The Weak, the Wound and the Wonder
By Brenda Lenzen
For those of you who haven't been here in a few weeks, we are studying Time For God by Fr. Jacques Philippe. David and Mike and Sharon have led us through Chapters 1 and 2, where we have heard that prayer is not a technique, but a grace; that we have to persevere in our prayer, and that prayer is a journey that Sharon compared to a map. I love that analogy. Mike gave an excellent example of how having the sacraments without a prayer life to back them up is like eating with a Lap Band on. David talked about never giving up –- like you wouldn't ever give up on your best friend -- and to continue to go before the Lord in silence and wait on his initiative.
Chapter 3 deals with several things, but my main focus is on contemplation. In order to summarize the chapter, I have divided it into three parts: The Weak, the Wound and the Wonder.
The Weak
I am not a theologian, so I can’t explain with any authority what the Church teaches about contemplation. We'll get that out of the way right away. But as I considered my audience today, I speculate that most of you could speak about contemplation better than me. Nevertheless. I would like to tell you what I have experienced personally as it relates to Fr. Philippe's thoughts.
I was confused for the longest time about contemplation. I wondered if it was just another word for prayer. Maybe was it a synonym for prayer? I wondered if it might be a synonym for the word meditation. Fr. Bob Hilz used to talk about contemplation in a way that made me start thinking, way back when, that it was something quite different.
I spent years not really exploring it further, but wondering. I had periods of great prayer times in those years. I meditated on scripture. I did multiple Bible Studies. I learned and practiced Lectio Divina. I interceded for people. I have journal after journal after journal full of thoughts and inspirations about and from the Lord. I sat before the Lord in Adoration and the list goes on. And when I look back, I can say the Lord blessed me profoundly with a wonderful prayer life; however, I did not experience what today I’d call contemplation.
Fr. Philippe says in Chapter 3 that many writers have written many things about contemplation, but we should not get hung up on vocabulary or methods and stages of prayer at this point. Nor should we compare our prayer to anyone else’s. But he says one thing stands out that is similar across the board, and that is that a transformation takes place, And the transformation is that our prayer goes from something active on our part, like meditating on scripture and intercession, to something passive on our part where the Lord does the acting. The speakers in the past three weeks have all touched on this.
With me, the transformation happened like this: As I said, I had been blessed with a wonderful prayer life. I experienced good and dry times for many years. I would be great at it and then I would fall off. It wasn't like I was the most disciplined person for all those years. But it wasn’t until I was diagnosed with cancer that a transformation like Fr. Philippe describes happened. And here is where the "weak" comes in. Fr. Philippe says that it always springs from impoverishment. So my sickness brought me to a total end of myself. Everything I had known and expected came crashing down. The idols I didn’t even know I had, like health and future, were smashed.
I remember going before the Lord and just telling him that I didn’t understand. I remember pouring out my heart to him about suffering, and asking why was there so much suffering. Yet my situation did not change; it got worse. The funny thing is that as the carrying of the cross in my life went on and on, I ran out of things to say to the Lord. To some extent, for me, it was the long suffering and the months of carrying that cross that were actually a saving grace, because I got to the end of myself and my intellect. I would go to him in prayer and simply say these words, “I’ve got nothing, but I trust you."
At some point then, in the midst of those long days, that transformation that I believe our author is talking about took place. God touched me. His love was poured out on me in a way that is indescribable. A peace came that was so pervasive and a knowledge of his love for me filled me in a mysterious way. My go-to scripture was Isaiah 45:3; “I will give you hidden treasures and reveal to you the substance and the mysteries of the secrets.” I believe that those secrets that the Lord wants to give us, are the extent that he can show us how big he is and how much he loves us.
The Wound
When the Lord touches us, we are left wounded. The second point of the chapter talks about the Wound. Fr. Philippe says on pages 72 and 73:
This wound produced in us by love may take many different forms at different times: desire, an eager search for the Beloved, repentance and sorrow for sins; thirst for God; agony in his absence. It may be a sweetness that swells the soul; it may be an inexpressible joy; it may be a burning passionate flame. It will make us into beings forevermore marked by God, with no other life than the life of God within us.
The author goes on to say that when we go to God we seek healing, but in a certain sense, God seeks to wound us more deeply so he can bring about a true cure. I thought that one of the most profound lines in the whole chapter was on page 74 toward the top: “Sometimes the Lord wounds us more effectively by leaving us in our wretchedness than by healing us of it."
Nevertheless, the wound is what happens to our soul when we catch even the slightest glimpse of who God is. The author says, “God is infinitely beyond every image, every representation, every perception open to our senses.” He is beyond our intellect. When God reveals to us something about himself and how much he loves us that goes beyond our imagination and our senses, we are changed. It is so sweet that we long for more. And it is this longing that is the wound.
The Wonder
Finally comes the Wonder. When God operates on our soul and performs the surgery that happens in contemplation, we have a realization that he is living in us. I am going to go off script for a second and again this was the message for today. I wrote this yesterday.
He is not a God who is out there whom we address, but he is in here [striking breast]. He is living in me. And not only is he living in me, but he is living in each and every one of us. He is living in each and every one of them that are outside of these walls. And if the God who is living in me and has touched me so deeply is equally in you, and he is, then think of what that does to our perspective. It makes us love because we realize the dignity in each and every one of us, in each and every person ever created because God is in them.
The last part of the chapter speaks of taking that love that has wounded us in our prayer to the Church by simply and profoundly loving. That is the Wonder.
In summary, the chapter quotes the Carmelite greats: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Lisieux. Our author talks about the great Carmelite tradition that makes the closest and clearest connection between the contemplative life and the life of the mystery of the church.
Charismatic connection
But I say to you that the charismatics of the world are also predisposed to the practice of contemplation. That’s because we are not afraid of the mystery and contemplative prayer at its very truest involves a mysterious touch of the Lord. You know we speak in tongues after all. We exercise the gifts of the Spirit. We are slain in the spirit and all of these things have an element to them that requires not just your normal Vanilla ice cream faith, but a faith like Rocky Road or Millennium Crunch.
Before Vi died, she lent me the book, Contemplation and the Charismatic Renewal by none other than our beloved Fr. Hinnebusch. He edited the book and it contains articles written by charismatic writers of the day on contemplation. They all agree that even though the words charismatic and contemplation seem like complete opposites because after all one is loud and has a boisterous connotation and the other is about quiet and peace, we charismatics can get quiet with the best of them. We can receive all the grace that the Lord has to offer through contemplative prayer.
I do think that God is calling all of us in this room today to a renewal in our prayer life. And as has been said, "this seems so boring" and we've been hearing it for years. But I exhort each of you to ask the Lord about it this week. God is infinite and that word means inexhaustible. He has much more to show each of us in prayer if we can carve out the time. Contemplation can rarely happen in five minutes. We have to quiet our mind, which is one of the biggest struggles and takes practice. Fr. Jerome, our beloved Carmelite from next door, says,
The etymology of the word ‘contemplation’ is ‘con’ and ‘templing’ or constructing the temple within. That temple is each and every one of our hearts. Our hearts are wounded, they are rent open so that the Lord’s Sacred Heart, which was wounded for us, might pour out into our woundedness. He resides here. He is living in each of us. He is transforming us. And he is working on you and you and you and you.
Discussion Questions
Describe your understanding about the Contemplative Form of Prayer.
Have you experienced the sweetness that the author is talking about?
Have you experienced the impoverishment that the author speaks of on pp 69-70?
Think about the quote on page 74, “Sometimes God wounds us more effectively by leaving us in our wretchedness then by healing us of it!”
St. Theresa of Avila says on page 78, “The world is on fire” and “there is no time to be concerned with unimportant things.”Can this quote, given the state of our world, spur us on to do everything we can to develop a keen awareness of how we should love?
Thursday of this week’s first reading was Ephesians 3: 14-20.Read and think about how this describes the practice of Contemplation.
Community Gathering, October 23, 2016