Prayer must penetrate and enliven every department o four life, including that which is most temporal and transient. Prayer does not despise even the seemingly lowliest aspects of man’s temporal existence. It spiritualizes all of them and gives them a divine orientation. But prayer is defiled when it is turned away from God and from thee spirit, and manipulated in the interests of group fanaticism.
In such cases, religion is understood to be at least implicitly misdirected, and therefore the “God” whom it invokes becomes, or tends to become, a mere figment of the imagination. Such religion is insincere. It is merely a front for greed, injustice, sensuality, selfishness, violence. The cure for this corruption is to restore the purity of faith and the genuineness of Christian love: and this means a restoration of the contemplative orientation of prayer.
Real contemplatives will always be rare and few. Butt ht is not a matter of importance, as long as the whole Church is predominately contemplative in all her teaching, all her activity and all her prayer. There is no contradiction between action and contemplation when Christian apostolic activity is raised to the level of pure charity. On that level, action and contemplation are fused into one entity by the love of God and of our brother in Christ. But the trouble is that if prayer is not deep, powerful and pure and filled at all times with the spirit of contemplation, Christian action can never really reach this high level.
Without the spirit of contemplation in all our worship—that is to say without the adoration and love of God above all, for his own sake, because he is God—the liturgy will not nourish a really Christian apostolate based on Christ’s love and carried out in the power of the Pneuma.
The most important need in the Christian world today is this inner truth nourished by this Spirit of contemplation: the praise and love of God, the longing for the coming of Christ, the thirst for the manifestation of God’s glory, his truth, his justice, his Kingdom in the world. These are all characteristically “contemplative” and eschatological aspirations of the Christian heart, and they are the very essence of monastic prayer. Without them our apostolate is more for our own glory than for the glory of God.
Without this contemplative orientation we are building churches not to praise him but to establish more firmly the social structures, values and benefits that we presently enjoy. Without this contemplative basis to our preaching, our apostolate is not apostolate at all, but mere proselytizing to insure universal conformity with our own national way of life.
Without contemplation and interior prayer the Church cannot fulfill her mission to transform and save mankind. Without contemplation, she will be reduced to being the servant of cynical and worldly powers, no matter how hard her faithful may protest that they are fighting for the
Without true, deep contemplative aspirations, without a total love for God and an uncompromising thirst for his truth, religion tends in the end to become an opiate.
- Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, 115-116.
The world says, “When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny.” But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. [See Jn 21:18.] Immediately after Peter has been commissioned to be a leader of the sheep, Jesus confronts him with the hard truth that the servant-leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. This might sound morbid or masochistic, but for those who have heard the voice of the first love and said yes to it, the downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of god, a joy and peace that is not of this world.
Here we touch the most important quality of Christian leadership in the future. It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest.
- Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, 81-82
1 comment:
Excellent words from Nouwen, in particular. Leadership development has been a point of conversation and prayer more recently at Cascade Hills, and seeing Nouwen here seem to be reminding of some other things he wrote, specifically in "Wounded Healer."
Hope life, family, and ministry are going well for you guys. We're in the midst of some important conversations with potential supporting churches as we prepare to lead a church plant to West Salem. God has been good in our lives and we keep following where he sends us.
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