NO GREATER LOVE: THE TOTALITY OF PRAYER

When we pray, one of the major categories of prayer is the prayer of petition. At the head of all petitions are the two petitions which Jesus Christ gives us in the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. Of course, a prerequisite for God’s Kingdom to come to earth is that His will be done on earth. We all know that the will of God is very far from being completely done here on earth. Yet there is one place where His will is completely done, and that place is heaven. We know from Divine Revelation that the Blessed Trinity is not the only inhabitant of heaven. There are multitudes of angels as well as the entire Church Triumphant, those who are worthy of dwelling with God for all eternity. These all desire and do the Will of God. Thus, when we are praying for the will of God to be done on earth, all of heaven is with us. Referring to this, theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar in his book Prayer says the following: People are only rarely aware of this when they pray. Unless they are real mystics who actually encounter heaven’s inhabitants---angels, saints, the Mother of the Lord, or the Son himself---they are inclined to act as if they were encountering God in a solitude which is total on both sides, God’s and theirs; as if they were alone in approaching God, alone in trying to come to grips with word and law. This is wrong in both respects. A person does not leave his place in the choir of the praying Church when he goes to his room to contemplate;............Nor, in contemplation , does he encounter the Word of God in abstraction isolated from the multitude of those who are already in the kingdom of heaven. If he so wishes, all his brothers and sisters (living and dead) in whom the kingdom of God has already come or is coming, can be as close to him as is Christ---and hence, through Him to the triune God. 

Heaven is populated with those who have accomplished the will of God. Some of these we have known personally on earth. We can encounter them in our prayer. Theologian Von Balthasar tells us: People are accustomed to think of the “merit” of other’s prayers and sufferings in far too anonymous and sacramental terms, describing them as the Church’s “treasury of prayer”; we pay too little attention to the fact that, in contemplation, the communion of saints also operates in a personal and expressly individual way.

When we pray for the will of heaven to be done on earth, theologian Von Balthasar tells us what we are actually praying for. The will of heaven can, and indeed must, be entirely different from the will of earth. Those who inhabit heaven have an entirely different view of things; what seems important to us is utterly insignificant to them, and vise versa. What we are at pains to avoid can be the very thing which they see as significant, profitable and necessary; what we put at the center is on the periphery as far as they are concerned; and what we altogether fail to see is, for them, the long acknowledged core of this human life of ours, to which all else must be oriented, as to a magnet. However, the earthly contemplative is not required to use his prayer to gain a kind of preview of heavenly plans and connections; he is not to meddle in the affairs of providence, let alone start pulling the strings; he is not meant to grasp the cardinal points and then steer his actions accordingly. On the contrary. Something entirely different is required of him, namely, that he be docile, that he be soft and malleable in the hand of the divine Potter. What is needed is that his love to God should be expressed as obedience, ecclesial, bridal obedience, the obedience of the body to its heavenly Head, being receptive to His will, His suggestions, His slightest movement. Obedience does not want to “see”, and so contemplation on earth is not primarily a matter of “seeing”. On the other hand, obedience must not be mechanical; it must be an agreement in love. It means being sensitive to the will of the one who commands. Light and spiritual understanding may be given in contemplation, but its purpose is to enhance and deepen this sensitivity to the divine will.......The wish “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is not meant to guarantee the observance of some moral commandment from God: it is to open the world of time to its invasion by the whole being of the kingdom of heaven. Many Christians fail to grasp that the reality of the kingdom of heaven is eternal and thus not temporally “future”. What, in prayer, we yearn for, “coming” for which we plead, is not something as yet nonexistent, something we have to introduce into our existing life by means of prayer and effort, like other temporal and historical values. It is the eternally Real; we, who are unreal, need to allow it to conquer us. So, the reality of contemplation is the eternal reality of the Kingdom of heaven; through contemplation it also becomes a reality here and now, for mankind and for the world.

While we need to pray for the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth, we also need to act to bring about this kingdom. Hans Urs Von Balthasar tells us the relationship between prayer and action. We do not bring about the kingdom of God on earth by our own efforts (however assisted by grace); the most we can do, through genuine prayer, is to make as much room as possible, in ourselves and in the world, for the kingdom of God, so that its energies can go to work. All that we can show our contemporaries of the reality of God springs from contemplation: Jesus Christ, the Church, our own selves. But it is impossible to put forward the contemplation of Jesus Christ and the Church in a convincing manner unless we ourselves participate in it. A person who has not loved cannot say anything relevant about love; nor can a man speak about the smallest spiritual problem unless he has genuinely encountered the spiritual world; so too no Christian can exercise an apostolate unless, like Peter the Rock, he can proclaim what he has seen and heard. In our actions, we certainly need to know what we are doing. However, book knowledge and head knowledge are not enough. We need to know what we are talking about through prayer. As theologian Von Balthasar tells us as an example: There is no divinely inspired religious order that was not born of contemplation and long exercised in it, whether its subsequent role were of contemplation or of apostolate and pastoral care, or both.

Von Balthasar warns us of a false concept often held concerning the relationship of prayer to action. “Action” strives for the implementation of the kingdom of God on earth. But if this is not seen to be rooted in the reality of contemplation, if the two things are torn asunder and prayer is regarded, at most, as a serviceable “source of strength” or a “treasury of merit” yielding earthly success, both contemplation and action are robbed of their reality. In the case of action this is obvious enough. Under these conditions, contemplation will seem to be primarily an opportunity to recover from earthly troubles, or a beholding of eternal verities, true and beautiful whether or not they can be realized on earth. Contemplation of this kind lacks the element of urgency which comes, not primarily from the worldly need and the world’s response to it, but from a particular quality of the kingdom of heaven itself, which is “coming”, “groaning in travail”, “imminent”, overripe and overdue. It is bursting with “power”, as the whole character of the gospel shows plainly enough. If only we were not so used to it, it would strike us with great force, like an apocalyptic tempest. 

According to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, the Church is absolutely essential for the coming of the kingdom of God to earth. The Church bows to this immense, imperious will on the part of heaven’s reality seeking its implementation on earth; the Church offers itself to be the meeting-point of heaven and earth; indeed, it is this point of contact. Here (in the Church triumphant, and first of all in those of its members who have already been raised from the dead) earth becomes heaven; here (in the sacraments, in the Church’s official and hierarchical word, but also in all the souls which share in the heavenly reality as a result of this mediation) heaven becomes earth. The contemplative stands on this very spot. When we are praying we are certainly still here on earth. However, through the veil of this earthly life, we are also doing what the inhabitants of heaven are doing, praising God, thanking God, seeking the will of God. May we always desire to join them in doing what they are doing. 

– Jim Nugent, CFP