Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness, by Brother David Steindl-Rast, 1984, 224 pages. Introduction by Henri Nouwen.
This book, which I read as an elective during our two-year Chiara Center Spiritual Direction Seminar, surprised me. Steindl-Rast’s fascination with words reminds me that he learned English as a second language and therefore might dig a little deeper than a native English speaker. In his foreword, Henri Nouwen appreciates Brother David’s way of play with words, who finds value in the rhythms of several poets: Kabir, Rilke, Eliot, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Auden, Frost, D. H. Lawrence, and a Danish scientist who played with English words in rhyme, Piet Hien (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Hein_(scientist). (Some of Hien’s playful poems are collected online and compiled here: http://www.davesandel.net/grooks-poems-of-the-lighter-kind-by-piet-hein/)
Brother David distinguishes between hopes and hope: “List the hopes you have in view of a particular project. Next, use your imagination to picture every single one of those hopes going down the drain … The hope that is left after all your hopes are gone – that is pure hope, rooted in the heart” (p. 144).
Equally helpful to me is his distinction between purpose and meaning: “In order to achieve our purpose we must take hold of the situation, take matters in hand, take charge of things … (on the other hand, when you) experienced deep meaning you gave yourself to the experience, it took hold of you and so you found meaning in it. Unless you take control, you won’t achieve your purpose; but unless you give yourself, you can’t experience meaning” (p. 69).
Prayerfulness, which is another word for wonder or wonderment in Steindl-Rast’s lexicon, is “given” to me. It’s not in my control, while saying prayers is in my control and can easily stay purposeful but lose any sense of meaning. But prayer and prayers are intended to come together: “(Giving in to wonder) is a matter of practice, of doing it over and over again, till it becomes second nature. And the more we become alive and awake, the more everything we do becomes prayer. Eventually, even our prayers will become prayer” (p. 47-48).
In his last chapter Brother Steindl-Rast challenges me to think of Jesus Christ as the “tension between two points of reference” (p. 204). There is the historic Jesus and the timeless “Christ-reality in him and all of us.” When I honor this creative tension, I am less likely to merely worship Jesus without following him. Instead, I more easily appreciate the life of Jesus as “an objective standard for the life of Christians” AND allow myself to learn what Paul meant when he said, “Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
Even more challenging for me is to not become “paralyzed by labels.” Steindl-Rast writes, “When Jesus says, ‘I am the Way’ in John 14:6, we would limit his claim pitifully by thinking of one way among a thousand others. This cannot be the meaning of his word. Rather, whosoever is ‘on the way’ to God is on the way of Jesus whose name means ‘God saves.’” The label “Christian” is only meaningful as I open to God’s guidance in becoming a little Christ. This is the walk of my deepest longings. “But it means finding one’s way by leaving the way behind with every step forward” (p. 220).
Steindl-Rast compiles an impressive list of either-or words and patiently kneads them into both-and words. They invite me to reflect on how silence moves into words, confusion into understanding, weakness into strength. But Steindl-Rast warns his readers that stones do not become bread; rather, like Jesus we learn to accept them even though they are still stones. Death is death. What lies on the other side? We don’t “know,” but Steindl-Rast is ready with his own “cockeyed optimism” when he points out that in all our little deaths we discover more meaning, more depth, more life. So what must lie on the other side of the big death? Big life.
QUOTATIONS
Condensed from the Foreword by Henri Nouwen:
This book is a true delight. Knowing Brother David is a special grace. As long as I have been in the United States I have been blessed with his presence in my life.
I have seldom taught a course without trying to make David a part of it, because I know that the thousands of people who hear him speak in churches, classrooms and retreat centers never forget him. (Nouwen taught at Notre Dame from 1966-1968, Yale from 1971-1981, and was just beginning three years of teaching at Harvard as this book was published).
Whenever he speaks, it is always much more than a brilliant lecture. It is something of an event. When Brother David enters into the heart and mind of his listener something new happens to them and they know it. He is my ideal of a teacher. He does much more than speak about the spiritual life – he speaks of it with the authority of the monk who is living it. For Brother David there hardly seems to be a distinction between teaching, preaching, praying and meditating.
He has the ability to invite his listeners to become part of his own experience, and to enter with him in the places that fill him with gratitude and joy. His lively gestures, his open, always surprised eyes, his attentiveness to every question, his concise responses, his sparkling humor and most of all his obvious love for his students allow him to open hearts that remain mostly closed to the realities from and about which he speaks.
To my embarrassment, I discovered that concepts I had explored elaborately int eh same course became suddenly and unexpectedly crystal clear when Brother David touched upon them. My embarrassment, however, was always a happy embarrassment since I too experienced that same clarity and felt loved in a new way that freed me to understand with less fear.
Brother David makes old words new. He speaks simple and normal words like joy, peace, patience, humility, obedience, heart and mind with so much care that they appear as precious gifts to be admired and joyfully shared with others. His words become active instruments of inner transformation.
Brother David’s monastic life has formed him in gratitude. He knows with his heart and mind that a monk is a monk to say thanks. In his visits with me he saw flowers with the an expression of discovery and surprise, he looked at the sky as a marvelous piece of art, he admired poetry, music and handicrafts with a spontaneous enthusiasm.
In the midst of a pragmatic world Brother David calls us to “useless” praise. Joy and peace are closer at hand than we might realize. Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer throws a ray of light and lets us see that we can live as people who let an “inch of surprise become a mile of gratefulness.”
Surprise and Gratefulness
The interdependence of gratefulness is truly mutual. The receiver of the gift depends on the giver. Obviously so. But the circle of gratefulness is incomplete until the giver of the gift becomes the receiver: a receiver of thanks. When we give thanks, we give something greater than the gift we received, whatever it was. The greatest gift one can give is thanksgiving. In giving gifts, we give what we can spare, but in giving thanks we give ourselves. One who says “Thank you” to another really says, “We belong together.” – p. 17
In the great dance, giver and receiver are one. We suddenly realize how little it matters which of the two roles one happens to play at a given time. Beyond time, our true self rests in itself in perfect stillness. Within time, this is realized by a graceful give-and-take in the dance of life. As in a fast spinning top, the stillness and the dance are one. Only in that ones is true self-sufficiency. Any other self-sufficiency is illusion. – p. 23
If we begin by fully tasting joy wherever at this time we can, wider and wider areas of our feelings will become youthful again and respond. Gratefulness makes us young. By growing more grateful, we grow younger every day. – p. 24-25
Heart and Mind
“Restless is our heart until …” Until what? Until we find rest. But what can still our existential thirst? Today many who thirst will not use the name “God” because of those of us who do use it. We have abused it and confused them. Can we find another name for that which gives rest to our heart? The term “meaning” suggests itself. When we find meaning in life, then we find rest. Meaning is simply that within which we find rest. – p. 32-33
Meaning in this sense is not something that can be put into words. Meaning is not something that can be looked up in a book, like a definition. Meaning is not something that can be grasped, held, stored away. Meaning is not something … maybe we should stop the sentence there. Meaning is no thing. It is more like the light in which we see things. – p. 34
The restlessness of the heart leads from the misery of being alienated (often in the midst of pleasure) to the joy of being together with self, with all, with God (often in the midst of suffering). “Together” is the word that marks the goal of the religious quest. – p. 37
When I discover in my heart of hearts God is closer to me than I am to myself, then I have come home. When the thirsting heart discovers the fountain of life in its own unfathomable depth, then we “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – p. 37
Prayers and Prayerfulness
Sometimes people who are in the habit of saying prayers at certain set times have their moments of genuine prayer precisely at times when they are not saying prayers. – p. 39
Sooner or later we discover that prayers are not always prayer. That is a pity. But the other half of that insight is that prayer often happens without any prayers. And that should cheer us up. In fact, it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between prayer and prayers. – p. 40
The wakefulness which comes spontaneously at special moments often costs us an effort at times of formal prayer. The technical term for that effort and for the state of mind that results from it is, in the Catholic tradition, “recollection.” Recollection means a special kind of mindfulness in prayer that is identical with prayerfulness. When I am fully “recollected,” my prayers are fully prayer. When I am more and more distracted, my prayers run dry. – p. 42
Mindfulness implies concentration. And yet, no amount of concentration will, by itself, make us recollected. Recollection has two ingredients. The other one is what I call wonderment, a kind of sustained surprise. But concentration tends to narrow down the field of vision, while wonderment is expansive. Even the bodily gestures associated with wonderment and concentration contradict one another. When we want to concentrate we squint with our eyes, but when you are filled with wonderment, your eyes are wide open. – p. 42-44
When we pull children out of their innate concentration and wonderment, their wholeness is scattered and their sense of mystery lost. Healthier cultures find a different view of education. Some native American tribes would say, “A well-educated child ought to be able to sit and listen when nothing is to be heard.” – p. 46
It is not an easy task to maintain the mindfulness, gratefulness, prayerfulness we experience in those wholehearted moments. It is a matter of practice, of doing it over and over again, till it becomes second nature. And the more we become alive and awake, the more everything we do becomes prayer. Eventually, even our prayers will become prayer. – p. 47-48
Contemplation and Leisure
If we allow the contemplative tension between action and vision to snap, meaning would fade out of any purpose we pursue. For what I have called action and vision might just as well be called purpose and meaning. You may have been engaged in pursuing a purpose for a long time, when suddenly you wake up to the question: What is the meaning of it all? Meaningless purpose is mere drudgery.
In sloppy everyday speech we sometimes use purpose and meaning interchangeably as if they meant the same. But remember how we go about a given purpose and how, in contrast, we experience meaning. The difference is striking. In order to achieve our purpose, whatever it may be, we must take hold of the situation, take matters in hand, take charge of things. We must be in control.
Is this also true of a situation in which you experience deep meaning? You will find yourself saying that you were touched, moved, even carried away by the experience. This doesn’t sound as if you were in control of what happened. Rather, you gave yourself to the experience, it took hold of you and so you found meaning in it.
Unless you take control, you won’t achieve your purpose; but unless you give yourself, you can’t experience meaning. – p. 68-69
Holding these together (vision and action/giving and taking/meaning and purpose) demands courage. As long as we are in control, we feel safe. But when we allow ourselves to be carried away, there is no telling where things will lead. There is risk implied in adventure. – p. 69-70
Life is give-and-take, not give or take. Balance is too mechanical a word to apply to the intimate intricacy of this give-and-take. We are talking about a giving within taking and a taking within giving. So we are not playing off giving against taking. We are playing off a life-giving give-and-take against a mere taking that is as deadly as a mere giving. It matters little whether you merely take a breath and stop, or give a breath and stop there. In either case, you’re dead. – p. 70-71
Whenever you work, you work for some purpose. And in play, all the emphasis falls on the meaning of your activity. Play needs no purpose. We need this kind of experience to correct our world view. Too easily we are inclined to imagine that God created this world for a purpose. We are so caught up in purpose that we would feel more comfortable if God shared our preoccupation with work. But God plays. The only bird God never created is the no-nonsense bird. – p. 72-73
Leisure is the balance of work and play. Leisure gives full measure to both. But we are unable to play playfully unless we learn to work playfully. Working leisurely means putting into our work what is most typical of play, namely the emphasis on meaning. Leisure gives meaning to purpose. – p. 74
The heart is a leisurely muscle. It differs from all other muscles. It does not get tired, because there is a phase of rest built into every single heartbeat. – p. 75
So leisure is not a privilege but a virtue, the virtue of all who are willing to give time to what takes time. – p. 75
No matter how hard you strike a bell, it will ring. What else is it made for? Even under the hammer blows of fate the heart rings true. The human heart is made for universal praise. As long as we pick and choose, making praise depend on our approval, we are not yet responding from the heart. – p. 81
Faith and Beliefs
Faith is not first and foremost a collection of religious beliefs handed on to us by tradition. It has far more to do with that courageous trust in life that we know from our moments of inner breakthrough. Not one of the New Testament passages using the Greek word for faith (tietis) means, strictly speaking, “beliefs.”
Eventually this trust would crystallize into explicit beliefs, but the starting point is trusting courage, not beliefs. And in our life of faith – just as in lighting a fuse – it makes a vital difference at which end we start. – p. 88-89 (This is quoted by Brennan Manning in The Signature of Jesus)
Before Biblical passages can help us we must allow them to put us on the spot. I must tell myself: stop and listen! This concerns you! – p. 91
Faith as courage and trust takes priority over faith in the sense of beliefs. If we get that priority wrong, beliefs may even get in the way of our faith. But if we get it right, we have direct access to the heart of the matter: the heart of faith is the faith of the heart. – p. 102
The ascent of faith is prayerful ascent. That means every time we move another step, we do not only exercise faith, but we tap the very source of faithfulness that gives us strength to go on. Drinking from that source is prayer, which can be called living by the word of God.
God is too simple to say more than one Word. That one Word, however, is so inexhaustibly pregnant with meaning that it needs to be spelled out forever and ever in all that is.
The easy stage of the prayer of faith comes first, its joyful mysteries. We are still on the stretch of our ascent that leads through the meadows, barely sloping upward. But starting with our first breath, every new encounter with the world implies trust in the faithfulness at the heart of all things. That faithfulness is always a brand new surprise. – p. 106-110
How can we expect to find life in fullness unless we learn to live “by every word that comes from the mouth of God”? Can I pick and choose which word of God to live by? Who knows best what’s good for me? Remember Jesus tempted in the desert, hungry after forty days of fasting. God provides nothing but stones for Him. What father will give his hungry children stones when they cry for bread?
But Jesus turns this around: This is how I show my faith as Son in the Father: not by asking to get what I need, but by trusting that I need what I get. God knows best. When God says “stones,” I will not insist that the word should be “bread.” I can live by every word … – p. 111-112
Now we are out of the meadows, and our ascent gets steep. Bread stands for life, stones for death. Jeusus trusts that every word of God is life-giving. The word in question here is stones. It spells death. The implication is that I can live even by dying. – p. 112
This is the prayer of faith in its sorrowful mysteries. As in Gethsemani, when with bloody sweat Jesus struggles through to a faith that trusts in finding God’s faithfulness even at the core of death. Sooner or later each of us must reach this level of faith. – p. 112
At the beginning living by the Word is pure delight. God feeds us not only with bread, but raisin bread! But sooner or later comes the moment when we bite into that raisin bread, and what we took to be a raisin turns out to be a small pebble. That is the crucial moment. What am I going to say? I can’t live by stones? Or can I pass over from the joyful mysteries to the sorrowful ones? – p. 113
We might get killed in this process, but we come out of the (partial) killing more alive. “Death is swallowed up in victory.” How many times in the course of a lifetime must we go through this process of creative dying? (The more creatively we live, the more often we shall have to die, I suppose.) But one thing is certain: in the end, no one can be spared this passage. After whatever banquet life lays out for us, the final course is the same for all: It is one big rock. “Sorry,” says our Host, but now it’s time to die.” Will we be ready by then to “swallow up death?” If so, it will be a dying into fullness of life. We know this. We know it, not because someone told us so, but because we have experienced it in one way or another. – p. 114
From our partial experiences of dying, we learn to expect a similar pattern in our final death. We learn that faith is the power to die into greater aliveness every time we get killed. And so we have reason to expect that being fully killed will mean coming fully alive. How? We cannot tell. If we knew, there would be no room for faith. But we know all we need to know: Faith finds life in every word of God, even when that word spells death. – p. 114
Every creative death experience, no matter how small, teaches us how to rise to the third level of our ascent in faith, the glorious mysteries of Living By the Word. Now we are among those snowy peaks that looked so frightening from below. And, in a way, they are even more frightening now. But our courage has grown strong enough to enjoy it all. There is no more birdsong. There are no more flowers. Only the sky (blue, almost black in contrast to the glacier peaks), silence, and fierce sun. But it is pure ecstasy. – p. 114-115
Hope: Openness for Surprise
God gives us faith to respond to God’s own faithfulness. And so we come to understand faith as an aspect of God’s own life within us. Hope is another aspect of that same fullness of life. The more the insight that life is surprising takes hold of us, the more our life will be a life of hope, a life of openness for Surprise. And Surprise is a name of God. – p. 123
How can we grow more open in hope? We are sometimes surprised by joy. No matter how fleeting the experience we know now the joy of being open for surprise. For a moment we feel unconditionally welcome, and that makes us able to welcome life unconditionally. The taste of that experience awakens hope in us, a passion for life with its sheer limitless possibilities. – p. 124
How difficult it is to live in the creative tension of hope, the tension between non-yet and already! When we allow that tension to snap, our quest peters out in aimless wandering or gets stuck in a compulsive settling down. – p. 126
Great and justified is the fear of dangers that could befall us on the road; even more so is the fear of risking commitment. We can never fully assess the courage it costs to overcome that double fear by faith. We overcome by joining the daring of the wanderer to the daring of the settler, and that gives us the courage of a pilgrim. – p. 127
T. S. Eliot understands this. In The Four Quartets he speaks of the paradox of being “still and still moving,” the paradox of hope. “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” – p. 129
To be stuck in what we have found is not better than losing ourselves in the seeking. Sooner or later we begin to realize that our finding is not really what matters, but our being found. – p. 130
As pilgrims we have a goal. But the meaning of our pilgrimage does not depend on reaching that goal. It depends on remaining open in hope, open for surprise, because God knows our way far better than we do. Hope as the virtue of the pilgrim accounts for both stillness and movement. – p. 130
Hope simply does its thing, like that spider in the corner of my bookshelf. She will make a new web again and again, as often as my feather duster swooshes it away – without self-pity, without self-congratulations, without expectations, without fear. If I could achieve the corresponding attitude on my level of consciousness, that would be hope all right. It would cost me more. On my level the stakes are higher. But I bow to that spider. – p. 135-136
The process of purgation is at the core of every spiritual discipline. Patience holds still in the blast-furnace of experience. Discipline is not so much a matter of doing this or that, but of holding still. Not as if this would cost no effort. But the effort is all applied to this crucial task, the task of making no effort. – p. 137
The disciple waiting on the master is silent. The pupil, eye-to-eye with the teacher, is all attention. This still is not a shutting up. It is the stillness of the anemone wide open to the sunlight. Even the clutter of thoughts is silenced by the discipline of this stillness. – p. 137
As long as we wait for an improvement of the situation, our desires will make a great deal of noise. And if we wait for a deterioration of the situation, our fears will be noisy. The stillness that waits for the flash of the Lord’s coming in any situation – that is the stillness of biblical hope. A machine that rattles squanders energy on the rattling. The stillness of hope is the expression of a perfect focusing of energy on the task at hand. – p. 138-139
Hope looks at all things the way a mother looks at her child, with a passion for the possible. But that way of looking is creative. It creates the space in which perfection can unfold. More than that, the eyes of hope look through all imperfections to the heart of all things and find it perfect. – p. 142
We can subject our hope to a simple test. It’s not foolproof. But try it out on one of your pet projects. First list the various hopes you have in view of that particular project. That’s step one. Next, use your imagination to picture every single one of those hopes going down the drain. You may want to dwell on that possibility just long enough to feel the degree of despair to which it would tempt you. The hope that is left after all your hopes are gone – that is pure hope, rooted in the heart. – p. 144
We have seen that beliefs can get in the way of faith. In a similar sense, hopes can get in the way of hope, stop up and block pure hope’s openness for surprise. It makes a world of difference where we put our weight – on those hopes out there ahead of us, or on “the hope that is within.” – p. 144-145
Hopes do not hasten the coming of peace on earth. Only hope does. For we can all too easily get stuck in our hopes, but no one can get stuck in hope. Hope liberates – first from the bondage of hopes, then from every other bondage. Pure hope is so steadfastly anchored at the moorings of the heart that it can afford to hold its own hopes lightly. – p. 145-146
Hope unites. Hopes differ and tend to divide us. But we are united “in one hope” (Eph 4:4). And this “we” includes all creatures, the whole universe. Clarence Jordan’s Cottonpatch version of Roman 8 says, “The fondest dream of the universe is to catch a glimpse of real live sons and daughters of God.” – p. 146
Is this realistic? Every day of the year one endangered species of plant or animal life is forever lost. Extinct. In one day this world spends more money on weapons than the United Nations can scrape together in a whole year for the World Food Fund. Time is running out.
But hope discovers within that time a different kind of time – a time that is coming to fullness … Hope makes the most of time, exhausts time’s possibilities, even time’s unsuspected dimensions. In time that grows old, hope sees time that is with child. At the very moment when time is running out hope allows the fullness of time to break in. – p. 147-148
“We are all one silence,” says Thomas Merton, “and a diversity of voices.” How can we keep our ears attuned to the silence of our common hope when the divergent voices of our hopes distract us? Only by being still. Only by nurturing in our heart a stillness that grows big enough to embrace even contradictory hopes. – p. 149
The aesthete and the busy body are desperate in opposite ways. The one despairs of the power of action and gets drunk on vision. The other drowns his despair of finding a guiding vision in mere activity. But hope brings us right back to the core of contemplative transformation: glory. Glory is seed and harvest of hope, its initial spark and its ultimate blaze. – p. 156-157
The cross stands for that collision in which our hopes must go down so that on the third day hope may rise … But resurrection is not revival, survival, resuscitation. Resurrection is not a coming back to this life of death. What would be the point of that? Resurrection is a going forward into death and through death into a fullness that lies beyond life and death as we know them. From this side of the divide, death is all we can see. Hope looks squarely at death, the open door for Surprise. – p. 159-160
Most of us are so used to an overabundance of words that silence tends to frighten us. It seems to us like a vast empty space. We look down into its expanse and get dizzy. Or else we feel a marvelous attraction toward the silence that leaves us bewildered. At the silent center of our heart, the fullness of life strikes us a great emptiness. That fullness surpasses what eye has seen and ear has heard. Only gratefulness, in the form of limitless openness for surprise, lays hold of the fullness of life in hope. – p. 161-162
Love: A “Yes” to Belonging
We have had to carefully distinguish faith and hope from their popular misconceptions: beliefs and hopes. – p. 163
(Love, too. It is not just passionate attraction, but more basically a kind of belonging.) Deep down that sense of belonging is all-embracing. By exploring what we glimpsed when we fell in love, we will grow in love, in gratitude, and so in aliveness. – p. 173
Falling in love happens by itself; rising to the heights of love costs an effort. The glimpses we catch of our great, blissful belonging are merely a challenge to growth in relationships, a challenge to grow to our full human stature. Only on the wings of love will we rise to that challenge. – p. 174
When Christian tradition speaks of love, the accent falls on our human will, not on our emotions. No one can command us to feel one way or another. Feelings are simply not subject to commands. Neither are our thoughts. Only our will can obey. As our will makes a vigorous effort to overcome the inertia of indifference, it will take our thoughts and our feelings along step by step. – p. 174
Gratefulness is the school in which one learns love. The only degrees one receives in that school are degrees of aliveness. Aliveness can only be measured by the intensity, depth, and variety of our relationships. – p. 176-177
A schoolteacher comes home exhausted. “All day long I didn’t have a minute to pray,” she complains. Well, chances are she did nothing but pray all day long. Her heart was steeped in Contemplation in Action, and her head doesn’t even recognize it. The love that made her care for each child with full attention was God’s love flowing through her.
By savoring this love from within, she could have a whole day of prayer – and prayer without distraction at that. “But what,” she might say, “if I’m not even thinking of God? Can this still be prayer?” Well, are you still breathing, even though you are not thinking of the air your breath? Action is realized by acting, not by thinking about it. We realize God by acting in love. Thinking about God is important. But acting in God leads to a deeper knowledge. – p. 180
What a joyful surprise to discover that we can find God in, not only during, our loving service. Many people struggle to make extremely active lives more prayerful. The discover of Contemplation In Action can bring them great relief and encouragement. – p. 181
On the other hand, the faster the spin of our daily round of activities, the more we need to anchor ourselves in the silent center of our heart. – p. 181
Shaker tradition has a saying that puts the idea of contemplation as simply as it can be put: “Hearts to God, hands to work.” The Romans had a word for love which expressed precisely that attitude: the Latin word pietas. It means “family affection” which springs from a sense of belonging and extends itself to the whole household, the ancestors, the pets, the farm animals, the land, the tools, the furniture. If we could put the vigor of the Latin pietas into our words “pity” and “piety,” which derive from it, our concepts of compassion and devotion would surely be enriched. We cannot revive a word at will. But we must recover the sense of belonging that coined the word pietas. – p. 182-183
The crucial question is, “How big is our family? How wide is the reach of our belonging? Can we stretch it to the furthest reaches of God’s household to embrace all – humans, animals, plants, who we now still consider “strange, or strangers?” – p. 184
The yawning of any self-respecting cat is part of a whole ritual of stretching and arching that is full of vitality. When we yawn not with boredom or fatigue but with a “deep calm in the heart,” it is a “yawning before the fire of life.” The calm of true peace is the live stillness of a bright burning flame.
Fire is often an image of love. But here it is the raging and consuming fire of passion. It is the calm, life-giving fire on the hearth that makes everyone in the house feel welcome and at home. When we allow that hearth fire to warm us to the bone, we go a long way toward healing the split between heaven and earth. The house of life is the house of the God of life. – p. 186
Faith, Hope and Love are ways in which we explore the life of the Triune God. In Faith we live by every word in which the eternal Word is spelled out in nature and history. In Hope, we let ourselves down into the Silence of the Father, from where the Word comes forth and to where it comes home. In Love we begin to understand, in the Spirit of God’s self-understanding, that Word and Silence belong together in action.
We come to understand that belonging is a name of the Triune god. Our heart is rooted in that ultimate belonging. We do not have to earn this, nor deserve it. It is pure grace, pure gift. We need only enter into this fullness through gratefulness. – p. 188-189
The Triune God is Giver, Gift and Thanksgiving. This movement from the Father through the Son in the Spirit back to its source is what Gregory of Nyssa called “the Round Dance of the Blessed Trinity.” This is how God prays: by dancing. – p. 189
Fullness and Emptiness (P. 190-224)
In this final chapter Brother David collects some key words and comments on them briefly:
Alive.
Authority.
Becoming. If you stopped becoming, you cease to be. Yet, in the process of becoming you case to be what you were.
Belonging. Belonging is the basic fact. Belonging is mutual and all-inclusive. Whatever there is belongs to whatever else there is. Therefore we are at home in the world, wherever we may find ourselves.
Catholic. Catholicity must also be taken in the sense of depth. The good news is meant to penetrate every layer of reality. Nothing is excluded as being base, unworthy, or profane. The opposite of catholic is provincial, not Protestant. There are provincial Catholics and catholic Protestants.
Communication. Communion is not only the fruit, but the root of communication. At heart, everything hangs together with everything. All communication is rooted in this most basic communion. There are no gaps. As Thomas Merton put it, prayer does not consist in an effort to get across to God, but in opening our eyes to see that we are already there.
Contemplation.
Death. In death, two events happen at once: being killed and dying. Nothing is more passive than being killed, but nothing is more active than dying. Dying is something I must do. Every moment is a dying into the next moment’s life. Learning to die means learning to live.
Divine Life. There are moments when we get an inkling of the ground of our being. We realize we are both at home there and on the way there. Some are bold enough to call this starting point and goal of our heart’s journey, “God.” Nothing else deserve that name. We can call the two poles of this experience God’s immanence (closer to me than I am to myself) and God’s transcendence (beyond the beyond).
Emotions. Emotionalism in prayer is an imbalance that results not from too much feeling, but from too little else. The balance is not redressed by curtailing the emotions, but rather by adding to them our intellectual and moral energy. – p. 198
Faith. To have faith does not mean primarily believing something, but rather believing in someone. Faith is trust. We trust in God, not in our particular understanding of God. That is why people of deep faith are one at heart, even though their beliefs may differ widely. But when beliefs become more important than faith, even small differences can create insurmountable barriers. Faith is the courage to respond gratefully to every given situation (without checking what’s inside the wrapping), out of trust in the Giver.
Fear. Most of us are fear-ridden people. All of us live in a fear-ridden society. But nothing is gained by this discovery if in additional to all our other fears we now begin to fear fear. Why not rather look at fear as the necessary condition for courage?
Give-and-Take. Mere giving is as lifeless as mere taking. If you merely take a breath and stop there, you are dead. When you merely breathe out and stop there, you are also dead. Give-AND-Take is the dynamic expression of universal belonging.
Given Reality. The appropriate response to a given world is thanksgiving. To understand this and draw out the consequences leads to grateful living.
Giving. There are three pre-eminent forms: giving up, thanksgiving, and forgiving. Forgiving is the perfection of giving.
God. What matters is never knowledge about God, but knowledge of God – as the magnetic North of the human heart.
Gratuitous. The universe is gratis. From this simple fact of experience springs grateful living, grace-filled living.
Heart. Whenever we speak of the heart we mean the whole person. The heart stands for that center of our being where we are one with ourselves, one with all others, one with God.
Hope. One can cling desperately to one’s hopes. But even in a hopeless situation, hope remains open for surprise. It is surprise that links hope with gratefulness.
Humility. In our best moments humility is simply pride that is too grateful to look down on anyone.
I.
Individual. We are individuals by being separate and distinct from others. We become persons by relating to others. We grow up to become human persons. To do this, we need others. As one becomes a person, individuality is at one and the same time enhanced and transcended.
Joy. Joy is that extraordinary happiness that is independent of what happens to us. It is not joy that makes us grateful, but it is gratitude that gives us joy.
Jesus Christ. We speak not merely of Jesus, or merely of Christ, but of Jesus Christ, thereby stressing the tension of two points of reference: the historical figure Jesus and the Christ-reality in Him and in all of us.
Knowing.
Leisure. Giving and taking, play and work, meaning and purpose are perfectly balanced in leisure. We learn to live fully in the measure in which we learn to live leisurely.
Love. Passionate attraction is indeed an important instance of love. But when we ask for characteristics of love applicable to each and all of its forms, we find a sense of belonging and wholehearted acceptance of that belonging with all its implications. Love is a wholehearted “yes” to belonging, whether to country or pet or friend or family or lover. We can broaden the scope of our “yes,” say it under less favorable conditions, and draw out its consequences all the way to love our enemies.
Meaning. Meaning is that in which our hearts find rest. We don’t achieve meaning as we achieve a purpose. It is always received as pure gift. Gratefulness is the inner gesture of giving meaning to our life by receiving life as gift.
Mystic Experience. Not all people feel comfortable calling Ultimate Reality “God.” But all of us, regardless of terminology or religion, can experience moments of overwhelming, limitless belonging, moments of universal communion. Those are our own mystic moments. Their frequency doesn’t count, but how we allow them to influence our lives counts a lot.
Nature/Supernature. Nature and supernature are not two different realms of reality, or two different layers of the universe. One and the same reality can be natural or supernatural, depending on how we approach it. What we take hold of, physically or intellectually, will always be the natural. By taking hold of it, we limit it. The supernatural is limitless. We must let it take hold of us.
Nothing. Meaning is no thing. And yet the nothing that is meaning is far more important to us humans than all things taken together.
Openness. Openness is an attitude of readiness to receive life in fullness. But is openness in itself fullness or emptiness. Hope, when it open for surprise is fully open only when it is drained empty of all hopes.
Opportunity. The gift within every gift is opportunity. Usually this means opportunity to enjoy. But sometimes it means opportunity to labor, suffer, even die. Gratefulness is not passive. It is the gallantry of a heart ready to rise to whatever opportunity a given moment offers.
Paradox. Nicholas of Cusa said that all opposites coincide in God. This insight has weighty implications for any attempt to speak about divine realities. The closer we come to saying something worthwhile, the more likely that paradox will be the only way to express it. “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10).
Peak Experience. These are, says Abraham Maslow, moments when we are overwhelmed by a sense of belonging, in which everything makes sense. Acceptance, universal wholeness and holiness, seemingly outside time. Gratefulness pervades every aspect of these peaks. The power at the core of our religion is fueled by these moments. That is why can call gratefulness the root of religion.
Prayer. Prayers are not always prayer. Saying prayers is one activity among others. But prayer is an attitude of the heart that can transform every activity. There is no human being who does not pray, at least in deep dreams that nourish life with meaning. Prayers can make one more prayerful.
Questions. To prevent questions from weighing us down, we must raise them. Questions can free us from the misconception that we can know anything unquestioningly. Keen questioning is no luxury.
Religion. We need an action verb to express what religion is all about. But we cannot say that someone is “religioning.” Praying is the verb that goes with religion. Praying (in its widest sense) is what keeps religious experience from drying up into nothing but religious structures. Experience is the starting point of religion. Inevitably, intellect, will and emotions grapple, each in its own way, with the experience of ultimate belonging.
The intellect interprets the experience, and so we get religious doctrine. The will acknowledges the implications, and that accounts for the ethical side of religion. The emotions celebrate the experience by means of ritual.
But a religion is not automatically religious. Those three main areas of every religion are always prone to shrivel up into dogmatism, legalism and ritualism unless they are continually re-rooted in live experience. This process is prayer. Prayer puts religion into the religions.
Silence. Negatively, silence means the absence of sound or word. Positively, silence is the matrix from which word is born, the home to which word returns through understanding. Word (in contrast to chatter) does not break the silence. For those who know only the world of words, silence is mere emptiness. But this “emptiness” of silence is inexhaustibly rich; all the words in the world are merely a trickle of its fullness.
Sin. The word is so prone to misunderstanding as to be useless. But the reality once called sin is still with us. What other ages called sin, we call alienation. This suggests an uprootedness from one’s true self, from others, and from God (or whatever else ultimately matters). An action is sinful to the degree to which it causes alienation. “Working out our salvation” means overcoming alienation in all its forms. The contemporary term for salvation is belonging. The path from alienation to belonging is the path from sin to salvation.
Surprise. To recognize that everything is surprising is the first step toward recognizing that everything is gift. The wisdom that begins with surprise is the wisdom of a grateful heart.
Thanksgiving. The more we lose the sense of all belonging to one big family, the more we must explicitly express that belonging when it is actualized in some give-and-take. To give thanks means to give expression to mutual belonging.
Truth. What our heart longs for is truth, but what we can express are merely truths. The countless aspects of truth (which in itself is a unity of one) can be expressed in conflicting truths. Their limitations bring them into conflict. Truths tend to divide us, but the truth that upholds us unites.
Understanding. Word, Silence and Understanding are the three of dimensions of meaning. What happens when we understand? We give ourselves to the Word so wholeheartedly that it can take hold of us.
Usefulness. Quite unawares, one can get trapped in a world in which only the useful counts. In a utilitarian society there is only usefulness and more usefulness without the sparkling overflow that keeps it all from getting stagnant. Enjoyment is not measured by what flows in, but by what flows over. The smaller we make the vessel of our need for use, the sooner we get the overflow we need for delight.
Vacation. Originally, schools were conceived as places where people had leisure enough to find themselves. But schools are now geared toward purpose rather than meaning, toward know-how rather than wisdom.
What enriched your life more, the useful things you did at school or the enjoyable things you did on vacation? In Psalm 46, instead of “Be still” St. Jerome translates (in the Latin Vulgate Bible), “Make a vacation!”
Way. To escape being paralyzed by labels (like “Christian”) one must continually trust the dynamic experience of being on the way. When Jesus says, “I am the Way” (John 14:6), we would limit his claim pitifully by thinking of one way among a thousand others. This cannot be the meaning of his word. Rather, whosoever is “on the way” to God is on the way of Jesus whose name means “God saves.” And whoever follows the deepest longing of the human heart is “on the way.” It matters little what label we give to that way. Holding on to the signpost does not mean “being on the way,” even if that sign bears the right label. What matters is walking. All those who move forward are on the way. But this means finding one’s way by leaving the way behind with every step forward.
Work/Play. We work in order to achieve purpose. But we play for mere enjoyment. Play is meaningful in itself. Work can crowd out enjoyment, but we can rescue work from being mere drudgery when we learn to work playfully. That means doing our work not only for its useful results, but also for the enjoyment we can find in it all along when we do it mindfully, gratefully. In the long run, only playful, leisurely work is efficient.
Wonderment. G. K. Chesterton reminds us that wonders will never be lacking in this world; what is lacking is wonderment. Even natural laws are wonders: We glibly talk of nature’s laws/But do things have a natural cause?/Black earth becoming yellow crocus/Is undiluted hocus-pocus. – Piet Hein
If you can’t wonder at what is natural, what would it take to make you wonder? As long as you are full of yourself, you are incapable of wonderment, and life seems empty. But in wonderment, you lose yourself.
Word. What most determines my use of “word” in this book is the basic biblical truth that “God speaks.” If God speaks, the whole universe and everything in it is word. This is the biblical way of saying that everything makes sense the moment we listen with the heart. The courage to listen is called faith. The listening is called obedience (from the Latin ob-audiens, to thoroughly listen). Its opposite is ab-surdis, which means thoroughly deaf. We escape from absurdity by learning to listen to the word in everything we encounter.
X. X marks the spot, and X crosses out whatever is found on that spot. With two strokes, X expresses the paradox contained in the word NOWHERE. By simply making a little space inside of nowhere, we can transform it into NOW HERE.
X is a cross in disguise, a cross that stands on two legs instead of one. X marks the spot where fullness and emptiness are one.
Yes. Usually our “yes” is conditional. There are strings attached. But now and then we get carried away like kites in a great wind and say an unconditional “yes.” At that moment we realize that “yes” is the answer to every “why?” When Paul calls Jesus Christ the great Yes (2 Cor 1:20), it is our full response to the faithfulness at the heart of all things. In saying this “yes,” we become what we are. Our true Self is “Yes.”
You. The relationship between I and Thou has been brilliantly explored by Ebner and Buber. But it took them volumes to say what e.e. Cummings sings in a single line of a love poem: “I am through You so I.” (Not only am I through you so happy and alive, but “so I.”) In moments in which I can sing this line with conviction, I know that fulfillment is found when I am completely empty.
Zero. The very shape of zero, written as 0, expresses emptiness. But the full circle also signifies fullness. Zero stands for nothing, but by adding zero to a number we multiply it tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold … Gratefulness gives fullness to life by adding nothing. Understanding 0 by becoming 0 – that’s what gratefulness is all about.
Anyone who understands the preceding sentence no longer knows how to read it aloud. That’s one good reason for writing this book. 🙂
