Shelley Lawrence rscj
Province of Canada
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Introduction
In the Constitutions of the Society of the Sacred Heart, 1982, there is a brief but deeply illuminating paragraph about the Eucharist:
By receiving the Body of Christ,
we unite ourselves to His prayer of thanksgiving
and to His offering of Himself to the Father
for the life of the world.
Gradually, the Eucharist makes us become more truly
Body of Christ, broken to give birth to a new humanity. §29
Through active participation in the Eucharist, and especially through reception of the Body and Blood of Christ, the Constitutions suggest, our lives are merged with Christ’s life. In the unfolding of the Eucharist our daily dyings and risings are joined with the dying and rising of Christ, our daily experiences of gratitude and sacrifice are united with His prayer of thanksgiving and offering to the one he called his Abba. Eucharist plunges us into the very life of God and it invites us into the two-fold movement of the Heart of Christ, for Christ was at one and the same time deeply captivated by God and deeply given to every desire of God’s heart for the life of the world.
Religious of the Sacred Heart have come to talk about this double movement of the Heart of Christ—being at once completely contemplative and completely apostolic—as the double demand of our consecration. We are called to a life of prayer and union with God and that contemplative union with God makes us long for the establishment of God’s reign in our world. Our prayer sends us to make known the love of God’s heart which we have discovered in solitude. Our prayer motivates our action. And at the same time, our daily apostolic experiences drive us back to prayer where we bring with us the sufferings and hopes of those we have encountered on the way. It is an ever deepening spiral of listening and loving.
This may all sound a little esoteric—perhaps a way of life limited to religious “professionals.” But it is not. Prayer and activity, contemplation and mission, love of God and love of our neighbor, being and doing…these are some of the many ways to talk about the basic vocation of all Christians. By virtue of our baptism, we are plunged into Jesus’ life and, throughout our lives, we are invited to “put on Christ,” to learn the thoughts and sentiments of his Heart and to make them our own. His total preoccupation with God and his unfailing desire to do God’s will become, then, the measure of our own humanity.
There is no better event than the celebration of the Eucharist to teach us how to listen and to love after the manner of Jesus Christ. Contemplation and action, listening and loving, are the very attitudes that we rehearse together every time we gather for this liturgy. The Eucharist, while not exhausting our spiritual lives, provides a perfect model for a balanced spirituality. The very shape of the eucharistic liturgy, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, tells us about the dynamic of the spiritual life: first we attend and then we respond, first we come before God in silence and poverty of heart and allow God to take hold of us and transform our hearts, and then we reply in word and ritual action. We lift up our hearts and join our thanksgiving to the great prayer of thanksgiving, the one sacrifice of praise in Christ. In fact, the two principle parts of the Mass perfectly illustrate the essential elements of the spiritual life: contemplation and action, being and doing, listening and loving. If we take our cue from the Eucharist, we discover that we cannot respond to God--we cannot engage in action or doing or loving--without also being women and men of attentiveness and listening and contemplation. In this age of the Church’s life, listening is by far the harder of these two aptitudes to acquire, so first a word about learning how to listen before we look at the Eucharist more carefully.
Listening as Key to the Spiritual Life
To suggest that "listening" is a key to the spiritual life is another way to talk about becoming people of prayer. Yet, especially in this age of noise and haste, we can easily agree with St. Paul: "We do not know how to pray as we ought!" We barely even know how to talk about it, about that mysterious conversation with the Divine which prayer is. We do not know how to be in the presence of the One who is wholly Other, how to allow ourselves to be held and loved, forgiven and embraced, blessed and transformed, or how to speak our thanksgiving and praise in communion with the God of our lives.
Perhaps a story will give us courage and hope.
Among the many great zen-like tales of the Hasidic rabbis is the one told about a conversation among disciples in the days just after a great master's death. One of the disciples asked several others: "Do you know why our master went to the pond every day at dawn and stayed there for a little while before coming home again?" No one knew, so the one who had posed the question told them: "He was learning the song with which the frogs praise God. It takes," he added, "a very long time to learn that song." Every day, it seems, the great rabbi put aside matters of consequence and simply sat by the pond. But perhaps, since none of the disciples except one knew what the rabbi was doing, we may conclude that in all those trips and in all that time the rabbi never became proficient. Perhaps the rabbi was never able to say: "Listen. I know a whole verse of the song now. I'd be happy to sing it for you." So, all that time, a whole lifetime, and not much to show. But the rabbi never weighed matters, never considered just how hard the song was to sing, never wondered whether he would ever approach a frog in musical aptitude.
Perhaps what the rabbi learned was how to sit by a pond, how to still his mind and heart, how to listen in some of the many ways that listening takes place. Perhaps what the rabbi learned was that listening, becoming open and receptive, precedes loving, that action must be tested in contemplation, that doing is useless without being. Perhaps what the rabbi teaches us is something about the importance of listening and learning, and something about the song, the song which in our case is the Church's song, not our own, the song which is Jesus' song before the one he called Abba, the song which is the Spirit's song in each one of us.
When St. Paul said that we do not know how to pray as we ought he immediately added that the Spirit would aid us in our weakness. The Spirit of God will teach us to become listeners, will help us and prompt us to sing now this verse, now that phrase of Jesus' song. The Spirit will tutor our hearts if we take the time to go to the pond and listen.
There is no right way to pray. Why? Because we are each different people in different circumstances with different temperaments, drawn to different sorts of ponds. Some will dwell in silence, others love music. For some God is found in the beauty of nature; for others it is on a city street where they encounter the pierced heart of Christ in the pierced heart of humanity.
Prayer is a gradually deeper and deeper relationship with God and, as with any other relationship in our lives, it will change and modulate over time. There will be conversation of every kind, small talk, awkwardness even, but also exchange about what's really going on--the struggles and the pain and the hopes and joys. There may sometimes be a struggle with truth; there may be a rush of words; there may be deep and comfortable silence like the silence of old friends when words cease to matter.
Sometimes, like the rabbi, we will need some structure to become real listeners. Structure can take many forms: there is the discipline of time, of space, of regularity, of certain patterns. We may find the Scriptures appointed for the liturgy useful to launch our listening and to keep us sensitive to their word of life which touches us, troubles us, challenges us. We may turn to the psalms as a pattern of praise in tune with the rhythms of morning and evening, of feast and season, of the joys and sorrow, the highs and lows of the human heart. We may occasionally find that talking about prayer with another, a soul friend, is the discipline we need to remain faithful listeners by the pond. And regularly, the celebration of the eucharist will transform us and tutor our hearts.
The Eucharist: A School of Listening
Perhaps the best school of all to learn the art of listening and loving is that of Eucharist. Regular, attentive participation in the Eucharist for the Christian corresponds to the rabbi’s pond. In the Eucharist we are invited, in a myriad different ways to listen. Consider the Gathering Rites and the Liturgy of the Word. Even before the celebration of the Eucharist begins, God’s word is revealed to us in those who gather around us, a motley assembly of nationalities, ages, race, gender, abilities, and so on, drawn to one another’s side because of God’s gift and grace and because our very presence says to one another that God finds us and saves us in a common life. God’s word is spoken as the ministers process down the aisle—all life is journey into God, they tell us—as our voices search for words to name the feast or season and to merge our praise as one. And then, in the sign of the cross and greeting, we mark the sign of salvation on our bodies, saying, in so many words, that all we do will be done in the name of the Triune God. We speak, then a word of trust: we greet each other with the hope that in the very act of gathering, the Lord is with us. We come as loved sinners to this celebration and we say so to each other, and then, absolved, embraced, we give God praise for creating us, sustaining us and rescuing us for God alone is the Holy One, God alone is the Lord. So many words we hear in these entrance rites and our “listening” culminates with a prayer spoken in our name to God, through Christ, in the power of their abundant and life-giving Spirit. And all of these “words” and all of our attentive listening during these simple rituals of gathering, prepare us for listening, strictly speaking, to the revealed word of God in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, in the voice of the psalmist, in the words of the homily – all of it “revealed” and all of it revealing of human history and human life and the human heart and God’s tender presence throughout. Each week a different piece of the story; each week a different word of shape our being and to inspire our doing.
What will all this listening do for us? It will gradually, almost imperceptibly transform our minds and hearts. As we sit by the “pond” and listen deeply and well, we will learn the song of Christ who sings it now forever before the throne of grace. Once we learn this song we can sing it with Christ in His great prayer of praise and thanksgiving, the eucharistic prayer.
The Eucharist: A School of Loving
Our loving, our response to all we have heard and seen in the Gathering and the Liturgy of the Word, begins with intercessory prayer. The word we have heard has stretched our hearts, our concerns, our cares. The cries of the needy, the plight of our world, the anguish of sickness and death in this local community all form the substance of our faithful prayers and the object of our giving in the collection. Next we move to the Table of the Eucharist, preparing the table, the gifts and ourselves for the action of Eucharist which is to follow. We make ourselves available for the same action of God which will transform the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood.
The central action of the eucharistic celebration follows, the great prayer of praise and thanksgiving called the eucharistic prayer, and it makes us bold in our loving: we unite ourselves with Christ; we remember the great things God has done; we beg the transforming power of the Spirit; we tell the story of the Supper once again; we stand in union with the Risen One and offer the one and only sacrifice, the spotless victim, and surrender ourselves to the same action of the Spirit; we join our prayer with that of Mary and the saints that all the world will share in the salvation and redemption of Christ; and we add a final, doxological burst of praise.
What is there left of our loving? To pray in Jesus’ own words, to embrace one another in peace, to come together at the table and share the food of life, and then to go in peace, but never the same, for those of us who eat of this food must change, must go in the peace of Christ to live, in deed, what we have just done together in word and ritual action.
Conclusion
Perhaps nowhere better then at the altar table of the Eucharist do we learn the implications of Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat’s primordial vision. It was her desire to form a great throng of adorers, and this was associated most often in her day in light of the spirituality of the age, as forming others to the devotion of perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Yet for Sophie, even when frequent communion was rare, eucharistic adoration was a dynamic activity of watching and listening and being utterly attentive in the presence of the sacrament that we might learn how to love, how to glorify God, how to lay down our lives and to live no longer for ourselves. For her, adoration was always and only oriented to full participation in the sacrifice and in the meal, to transformation of minds and hearts, and thus to becoming more really the Body of Christ to the praise and glory of God and for the sake of the world God so loves.
The whole of the Eucharist may be likened to a dress rehearsal. In many ways it is just that. When we come to the Eucharist we “rehearse” the attitude and values of Christ. We learn, gradually, even imperceptibly, to listen more deeply to the word and the way of God in our lives. And listening leads to loving, to responding to the gift and grace of God in Eucharist, We cannot do otherwise. Meanwhile, each time we celebrate the Eucharist we will do it more truly through Christ and with Christ and in Christ to the glory of God. Just as the Eucharist is a perfect mirror of the relationship of Christ to his Abba, his dear Father, it is the same spiritual dynamic that we are all called to realize in our lives—listening and loving, learning to ache with the very desires of the Heart of God and to work for their realization. As the Constitutions of the Society of the Sacred Heart remind us: “Gradually, the Eucharist makes us become more truly Body of Christ, broken to give birth to a new humanity.”
Written for Journey of the Heart, a Bicentennian Anthology, a publication of the Network of Sacred Heart Schools in 2000.
Kathleen Hughes rscj
Province of the Unites States
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