Lord, you are great!
And worthy of our praise!
Your strength and your wisdom
Are beyond measure.We long to praise you,
though we are burdened by our mortality.
We are conscious of sin,
we long to praise you.
For you have so made us that we long for you,
and our heart is restless until it finds rest in you…Lord, I shall seek you by calling to you,
In calling to you I shall believe, for your Word has come to us.
My faith will call out to you, my Lord.
Faith is your gift to me, through Jesus…Confessions: St Augustine tr. Benignus O’Rourke OSA
We cannot help it – we are strangers and pilgrims by our very nature (1 Peter 2.11 AV) – a people called out from among those who live only among material longings, to long for God. How this happens is probably a mystery. Certainly it is grace. We are called; and yet that invitation is for all, even for those who do not answer (Revelation 3.20). Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wrote:
What does it mean to be holy? Who is called to be holy? We are often led to think that holiness is a goal reserved for a few elect. St Paul, instead, speaks of God’s great plan and says: “even as he (God) chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph 1:4). And he was speaking about all of us. At the centre of the divine plan is Christ in whom God shows his Face, in accord with the favour of his will. The Mystery hidden in the centuries is revealed in its fullness in the Word made flesh. And Paul then says: “in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell” (Col 1:19)…
We cannot settle down in a broken world. This is what lies at the heart, I think, of the Bodhisattva Vows of Mahayana Buddhism – a compassion that will not abandon the suffering of created things.
As strangers, we cannot be at home among the pain and injustice that are an inescapable part of this time-bound world into which we were born. As pilgrims, we wander in search of the mercy of God. Like Augustine, we call to God, though our longing itself is through grace. Our weakness, our lack, our longing, is the place where grace finds us: “But [God] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” (2 Corinthians 12.9 NIV)
Thus I have found myself called back again and again to the Jesus Prayer. Laurence Freeman once wrote that “sinners make the best contemplatives.” The sense of being separated, marginalised, is in itself a grace, strangely. Jesus himself said that he came (Luke 5.32) not to call the righteous, but sinners. Perhaps it is in accepting this that we open ourselves to the grace and mercy of God in Christ, regardless of our external circumstances. It is no coincidence that the classical form of the Jesus Prayer ends with the words, “a sinner.” To me it seems that knowing oneself as imperfect, fallible, poor in spirit (Matthew 5.3) is essential to living in that mercy.
As I wrote a while ago, our prayer, as contemplatives, is not something that is for ourselves alone, nor even – as if that were not sufficient – simply our response to our perceiving of the immensity of God’s love. I think this cannot be emphasised strongly enough. We need to understand that our life of prayer, especially if we are called to the contemplative life, is not a solipsistic, “self-actualising” activity, or some kind of relaxation technique aimed at producing a pleasant, stress-free state of mind, still less a quest for any kind of psychedelic experience. The contemplative vocation is as much as anything a call to intercession, and to a life lived in the shadow of the Cross.
In the end, our only destination is mercy. Like Ironside’s Door, it may look different from either side: we cry to God for his mercy – but having received it, we realise it was freely given all along.
A Long Restlessness 