David Torkington: the art of praying as Christ Himself showed us
Sometimes I dream of writing a book explaining Christianity for complete outsiders. I would write it without using any of the traditional jargon that can be a stumbling block to understanding a message that is meant to be for all. It would help insiders too, who have been brought up on a jargon that has never been properly explained.
The word liturgy is a case in point. The moment I use it I can almost hear people yawn, see their eyes glaze over and hear their mind turning off. So before you stop reading this, let me tell you some good and exciting news. It is about a place without any taxation – no income tax, no capital gains tax, no value added tax – no tax at all, at least as we know it. This should be good news for everyone, but before you pack your bags and put your house up for sale, let me tell you the bad news. This Utopia no longer exists! I have been referring to ancient Athens, whose citizens were free of the ‘financial furies’ that pursue us throughout our lives. I know it all sounds too good to be true, because even Utopians need roads and bridges, civic buildings and public amenities. So how did they do it?
They invented a unique method of public service that expected every citizen to be responsible for financing one major public work once in their lifetime. It may be erecting a statue, building a temple or equipping a battleship to defend their shores. Then they would be free of any other financial responsibility for the rest of their lives. Now this act of public service performed by one person for the benefit of the whole community was called their ‘liturgy’.
So, when Greek converts were told what Christ’s redeeming action had done, not just for His own people but for the people of the whole world, they called that the greatest ‘liturgy’ that anyone had ever performed. It was the greatest act of public service performed by one person for the good of all humanity. However, they did not just want to be bystanders merely admiring what He did. They wanted to become participators by choosing to share in His unique self-sacrificial redeeming action which He performed every day of His life, on every day of their lives. Then, when they came to Mass on Sunday, they would bring with them the daily sacrifices they had made in trying to imitate the way Jesus Himself had brought about their redemption, by battling against the powers of evil every single day of His life.
The battle that He finally won was only possible because of the profound contemplative prayer to which He continually turned every day of His life as St Luke pointed out, to receive the supernatural strength and support to continually confront and confound the Devil. “He would always go off to some place where He could be alone and pray” (Luke 5:16). It was pure contemplative prayer, because there was no sin in Him to prevent Him having a pure, simple, and immediate access to God to receive His Father’s love in return.
Like St John the Baptist, the first Christians realised that if they were to introduce Christ to others, they would first have to undergo a prolonged purification in a real or metaphorical desert. That is why, while St Paul was preparing for ten years to become a true and effective apostle, his confreres in Jerusalem were doing the same. They did not write down the details of their spiritual purification as later mystics did, but nevertheless a few words from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is most revealing:
“I know a man who fourteen years ago was caught up whether still in or out of the body, I do not know – God knows – right into the third heaven. I do know however that this same person whether in or out of the body; God knows, was caught up into paradise and heard things that cannot, must not be put into human language” (2 Corinthians 12:2-5).
That the Church is at present full of would-be apostles eager to do what the first apostles did for the Church is clearly evident. Sadly, what is not so evident is that they are prepared to do what their predecessors did. Both recent converts, cradle Catholics and lapsed Catholics who return to the faith, seem to think that a religious experience, albeit genuine, is a call to set out without delay to become the spiritual leaders for which they have not been prepared. The first apostles were called by Christ Himself and through Him they had profound and personal experience of God’s love, but they still knew that they had to spend many years of penance and repentance learnt in ‘the desert’ before they had the effrontery to set themselves up to lead and guide others.
When I had such an experience, a wise theologian to whom I turned said, that God is not calling you because you are living a virtuous life, He is calling you to live a virtuous life. He is not calling you because you are a saint, but to become a saint, and believe me that will take many years of prayer and purification. Lest what I say about returning to the desert is taken too literally, remember St Catherine of Siena, who died at the age of 33, found her spiritual desert in her own home where the success of her incredibly fruitful apostolate was made possible by three years of continual prayer.
All too many modern Catholics seem to think that the only hope for renewal in the modern Church is to find it in the liturgy alone, and they seem to be blind to the importance of the deep personal prayer without which the ancient liturgy would have been loveless, like salt without savor, bread without leaven. Perhaps the greatest liturgist of modern times, Fr Joseph Jungmann SJ, who wrote the definitive work on the Mass, The Mass of the Roman Rite, makes this abundantly clear when he writes:
“In the present-day liturgical movement, primitive Christianity is often held up before our eyes as a model, an exemplar of liturgical observance. We are to believe that Christians of old, contrary to the tendency of modern individualism, knew no other, or scarcely any other form of prayer than liturgical prayer. Unfortunately, this ideal is not correct. The idea that the life of the primitive Christians revolved exclusively around the liturgy is not correct either. And it cannot be correct, simply because it would be unnatural and in contradiction to the Gospels. How could the Christian life exclude private and personal prayer? It is a gross exaggeration to restrict the prayer of Christian antiquity to liturgical prayer alone.” (The Early Liturgy page 97).
In his many books on early Christian spirituality he goes on to explain how the early Christians like Christ Himself, prayed at least five times a day, as all the jews had done before Christ rose from the dead. However, after Pentecost when new converts joined the Church they were taught a new form of prayer called meditation. In addition to the prayers they were accustomed to use, they were taught to meditate on Christ’s condemnation to death at 9 o’clock, on his Crucifixion at 12 o’clock, on his death on the Cross at 3 o’clock and to rise at midnight to meditate on his Resurrection This was of particular importance when later Christians who had never seen Christ personally, came to know and love Him spiritually, and with the love developed there, to enter into Him mystically, into His mystical body, thence into His ongoing redeeming action. (see Joseph Jungmann’s book, The Place of Christ in Christian Prayer, and Pastoral Liturgy).
When we go to Mass each week we take with us all the sacrifices that we have made in trying to offer everything we say and do each day to God, together with all the sacrifices that we have made in trying to love God daily in our personal prayer life, despite the distractions and temptations that the Devil has been using to focus our attention on him and away from God. To put this in biblical language – we offer to God the repentance that we have been practicing both inside and outside of prayer in imitation of Christ’s redeeming actions throughout His life on earth.
When we go to Mass, our offerings, our sacrifices, are united with Christ and His Sacrifices, made throughout His life, that found their fullest possible fullfilment and embodiment in the Sacrifice that He offered on the Cross. Then something sublime happens. When we offer them to God, in, with, and through Him, we receive in return the same, life and love that He received, namely the Holy Spirit, giving us the supernatural help and strength to continue imitating the redeeming actions of Christ in the forthcoming week. This ever-recurring weekly dynamic constituted the profound mystical, redemptive, sacrificial, and contemplative spirituality that made a greater percentage of the population of the early Church into saints than at any other time in history. Notice that the love that Christ received from his Father to redeem us was not paid as ransom to the Devil for he could not possibly receive it. It was given to us to empower us to continually resist him and finally to defeat him as Christ Himself did before us.
In the year one hundred and twenty, St Justin who finally died as a martyr, summed up how this spirituality was both understood and practiced in life and in liturgy by the first Christians. When, at the end of the great Eucharistic prayer the celebrant said, “In Him, with Him, through Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory to you almighty Father”, St Justin said that the ‘Amen’ recited by the congregation nearly took the roof off. Two hundred years later, St Jerome said virtually the same thing. “When the great Amen was proclaimed by the congregation, it sounded”, he said, “like a thunderclap” that resounded around the Basilica. Those early Catholics, our spiritual ancestors, who were totally aware of their priesthood exercised in the New Temple, which was Christ, were not just giving their assent to a prayer with which they agreed, but something more.
They were proclaiming loud and clear their adherence to a profound inner and mystical way of life. It was a way of life in which they took up their crosses daily, in order to follow and imitate Christ their Redeemer and His redeeming actions both in their daily lives, and in the Liturgy of Love that they celebrated each Sunday.
Too often, in recent times liturgists both professional and amateur have laid all the emphasis on what Christ called the outside of the cup, namely the way in which His redeeming action is celebrated at Mass each Sunday, rather than how it must be practiced in prayer and in action every day of our lives. When we return to the balance that we see practiced by our Spiritual ancestors in the early Church, then the deep renewal that we have so longed, hoped and prayed for, will be well underway.
If you want to study and make this profound Spirituality your own, please think of participating in a ‘LENTEN RETREAT: called The Lost Art of Prayer— Praying as Christ Himself Showed Us, ’ introduced by Bishop Athanasius Schneider on Ash Wednesday and continued each Saturday of Lent, with John-Henry Westen, Kevin Wells and David Torkington on Life Site News. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/join-lifesitenews-theologian-david-torkington-for-an-8-week-lenten-retreat/
Using my free 15 video series on Prayer to Contemplation whilst studying ‘Passport to Perfection’, we aim to introduce this sublime God-given spirituality into our Parishes, in new style Parish Retreats, so that once again it can be lived by the laity who were the first to practice it years before monasticism was even thought of.
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David Torkington is a Spiritual Theologian, Author and Speaker who specializes in Prayer, Christian Spirituality and Mystical Theology.
For the past fifty years, he has been communicating to his audience his profound love of the traditional and authentic Mystical and Biblical Theology that has inspired all his writings on prayer.
He has done this through his ability to express profound truths simply and truthfully in his inspiring lectures and retreats to religious and laity, in England, Ireland, Europe and Africa.
He was asked to lecture on Mystical Theology at the Angelicum in Rome as the only speaker who had practical knowledge and experience in Mystical Theology.
More recently he has concentrated on writing, blogging, podcasting and broadcasting.