Dialogue with God

A few years ago Michael Plattig, Carmelite friar, and Elisabeth Hense, Lay Carmelite, edited an excellent anthology in German of spiritual texts, one for each day of the year: Dich suchen Tag und Nacht: Mystik in der Tradition des Karmel (To seek you day and night: mysticism in the tradition of Carmel), Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 2001). It includes extracts from 45 Carmelite authors, many of them little known today, arranged thematically. I'm preparing an English version, and will occasionally post some extracts, first from the introductions to each month. Here is February, on the theme Dialogue with God.

A characteristic of idols, according to the Psalmist, is among other things that they can't hear and can't speak: they are incapable of communication (Ps 115.4–7). In contrast, those who pray to Yahweh, the God of Israel, experience a living God, One who speaks to them, who works in and through history, who is in dialogue with them. The "aliveness" of God manifests itself especially in his profound capacity and willingness for self-communication.

That is also the experience of Carmel: whether expressed in the image of the Bride and Bridegroom, or in the terms of Teresa's definition of prayer as a "conversation with a friend", over and over again a living dialogue with God has been proposed as a fundamental element of Carmelite spirituality.

Therefore, it is essential that dialogue with God is practiced and nurtured with the same attention one would give to a friendship, as Teresa's image suggests. This means on our part an effort and a consciousness that our every step towards and with God is always a response to the Word of God already addressed to us. This Word of God is spoken in Scripture, in the tradition of the Church, in the experience of believers before us. It is happening now in worship, in the sacraments of the Church, in personal prayer. To enter into conversation with God means, therefore, to seek out these "places", to engage myself with his words, so that I can discover the Word he addresses to me, and to me only, and become able to answer it.

the holy innocents

It was long traditional to remark, even to flaunt the fact, that the white of Christmas is soon followed by the red of martyrs, St Stephen and the Holy Innocents. We're a bit more squeamish today. Perhaps it's because our ancestors were more familiar with death: they killed their own meat, and we get it shrink-wrapped. Or perhaps we have become rightly suspicious of the kind of devotions which romanticise suffering when our lives are safe and comfortable. The Holy Innocents seem a rude intrusion on our post-Christmas surfeit.

In a very thought-provoking Urbi et orbi address at Christmas Benedict XVI struck a challenging call to a more international consciousness:

Is a Saviour needed by a humanity which has invented interactive communication, which navigates in the virtual ocean of the internet and, thanks to the most advanced modern communications technologies, has now made the Earth, our great common home, a global village? This humanity of the twenty-first century appears as a sure and self-sufficient master of its own destiny, the avid proponent of uncontested triumphs.

So it would seem, yet this is not the case. People continue to die of hunger and thirst, disease and poverty, in this age of plenty and of unbridled consumerism. Some people remain enslaved, exploited and stripped of their dignity; others are victims of racial and religious hatred, hampered by intolerance and discrimination, and by political interference and physical or moral coercion with regard to the free profession of their faith. Others see their own bodies and those of their dear ones, particularly their children, maimed by weaponry, by terrorism and by all sorts of violence, at a time when everyone invokes and acclaims progress, solidarity and peace for all. And what of those who, bereft of hope, are forced to leave their homes and countries in order to find humane living conditions elsewhere? How can we help those who are misled by facile prophets of happiness, those who struggle with relationships and are incapable of accepting responsibility for their present and future, those who are trapped in the tunnel of loneliness and who often end up enslaved to alcohol or drugs? What are we to think of those who choose death in the belief that they are celebrating life?

How can we not hear, from the very depths of this humanity, at once joyful and anguished, a heart-rending cry for help?

i am a little church

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalour of hurrying cities
– i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and death and glory and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i awake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
– i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever;
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

e.e. cummings