Although it is imperative, particularly during Lent, that all of Christendom must turn back to prayer and without delay, no one seems to be listening. Our Lady has been begging us to do this for years, but nobody seems to be hearing her. After her appearances, pilgrims in their hundreds of thousands rushed out to where she appeared to see the place for themselves. They wanted to meet those who witnessed the appearances, to speak with them, to touch them. They wanted to see miracles, the sun dancing in the sky, witness healings, and have their personal prayers and petitions answered. But how many listen to her message, which is not about how to have or see esoteric experiences but how to pray in order to come to know and love her Son?
The Talmud shows how Jewish mothers and fathers like Our Lady and St Joseph would have taught their Son how to pray each day from morning to night. In the early Church, these prayers were Christianised by our first spiritual ancestors. However, in addition to this mainly vocal prayer, another deeper form of prayer called meditation was introduced. It was introduced in order to enable a person to enter into Christ and then into his contemplation of his Father. Because Christ was without sin, he could contemplate his Father’s love at every moment of his life on earth. This contemplation enabled him to receive the fruits of contemplation contained within the love he received from his Father, as all the colours of the spectrum are contained within a single shaft of light.
A Supernatural Prism
In this way, the Risen Christ became a supernatural prism God could use to channel his love through his Son to the world. At first, and because his human being was restricted to a certain part of the world at a certain time in history, only a limited number of people could benefit from his love. However, after his glorification, his human body was transformed into a Mystical Body, transcending space and time restrictions. Consequently, his love could be transmitted to everyone at every moment in history, at any time and in any place. However, as those of us who wish to receive this love and its supernatural gifts are not immaculately conceived, we must undergo a second baptism of fire. In this baptism, the Holy Spirit purifies and so prepares us to receive the fruits of divine love that Christ received before us, enabling us to do for others in our day what Christ did in his day.
A Mutual Loving
Although, at baptism, everyone is taken up into Christ’s Mystical Body, the Holy Spirit draws all who would follow his powerful magnetic love further and deeper into the glorified Christ. This means that we will not only be able to share in his new life, but also into his action, —into his loving of his Father. This same loving enabled him to be open to his Father’s love whilst he was on earth but in a new and even more powerful way. Firstly, because after his Ascension into heaven, the mutual loving that bound him to his Father whilst he was on earth, was intensified by his transformed and transfigured body and soul, which would redetermine his close and intimate relationship with his Father. Secondly, because all who are drawn up into him after baptism can now not only share in this sublime new relationship, but even in the mutual contemplative loving that now bonds the glorified Christ to his Father.
However, as those who are now called to take part in this mutual loving with his Father are not immaculately conceived, there will always need to be a profound inner purification before their ultimate hopes and dreams can be realised. This realisation and the practical experience of what this purification involves is responsible for the vast majority who give up after beginning this journey. St John of the Cross said that ninety percent of those who come to the beginning of purification run away.
A Purgatorial Purification
Those who run away from the purgatorial purification that is offered in this life might console themselves with their ultimate salvation in the next life, thanks to purgatory. But they will not be able to work effectively for the salvation and sanctification of others in this life, which they have been called to do at Baptism. Far more persevered in the early Church, thanks to the teaching and example of the Apostles who preached Christ and him crucified. Furthermore, they encouraged their followers to take up their daily cross inside as well as outside of prayer. In this way, they were prepared to rise with Christ and also to enter into him and into his transcendent loving or his Mystical Contemplation of God the Father. Only then can they observe the First Commandment like never before, as they participate in Christ‘s own loving of his Father. This sublime, wordless, all-engrossing, all-consuming loving of his Father is called his hidden or Mystical Contemplation.
Only by being drawn up and into his Mystical Contemplation will we gradually begin to receive, in ever deeper, ever fuller measure, the fruits of Contemplation, enabling us to do for others in our world what Christ did for others in his world over two thousand years ago. If we read the Gospels, we can see just what Christ was able to do in the Jewish world into which he was born. If we read the Acts of the Apostles, we will be able to see what his followers were able to do in the Roman world in which they spread the Good News.
What they did can be done again by those who are prepared to journey on in ‘The Way’ where they will be so purified that they will be led into the contemplation of our Risen Lord, to receive the fruits of contemplation that can make the impossible possible, as it did over two thousand years ago. Try to remember during this Lent, those memorable words of St Thomas Aquinas, “To contemplate and to share the fruits of our contemplation with others”. Doing this in, with, and through Christ is the very essence of the God-given spirituality that Christ introduced into the early Church. It is the spirituality to which we must return without delay; without it, the renewal for which we are still awaiting will continue to evade us.
Please continue to follow my free course on Prayer during this Lent on essentialistpress.com
