Prayer and the Spiritual Life

It was in putting this prayer into practice that Jesus was also putting into practice the new form of Worship that he promised to the Samaritan woman. As the days of the Old Temple were now finished, there would be a new way of offering Sacrifice to God; that is to offer oneself and all that we do each day.

Before giving you the practical details that will immediately enable you to start your journey to try and follow the way Christ prayed when He was on earth, let me remind you of one of the simplest and most accurate definitions of prayer which many will remember from their childhood. It is simply that, ‘Prayer is the raising of our minds and hearts to God’. This means that whatever methods of prayer we may find helpful, they will get us nowhere if there is something fundamentally wrong with our attitude. Let me explain what I mean.

Two main attitudes have dominated the approach to God in prayer throughout the history of Christian spirituality. Before the Renaissance, the older religious orders emphasised the action of God, while the newer orders, founded after the rise of humanism, tended to emphasise the action of man. Both are orthodox, but both have inbuilt dangers that have often led people into a spiritual cul-de-sac. Those who put all the emphasis on what God does can easily forget what they should be doing to cooperate with Him, thus falling into Quietism. This leads to a sort of presumption as they present themselves to God in prayer like suet puddings waiting to be soaked in syrup! On the other hand, those who stress the importance of what we can do can forget what God does and can easily fall into what used to be called Pelagianism. They act as if everything depended on themselves. This can lead to a sort of spiritual pride, to an arrogance of heart and mind that destroys the prayer that they seem to believe depends more on their endeavour than on God’s.

In order to avoid the danger of presumption, I would like to introduce the word “trying” into the traditional definition of prayer. Then, in order to avoid the danger of falling into pride, I would like to introduce the word “gently” to stress that our endeavour will lead us nowhere without God’s help. If we get angry or upset at our failure, it is not because we have failed God, but because we have failed ourselves and the goal we thought we could attain by our own endeavour.

Prayer then is gently trying to raise the heart and mind to God. Despite having a perfect definition of prayer, most of us will spend much of our lives trying to walk the spiritual tightrope between pride and presumption, continually falling off, once this side then the other. Then in God’s time, not ours, the Holy Spirit will eventually reward those of good will who have persevered despite human failures. They will finally receive the perfect balance that enables them to keep their hearts and minds open to God, free of the pride or presumption that can prevent them from receiving the love they long for more than anything else.

Despite what I have said, the spiritual life seems to have become so complicated over the years that you almost feel you need a couple of degrees in theology just to understand it before you can even attempt 22 Passport to Perfection to live it. Yet it is essentially simple, so simple that you need the simplicity of a little child to see it. You see, there is only one thing that is necessary, and that is love. Not our love of God, but His love of us. In other words, Christianity is firstly a Mystical Theology, not a Moral Theology. It is not primarily concerned with detailing the perfect moral behaviour that we see embodied in Christ’s life and then trying to copy it virtue by virtue. That is stoicism, not Christianity, and it is doomed to failure.

Christianity is primarily concerned with teaching us how to turn and open ourselves to receive the same Holy Spirit who filled Jesus Christ. The more we are filled with His love, the easier it is to return it in kind, as the divine suffuses and then surcharges human love so that it can reach up to God and out to others. Only then are we able to “love God with our whole hearts and minds and with our whole being and to love our neighbour as Christ loves us.”(John 13:34).

The trouble is, we make the same mistake with Christ as we do with the saints. We read their lives backwards. We read about their rigorous lives, their superhuman sacrifices, and their heroic virtue, and we believe that the only way we can be like them is to do likewise. If we would only read their lives forward instead of backwards, then we would see that they were only capable of doing the seemingly impossible because they first received the power to do it from the Holy Spirit in prayer.

If we try to be and do what they did without first receiving what they received, then our brave attempts will inevitably end in disaster. True imitation of Christ or any of His saints means first copying the way they did all in their power to receive the Holy Spirit who inspired them. That is essentially all we have to do. That is why the spiritual life is so simple, if only we have the simplicity of a little child to see it. True imitation of Christ then means, not trying to replicate in our lives His exemplary dealings with others, not trying to love them as He did, not trying to acquire for ourselves all the Theological Virtues, the Cardinal Virtues, the Moral Virtues that we see Him exercising to perfection, but trying something that will give us the power to do all these things. Quite simply, this means to pray as He did, so that we can receive the Life and Love of the Holy Spirit who can make all things possible that are quite impossible without Him.

We know from the early Christian writings that Mary His mother taught Jesus to say His morning prayer each day. The prayer was called the Shema, and it was such an important prayer that it was said many times over each day when every good Jew would go to the Synagogue at nine o’clock, twelve o’clock, and three o’clock. This prayer embodies within it the first and greatest of the Commandments, which is to love God with your whole heart and mind, with your whole body and soul, and with your whole strength. As they practised this prayer, they would receive the help and strength of God to put into practice the second great Commandment which was to love others ‘as you love yourself’. However lest I forget, remember that this second commandment was changed by Christ at the Last Supper to: “You must love others, not just as you love yourself, but as I have loved you” (John 13:34). So, by saying his Shema daily, Jesus offered up and consecrated the whole of the forthcoming day to God by promising to put into practice the most important two Commandments.

It was in putting this prayer into practice that Jesus was also putting into practice the new form of Worship that he promised to the Samaritan woman. As the days of the Old Temple were now finished, there would be a new way of offering Sacrifice to God; that is to offer oneself and all that we do each day. It would become a powerful new form of sacrifice because it would be offered up in the New Temple which was nothing other than His own mystical body.

In the next stage, I want to show how we can truly imitate Christ by following the example of how He prayed every day of His life. By praying as He prayed, because we pray in, with, and through Him, we can receive the same love of God that He received. In order to do this, I will transpose the Shema used by both Our Lord and Our Lady and all the apostles and disciples into what gradually came to be called the Morning Offering. By saying this and by trying to put both the first and the second Commandments into practice as Jesus did, we will receive as He did the fullness of the Holy Spirit who will enable us to do what Jesus Himself did, as He promised at the Last Supper.

This essay is chapter three of the author’s book, Passport to Perfection (Essentialist Press, 2024) and is published here by gracious permission of the author.

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The featured image is “Woman Praying” (1887) by Gaetano Esposito, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.