative to begin to give you the experience of contemplatio – sharing in the life of the Trinity. Guigo teaches that oratio is closely tied to contemplatio. In the sixth chapter of The Ladder of Monks, he says that, The Lord, who is attentive to the meaning and not the words of our prayer, does not wait until the longing soul has said it all but breaks in upon the soul in the middle of its prayer, runs to meet it in haste, sprinkles it with sweet heavenly dew. He slakes its thirst, he feeds its hunger, makes the soul forget all earthly things. By making it die to itself, he gives it a new and wonderful life. By making it drunk, he brings it back to its true senses. Notice the paradoxes of mystical language. God there is acting. This is the part that God does. As you’re practising your meditatio and your oratio, God doesn’t wait for you to finish. He breaks in on his own initiative to begin to give you the experience of contemplatio. And what about William? Contemplatio in William is a very broad term. All the major themes of William’s distinctive mysticism relate to contemplatio such as the notion of seeing the face of God, of having a vision of God, or the understanding of love (intellectus amoris) and the unity of spirit (unitas spiritus). William loved one of the great passages from Paul 1 Corinthians 6:17, which says ‘the person who adheres to God becomes one spirit with God’. He quotes that over and over again because that’s the biblical proof for becoming one spirit with God, of achieving a kind of unity with God. And so unitas spiritus, oneness of spirit, is a kind of formula to express 1 Corinthians 6:17. William, throughout his whole career, wrote endlessly about contemplation. In the middle of his career in the 1130s, around the time he became a Cistercian, he wrote a commentary on the Song 12
of Songs in which he often talks about contemplation. I’ll read you just one example of this. He is talking about the text from Song of Songs 1:15 where the bridegroom says to the bride ‘your eyes are like doves’. ‘Your eyes are like doves’ – spiritually interpreted, mystically interpreted, this is how William reads this. The two eyes that are like doves signify reason and love. Reason and love are the two eyes of contemplation that have to work together as one ascends towards union. And the two eyes become one when in the contemplation of God, in which love is chiefly operative, reason passes over into love and is formed into a kind of spiritual divine understanding which surpasses and absorbs all reason. So reason is important, but it ascends to a level where it’s absorbed into love. It’s transcended in a certain sense. It becomes what William called the intellectus amoris, the understanding of love, or that he also expresses in another very famous phrase ‘love itself is a form of understanding’. Love is not reason, but love becomes a deeper kind of understanding in the highest level of contemplatio. Finally in his last major work which is the Golden Epistle, he also talks a good deal about contemplatio and unitas spiritus, but he emphasises that our oneness with God that comes in contemplation is Trinitarian. It is fundamentally Trinitarian and is centred on the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son. And so when you reach the height of contemplation, when you come to oneness of spirit, unitas spiritus, you in a certain sense become the Holy Spirit joining together the Father and the Son. You say, oh that sounds bad – we become the Holy Spirit? We could understand it best by saying we become the Holy Spirit operationally, that is, we share in love as uniting the Father and the Son; we don’t become the Holy Spirit substantially in the sense that our human nature becomes a divine nature but we’re sharing in the uniting activity, the loving activity that is the Holy Spirit. Towards the end of the Golden Letter: He who is the love of the Father and the Son [that’s the Holy Spirit], he who is the love of the Father and the Son, their unity, their sweetness, their good, their kiss, their embrace and whatever else they have in common, he becomes for man in regard to God, in the manner appropriate to man, 13
what he is for the Son with regard to the Father and for the Father in regard to the Son. The soul in its bliss finds itself standing midway in the embrace and kiss of the Father and the Son. So contemplatio, for William, is sharing in the life of the Trinity, especially in its focus on the action of the Holy Spirit. ď‚Ą
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5 Meister Eckhart Those who pray for anything but God or to do with God, pray wrongly. When I pray for nothing then I pray rightly, and that prayer is proper and powerful. Meister Eckhart Eckhart is a Dominican, a German. He was born about 1260 in present day Saxony. As a young man he would have become a Dominican at the age of 15 or 16 in Eastern Germany. There, he is a brilliant young man so he is sent on for further education to the Dominican house of studies in Cologne and then he’s sent on to Paris, centre of theological education at that time. At Paris, he studies for many years and he takes the Chair of Theology at the University of Paris. Then he goes back to Germany and he serves as a Provincial. And then he has the unusual accolade of being called a second time to teach in Paris. Only Thomas Aquinas before him had had two Paris teaching periods. Eckhart is a very famous preacher at this stage; famous theologian, head of all the Dominicans in Germany etcetera. So it’s a crisis when, in 1326, the archbishop of Cologne says ‘This Meister Eckhart’s teaching is dangerous!’ and they begin an inquisitorial process against Eckhart with excerpts taken from his writings. Most of the Dominican powers that be defended him, and we have Eckhart’s defence saying that he had been misunderstood or misquoted, occasionally admitting ‘well I could have said that better’. And he always says quite explicitly, ‘If someone can convince me this is theologically wrong, I withdraw it. So I cannot be a heretic.’ Why? Because a heretic is not a question of your intellect; it’s a question of your will, that is that you stubbornly maintain things that you have been told and know are wrong. So he said ‘I can be in error, sure, but convince me of that. But I can’t be a heretic because if you really show me that what I have said is incorrect, I withdraw it.’ In the midst of this inquisitorial process Eckhart dies in January of 1328, and usually that’d be the end of the story; but the Archbishop of Cologne keeps pestering the Pope and the Pope is afraid of heresy that is spreading all over Europe. So on March 27th of 1329, the Pope issues a Bull – a papal document in which he 15
condemns 31 articles of the original hundreds of articles taken from Eckhart’s writings. In the 1980s the Dominican order petitioned the Pope John Paul II to withdraw the condemnation but thus far nothing has happened. One of the articles condemned as radical deals with prayer – article 7. Let me read it: He who prays for anything particular prays badly and for something that is bad, because he is praying for the negation of the good and the negation of God and he begs that God be denied him. What Eckhart is saying is, you should not pray for any particular created thing, and the Pope says ‘oh no, no, no, that’s bad’. Now, is that really bad or not? That’s what I’m going to try to unpack. Eckhart liked to speak excessively. He liked to speak outrageously, and a lot of his sermons are filled with outrageous statements. But that was part of his technique as a preacher. Eckhart’s technique was that most of the audience are asleep. and if you say something outrageous it wakes them up and it makes them think. And what you really need to do with regard to your faith is to think about it. Let me quote a few other passages here that echo the same kind of thing. German sermon 67: Those who pray for anything but God or to do with God, pray wrongly. When I pray for nothing then I pray rightly, and that prayer is proper and powerful. But if anyone prays for anything else, he is praying to a false God and one might say that’s sheer heresy. I never pray so well as when I pray for nothing and nobody. So Eckhart has this strong critique of petitionary prayer, asking for some ‘thing’ other than God. And I think that’s the crucial recognition. Because he also insists that prayer is absolutely essential to the Christian life. It’s certain kinds of attitudes of prayer, certain ways in which we pray that are wrong, and that’s what Eckhart is trying to get across in these very excessive dramatic kinds of statements. Sermon 34: If the only prayer we ever say in our lives is ‘Thank you’, that will be enough. He actually gives a little theology of prayer. In the Latin sermon 47.2, he lays down nine points about what is prayer and what is the 16
proper way to pray. He gives a wonderful definition of prayer. He says, Prayer is having a conversation with God; much delights those in love, to talk to each other familiarly and in secret. So there’s a strong theology of prayer in Eckhart but there is also a strong critique of certain ways of praying. Eckhart‘s teaching on prayer needs to be seen in the light of his whole mystical theology in which the idea of letting go, letting go and detaching from creatures and our attachment to creatures is the only way to God, and getting rid of our attachment to creatures, our attachment to ourselves, and even our attachment to God at least God conceived of as a kind of reward machine. God is a great rewarder in the sky; you put in enough quarters in the slot, God will send down a candy bar – that’s the idea of God you have to get rid of. So you have to detach yourself from creatures, inordinate desire for creatures, your inordinate sense of yourself, and also your wrong idea of God. That needs to be let go; that needs to be detached. And in so far as wrong attachment is a part of your praying, it’s a bad prayer. Prayer that Eckhart wants most must be without attachment and it must not become a business arrangement with God. ‘It should not take away a person from his inner rest. It must ask nothing else from God than God himself.’ So that’s the proper prayer – asking God for God’s self; not asking God for stuff that we need to fulfil our own desires. And you find that teaching throughout the course of Eckhart’s writing. I will quote just a couple of these. The most powerful prayer and the strongest of all to obtain everything is that which proceeds from an empty spirit. The emptier the spirit the more is the prayer and the work mighty, worthy, profitable, praiseworthy, perfect. The empty spirit can do everything. The empty spirit is one that is confused by nothing, attached to nothing. For it’s all sunk deep down into God’s dearest will and has forsaken its own will. We ought to pray so powerfully that we should like to put our every member and strain our two eyes, and ears, mouth, heart, all our senses to work. And we should not give up until we find that we wish to become one with God who is present to us and whom we entreat. So, powerful prayer for Eckhart is really essential but it has to be the right kind of prayer. You can’t ask God for some ‘thing’. You have to 17
ask God, in a certain sense, for God. In that sense, Eckhart also teaches that prayer is not changing God’s will because there is no past and present for God. God lives in the eternal now in which all things are present. So asking for something that might change in the future is the wrong way of thinking about this. Detachment is the true nature of prayer. So if someone prays, he asks God to get something for him or he asks God to take something away from him, he does not know how to pray. But a heart in detachment asks for nothing, nor has it anything of which it would gladly be free. So it is free of all prayer and its prayer is its uniformity with God. So your union with God itself is a prayer. If you take that condemned article that I read at the beginning, article 7, the Pope and the inquisitors lifted out this article. In explaining that outrageous statement, Eckhart says: Every devout person praying to God should pray this alone: ‘May the will of God be done, or what God wants.’ Fiat voluntas tua, let your will be done. That’s the ultimate prayer. May the will of God be done or what God wants. Not this or the other thing being done. Let it be that God wishes this or that, whether to give or not to give. Hence a person who prays like this receives by not receiving; consequently always gets everything that he asks for. Two further points about Eckhart’s prayer; Eckhart almost always ends each sermon with a prayer. They are short prayers but I think they are very powerful because they come at the conclusion of each of those sermons and they often summarise the message of the sermon. I am going to read you just one of those because it gives insight into Eckhart’s mode of prayer. We thank you Heavenly Father that you have given us your only begotten Son, in whom you give yourself and all things. We ask you Heavenly Father that just as you have given us your only begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom and in whom you neither will nor can nor may deny anyone anything, so may you hear us in him and make us free and empty of our many faults, and make us one with him in you. Amen. 18
That prayer starts with thanksgiving. It does make a petition, but it doesn’t make a petition for some particular thing; it makes a petition for God’s giving in Christ. It’s a deeply Christological prayer. I think it is a fine summary of what Eckhart had in mind. Eckhart preaches about the birth of the Word in the soul. What is the birth of the Word in the soul and how do we arrive at that birth of the Word in the soul? The basic message is stillness and silence, and emptying the self is the only way to arrive at the birth of the Word in the soul. This may be one reason why John Main in a certain sense had read Eckhart and resonated with Eckhart. Someone asked Eckhart ‘Is it better to do something towards the birth of the Word in the soul, to imagine and to think about God, or should a person keep still and silent in peace and quiet and let God speak and work in him, waiting for God to act?’ He says this teaching is advanced teaching. It is for advanced people. They must know that the very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and to let God work and speak within. When the powers of the soul have been completely withdrawn from all their words and images, then the Word is spoken. Therefore [he says], in the midst of silence the secret Word was spoken unto me. And so, the more completely you are able to draw in your powers to a unity, and forget all those things and their images which you have absorbed, the further you can get from creatures and their images, the nearer you are to this and the readier to receive it. If only you could suddenly be unaware of all things, then you could pass into the oblivion of your body as St Paul did when he said, ‘whether in the body or not, I cannot tell’.
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6 Julian of Norwich Julian re-centres prayer in God rather than in us. God is the ground of our beseeching; God is the ground of our asking. Praying is not something that we do; praying is something that God is doing in us. Julian was born around 1342; we don’t know exactly when she died, maybe around 1417. At the age of 30½, in the year 1373, on May 13, she has a near death experience, and in the midst of that near death experience she is given 16 showings, revelations of Christ’s passion. The descriptions are really remarkable. After this, she has a miraculous recovery and she writes down what she calls ‘the vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman’. By this stage she is now an anchoress in the city of Norwich. An anchoress is a person who chooses to be enclosed within a cell and adopt a particular lifestyle of asceticism and prayer. The cell was built alongside the church where she could observe the liturgy during the day; food would be passed in to her. Julian’s theology is not school theology; not like what the academics, scholastics, were doing. It’s a visionary account and a theological mystical meditation of what those visions meant, that has a profound, deep, but integrated theology. The more you read her, the more you see how integrated her vision of God and God’s relationship to the world is. The striking originality of what she has to say: ‘The centre is love.’ She says for 15 years she had been asking God for deeper insight into ‘this thing’, the experience. The answer given her in her spiritual understanding was God, Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love, Why did he reveal? Love What did he reveal ? Love Remain in this. And you will know more of the same. So it is God as love, charity: ‘uncreated charity’, ‘created charity’ 20
and ‘given charity’. The uncreated charity – God. The created charity – that is the soul. And the given charity which is the gift of grace in deeds, and by which we love God for himself and our souls in God – that’s the kind of centre. But perhaps the most important practice of living out the message of love is prayer, because in prayer we worship charity unmade – that is God; we express the depths of our own charity made – our created nature, our, soul; and we exercise charity given by Christ and the Holy Spirit, we exercise the gift of grace. And she teaches us about prayer, specifically in revelation 14, The 14th of the 16 revelations centres on prayer. After this our Lord showed me about prayer, in which showing I saw two conditions [two characteristics] in those who pray. One condition is that they will not pray at random but only for what is God’s will and worship. The second is that they apply themselves mightily and continuously to beseech [ask] God what is his will and what is his worship. That is how we should worship him. These two characteristics, Julian explains in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Church. Praying the right way is to pray for things that are in accordance with God’s will and his worship. Once again, fiat voluntas tua –let God’s will be done. Secondly, our beseeching, as Julian says, must be strong and unrelenting. We have to keep praying to God with what she calls sure trust, sacred trust. And it is also a prayer that is incorporated into the life of Christians, it’s a collective prayer. She says, Thus we pray for all manner of people that God’s will be done, for we would that all manner of men and women were of the same virtue and grace that we desire for ourselves. But she knows proper praying is not easy and she knows that it is difficult to pray because we often doubt that God hears us. We sense our own unworthiness and we often experience dryness in praying. She says she’s had experience of all of these. Haven’t we all! As she confronts God with these problems about praying, these difficulties, she says God says to her, ‘I am the ground of thy beseeking’ – I am the ground of your beseeching. I am the ground [or foundation] of your beseeching. First, it is my will that you should have it; [beseeching, asking] then I 21
make you wish for it, then I make you beseech it and you ask for it. How could it be then that you would not have what you beseech? So in other words, Julian has re-centred prayer in God rather than in us. If we realise that it’s God who is praying in us – God is the ground of our beseeching, God is the ground of our asking – we get a whole different view of prayer. Praying is not something that we do; praying is something that God is doing in us, as the ground of our beseeching and that should give us confidence in our prayer, even when it seems very difficult to do, when we have dryness, when we have difficulty understanding if we are heard. And she goes on to emphasise that it’s this kind of prayer which is actually the source of our union with God; ‘Prayer ones the soul with God.’ Prayer ‘ones’ the soul with God; it makes God to become one with us. When we recognise that it’s God praying in us, we are one with God. In the final part of the 14th showing in the short text, Julian makes a further step from petitionary prayer which is really what beseeching is, to contemplative prayer, emphasising that prayer makes an accord between God and the soul and that we may move from the prayer of supplication to the prayer in which we behold reverently what God says, that is, behold or contemplate reverently what he says. So within the act of praying, we move from beseeching to looking, to beholding, to what we can call contemplation. Julian highlights the fact that all our prayer is part of Christ’s prayer as given to us by the Holy Spirit. Julian says more about the relationship between the prayer of petition, the prayer of thanksgiving and the prayer of vision or contemplation. [Petitionary prayer] beseeching, is the true gracious lasting will of the soul, oned and fastened into the will of our Lord by the sweet, secret working of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord himself is the first receiver of our prayer, and he accepts it most thankfully. So prayer is Christological. It’s also the work of the Holy Spirit. Thanksgiving: Thanking is a true inward knowing with great reverence and lovely dread [loving fear], turning ourselves with all our 22
powers towards the task our Lord stirs in us that is enjoying and thinking inwardly. And the prayer of vision or contemplation, mystical prayer: And thus we shall, with his sweet grace, in our own meek and continual prayer come into him now in this life, with many secret touchings of sweet spiritual sights and feelings measured out to us as our simplicity may bear it. When by a special grace God shows himself here, he strengthens the creature from above and he measures the showing according to his will as it is profitable for the person at that time. Prayer that starts from the petitionary level moves on to thanksgiving and comes into a prayer of contemplation. That’s Julian’s message. 
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7 The Our Father as Mystical Prayer I have made it a practice of saying it through once each morning with absolute attention. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep in the minutest degree, I’d begin again until I have once again succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. Simone Weil I want to take the most familiar Christian prayer, the Our Father, and try to expound it as a deeply mystical prayer. The Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, exists in three versions actually: one version in Matthew 6, there’s another version in Luke 11, and another early Christian writing that’s really contemporary with the New Testament, the Didache. Chapter 8 of the Didache also contains a somewhat different version. The fact that they are different shouldn’t bother us; that’s the transmission. But the fact that the Our Father exists in these three closely related but slightly different versions is an indication that the prayer went back to Jesus and was remembered in slightly different ways by different communities. We may not think about it as a mystical prayer, but the great mystics have commented on the Our Father. I would like to start with a modern mystic. It is from Simone Weil and her book Waiting for God. Last summer [that’s 1941] doing Greek with T [whoever T was, I don’t know], I went through the Our Father word for word in Greek, and we promised each other to learn it by heart. I do not think he ever did so, but some weeks later, as I was turning over the pages of the Gospel, I said to myself that since I promised to do this thing and it was good, I ought to do it and I did it. The infinite sweetness of this Greek text took so hold of me that for several days I could not stop from saying it over and over and over again. Since that time I have made it a practice of saying it through once each morning with ab24
solute attention [absolute attention]. If during the recitation my attention wanders or goes to sleep in the minutest degree, I’d begin again until I have once again succeeded in going through it with absolutely pure attention. The effect of this practice is extraordinary and surprises me every time, for although I experience it each day, it exceeds my expectation at each repetition. At times the very first words tear my thoughts from my body and transport it to a place outside time, where there is neither perspective nor point of view. The infinity of the ordinary expanses of perception is replaced by an infinity of the second or sometimes third degree. At the same time, filling every part of this infinity of infinity, there is a silence, a silence which is not an absence of sound but which is the object of a positive sensation more positive than that of sound. Noises, if there are any, only reach me after crossing the silence. She concludes very briefly Sometimes also during this recitation or at other moments, Christ is present with me in person. But his presence is infinitely more real, more moving, more clear than on that first occasion when he took possession of me. Here’s a wonderful 20th century witness to the Our Father as a mystical prayer in which Simone Weil is transformed in a very unique fashion and in which Christ becomes present to her. 
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8 Origen on the Our Father When we say ‘thy kingdom come’, we are asking the Father to make Christ more present in us. Christ dwells within us as the kingdom that gives us the power to perform deeds of righteousness. Origen’s view of the Our Father may be described as fundamentally Christological with the phrases of the prayer indicating the gradual process of divinisation that we are gaining through our oneness with Christ in the Church. The Our Father indicates the kind of divinising process that we’re gaining through Christ’s action, and we gain that because we are members of Christ’s body. But the fundamentals of Origen’s interpretation, I would describe as mystical. ‘Our Father in Heaven’ – Origen notes that that phrase, that particular phrase, is not really found in Old Testament prayers, but he feels that it’s a phrase we could use, ‘Our Father in Heaven’, because of the new and secure status that Christians have as adopted sons of God, which of course is crucial in the New Testament, especially in the Pauline texts. So we are adopted in Christ and we are now sons and daughters of God, so we can pray to a common Father: ‘Our Father’. And although the being of God is distinct from everything created, he goes on to claim, Those who do not share his being [God’s being], nonetheless have a certain glory of God and his power, and they are, so to speak, an emanation of the Godhead. So you really get this theme of divinisation that is present there. We are adopted children of God in Christ who is the true child of God. So we have a status in which we can address God in a new way as ‘Father’. When you come to the phrase ‘thy kingdom come’, Origen extends this relationship to Christ, because Christ is the kingdom. When we say ‘thy kingdom come’, we are asking the Father to make Christ more present in us. Christ dwells within us as the kingdom that gives us the power to perform deeds of righteousness. Often, 26
when we are praying ‘thy kingdom’, we think of it externally. That’s one meaning certainly of the prayer. Origin says ‘but the kingdom that you are praying for is the kingdom within, and that kingdom is Christ in his kingdom’. The practice of virtue is what puts us on the road to deeper and deeper recognition of the kingdom of God within us. Again I’ll quote just one passage here. We are on the road to being perfect. If, straining forward to what lies ahead, we forget what lies behind as we make continual progress, the highest points of the kingdom of God will be established in us when the apostle’s word is fulfilled. Therefore, let us pray constantly with the character being divinised by the Word, and let us say to our Father in heaven, ‘hallowed be your name and your kingdom come’. So the whole phrase ‘hallowed be your name and your kingdom come’, for Origen, is an expression of our solidarity with Christ, that is our divinisation. We are being divinised by being members of Christ’s kingdom. ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’: The most important mystical reading is to see ‘on earth’ as indicating the union we enjoy with God now, which is the beginning of the perfect union we are going to have in heaven. So here is what we call the eschatological dimension of his reading which both expresses our divinisation in the present but also our hope and our progress towards the heavenly kingdom. ‘Give us today our daily bread’: For Origen, it emphasises that the daily bread is not corporeal bread; it’s the bread of life that Christ promised his followers, particularly in the 6th chapter of John’s Gospel. Here is how he puts it: The true bread is he who nourishes the true man made in the image of God; and the one who is nourished by it shall come to be in the likeness of him who created him. ‘Daily bread’ for Origen signifies the living bread that’s given daily to our being to enhance it so that we can ‘become true sons of God by eating the living bread that is nothing else but the tree of life’. So here Origen is putting together the image of the tree of life from the Genesis account and the living bread that Christ talks about in John 6. Towards the end of his commentary, Origen confronts the 27
phrase ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’, and he notes this seems to contain a kind of paradox or contradiction. How can we pray not to be brought into temptation when we know that all of life is a temptation? How do we pray ‘lead us not into temptation’ when we know life must involve temptation? Origen’s answer is this: Therefore let us pray to be delivered from temptation, not by avoiding temptation, but by not being defeated when we are tempted. Later in the section he makes valuable comments on the role of temptation in Christian life, basically saying that temptation is necessary for the Christian. It’s necessary because it always induces humility, and it brings us to self-knowledge – that is the recognition of our continuing need for God. So temptation tells us about our own weakness, our need for God, and the necessity for continuing humility and leads us to turn to God in petition to aid us in the midst of temptation. This is a very brief summary of what Origen says about the Our Father. I think it’s a deft combination of the teaching about daily Christian practice including what you do as you are tempted, but also fundamentally it’s a message about mysticism as divinisation through our adoption as sons of God in Christ’s body, the body of the Church. Theosis, we are being divinised, and what we are praying when we pray the Our Father is an expression of our belief in our divinisation, our ongoing divinisation process.
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9 Cassian on the Our Father The Our Father contains the fullness of perfection. It was the Lord himself who gave it to us as both an example and a rule. It lifts up those making use of it to that prayer of fire, oratio ignita, known only to a few. John Cassian Cassian must have read Origen; there are some similarities, certainly. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name’: Cassian says we address God as adopted sons, and we speak of him as being in heaven in order to express our longing to go to heaven. So for him it is eschatological. And he expresses the belief that ‘thy kingdom come’ means first of all that in each day Christ should reign among holy men. Again, it’s a little bit like Origen there in that sense. ‘Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven’: Cassian says, ‘What else is this if not a declaration that men should be like angels?’ And that’s very monastic. Because being like an angel (the Greek is ees angelos, similar to the angels) this was part of the goal of the ancient monks of the East, of the Desert, that the monk who will reach true apathea, true purity of mind, was in a certain sense like the angels, similar to the angels. So this part of Cassian’s commentary in the use of that phrase ‘being like the angels’, is Cassian is talking to monks, ‘Oh yeah, our life is supposed to make us be like angels!’ ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive those in debt’: Cassian makes an original comment here. I’ll read it. Oh the unspeakable mercy of God, not only has he handed us a model of prayer, but he has also given us a discipline which will make us acceptable to him. And so if we wish to be judged mercifully in the end, we must be merciful now to those who have done us wrong. Cassian closes his brief commentary with two sections in praise of the Our Father. First of all, he notes that the prayer contains no 29
petition for anything transitory or perishable. All of what you ask for in the Our Father is what eternally endures. Even if you are asking for it in this life in some way, it’s not pertaining to this life – pertains to the relationship between this life and the life to come. And he closes with the following words: It would seem then that this prayer, the Our Father, contains the fullness of perfection. It was the Lord himself who gave it to us as both an example and a rule. It lifts up those making use of it to that prayer of fire, oratio ignita, the prayer of fire known only to a few. So for Cassian, it’s the perfect prayer and the constant repetition of the perfect prayer is a little bit like that formula ‘God come to my aid, Lord make haste to help me’. That is its way into the gift of the fiery prayer that God sends down. So there is a mystical dimension to the Cassian interpretation.
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10 Teresa of Avila on the Our Father Certainly it never entered my mind that this prayer contains so many deep secrets. For now you have seen the entire spiritual way contained in it. Teresa of Avila So, we have The Way of Perfection. The final part of The Way of Perfection contains this commentary on the Our Father, petition by petition, and Teresa ties that to her own notion of three stages of prayer in the progress to mystical union. So, the three stages are: First of all you start with recollection or ‘mental prayer’ in which we cooperate with God; then you pass on to what she calls the ‘prayer of quiet’, prayer of quiet where the senses and the mind and the other powers are still, and this comes about primarily through grace, not through your own efforts; and finally you arrive at the third stage of prayer, what she calls the ‘prayer of union’ which she identifies with contemplation. The first phrase ‘Our Father Who art in Heaven’ (chapters 2729) teaches the prayer of recollection. Teresa’s Life also viewed meditative recollection as preparing the soul for the higher stages of prayer. What she teaches here is that an assiduous careful practice of recollecting the senses in meditation is necessary to prepare the soul for the higher transfusions of divine grace. She says This recollection is not something supernatural [that means it is not just a gift of God in that sense] but it is something we can desire and achieve with the help of God. It is not yet a silence of the faculties but it’s an enclosure of the faculties of the soul. It’s recollecting them, from outside disturbances, into the soul itself’. The next phrase is the second stage of prayer: ‘Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come’. This is the prayer of quiet which Teresa says is something supernatural. Something we cannot procure through our own efforts. In it the soul enters into peace. Or better, the Lord puts it at peace in his presence. And here she sees, as others did, the presence of the Trinity within the soul as the three 31
powers of memory, intellect and will are stilled by the action of grace. ‘Thy will be done’ is the highest stage of prayer, the prayer of union, total surrender of the will to God in which he draws us into contemplation and even rapture. Again I quote: Oh my sisters, what strength lies in this gift. It does nothing less, when accompanied by the necessary determination, than draw the Almighty so that he becomes one with us in our lowliness, transforms himself into us, and effects a union of Creator with the creature. Not content with having made the soul one with himself, he begins to find his delight in it, reveal his secrets to it, and rejoice that It knows what It has gained and something of what he will give it further in heaven. He makes it lose its exterior senses so that nothing will disturb it. This is rapture. So you have a detailed theory of prayer now explained in terms of the Our Father. Teresa uses the later chapters and the remaining petitions to teach other aspects of the life of the nun. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, for her, is Eucharistic; that is our closest contact possible with Christ. ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’ – she gets very practical here. This is about forgiveness and not thinking about your personal honour. One of the biggest problems that Teresa had with her nuns and the whole Church was the Spanish notion of honour and the gradations of societies, you know, between nobility and merchants and the others, etcetera. Spanish society ran on that, and Teresa insisted you can’t do that in the convent. So she is very concerned that the sisters, the aristocratic ones, do not look down upon the ones who are not aristocrats. The later phrases teach love and fear of God. Freedom from evil is not total freedom from evil (sounds like our friend Origen); it’s the acceptance of the fact that temptation is always with us, and selfknowledge is always necessary. She concludes by talking about the nobility and the profundity of this prayer. She says: Certainly it never entered my mind that this prayer contains so many deep secrets. For now you have seen the entire spiritual way contained in it – from the beginning stage until 32
God engulfs the soul and gives it to drink abundantly from the fount of living waters, which he said was to be found at the end of our path. So it is the prayer for Teresa. ď‚Ą
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Our Lord showed me about prayer, in which showing I saw two conditions in those who pray. One condition is that they will not pray at random but only for what is God’s will and worship. The second is that they apply themselves mightily and continuously to beseech God what is his will and what is his worship. Julian of Norwich
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BERNARD McGInn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and the History of Christianity in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. An internationally respected theologian and scholar of spirituality and the history of Christian thought, he has lectured widely and written extensively on spirituality and mysticism. Prof McGinn's work as theologian and historian recaptures the riches of the mystical tradition for the contemporary world. In these talks, he draws on the experience and writings of the Christian mystics who saw the mystical or contemplative practice as crucial to what it means to be human. McGinn describes the mystical element as necessary to a balanced religious personality, integrating with the institutional and intellectual elements but also bringing something to the whole. In the first volume, McGinn traces the development of contemplation as found in the early church. This volume traces contemplation as represented by the modern mystics including the Carthusians, the Cistercians, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, and others.
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