The Way – A Spiritual Journey Through Lent

If you are travelling to a distant destination you will have to travel by car or coach, by train or ‘plane by ship or space ship. It is exactly the same with the spiritual journey on which we have embarked, only this journey has an infinite destination because it is into the Love of God which never ends this side of eternity.

The only vehicle that can be of use to us is the human person of Jesus Christ who has already completed the journey before us. He knows the way because he is ‘The Way’. It is not just human  energy alone that will enable us to enter into him, something more is required. This is the love that Christ himself released on the first Pentecost Day after he had completed his own journey.

The Sacred Heart

Those who chose to receive this love and continue to choose to receive it through their baptism, are drawn up into Christ’s own personal mystical body which now spans the distance between heaven and earth. However, at the centre of this mystical body is a Sacred Heart. This Sacred Heart is like a supernatural engine that not only enables the love of Christ to continually rise into God, but all who have been drawn into his love to rise with him.

But those who would rise in, with, and through him must first be prepared through a deep personal purification, for imperfect human hearts cannot be united with the perfect Sacred Heart of Jesus. As this purification deepens it will enable a human heart, not just to be one with his heart in being,  but in loving, enabling it to rise in, with, and through him, and at speed, to the Father.

The One Thing Necessary

There is then only one thing necessary for this journey and that is love. Firstly this means the perfect  love of Christ, and secondly it means our imperfect love that has to be made sufficiently perfect to be united with his love. This purification  is brought about in meditation and then in contemplation. This point  is so important that I must explain myself further.

The Apostles, the first  disciples, and all the new converts who were received into the early Church first and foremost had to meet Christ personally, come to love him, and then have their love purified in such a way that they could enter into him. This was the only way that they could be  made one with his loving which could alone enable  their loving then, and our loving now, to be united with God.

It was for this reason that the very first thing that the apostles taught new converts was to come to know and love Jesus Christ as they themselves  had come to know and love him in the past when he was on earth. It would be in this way that a similar human love that had drawn them to him whilst he was on earth would draw them to him too. In order to do this a new form of preparation for prayer was developed.

A New Preparation for Prayer

In this new approach to prayer that came to be called meditation, a  beginner who had never met Christ in person could meet him in their hearts and minds that would be set afire by the memories of those who had come to know and love him in person while he was alive on earth. Often two or even three Apostles or disciples, who had known Christ personally, would electrify their listeners at the weekly Eucharist, or around the fire side where for centuries tales of the past had been told to inspire future generations.

Their listeners would be encouraged to  reflect and ruminate on these stories in personal meditation where the love would be generated that would fill them with a desire to be united with the one whom they had come to know and love. If you read the earliest sources you will find that the Christians who were taught to pray five or six times a day, were encouraged to use this time to meditate on the life, death and Resurrection of Christ too. In this way like the Apostles before them they would come to know and love him as he once was before his death and Resurrection. This would become the spiritual  stepping stone to loving him as he is now, where the union  for which they crave above all else could be realised.

A Mystical Change of Direction

However, although it is possible to love someone who once lived but who no longer lives on earth, it is not possible to be united with them. It is here, at the most important point in a person’s spiritual journey that a change of direction takes place, which is the special prerogative of the Holy Spirit.

The love that is generated in meditation  is now redirected from the Christ who once lived on earth, to the Christ who now lives in heaven. This is what happened to the first Apostles and the earliest disciples and what they wished for their first spiritual sons and daughters. So like them, they too could be united in love with the Risen and glorified Lord, and through him with his Father.  That is  why they developed this new form of preparation for prayer, that eventually came to be called meditation.

Learning from the Apostles

The first apostles, like St Paul after his conversion, spent many years in prayer after they had received the Holy Spirit. They did this  so that the Holy Spirit could purify their imperfect love of Christ in such a way that they would, not only enable that love to be taken up into Christ’s mystical body, but into his pure mystical  loving of his Father through his Sacred Heart. This was absolutely necessary because it was only in sharing in Christ’s mystical loving,  his mystical contemplation, that they would receive all the fruits of contemplation.

This would  enable them to share these fruits with others through their apostolic endeavour that would take them all over the known world. Alone, they could not convert a pagan Empire into a Christian Empire and that is why they taught all new converts the way through meditation to contemplation so that the fruits of the Holy Spirit could work through them too, to do what was quite impossible without him.

Returning to our Spiritual Origins

Sadly ,when after over three hundred years or more the pagan Roman Empire had become a Christian Empire, laxity began to creep in and the profound mystical spirituality that had animated the early Church soon became the way for the few not for the many as it had been in the early Church.

All renewal that did subsequently renew the Church came through the great saints and mystics who returned to the profound mystical prayer that animated our first Christian forebears. Any objective observer will see that, not just the world, but even our beloved Church is enveloped by an unwelcome moral morass.

This can only be overcome  by returning without delay to the spirituality of our first Christian ancestors. The Holy Spirit is ready to lead and guide us as he led and guided our first spiritual ancestors; the only question is are we?  In our Lenten journey ahead, I hope to describe  the traditional teaching of the great apostles, who have detailed for us how to cooperate with the only One who can lead us back into Christ and into his love that is the only way back to the Father.

But the pivotal role of Mary, the Mother of God helps us to practise that prayer, as God intended, and how to  love God by firstly learning to love him in Jesus Christ her son. For it is in him and in him alone, in whom his infinite love was made flesh and blood for all to see, and for all to love.

Only Our Lady’s recollection of him and of what he said and did, and how he loved, was free of the pride and prejudice that would distort the recollection of others. That is why it is to Our Lady, more than to any other, to whom we are indebted for teaching to the early Church, the way to the contemplation that was her supreme prayer then, as it still is now.

David’s latest book,  The Primacy of loving – David Torkington    https://davidtorkington.com/the-primacy-of-loving/     teaches the traditional and orthodox prayer to contemplation to which all are called.