A funeral hymnn cited by Fr John Behr in this talk on the economy of God:

I weep and I wail when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, created in the likeness of God, lying in the tomb, disfigured, bereft of glory and form.

O Marvel! What is this mystery concerning us? Why have we been given over unto corruption? And why have we been wedded unto death? Truly as it is written by the command of God, who gives the departed rest

Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or Conscience

Blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts: We beseech thee, took down in pity and com- passion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bit- ter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniq- uities; thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trou- ble: But, O merciful God, who hast written thy holy Word for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of thy holy Scriptures, might have hope; give him a right understanding of himself, and of thy threats and promises; that he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in thee. Give him strength against all his temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smok- ing flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure; but make him to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift up the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

-The Book of Common Prayer (1662).

Jean-Pierre de Caussade:

God’s order and his divine will is the life of all souls who either seek or obey it. In whatever way this divine will may benefit the mind, it nourishes the soul. These blessed results are not produced by any particular circumstance but by what God ordains for the present moment. What was best a moment ago is so no longer because it is removed from the divine will which has passed on to be changed to form the duty to the next. And it is that duty, whatever it may be, that is now most sanctifying for the soul.

· · ·

The divine will is the wholeness, the good and the true in all things. Like God, the universal Being, it is manifest in everything. It is not necessary to look to the benefits received by the mind and body to judge their virtue. These are of no significance. It is the will of God that gives everything, whatever it may be, the power to form Jesus Christ in the center of our being. This will knows no limits.

· · ·

Divine action does not distinguish between creatures, whether they are useless or useful. Without it everything is nothing, with it nothing is everything. Whether contemplation, meditation, prayer, inward silence, intuition, quietude, or activity are what we wish for ourselves, the best is God’s purpose for us at the present moment. Souls must look upon everything as though it were a matter of complete indifference, and, seeing only him in all things, must take or leave them as he wishes so as to live, be nourished by, and hope in him alone and not by any power or virtue which does not come from him. Every moment, and in respect of everything, they must say, like St. Paul, ​“Lord what should I do?” Let me do everything you wish. The Spirit wants one thing, the body another, but Lord, I wish only to do your divine will. Supplication, intercession, mental or vocal prayer, action or silence, faith or wisdom, particular sacraments or general grace, all these, Lord, are nothing, for your purpose is the true and only virtue in all things. It alone, and nothing else, however sublime or exalted, is the object of my devotion since the purpose of grace is the perfection of the heart, not of the mind.

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry — “Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

— Malin, in The Age of Anxiety

Father Zossima:

…be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.

I snapped this photo during my first retreat to Laity Lodge. I hope to return there soon.

According to Kyle Strobel's reading of Jonathan Edwards and Puritan spirituality, there is a vital difference between Contemplation and meditation (31:07 min mark in podcast).

Meditation

A holding of one's attention on scripture and doctrine. "When their mind wandered they would wrestle with themselves, naming the truth." "Being watchful" of your heart.

Contemplation

Here he makes the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation.

a) Natural: Set mind and heart on an object of our attention and desire so that we can be one with it. b) Supernatural: Ps 27, Contemplate: "temple with" To be with God in his temple.

Here is what proves most particularly Puritan: Attending to God. If the heart wanders, bring it back to God. Set your mind on things above.

A second type of contemplation grows out of the quiet, solitude habit and into the practice of the presence of God.

Tish Harrison Warren:

Prayer itself is a kind of work and it sends us into our work in the world.
For the Christian, the postures of prayer and work are interwoven: ora et labora, pray and work. We work as prayer and pray as work. And our prayer and our work transform each other.

In an article about the poetry of doubt and faith, Christian Wiman brings together Christology with interpretation. The way I read Wiman’s take on John 8, he seems to say that the two natures of Jesus the Christ source and pattern the mind’s conception of being and meaning. In other words, two seperate ways of encountering life are, in Christ, one thing. Does that mean, in some sense, the hermeneutical key of meaning and being is the mystery of the hypostatic union?

Being and meaning: two ways in which the mind relates to – or, in the case of the former, participates in, even fuses with – life. Christ and Jesus: two names that are the source and pattern for that way of relation. Christ is Being itself. Jesus is one specific meaning that Being acquired at one specific date in history (and forever after). And they – being and meaning, Christ and Jesus – are one thing.

In the same article, the theme of faith and poetry touches on a question I’ve been considering. How are poems like prayer? Or said another way, what about prayer fits so well to poetry? Wiman gives a response by sharing a poem by the Australian poet Les Murray. I’ll include it here

Poetry and Religion

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier’s one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can’t pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can’t poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There’ll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds—
crested pigeon, rosella parrot—
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

Last week, about this time, I set off for my maiden voyage to Laity Lodge. There, I met some great people and heard some wise words on the Lord’s Prayer from Wesley Hill and Alan Jacobs. For Jacobs, wise words means poetry. He shared what he called two short sermons and three poems: George Herbert’s “Prayer,” Richard Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us…,” and Andrew Hudgins “Praying Drunk.”

In the course of his talk, Alan Jacobs kept calling the poems prayers. I think the connection is more than just a slip of the tongue. The poem and prayer that’s stuck with me most is the last line of “Praying Drunk,” “Remember me.”

“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”

—Saint Thérèse of Lisieux quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2558.

Quoted in this video, “Writing as Spiritual Practice: A Conversation with Rev. James Martin, S.J.” Linked from ImageUpdate

An excerpt from George Herbert’s book A Priest to The Temple: Or The Country Parson, His Character, And Rule of Holy Life, included in the chapter titled, “The Authour’s Prayer before Sermon.”

Thou hast exalted thy mercy above all things; and hast made our salvation, not our punishment, thy glory: so that then where sin abounded, not death, but grace superabounded; accordingly, when we had sinned beyond any help in heaven or earth, then thou saidest, Lo, I come! then did the Lord of life, unable of himselfe to die, contrive to do it. He took flesh, he wept, he died; for his enemies he died; even for those that derided him then, and still despise him. Blessed Saviour!

I'm headed to the beach this weekend!

Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.

— Carl Jung via: Swissmiss

This Jung quote grabbed my attention for its Emersonian charm and near narration of what I hope this weekend to be. On second reading, I found myself remolding some of the pastoral platitudes. At the risk of over-spiritualizing, here are my thoughts:

When one enters a dream, more than one's self is present. We enter the unconscious in the compony of the invisible. There, not all are benevolent. Yet, when we humble ourself to the good, true, and beautiful one, we bath in the sea, walk in the calming compony of the woods and are consequently washed, calmed, and put right, in the compony of The Man of Sorrows. In him, we get clean. In him, we touch nature from the inside.

Prayer is the portal.

My anxiety shortens my breath. The fundamental instinct of respiration thwarted by fear, worry, too much time just in my head. I've learned, through the trauma of a couple panic attacks and a steady breathing practice—in thru the nose, out thru the mouth—that breathing consists in waiting (thanks for humoring the personal example).

It might sound weird that I'm relearning how to breath as an adult. Mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer-all forms of attentive breath train one to wait. I use the personal and fundamental example of patient breathing to claim that to wait is to be human. Our journey through time waits for an end.

Here's Nick Cave on the theme:

The idea of lyrics ‘not coming’ is basically a category error. What we are talking about is not a period of ‘not coming’ but a period of ‘not arriving’. The lyrics are always coming. They are always pending. They are always on their way toward us. But often they must journey a great distance and over vast stretches of time to get there. They advance through the rugged terrains of lived experience, battling to arrive at the end of our pen. In time, they emerge, leaping free of the unknown — from memory or, more thrillingly, from the predictive part of our minds that exists on the far side of the lived moment. It has been a long and arduous journey, and our waiting much anguished.

This morning a listened to a podcast discussion on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar that sadly seems to be inactive. Despite truncated production, the one episode that was published gave an invigorating introduction to Balthasar’s book Christian Meditation. From which, the hosts highlight VB’s theology of meditation, IN Christ. I have two takeaway thoughts and one takeaway prayer:

1. Thomas Torrance’s The Mediation of Chirst might make a great reading companion to VB’s Chirstian Meditation for their mutual, high christology. Torrance holds a reformed catholic view of the atonement that leaves much to mystery, while staying firmly trinitarian in upholding the hypostatic union. Jesus the Christ is cosmically inclusive by way of his exclusice mediation on the cross. In a similar way, VB maintains the particular mediation by the person of Christ, in prayer. By Christ’s mediation, one does not empty the mind in order to incite God to come near. Rather, Jesus prays for us as the incited action of God, particularly when he came near in space and time to pray for us in death (Lord, Jesus, pray for me now and in the hour of my death). “Why am I forsaken,” can only be prayed by Christ on his cross.

   VB and Torrance might hug or, at least shake hands, in saying: even now, the risen, slain-Lamb is behind the veil, praying to his father, in the love of the Spirit, for his people.

2. Prayer is inviting one’s soul into the presence of Chirst and finding one’s home in the triune God. AND Prayer is kneeling, at the trough of our sin, sadness, misery, and self-love, in/with Christ, long enough to find satisfaction in a father already running to meet us—coming to our senses…in the words of George Herbert, “Something understood.”

Our Father, in whom we surrender our perceived control, your self-revelation is heavy with value. Please bring your crowned king to rule, here and now, like it is there and always, in heaven. Give us grace enough for our next breath and decision, in remembrance of you. Please wash us with the clensing blood of your son, Jesus, as we wash others with the water of your word. Don’t steer us into the songs of the Sirens but sail us away from the rocks into the open sea of your love. Because we journey, fight, and serve your purpose, by your strength, and for your praise. Amen