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Prayer: Pathway to Personal Renewal
This is the ninth of eleven reflections on Thomas Merton’s teaching on the True Self/False Self dynamic. This conflictual but enlightening relationship permeates Merton’s huge quantity of writing on the spiritual life. The basic point of the conflict is the individual’s pull toward and away from God, one’ true and ultimate destiny. Merton’s exposure of the consequences of original sin is ruthless in its intensity. This is the task of the False Self. At the same time, the pull of the True Self, the ever-present call of God’s personal and passionate love, is even more powerful. The human heart is the battlefield of this seemingly endless confrontation.
The Carmelite tradition states clearly that we are called to union with God as the goal of our full human development. This is another way of saying that our goal is the victory of the True Self. This is the pilgrimage to the innocence of Paradise. We achieve this transformation by a process of purification that begins with our effort to live an authentic and prayerful life. It concludes by the action of God in the state of contemplation. Our Christian life leads us through prayer to the experience of God that purifies and transforms us.
St. Teresa of Avila had a high regard for vocal prayer. For her, the key point was that we need to pay attention to whom we are praying along with the message of the words of the prayer. The common practice of mental prayer in her day was called meditation. It involved using the mind and the imagination to stir the heart. It led her to one of her more famous sayings, “For mental prayer, in my opinion, is nothing else than intimate sharing between friends. It means taking the time to be alone with Him whom we know loves us.” (L 8.5)
The thinking and imagining of meditation are meant to stir the heart to know Christ better and to seek God’s will. This develops our personal transformation. Teresa told us the goal of prayer is “not to think much but to love much.” (IC.4.1.7)
Teresa always saw prayer’s importance as drawing us into a deeper loving relationship with Christ. Meditation for Teresa was a necessary endeavor. With growth and dedication, the hope is that God will call us into the gift of contemplation. In the meanwhile, we need to make the steady practice to pray as we can each day.
Effects of Prayer
When we pray regularly with deep personal commitment, things happen within us. The purification and transformation are witnessed in a new consciousness. We begin to trust with a new sense of spiritual security. Faith leads us to be open to God leading the way, guiding us through the darkness. Our relationships are enriched with a new sense of compassion. Likewise, we become more accepting and gentler with ourselves and with others. Failures become less traumatic and even seem like an opening to let God take over. Our faults are accepted. We do not need to be in endless pursuit of looking good. We begin to see our search for personal worthiness as truly laughable without God’s mercy
As our prayer becomes more authentic, there is a movement to our true center where God is. This means moving beyond the superficial self, the self-engrossed in the advertising world of never-ending new products to fill the void of a misdirected heart. This is the self-propped up by a lifetime pattern of self-absorption. This is the False Self. Prayer opens the passage to the True Self. While this journey inward in prayer offers innumerable blessings, it is always limited and deficient. It gradually allows us to see how distant we are from our real destiny: union with God.
With this new focus on God in prayer, there are even more deep-seated changes within us. We begin to see the need for more honesty and authenticity in all our relationships to persons, things and ideas. We find it easier to cast out the log in our eye and to be more accepting of others in all their faults. The either/or situations begin to fade away. The both/and view of life blossoms as a real possibility for us. Finally, we gradually begin to experience life as rooted in an overwhelming sense of God’s gracious presence. Prayer, indeed, opens the road for our return to Paradise. This is the experience of moving from the False Self to the True Self.