Essence to Eternity

Chapter 4 in my series "Deep Prayer"

Welcome to the final chapter on Deep Prayer. Before we get into it, I wanted to take a quick moment to remind you that prayer is never perfected- we spend a lifetime practicing. It’s a lot like a basketball player’s practice regimen- he or she can spend countless hours in the gym perfecting a jump shot, and when it comes to the game, they’re likely going to miss some shots. No player has ever believed that they would make every single shot they ever took in a game or in practice, and it’s healthy to take this attitude when pursuing a deeper prayer life. We simply cannot do it perfectly all of the time. What we can do is practice, and just as in the case of the basketball player putting countless hours in the gym, so too must we practice our prayer as often as possible. Practice is the only way to get good at anything- including prayer.

We’ve established that there is a process by which deeper prayer is achieved. We start with the silence of contemplation, then move on to the understanding of the truth, then proceed to the willful act of charity, and finally, we reach the finale in the methods that mother Church has taught us in the Rosary, the Divine Office, and, most importantly, the Mass where heaven truly comes down to earth in the form of the Eucharist. But, is that the end of the line? Isn’t there more?

Always.

The thing is, most people don’t truly want the “more,” because the next step in the process of deep prayer is one that is present throughout the entirety of our lives - pain.

“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?

No one is good but God alone.

You know the commandments: You shall not kill;

you shall not commit adultery;

you shall not steal;

you shall not bear false witness;

you shall not defraud;

honor your father and your mother.”

He replied and said to him,

“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,

“You are lacking in one thing.

Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor

and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

At that statement his face fell,

and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

-Mk 10: 17-22

Note how, just before replying to the young man in that Gospel reading, the narrator makes sure to include the line “Jesus, looking at him, loved him…”

To those whom Jesus loves, he gives to them a cross.

Jesus told His disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Mat. 16:24-25). Self-denial, then, is the final step toward attaining a deeper prayer life because it requires us to suffer and to use this suffering as a catalyst to a deeper relationship with Christ. As St. Catherine of Siena once said, Suffering and sorrow increase in proportion to love.”

Unfortunately, many people don’t know this and, consequently, they don’t want to suffer. I know I didn’t:

In March of 2020, the entire world stopped due to the Covid pandemic. That fall, I was teaching 6th grade full time. My wife had just given birth to our fifth child. I was writing my first novel. And to top it all off, we were moving houses. Needless to say, we were overwhelmed: I had to prepare both in-person and online lessons for my students who were dipping in and out of quarantine. My wife and I also had to teach our own kiddos at home whose virtual learning experience was hectic, burdensome, and a hard on them emotionally. On top of that, we were sleepless with the newborn, and constantly on-the-go to get our new house ready to be lived in. To make matters worse, our Church was closed to the public and we were only allowed to celebrate Mass virtually. No community. No real presence. And no access to the Sacraments, which meant no Eucharist.

Little by little, the parish started allowing small groups to enter the building for Mass. We remained at home for all but two Sunday’s for an entire year to avoid the possibility of being contaminated and spreading the disease to our children and my mother-in-law who lived with us.

After the first month, I started to feel the effects of not being able to celebrate Mass in my soul. My prayer life was non-existent due to the many things I had to do, and even in those rare moments of silence, I was too exhausted to offer up anything but a pithy Hail Mary. It got to the point that I stopped praying all together because I had convinced myself that prayer was unnecessary for my survival. I didn’t need it. I justified this decision by saying that the hectic acts I strung together haphazardly to serve my family and students was my prayer. I had had enough of the pain and suffering, the last thing I needed to do was sacrifice more time and energy to pray - I was already doing so much!

In retrospect, however, I realized that I was refusing to ask for the graces necessary to complete those tasks in the right way. I relied on my own strength, not God’s, and as a result I plummeted into a darkness that overtook me physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It was one of the darkest moments of my life, and at the center of it all was this void where prayer once was. I had no communion with God, not spiritually in prayer nor sacramentally in the Eucharist. I was lost.

I eventually was helped out of this hole by the prayers of my family and some very close personal friends. I managed to prioritize prayer, which made all of the difference in the world. In fact, I discovered that in my suffering, I was a more loyal child of God because in my weakness, I re-discovered He who made Himself weak for me on the cross. Many people don’t feel comfortable looking upon the beaten and bloodied crucified Christ. They avoid it like the Apostles instead of welcome it like the Apostle John. It took me a long time to learn what St. John knew - that in order to reach the next level of holiness, I’d need to learn to pray at the foot of the cross and, perhaps in the future, rise higher still and become the one who is nailed to it.

Many people are like me in that they think that pain and suffering are a detriment to their prayer life. We think that positive human emotions lead to a deep faith and, while that is true, we must never depreciate the worth that negative emotions can provide our faith. In fact, it is precisely in these dark times that we gain the most graces, but we must change our mindset and believe it. As Job said, “We accept good things from God; should we not accept evil?” (Job 2:10).

Paradoxically, the biggest threat to your prayer life is also your greatest tool in achieving a closer relationship with Christ- namely your pain. This is what St. Paul meant when he wrote “Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). The mystery of suffering provides the sturdiest bridge to holiness, so it is in our best interest to harness our emotions and cross it with our entire trust in God.

This process varies in difficulty for every person because, while we all suffer, some suffer more than others. In fact, some suffer to a degree of unbelief; they can’t believe in a God who would allow so much suffering to exist in the world, much worse when these evil happen to them personally. The loss of a child due to brain cancer or the loss of a spouse in a freak accident. How can one possibly remain faithful when their souls are shaken to such extremes?

Because we have a Savior who suffered to even greater extremes.

St. Peter: “In this you rejoice, although now for a little while you may have to suffer through various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that is perishable even though tested by fire, may prove to be for praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:6-7). In our suffering, we unite ourselves with Christ crucified and, as a result, we share in his resurrection, a mystery of faith that is seldom contemplated for we tend to avoid it.

And yet, his is how the deepest of prayer lives progress; through suffering. Like in life, we must all pass through the scourge of death, so too do we end this course on the note that our sufferings are what bring us closest to Christ, because in them we deny ourselves and become nailed to our crosses with the God who accompanies us in every moment, both good and bad. It is the secret of Christian happiness that we are able to find a mystical joy in our tears, a paradoxical sense of the divine in the depths of our frustrations. A balance that holds our difficulties and pain on one hand, and on the other the graces of God that far outweigh our imperfections and pain.

You must first believe, however, that this is possible. Hence, the process begins anew with your petition to the spirit in contemplative silence. Deep prayer, then, is a cycle that both starts and ends in contemplation. In fact, life itself mirrors that same cycle - before we are born, we are silent in our non-existence, mere contemplative thoughts in the mind of God. During life, we discover truths and produce a multitude of acts, both charitable and evil. And when we die, we return to the contemplative mind of God and dwell within it, and within Him, for eternity.

With such everlasting joy as our final destination, it’s nice to know that we can catch glimpses of our eternal reward through prayer - the deeper the prayer, the closer to heaven we arrive. On that final day when Our Lord wraps us in His eternal embrace, we will have known that touch already, having experienced it a million times over in our contemplation, our words, our deeds, and our sufferings, we will have known it through the love he shares with us in every prayer.