By Dr. Tiju Thomas –
Not too long ago, in this very magazine, we saw that we are ‘Called to be communicants’. We are called to be one with God, in what the Catechism teaches and the Church Fathers call as divinization (theosis in Greek).(1) One may then legitimately ask – how one may achieve this? The fundamental answer would be loving prayer. While prayer is used loosely and widely in social circles, it remains a puzzling phenomenon. What is prayer? If God knows everything about everything, and that which needs to be done, why pray at all?! Finally, what does prayer do to God and to me?
One thing is certain; prayer transforms me but does not transform God – for God is wholly and absolutely perfect, and he is complete in every way. St. Thomas Aquinas said that God is actus purus (Latin)/pure act He meant that there is nothing in God that remains unrealized. On our end however, true prayer allows the transcendent to set in. This is easier said than done though. We often mistake prayer to simply mean recitation of well known prayers. While the recitation of prayers certainly helps, evidently purely ‘mechanical prayer’ is not transformative. Prayer requires a certain preparation of the mind and heart, and that makes prayer both beautiful and challenging at the same time.
The Cappadocian fathers (e.g. St. Gregory of Nyssa – 335-395 A.D.; Doctor of the Catholic Church) would call this interior work for prayer – the preparation of the ‘nous’. ‘Nous’ is the heart/a faculty of the mind (considered incorporeal) that opens us to the Divine. They taught that prayer requires a receptive mind, and a heart (i.e. a well prepared nous) that is attentive to the encounter with the Divine.(3) Such prayer is called ‘noetic’ prayer – it allows the cooperation of the human heart with God. This is not without difficulties though. St. Peter who understood this says: ‘Be alert and of sober mind.’(1 Peter 5:8) He teaches that watchfulness and mindfulness are both essential to enter into and stay in the state of prayer. The Greek fathers called this watchfulness nepsis. It is this nepsis that allows elimination of distractions and entry into the zone of receptivity to God, and the maintenance of this state.
All of this is easier said than done. Understandably prayer presents challenges to all of us. In fact we are in good company. Even the disciples of Jesus implored him: ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’ (Luke 11:1) In response, Jesus goes onto teach a prayer that many of us know and recite fondly – the Lord’s prayer – ‘Our Father who art in heaven’. There after Jesus consoles his disciples who struggle with prayer, and asks them to seek God with hope and trust, for God is truly a friend and a father. He consoles: ‘Seek and you shall find’.(Matthew 7:7)
The Lord ’s Prayer is profound because it is about us entering into a state of submission to God by stating ‘thy will be done’. If we hold onto our ego, pride, and self-absorption; then it is impossible to allow God’s indwelling and his work in our lives. Holding onto pride is the most serious impediment to the preparation and maintenance of the prayerful state. This is why the pride is often considered the deadliest of the cardinal sins.(4) Unlike pride, nepsis (watchfulness) and humility prepare us to receive consolations from contemplations on God and his divine nature.
We may now think of what happens in prayer using at least two Biblical images: (i) Jacob wrestling with penuel (Hebrew for ‘face of God’; based on context sometimes interpreted as an angel), (Genesis 32: 22-32), and (ii) Jesus’ frequent visits to the wilderness; not to mention his prayerful stint in the desert – fasting and praying for forty days (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 5:16). While Jacob’s is unwillingness to submit and wrestles with the ‘face of God’, practically making God exterior to him; Jesus submits to the Father completely and draws into himself the Spirit that spirates from the love of the Father. Thus the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and the simultaneously mystical, relational and fundamental nature of God is revealed through Christ.
We have seen Christ’s prayer is fundamentally Trinitarian – a conversation between God the Father and God the Son, which involves God the Holy Spirit; all co-eternally present, all equally Divine – together being the Triune God. This Triune God, who is love, breaks into history through the Incarnate Christ. True prayer is hence the mirroring of that eternal relationship that exists within the interior life of the Triune God. Meditations on the mystery of Trinity, along with mystery of incarnation yields the insight that ‘God is love’.(1 John 4:7). Prayer thus becomes fundamentally an act of love, an act of submission and trust allowing the entry into the life of the Triune God himself.
This ‘face to face’ between the prayerful and God is truly adoration that we rightfully owe to God. Pope Benedict XVI reflected on this mystery and pointed to the fact that this intimate and personal encounter with God, also takes on a fundamentally inter-personal and social dimension:
“Only in adoration can profound and true acceptance develop. And it is precisely this personal act of encounter with the Lord that develops the social mission which is contained in the Eucharist and desires to break down barriers, not only the barriers between the Lord and us but also and above all those that separate us from one another“.(5)
But why pray – would not God do what he knows to be right and bring about this communion anyways? The Catholic response to this is that God created us to be his collaborators; this is so since he has willed us to be his children and ‘imago dei’ (the image of God).( Gen 1:26–28) God rejoices in working with his created beings, and his creations achieve their purpose by doing that which is properly God-ordained.
In the story of creation, while God remains the primary cause, he wishes for us (along with nature and its laws) to be ‘secondary causes’. These secondary causes work with God, and collaborate with him. The human person is special in this story since s/he possesses free will, so as to agree or disagree to this cooperation with God. For us, this gift of free will is in fact a call to both humility and duty. In prayer hence, we render ourselves as collaborators of God, by letting his presence dawn upon us, so that we may live and govern our lives, as per his eternal law of love. Hence prayerful dwelling in God who is love, causes inter-personal barriers to be lifted – we truly become communicants then; we become the ‘salt and light’ of the world (Cf. Matthew 5:14).
We see why a ‘kneeling prayer’, i.e. a humble prayer of trust, with complete surrender of one’s pride is essential to true spiritual growth. We also ought to understand here that God’s activity and our activity are fundamentally different. God is wholly different (transcendent) in his nature, while we are created (thankfully and joyfully in his own image!). Hence though God’s grace and action precedes our own, our free choice remains and is however preserved by God – we are secondary causes in the story he has begun. Hence union with God has an at once personal, social (inter-personal, ecclesial) and even ecological dimension, as Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis(5) have pointed out in recent times.
Finally how do we understand that God becomes wholly present to us (i.e. he is immanent), and yet he remains truly transcendent? Does God have different parts that allow him to be so? Not at all! God in his wholly different nature belongs to no category we can humanly imagine. This means all our conceptions of space and time, which is all we have in our thoughts; are meaningless when it comes to thinking of the simultaneous transcendence and immanence of God. He just cannot be decomposed into more elementary parts. God is fundamental; he is the very ground of all being. He is thus simple and without any describable composition – this is an attribute of God that St. Thomas Aquinas called as ‘Divine simplicity’.
This idea of Divine simplicity points to why we are not in competition with one another to have a ‘greater piece of God’! He is equally fundamental to all of us. We cooperate with God, and hence find communion with God and with one another. In God and through his Divine simplicity, we become one through true prayer. ‘Thy will be done’ allows for the inevitable communion made possible through Divine mercy. This is the significance of the ‘communion of saints’ in the Apostle’s Creed. This communion is remarkable and complete, since God’s indwelling allows the glorification of everyone within the ‘communion of saints’.
Let us kneel and pray with an open heart and with trust, knowing well that we shall receive, when we seek. May we humble ourselves and allow the spirit of God to descend into the very depths of our hearts.
Dr. Tiju Thomas is an interdisciplinary engineering faculty at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M). In addition to his current scientific/technical engagements, he has an abiding interest in catechesis, and human formation of young students and professionals. He enjoys devoting time to work with people and families who wish for some assistance in gaining a meaningful life direction. He believes that his Christian vocation includes both human formation and availability
to those who wish to see hope even through suffering. Dr. Thomas can be reached at [email protected]
This article is written to encourage readers who wish to pray, but have several stumbling blocks along their way. With the due references to teachings of mystical saints (in this work, notably Cappadocian Fathers – St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Basil the Great – all Doctors of the Catholic Church), the reader is guided through the internal preparation necessary to enter into prayer and maintain a prayerful state.
Prayer – its preparation, its metaphysics/nature, and its maintenance – are described. Drawing from Divine simplicity; the fundamental Trinitarian dimensions of prayer are expounded for the catechetical formation of the reader. S/he will thus see the seamless relationship between true and humble prayer, unity with the Triune-God, and oneness with the communion of saints.
- (i) Catechism of the Catholic Church, paras 1988 and 1995. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c3a2.htm
(ii) Tiju Thomas, ‘Called to be communicants’: https://indiancatholicmatters.org/called-to-be-communicants-our-heart-is-restless-until-it-rests-in-thee-o-lord/ - Charles Dubray, ‘Actus Purus’, The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01125b.htm
- ‘St. Gregory of Nyssa’, Internet Encycloedia of Philosophy https://iep.utm.edu/gregoryn/ (see Section 4)
- John Climacus, ‘The Ladder of Divine Ascent’, Translation by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. pp 62-63
- (i) Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to Roman Curia offering them his Christmas greetings (Dec 22, 2005). https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_roman-curia.html
(ii) Encyclical letter ‘Laudato Si’ by Pope Francis on ‘Care of our Common Home’ (2015) http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html