One of the least appreciated and understood aspects of love is that when it is true and persistent, it cannot be simply based on our feelings and emotions. Instead, it has to be based on a decision to love, and not on the emotions or feelings of romance and bliss.
And one of the downsides of this very unappreciated definition of love is that for many, if not most people, once they no longer feel the sentiments and emotions of romance anymore, they stop loving altogether. Rather, they hope and pray for the return of those feelings that led them to make the decision to marry in Church, before a minister ordained to receive their wedding vows in the presence of their friends and relatives on the day that they got married.
This is one of the most fundamental things about true and life-giving love that I try my hardest to impart in preparing couples for their marriage before me in the church. I don’t ‘diss’ or ignore the fact that in their pre-marriage courtship, that they are experiencing the stirrings and uplifting moments of romance and being ‘in-love’. What needs to be reminded is that these experiences are not the kernel and essence of what is life-giving. These may be nice and exhilarating to experience, but for most people truly in love, just to live for these moments is akin to living in a dream-like existence.
As some spiritual gurus have written and maintained, our hearts and minds are complex and promiscuous, quite like wild horses frolicking to their own tunes, with love frequently not on their agenda. I am certain that imparting this to people who are madly and dizzyingly in love, can be quite disturbing and even an affront to them. But I need to find new and creative ways to impart this truth to them so that they will be prepared to face it well when the time comes in their married life, to hang on to the dream they have of living their marriage in the best way possible.
It’s the same for our prayer life. It can’t be that I was unfortunate to have bad or insufficiently prepared catechists in my days of spiritual formation in my pre-confirmation days of my teens. And if it was implied by my catechists, it was most probably done with such speed and little emphasis that we were not caught off-guard and given the opportunity to seriously think about what was being implied. What do we do about our prayer lives when we no longer feel like praying? After all, most, if not all of us are often tired, bored, no longer wanting to pray, and are just jaded with prayer. If I am in the ministry of catechesis, I would want to focus a large part of my syllabus to teach my students what real prayer is, and how to handle it when we no longer feel any desire to pray.
Just like love, prayer too, is a decision. It’s not a mere emotion or sentiment. If love is just an emotion, one will find one’s world turned upside down when there are no longer any familiar emotions or sentiments in one’s love relationship. But if one is well taught and catechized, one will appreciate that it’s ok if the familiar stirrings of the heart are no longer there. And that’s because one has learned to base one’s love on the decision to love, and not just on the fleeting feelings or sentiments of love.
When our prayer life is based on the decision to pray, one will not find oneself shaken and lost when those familiar feelings are no longer there.
God, who is love itself, is a being whose love is a decision. That makes God’s love ever present and real, because God’s love is not emotion-based. We only need to look seriously at a crucifix to realize this. On the cross of Calvary, Jesus didn’t base his being crucified so cruelly and inhumanely on his emotions. He willingly allowed his hands and feet to be nailed because of his decision to love all of sinful humanity. Just looking at a cross without a corpus on it doesn’t give us the all-important lesson of this. A plain cross with no body on it doesn’t impart that love is not a feeling, and that real love is rather a decision.
The monks in a monastery have something that is taught and imparted using something as simple as a bell or a gong. The striking of this gong about seven times a day helps the monks to sustain their prayer not just on feelings and sentiments. Monks in these monasteries pray together ritually each time the bell rings or the gong is struck. They ritually pray their offices and celebrate Mass together. Monks are not robots. They are humans, and the founders or their order or society have wisely chosen to teach the monks that a faithful and regular prayer life is not one that is just based on enthusiasm or sentiments. Throughout the monastery, whether the monk is on the library or the kitchen, when they hear to bell ring, everything stops and their Divine Office books are opened and their will is being reminded to pray.
As Fr Rolheiser has said it so well, this regularity reminds each monk that time is not their time, but God’s time. And if their time is God’s time, then their lives are God’s life as well.
My being posted to the Office of Catechesis has something that is similar to the discipline of the monasteries. Every day, at the precise moment of 12pm, every person in the building of the Catholic Archdiocese Education Centre come out of our offices and gather at the parapet of the building overlooking the ground floor and we pray the Angelus together, ending with a blessing bestowed by any priest who is there at that time. It’s not because we feel like doing it. It’s a reminder that prayer, like divine love, is something that is based on a decision. The purer that decision is, the purer the love will be.
May we all learn from Michael Leach, who has taught that falling in love is the easy part; learning to love is the hard part, and living in love is the best part. If this is true of love, it is so true for prayer as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment