Tag: Fr. Thomas Dubay

Avoiding false teachings on prayer (Part 3 of 3)

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Praying in the Dominican Church in Danzig
 by Daniel Chodowiecki (Wikimedia Commons)

 

This series by Dan Burke originally ran at SpiritualDirection.com. It is reposted her (slightly edited) by persmission.

In this third post we will explore the dangers of reducing God to a cosmic force along with ways we can better gain a healthy perspective on prayer and enhance rather than diminish our progress in prayer (you can read the first post here and the second post here).

Depersonalization

The final and most dangerous aspect of modern popular teaching on prayer is depersonalization. The danger here lies in an essential denial of two central doctrines of Christianity: first, the Incarnation (Christ really did come in the flesh) and second, the distinction between Creator and creature (I am not God and He is not me).

The historical reality of the Incarnation of Christ leads us to the critical understanding that God is person and we can commune with Him as such. This is similar to saying, “My wife is a person, and I am a person, and therefore we can commune most fully as persons.” Now, if I were to treat my wife not as a person but as an ethereal cosmic being, communication would break down in short order.

We can envision two contrasting scenarios that illustrate this point.

1. In the non-person prayer orientation, the husband claims to love his wife and yet stares past her in a self-entranced muttering while she stands ignored. It doesn’t matter that he intends or wants to love her, or is open to loving her; his approach is self-centered rather than other-centered.

2. In a person-oriented understanding of prayer, the adoring husband kneels before his spouse and recites poetry rooted in an exalted language of love and adoration. As he offers his love, all his attention is focused on her. She receives his love, as it is clearly for her alone. This is true intimacy, even if only the beginning of a more complete intimacy of the marital embrace.

God is not a distant idea or cosmic force to be communed with in some dazed stupor or blank mind created by the misuse of a mantra-centered method. These distant, ephemeral, and spiritual sounding descriptions of God and their related ideas are acid to the soul. They radically misrepresent who God is, how He has chosen to reveal himself to us, and what it means to be in a personal relationship with Him.

If God is in any way depersonalized, then his Incarnational essence and personhood can easily be morphed into some kind of cosmic force to be harnessed or absorbed into. Even worse, this can and does lead unsuspecting Catholics into the pseudo-faith of pantheism: “He is everything, and thus I am He.” In the end, the gurus of this false gospel seek to lead the naive practitioner to the center of their being where they then discover who they really are. The great triumph of this false prayer is the “realization” that we are God, because there is no substantive distinction between us (they call this “non-dual thinking”). Clearly, this idolatry will in no way lead us to heaven and is most definitely leading many down the broad path to spiritual destruction.

How can I protect myself?

The key to avoiding these errors is to be aware of them, but not to focus on them. Instead, we need to immerse ourselves in the truth. How? Begin with spiritual reading and meditation on the Catechism, and the Compendium of the Catechism, on the topic of prayer. These treatments are far from dry and, word for word, are the most valuable teachings on the topic in all of the Church aside from the words of Christ Himself. Second, we should immerse ourselves in the writings of the doctors of the Church, particularly those who have come to bear significant influence on how the Church understands what it means to commune with God (like Saints Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Thérèse of Lisieux). Modern writers like Fr. Thomas Dubay and Fr. Jacques Philippe provide fantastic resources on prayer that are faithful to this profound and rich Catholic tradition.

Beyond these helpful resources, there are a handful of publishers of materials on prayer and the spiritual life that can be trusted without reservation. Three of these are Emmaus Road Publishing, Ignatius Press, and Scepter Publishing. Emmaus Road publishes my book, Navigating the Interior Life, in which I provide a time-tested and practical road map to understanding spiritual direction and what it means to enter into a progressively deeper relationship with our Lord. They also publish Ralph Martin’s marvelous work on this topic entitled, Fulfillment of All Desire. For more recommended reading on prayer and the spiritual life, check out EWTN’s Religious Catalogue.

Finally, we should close with a profound example of an authentic relationship with God – a look into a heart that truly understands what it means to commune with the Blessed Trinity. In Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity’s prayer, we find a living and beautiful dismantling of all of the errors we have discussed in this series of posts.

“O my God, Trinity whom I adore, let me entirely forget myself that I may abide in you, still and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity; let nothing disturb my peace nor separate me from you, O my unchanging God, but that each moment may take me further into the depths of your mystery! Pacify my soul! Make it your heaven, your beloved home and place of your repose; let me never leave you there alone, but may I be ever attentive, ever alert in my faith, ever adoring and all given up to your creative action.

O my beloved Christ, crucified for love, would that I might be for you a spouse of your heart! I would anoint you with glory, I would love you – even unto death! Yet I sense my frailty and ask you to adorn me with yourself; identify my soul with all the movements of your soul, submerge me, overwhelm me, substitute yourself in me that my life may become but a reflection of your life. Come into me as Adorer, Redeemer and Savior.

O Eternal Word, Word of my God, would that I might spend my life listening to you, would that I might be fully receptive to learn all from you; in all darkness, all loneliness, all weakness, may I ever keep my eyes fixed on you and abide under your great light; O my Beloved Star, fascinate me so that I may never be able to leave your radiance.

O Consuming Fire, Spirit of Love, descend into my soul and make all in me as an incarnation of the Word, that I may be to him a super-added humanity wherein he renews his mystery; and you O Father, bestow yourself and bend down to your little creature, seeing in her only your beloved Son in whom you are well pleased.

O my `Three,’ my All, my Beatitude, infinite Solitude, Immensity in whom I lose myself, I give myself to you as a prey to be consumed; enclose yourself in me that I may be absorbed in you so as to contemplate in your light the abyss of your [greatness]!” (http://www.elisabeth-dijon.org/v_en/prayer.html)

Dan Burke is the Managing Editor of the National Catholic Register, President of the Avila Institute, the administrator of SpiritualDirection.com, and the author of several books on mystical theology.

Did Teresa of Avila teach Centering Prayer?

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The Ecstasy of St. Teresa by Bernini (Wikimedia Commons).

Last winter on social media, I came across another Catholic author who was promoting yoga. Not as an exercise program, but for spiritual growth. I was shocked. I asked her why she wasn’t promoting prayer instead. She answered, “Meditation is prayer!”

Nope.

Two months ago, my brother forwarded an email from a colleague, asking about Centering Prayer. A friend was pushing it relentlessly. I looked at the website of the Catholic group that promotes Centering Prayer and found this in the FAQs:

This form of prayer was first practiced and taught by the Desert Fathers of Egypt … the Carmelites St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and St. Therese of Lisieux…

Nonsense.

The other day a new reader asked in the comments about meditating on Sacred Scripture. “Is this the same as the method of Fr. John Main, who has adapted an Eastern mantra method for Christian meditation?”

Uh-uh.

Let’s start with Teresa of Avila.

Teresa of Avila’s method of prayer

Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross are Doctors of the Church. They are THE experts on Christian prayer. So what method of prayer did Teresa teach? Are you ready to be surprised?

None.

Now that you’ve picked yourself off the floor, let me clarify that a bit. A passage in Teresa’s Foundations does explain briefly how her nuns should practice meditation. But you won’t find a word about this in her classics on prayer Interior Castle or Way of Perfection. Why not? Teresa was not concerned with methods of prayer, but with stages of prayer. She never taught that meditation was a necessary prerequisite to contemplation, let alone the same thing as it.

She had good reasons. In Way of Perfection she mentions a nun who was unable to meditate, but became holy by praying the Our Father slowly and reverently. Teresa herself spent years unable to pray unless she had a book to read, because constant distractions plagued her.

In other words, she knew that everyone was different and that one method of mental prayer would not suit all souls.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here are what others have said:

What we find in Ss. Teresa and John and in Scripture is a very different message… as far as I can find, not a single sentence … speaks of methodology as a means to deep communion with the God of revelation.” (Fr. Thomas Dubay, Fire Within, 111)

A few paragraphs later Fr. Dubay says:

While St. Teresa was well acquainted with methods of meditation and wished her young nuns to be instructed in them, she emphatically insisted that the primary need for beginners is not to find the ideal method but to do God’s will from moment to moment throughout the day.”

Pere Marie Eugene, OCD, writes in I Want to See God:

For Saint Teresa, mental prayer–the door of the castle and the way of perfection–is less a particular exercise than the very practice of the spiritual life…” (53 in the combined 2-volume work with I Am a Daughter of the Church)

Here are the words of Teresa herself:

Mental prayer, in my view, is nothing but friendly intercourse, and frequent solitary converse with Him Who we know loves us.” (Way of Perfection)

Shortly after quoting this definition, Pere Marie Eugene explains further:

According to temperaments, the intercourse of friendship will assume an intellectual form, or an affective, or even sensitive one. The child will put its love for Jesus in a kiss, a smile sent to the tabernacle, a caress for the infant Jesus, an expression of sadness before the crucifix. The youth will sing his love for Christ and will encourage its growth by using expressions and images that strike his imagination and his senses, while waiting until his intellect can provide strong thoughts to form a more spiritual and more nourishing prayer.” (55)

Prayer is accessible to all

Do you see how important this is? If true mental prayer, the necessary preparation for the gift of contemplation, requires an elaborate method, it is elitist. Such a way bars the ignorant, children, and those of certain temperaments or psychological weaknesses from being contemplatives. It bars them from intimacy with Christ. It makes holiness the possession of the few who know enough and who have the right natural gifts. This is not the Gospel!

Children can become saints. Some have. For St. Therese of Lisieux, spiritual childhood was the way to reach the heights of holiness very quickly. And we are supposed to believe that she taught a form of prayer that was reserved for the few?

On the contrary, the essential element is not a method, but the loving friendship between the person praying and God.

St. Therese’s method of prayer

St. Therese speaks in a similar way as her patron saint and spiritual mother:

With me prayer is a lifting up of the heart, a look towards Heaven, a cry of gratitude and love uttered equally in sorrow and in joy; in a word, something noble, supernatural, which enlarges my soul and unites it to God…. Except for the Divine Office, which in spite of my unworthiness is a daily joy, I have not the courage to look through books for beautiful prayers…. I do as a child who has not learned to read, I just tell our Lord all that I want and he understands.” (Story of a Soul, Ch. 11)

Do you see any indication there of a method we should all follow? In contrast to this, those who want to learn Centering Prayer are encouraged to attend a retreat or workshop or take an online course. But the proponents of Centering Prayer still insist it’s not a technique! It doesn’t take a workshop or a class to learn to speak to God from the heart. Moses spoke to God “as a man speaks to his friend.” That is mental prayer.

Are methods useless?

Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t practice any method of prayer. Methods help us stay on track. They help us not sit idly in our prayer time. Some methods are better than others. But the key is this: no one method of prayer is required to prepare us for contemplation. And no method at all can make us contemplatives.

Contemplation is the goal. And contemplation is not an altered state of consciousness. It is not peaceful feelings. It is a supernatural gift. It is God drawing the soul to Himself on His own initiative. It is a progressive union with Him.

Well, some are

So, why do I say that meditation is not prayer? Prayer can be practiced in many legitimate ways. One of them is meditation. But not Buddhist/Hindu/yoga meditation. Those have a different goal. They are not prayer at all! Christian meditation always centers on Christ. There are many traditional means of Christian meditation. Here is one example.

Do not look for God in pagan religious practices. The Church gives us all we need and more, without the dangers of dabbling in foreign religions.

As for Fr. John Main, the criticisms I have read of his method are very similar to criticisms of Centering Prayer. It too originated in pagan religions, trying to make their practices Catholic, and failing. Christ, not a mantra, is the focus of our prayer. Fr. Main’s organization has been accused of syncretism. He apparently learned his method of “prayer” from a Hindu Swami.

This post originally appeared at Contemplative Homeschool.