PRAYING GOD’S WORD

Fr Billy Swan

For his prayer intention for January, Pope Leo XIV prayed:

"Make us a Church that prays with the Word, that is built upon it and shares it with joy, so that in every person the hope of a new world may be born again".

For this 'Word of God Sunday', I share a few thoughts on how we can pray together with the Scriptures.

In ‘The Joy of the Gospel’, Pope Francis reminds us that ‘the sacred Scriptures are the very source of evangelization…it is indispensable that the Word of God be ever more fully at the heart of every ecclesial activity’ (n.174). Therefore, for those of us dedicated to the mission of evangelization, our efforts need to be grounded first and foremost in a prayerful attentiveness to the Scriptures. So how then can we pray God’s Word better in order to share it?

St Teresa of Avila once described prayer as ‘a close sharing between friends…to be alone with him who we know loves us’ (Life, 8, 5). In God’s Word, we encounter the God who loves us. He speaks to us and invites us to speak to him. In this conversation we call prayer, there exists a divine power that transforms us. At the heart of this transforming encounter is God’s search for us and our search for him. Prayer happens when this search ends as the Lover and the Beloved unite. Yet God’s search for us and our search for God are not on the same level. As always, God’s passionate love is infinitely deeper  and greater.

God’s search for us

The Bible reveals a God who makes himself known in his constant search for us. He is the one who seeks humanity, who chooses a people as his own, who seeks out the stray and calls his people to become more perfect in love. Scripture reveals a God who has turned towards human beings in order to enter a relationship with them, to open up a dialogue with them which is directed towards communion with him. Praying with the Word is that time when we listen attentively to our God who comes to meet us and speaks to us.

By listening and submitting to his Word we are drawn into the continual dialogue between the three persons of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit, which is the artisan of prayer, leads us into the communion of love shared between the Father and the Son. When we listen prayerfully ‘with the ears of the heart’ (St Benedict, Rule, Prolog) to God’s Word, we participate in the same reciprocal listening within the Trinity as some of the words of Jesus suggest: ‘I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father’ (John 15:15); ‘When the Spirit of truth comes…he will not be speaking as from himself, but will say only what he has learned’ (John 16:13); ‘Father, I thank you for hearing my prayer’ (John 11:41). Prayer therefore, is nothing less than a participation in the very life of God where each of the divine persons listen and submit to the other in love. With this understanding, prayer with Scripture leads to an absorption into the life of God by listening and responding to the Word. The language of the Psalms in particular articulate God’s Word to us and give us the language to express our words to God. This is the spirit of prayer that permeates the whole existence of the believer. Thus it could be said of St Francis of Assisi that ‘no longer did he say prayers, he had become prayer’ (Thomas of Celano, Second Life, 95). This too is our destiny – to become prayer through prayer and abide in the love of the Trinity. There ‘we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise’ (St Augustine, City of God, 22, 30).

Our Search for God

The classic definition of prayer as ‘the raising up of the heart and mind to God’ (John Damascene, The Orthodox Faith, 3, 24) can give the impression that prayer is something we do by our own efforts. The truth is we would be unable to search for God, still less find Him, unless God had placed this desire within us. Therefore, as we enter into the presence of him who awaits us in his Word, our first priority is to ask for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit intercedes for us and leads us to pray in accordance with the mind of God (See Rom. 8:26-27). The Spirit transcends the knowledge of ourselves in favour of the knowledge God has of us. Without asking the Spirit to guide and purify our prayer we risk asking for what we want rather than what we need or seek to bypass the transformation that is such an essential part of prayer. Without the Spirit we can seek the things of God rather than God himself.

When we pray with the Word of God, the Spirit leads us through the three stages of mystical prayer known as the purgative, illuminative and unitive dimensions that come from the mystical Tradition of the Church. First the purgative - in light of the Word, we are led to an encounter with God as sinners in need of mercy. In the stories of Scripture that confront the darker side of the human condition, we recognise ourselves and seek the grace of repentance.

In the illuminative stage, the Spirit leads us to see ourselves and all reality from God’s perspective in a way that both affirms us and calls us to conversion. For example with the parables, teachings and life of Jesus in the Gospels, we learn to ‘take on the sentiments of Christ’ (cf. Phil. 2:5) in ways that translate into the love of God and neighbour. St John Paul urged all preachers to ‘approach the word with a docile and prayerful heart so that it may deeply penetrate our thoughts and feelings and bring about a new outlook in us’ (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 26). In this we become like the Lord himself whose words and works were the visible manifestation of his interior life of prayer. Prayer with God’s Word also saves us from a mysticism divorced from concrete living and a commitment to the works of mercy. In the words of St James in his letter: ‘Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves’ (1:22). The one who prays with God’s Word is led by the Spirit from the initial lectio of the text to a meditatio, oratio, contemplatio and final actio of what fruitful effects the Word of God might have in our individual lives and in that of the community.

The final stage of prayer is the unitive where the Spirit leads us to union with God. This stage is marked by blessing, praise, thanksgiving, adoration, petition and silently abiding in the love of God. Here is where our search for God meets God’s search for us as we join Jesus who ‘wants us to be where he is’ (cf. John 17:24) in intimate communion with the Father.

Sentire cum Ecclesia

‘Sentire cum Ecclesia’ is one of the themes that permeates the thought of St Ignatius of Loyola. It means to feel with the Church, to love the Church and to listen to God’s Word within the Church community. The Church has always held that ‘the sacred text must always be approached in the communion of the Church’ (Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 86) which means that we listen to it together in community and with the saints and doctors of our Tradition who read, studied and prayed over the same Word in their day. For this reason, the Church is the home of God’s Word where we listen to it proclaimed and preached in the community. This is why a spirituality of the Word based on prayerful meditation on the weekday and Sunday readings is so important as the stable diet of communities and parishes formed and inspired by the Word of God.

Praying with God’s Word is beautiful but risky. It is beautiful because it leads us into deeper union with God who is love. It is dangerous because it calls us to change – it disrupts our comforts and fixed mindsets as we pay closer attention to the vision of life and the Kingdom that Scripture opens before us.

This happens when we pray in the presence of the God who searches for us and finds us - ‘The Lover with his beloved, transforming the beloved in her Lover’ (St John of the Cross, Dark Night, 6). May all of our efforts to evangelize begin from the wellspring of God’s Word that we have first pondered in prayerful contemplation.