A Spiritual Revolution

Living the Contemplative Life Upsets the Status Quo

As a seminary professor who teaches spiritual theology, I am dedicated to re-proposing the mystical tradition of the Catholic Church. My first blog Beginning to Pray began for this purpose. The title was inspired by Metropolitan Anthony Bloom’s book Beginning to Pray. As a kid in the 70s, he helped me see in the teachings and miracles of the Gospel an answer to difficult societal and personal questions. This answer involved the living and inviting presence of Jesus Christ that I felt spoke to me through the pages of the book. This presence is the source of Christian prayer. Anthony Bloom’s title Beginning to Pray was drawn from the words of Saint Antony of the Desert who called the whole Church to make a new beginning every day in our effort to pray.

The mystical tradition of the Church knows that we must take up prayer every day, making a new beginning as if for the first time. Moreover, the experience of the Desert Fathers shows that this new beginning is always chosen in the midst of a battle if against our own laziness also against dehumanizing ancient powers that seek an absolute claim over human affairs, to nudge people into tired-out old conventions, to prevent them from discovering their true greatness in the eyes of God. These spirits always torment and drag people down, but the Christian tradition proposes not only an antidote to our own spiritual lethargy but true strength to fight against these foes. The mystical tradition of the Church consists in the new beginning that Christian prayer advances. This new beginning is to rebel against demonic conventions that block spiritual freedom, to dare to live life to the full in a dying world, to risk opening eyes of the heart to the unimaginable possibility of God’s plan.

In my original blog, I proposed over and over that this tradition was rooted in the mystery of Risen Lord, biblical, liturgical, and sacramental. By means of the Cross, this tradition realizes stages of progress in spiritual maturity. Through the action of the Holy Spirit, this tradition describes degrees of prayer and intimacy with God. Though the witness of the saints one can even discern and taste the great mystery of communion with the Holy Trinity. Many of my readers generously shared how this kind of encouragement helped them grow in holiness. In these current reflections, I hope to build on some of this work and take it further.

It is with this hope that I started this new page on substack.com. I am very grateful to the growing number of readers and to spiritualdirection.com for reposting some of these pieces. Some readers have even pledged subscriptions. Thank you all for supporting this effort. I will attempt to honor your support through offering reflections that I hope encourage and challenge you to live life at the pace of prayer. My hope is to evoke a sense of rebellion against the status quo of materialism. I want to help readers fight for freedom from the socially engineered nudging of our technocracies. We are children of the Most High, not cogs in the wheel of social progress; predestined for heavenly glory, not boorish nihilism, meant to live, and move, and have our being in Christ, not in cubicles. Against the absolute claims of the administrative state, I want to help people of prayer stand firm on the truth of human life and the love of God, for our task together is to build a culture of life and a civilization of love. Against a faceless bureaucracy, I would that my friends might gaze on the face of the Lord.

Yes … this is the language of revolution. This revolt is not a violent struggle towards mere flesh and blood, but it involves certain death to self. This rebellion is not about winning ideological conflicts in the marketplace of ideas but instead the conversion of heart to all that is good, noble and true in this short life that God has given us to share together. This great effort takes its stand against the spirit of this age and it refuses to conform itself to anything that is not worthy of God. It is therefore spiritual and mystical in scope - the battle for a kingdom not of this world, but more real than all the politics and social turmoil this world has ever known.

Prayer resists the direction of things - it finds a new direction. The direction of things, the gravity of banality, the drift to societal emptiness is a force to be resisted by all people of goodwill. The direction of things finds expression, now more than ever, toward the administrative state where governments and political powers make absolute claims over human existence. This is the sensational direction of the anti-Christ, the continually tried and constantly failed direction of self-sufficiency where ultimate security is sought in human industry, achievement and cleverness rather than in reliance on the goodness of God. This brave (new?) direction of things is to leave the sacred behind in a digitally enhanced chase of the profane. The direction of things is to ever greater social unrest as a populace surrenders its virtues for power and pleasure. Our entertainment class helps us see that it is a perpetual turning to self-occupation, to self-exultation, and to self-loathing. A spiritual revolution is an effort to turn against this very material direction of things.

How does one take up a spiritual revolution? It begins with the humble decision to pray - to believe that the Risen Lord is present to you personally, that He has taken an interest in you, that He has taken up your side in the trial of life, that He has a great future for you and is actually concerned about your thriving. One can constantly renew this decision, moment by moment and learn to surrender his whole life to the Lord. This is called the contemplative life - learning to live by the pace of prayer.

To choose to live by the pace of prayer, to live a life with eyes of the heart open to the presence of Christ, this is to join forces with many others who have taken up a contemplative resistance against all kinds of technocratic expressions of materialism. Even if some are artists, musicians, writers and poets, they mostly spend themselves in hidden acts of courage just beyond the limelight. All have decided to make silent prayer the priority of their heart, devotion to the Word of the Father the hill on which they will take their stand. Very few actually know each other but, whenever an occasion brings them together, they know a sense of solidarity for which words fall short. Von Balthasar understood how we needed to form these islands of humanity in the storm of secularism. John Paul II called this new solidarity of hearts a spiritual revolution.

To live by the pace of prayer, to live the contemplative life, to live the mystical life - life in the mystery of Christ - this is a revolution. This reversal or change in direction is first of all spiritual on both the personal as well as social plane of human existence. Against entertainment industries that prod players to play to extinction, the revolt of prayer promises a new life that only the spiritual worship of sacrifices made with one’s own body can know. This turn against the spirit of this age is to opt not to be nudged by cultural, market and other social forces, but instead to discern how to obediently respond to the impetus of the Holy Spirit in every circumstance with the liberty of love. It is to opt to see oneself first and foremost as a beloved son or daughter of the Most High and to choose against acting like an abandoned orphan who must fend for himself in a hostile world. It is to choose to live by love, to put the neighbor God has given me first, before my own needs, in even the most unnoticed of circumstances. In a culture of convenience and comfort, living by the pace of prayer is the ongoing decision to seek the blessing of the Father and to thank Him for it even as it comes disguised in all things inconvenient, unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

The Contemplative Revolution takes it stand with, for and by love. This freedom from this age and from the powers of this age always sees every trial, renunciation, challenge, humiliation, rejection and failure as no more than yet one more opportunity to choose to love with the love of God, to fill the moment with as much love as possible, to love because no matter how much we love Christ has loved us more, to open for others a path to hope in Him by love - because he who loves is born of God.

Were one to try to live by love in this way on one’s own limited resources, he would soon fall short and lose hope. But we are not alone - by faith, Christ lives in us and renews His whole mystery in every moment of every day in inexhaustibly new ways. Because He has already won and has already definitively conquered evil, our own victory is assured. All that is required of us is trust - trust expressed in constancy, loyalty to Him, and patient endurance of every kind of hardship.

Contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition sees the goodness of the Father at stake in every moment, good or bad, precisely because it sees the whole world with the resurrected eyes of Christ. To be seen by Christ who gazes at us at work but hidden in the world, to behold Him in all things, to gaze together with Him in love - this is what makes the contemplative life.

This revolt is about a mutual gaze in which one’s own heart is overcome by the love of Christ’s heart, a love that bears away sin - until that love consumes one’s whole existence for the salvation of the world and the glory of the Father. Against forces of darkness, the Christian steps forward boldly in this vision of light with a newness of hope that nothing in the heavens, on the earth or below the earth can resist or hold back - until every knee bends, every head bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.