New York City, Ben Shafer
I never knew that prayer was a problem until I entered religious life.
During this process of “Remembering” I have found myself looking at the history of my prayer over the last forty-five years or so. And I realized, not for the first time but with more focus, that I never knew that prayer was a problem until I entered religious life. I had thought prayer was simply part of life.
The first problem for me was “discursive meditation” and “points.” Basically I couldn’t do it. Luckily, in the early years I had to stay put and so I passed the time browsing endlessly through Scripture and grew to love it. The second problem was that somehow it was conveyed to me that a prayer life was ponderously serious – indeed if I was not faithful to it I could lose my vocation and even my faith. That was so stressful for me that one day, I decided to put it to the test by giving up prayer (I never shared this decision with anyone). And what I discovered was that I could give up the methods and time frames, but I could no more give up prayer than I could give up breathing. Prayer kept happening to me. It was mostly intercessory prayer. Then, of course, I remembered classes on Spirituality where the professor presented us with a “hierarchy” of prayer. I can’t remember the whole list but I do remember that intercessory prayer was on the lowest rung of the hierarchical ladder. So there I was on the lowest rung. Obviously I had to shape up.
After Vatican II we were introduced to all kinds of methods besides discursive meditation. I tried, if not all, at least many of them one after the other, year after year hoping, I suppose, that I would find a method that fitted me and would help me to become a good RSCJ by becoming good at prayer.
To this day I don’t know what it means to be good at prayer. But the wonder is, I don’t care. Somewhere along the way, and without noticing it, I/Me/I stopped being important in my so-called interior life. The world that God loves so much became the focus of my prayer. Through no conscious effort on my part, my prayer had become looking at the world as best I could, with whatever courage I could muster, and interceding for it – for its poverty-stricken people deprived of abundant life, its children deprived of any meaningful future, its women and men deprived of dignity, its misguided leaders, and its sensitive, fragile environment.
I didn’t know that any of this had anything to do with RSCJ spirituality until Patricia Garcia de Quevedo, when she was on the central team, told us in the New York Area that the spirituality of the Society was the spirituality of the Pierced Heart, and that that meant being able to take the suffering of the world into our hearts because we share in the Pierced Heart of Christ. I recognized that I had been doing that all my life but without knowing that it was RSCJ spirituality.
This gave me the courage to go on with my own prayer – basically a prayer of solidarity leading me to intercession. I have always found God in bodies – other people’s bodies. But now I find God within my own body – in the chaos of feelings and emotions I experience daily – the shared grief in the mess, the anger at the incredible injustice and destruction everywhere, the helplessness and confusion, the desire for change and transformation, the compassion for the suffering everywhere, but also the joy and delight in the beauty, laughter, and goodness which keep popping up everywhere, and the neighborliness that is part of daily life on New York city streets, where thousands of ordinary people quietly live the Beatitudes every day.
I now believe that my feelings are not a burden or an accident of temperament, but the grace of baptism – the result of putting on Christ way back then in my infancy and slowly but surely taking on the attitudes, desires, feelings and emotions of the Word flesh. And I am still on the lowest rung of that “hierarchy” of prayer. I also believe that with me there is the Risen Lord who “lives always to intercede” for us who are going to God through him.
Eve Kavanagh rscj
Province of the United States
Remarks made at the Teleconference of the United States province
January 21, 2007
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