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  LIFE OF PRAYER
  by F.F. Huegel
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Huegel's spiritual work examining the psychological and theological foundations
of an effective prayer life, discussing how the disposition of the soul before
prayer significantly affects the quality and power of communion with God.

  Chapters: 2

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 01 The Facts and Doctrines Concerning God
    2. 02 The Facts and Truths Concerning the Soul Which

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  CHAPTER 1: 01 THE FACTS AND DOCTRINES CONCERNING GOD
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The Facts and Doctrines Concerning God Which Are of Especial Importance in the
Life of Prayer.

I FIND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO restrict myself here to explicit tests of Scripture or
to the Dogmatic Definitions of the Christian Faith. On the other hand, I will
only put forward certain positions which have behind them large affirmations or
assured implications of Scripture and great Fathers and theologians of the
Church positions which, if, in recent centuries or in our own times, largely
ignored or explained away, nevertheless express the never extinct Christian and
Catholic experience. Working within these lines and drawing also upon my own
fifty years of endeavour in these matters, I find the positions concerning God,
which require full and intelligent adoption in our life of Prayer, to be seven.

God is a stupendously rich Reality the alone boundlessly rich Reality. His
outward action throughout the Universe His creation, sustentation and direction
of the world at large is immensely rich. Still deeper and more delicate is this
richness and reality in God’s Incarnation and Redemptive Action. Yet His Being,
His Interior Life, are in no wise exhausted by all this outward Action, nor does
this action occasion or articulate His character. We indeed, we little mortals
they too, the greatest of angels we become our true selves, we articulate our
spirtual characters, by apprehending, willing and serving God. But God is God,
already apart from His occupation with us. These are the great facts which I
believe to be specially revealed to us in the dogma of the Holy Trinity facts of
which we have an especial need in these our times. The whole of the Negative
Theology, where it is sound and not really agnostic or pantheistic, is but an
attempt to utter vividly this stupendous richness of God. Our prayer will lack
the deepest awe and widest expansion, if we do not find room within it for this
fact concerning God. We will thus retain a strong sense that not even Jesus
Christ and His Redemption exhaust God. Christian prayer, indeed Christian
theology, are thus not Soteriology, practical or theoretical. Here Fenelon’s
great letters to the Carmelite nun, Sceur Charlotte de S. Cyprien, are admirable
in their tender devotion to Christ free from all excessive Christocentrism.

God is the author of, and God is variously reflected in, all (innocent} Nature
as well as in all Supernature. Here is the doctrine which was central in the
outlook of Aquinas and Dante, of St. Francis and of Giotto. It was very largely
forgotten or denied afterwards, during the later Middle Ages. And, although the
Renaissance and then the Protestant Reformation were (variously wise and wild)
protests against the abuses of the later Middle Ages, these movements were
themselves largely infected by the impoverished philosophy and the thin theology
of these same later Middle Ages. The signs are multiplying that man will return,
with such improvements as may be wisely desirable, to that wonderfully rich
outlook of the Golden Middle Ages, where God’s outward action moves on two
levels the natural level and the supernatural level a Good and a Better or Best
two kinds, and not merely two degrees, of Goodness. We thus recognise in man’s
actual life a polarity, a tension, a friction, a one thing at work in distinctly
another thing like yeast in meal, like salt in meat, like coral insects and
whole coral reefs in the huge ocean an ocean so different from themselves. We
thus also acquire an explanation, and one which is not discouraging, of the fact
that it is a difficult art to prevent religion from overstraining us and from
thus leading to a very dangerous reaction against itself. For thus we see that
the Beatitude of Heaven the Direct Vision of God, that the sincere forgiveness
of our enemies, the love of them, and that the eager acceptance of suffering,
are graces and dispositions beyond, and different from, God apprehended as the
dim background or groundwork of our lives, and from the honesties and decencies
of average domestic and political life. Such honesties and decencies are also
good, and they are necessary for us all, in various degrees and forms ; and
this, also, as the occasions and material for the supernatural to utilise and
transform the Mountain and the Plain, the Edelweiss, and Alpenrose, and the
cornfields and potatoes ; here all appear, and this in fruitful contrast and
congenital inter-aid.

Such an inclusive and yet discriminating position brings also much help to our
prayer. For in prayer, also, it brings a tension, to the verge of strain; and a
detente, to the verge of relaxation. In both these movements of the soul God
can, and God should, be envisaged in the detente, the God of nature, the source
of all that is wholesome and homely ; and in the tension, the God of
supernature, the source of all that is ardent and heroic. We thus escape
dullness, monotony and the like these subtle dangers of the spiritual life.

God alone is fully free. Here is another ancient doctrine which calls aloud for
resuscitation. It is already clearly formulated by St. Augustine, and Aquinas
elaborates it in its fullness. But the later Middle Ages largely lost it, and
Protestants to this hour have, in this point, merely extended and hardened the
later Mediaeval obtuseness. Indeed, even the present Broad High Churchmen of the
type of Foundations have, for the most part, elaborated an apologetic with
regard to the dread fact of Evil which deliberately eliminates the great
doctrine here envisaged. St. Augustine tells us : "It is already a great freedom
to be able not to sin. But the greatest freedom consists in the inability to
sin." And Aquinas elaborates how Perfect Freedom consists in the spontaneous and
joyous self-expression of a perfect nature. Thus God cannot will, God possesses
no inclination to, Evil; and this absence of choice springs from precisely the
perfection of His Freedom. The persistent and vivid apprehension of this fact
will greatly help our prayer. For thus only are we adequately humbled before
God, since the difference between God and man is thus, essentially, not a
difference, however great, in performance but in nature. Far beyond the range of
our actual sinfulness extends the range of our potential sinfulness of the
imperfection inherent in our human degree and kind of Freedom. Whereas God is
not only not actually sinful at all He is incapable of sin, incapable of
temptation to sin. But there exists, not only God Pure, but also God Incarnate,
Jesus Christ. Here, again, there is no actual sinfulness, and here also the
sinlessness is a most wholesome occasion of humility to ourselves, the
manifoldly sinful. In Jesus Christ the closeness of the union of His human
nature with the Divine nature with a Divine Person renders actual sin impossible
even in that Human nature. Nevertheless this human nature in itself is, even
here, not above real temptation. "He was in all points tempted as we are, yet
without sin," says the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 4:15). Here, again, it is
important for us to understand that even such temptation without sin is an
imperfection pertaining to a certain kind of freedom to the human kind of
freedom and not a necessary condition of all freedom, of freedom as such. For
thus in Prayer we can, we will, look up to, adore God, the Perfect Freedom,
which contrasts so grandly with our own poor little freedom even with our
freedom where this exists in us, and is used by us, at its very best.

God is the Supreme Good of the stone and of the plant, of the animal, of man, of
the angel, but in what wondrously various degrees both of self -communication on
the part of God, and of consciousness on the part of the creature, as to this
gift from God, and still more as to the Giver, God Himself 1 In proportion to
the depth and the breadth of any and every creature’s nature, the creature
possesses, or can attain to, the consciousness that God is its sole ultimate
rest, sole pure delight. Religion, as distinct from ethics, flies straight at
once to this great ultimate fact, to this unique personalist reality, to God as
Beatitude and Beatifier. Thus the religious soul, in proportion to the strength
of its religion, always reaches beyond all abstract law, all mere sense of duty
and of obligation. St. Augustine is the great doctor of this our divine rest and
our divine delight. Our prayer will be immensely enriched and expanded by a
persistent cultivation of this sense of God as our true home. For thus the
rivalry between God and creatures for the possession of our hearts will become
less and less a struggle between a mysterious obligation and a clear
fascination, and more and more a competition between an oceanwide,
all-penetrating joy, when our souls come to their true, deep selves, and
pleasures feverish, fleeting and shallow, when we allow ourselves heedlessly to
be carried along by our superficial selves.

God, we have thus already found, is, indeed, not all unlike man. For how, if God
were all unlike him, could man apprehend God, and love God, and try "to be
perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect"? Yet God is also other than man.
Other, because He, God, is a Reality, an Identity, a Consciousness, distinct
from the reality, identity, consciousness of any of His creatures or of the
sum-total of them. And God is other, because this His distinct Reality is, by
its nature, so much higher and richer, not only in degree but in kind, than is
the nature of man or of any other creature. "Man is made in the image and
likeness of God." Yes, but we must not press this as an exhaustive norm, as
though God were simply man writ large man’s better and best instincts and
conditions on an immense scale. We shall doubtless be much nearer the facts if
we think of God as the living Source and the always previous, always prevenient
Realisation, in degrees and ways for us ineffable, of our ideals and ever
imperfect achievements a Realisation which must not be taken directly to contain
concretely what our conditions and strivings contain ideally. I am deeply
convinced that the truth, and hence the fascination of Religion, as really
requires some such emphasis on the unlikeness of God as it requires emphasis
upon the likeness. So, for instance, "God is Love" is a central truth proclaimed
by the New Testament and by all the saints of God. And so again, "God careth for
us" that God is full of sympathy for all His creatures, and for man especially,
Jesus Himself never ceases to proclaim and to illustrate. Yet we must beware not
to press this further, so as to mean suffering in God. For suffering Is an evil,
and there exists no evil in God: the religious instinct spontaneously and
unchangeably hungers after God as Pure Joy. With St. Bernard, in his classic
lament on the death of his darling twin-brother Gerard, we will hold that there
exists the deepest compassio, but no -passio in God.

Yet our hearts long also (though less strongly, I believe) for downright
fellowsuffering, when they suffer and when they are exhorted to suffer well.
Such fellowsuffering (deeper than ever we ourselves could suffer, and in One Who
shares with us the evil of suffering, but without any admixture of the far
greater evil of sin) is supplied by the Humanity of Our Lord. The Humanity of
Jesus Christ, we have already found, brings temptation as near to God as is
compatible with Godhead. And now we find this same Humanity of Jesus brings
suffering as near to God as is compatible with the same Godhead. Indeed, the
sufferings are so great as to require, for their sustainment by His human
nature, the presence and action of the Divine nature, of the Divine Person which
has conjoined itself to, and which informs, this human nature. Our prayer will
profit greatly if we thus hold firmly and fervently this double truth: of the
Pure Joy of God and of the Deep Suffering of Jesus. For we will thus neither
diminish God to a man of but larger size than we little men are, nor will we
dehumanise Jesus by ignoring the immense sufferings, as well as the storm and
stress the temptations of His earthly life. The definition of the Council of
Chalcedon, difficult as it may be to apply it in any great detail, will thus
continue to enshrine for us, also as praying souls, an imperishable truth: Jesus
Christ is both truly God and truly Man.

All we have so far said implies or leads up to the great fact and truth: that we
men need God much more than, and very differently from f the way and degree in
which God needs us men. God is the Absolute Cause, the Ultimate Reason, the Sole
True End and Determiner of our existence, of our persistence, of our nature, of
our essential calls and requirements. God is all these things for man. Man is
not one of these things for God. Man comes to his true self by loving God. God
is the very ocean of Himself of Love apart from all creation. Thus the positions
between God and Man, and between Man and God, are entirely uninterchangeable.
Hence the most fundamental need, duty, honour and happiness of man, is not
petition, nor even contrition, nor again even thanksgiving; these three kinds of
prayer which, indeed, must never disappear out of our spiritual lives; but
adoration. Probably the greatest doctor and the greatest practiser among souls
well known to us in these respects, of such overwhelmingly adoring prayer, is
St. Augustine. Never, in spite of his tenderly anthropomorphic devotion, does
the great African forget this profound non-equality, this non-interchangeable
relation between God and man. Our prayer will greatly deepen and widen out, if
we also develop such a sense a sense which is now continually exposed to the
subtle testing and sapping of the pure immanentisms and the sentimental
anthropocentrisms which fill the air. The Prevenience of God thus appears as the
root-fact and the root-truth of all our previous positions. God not only loves
us more and better than we can ever love ourselves, "carior est illis" to the
Gods "homo quam sibi," already Juvenal told us ; but God loved us before we
loved, or could love, Him. God’s love of us rendered possible and actual our
love of God. This is emphatically proclaimed by the First Epistle of St. John,
and is a favourite doctrine of St. Bernard. Thus the great Cistercian Abbot bids
his monks rise never so early for their night choir prayer in coldest
mid-winter; they will find God awake, Him the awakener ; they will find Him
waiting for them, always anticipating even their earliest watches. How
scandalously much is this great fact forgotten in our days, even by otherwise
alert preachers to educated congregations! I had much talk with an Australian
nonconformist minister upon this point, some ten years ago; and he determined to
preach it before such a congregation a large one in London. He afterwards
reported to me that his discourse had made a great stir, crowds of his hearers
flocking into the vestry to declare to him that they never in their lives had
heard such doctrine, and how wonderful and awakening it was ! Our prayer will
certainly gain in depth and aliveness, if we thus continually think of God as
the true inspirer of our most original seeming thoughts and wishes, whensoever
these are good and fruitful as Him Who secretly initiates what He openly crowns.

I take these to be the seven great facts and doctrines concerning God His
richness, His double action, natural and supernatural, His perfect Freedom, His
delightfulness, His otherness, His adorableness and His prevenience. These seven
facts, vividly apprehended, will even singly and how much more if seen
conjointly, each penetrating and calling forth the others, bring much depth and
breadth, much variety and elasticity into our prayer. This, however, only if we
understand plainly that there is no occasion whatsoever for us to constrain
ourselves positively on these points. I mean that, though a Christian’s prayer
will suffer in its Christianity, if it consciously and systematically excludes,
still more if it denies, any of these facts, yet no one soul, at any one period
of its spiritual life, will feel equally attracted to them all. It will be quite
enough indeed it will be the only wise course if each particular soul, at any
one period of its growth, attends positively, affirmatively, and lovingly to two
or three, or even to but one of these facts. Thus not any one soul, but the
society of souls, the Church of Christ, will simultaneously apprehend and apply
all these facts and truths. The Church’s several constituents and organs will
supplement each other, and will, collectively, furnish a full perception and a
full practice of these great facts of God.


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  CHAPTER 2: 02 THE FACTS AND TRUTHS CONCERNING THE SOUL WHICH
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The Facts and Truths Concerning the Soul Which are of Most Importance in the
Life of Prayer.

MUCH IN HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY and epistemology has been rendered more clear during
the last thirty years or so, and some very ancient misconceptions have now been
finally cleared up. Yet the presentation and the penetration of the processes
operative in the life of prayer, which we owe to a St. Augustine, a St. Bernard,
a St. Teresa, remain unsurpassed, indeed, on the central points, unapproached to
this very hour. I take the points which concern the human mind and spirit,
indeed man’s complex organism generally, in so far as they come largely into
play in the life of prayer, to be again seven. The due allocation and
utilisation of the seven psychological facts and laws will, very largely, depend
upon the degree to which we have adequately and vividly apprehended the seven
great facts and truths concerning God. Indeed, a certain amount of overlapping
and repetition is unavoidable as between the two series of facts, where each set
of facts is, doubtless, in itself, very distinct from the other set, yet where
the one set has to be apprehended by, and has to be put into close relation
with, the other set. The decisive preparation for prayer lies not in the prayer
itself, but in the life prior to the prayer. That is, distractions and dryness,
indeed even the real fruitlessness in and of our prayer, spring largely from our
faulty dispositions, doings and driftings when out of prayer. The effects of
such faultinesses pursue us when we come to pray. The cure for such faults
committed out of prayer, and for their effects upon and within prayer, lies in
the very wise ordering, and in the very faithful execution of such ordering, of
our active life.

Fenelon pointed out to the Due de Chevreuse how overburdened, and how racketed
and distracted was the Duke’s life, outside of his direct and deliberate
praying; and how greatly that over-burdenedness, when out of prayer, damaged his
recollection when in prayer. Fenelon advised the Duke to begin his day with
quietly running through in his mind the chief things he would probably have to
do, or would probably be solicited to do, during that coming day. That he should
then and there reduce the number of such things as much as was wisely possible.
And that, when he came to the actual doing of these things, he should clip his
action of all unnecessary detail and development. In this way he would succeed
in placing each action within a circumambient air of leisure of leisure for the
spirit of prayer and peace. This would be like the ordering of a wise gardener,
who carefully sees to it that the young trees he plants have sufficient spaces
each from the other have sufficient air in which to grow and expand. I have
myself greatly profited by striving to practise this advice.

St. Catherine of Genoa’s method of life has also helped me much. She would
quietly concentrate, each moment, upon that moment’s special content upon God’s
gift and will of special suffering or joy, of determination, effort, decision
and the like, conveyed within that moment. Such a scheme follows out something
similar, within the spiritual life, to the action of the sun upon the sundial in
physical life. The sun successively touches and illumines this, and then that,
and then the next radius of the dial. Or, again, the scheme reminds one of
Goethe’s old mother, Frau Rath, who, when one day an acquaintance, ignorant of
Frau Rath’s condition, called at her door and asked to see her, sent down a
message to the visitor that "Frau Rath was busy dying." Indeed, a genial, quiet
death to self lies in every minute, when the minute is thus taken separately as
the dear will and the direct vehicle of God. The ceaseless interdependence of
Soul and Body. The more any state of soul any psychosis is mental, still more is
spiritual, or at least the more the agent or patient feels the psychosis to be
thus mental or spiritual, the less, as a rule, is the neural accompaniment, the
neural limitation, and the neural cost of this state perceived at the time by
the experiencing soul. Yet such accompaniment, limitation and cost are certainly
present, even in the most genuine and highest of man’s spiritual actions or
states; indeed, the neural cost appears, roughly, to rise in proportion as the
action, at the time, fails to bring with it any sense of cost at all.

Fenelon is admirably awake to this important fact, when he warns Madame de
Montberon not to indulge, beyond a certain limited time, in the prayer of quiet
a prayer which greatly helped and refreshed her; and this because of the neural
cost of such effortless-seeming prayer.

One quite general, yet very helpful preparation towards the practice of sobriety
in prayer, and hence towards escaping, as far as possible, the acute reactions
liable to follow upon such very delightful prayer, is admirably preached and
practised by Jean Nicholas Grou. This fine classical scholar, and deeply
spiritual writer and leader of souls, urges the importance of the soul’s
possession and cultivation of two levels and kinds of action and interest a
wholesome natural interest and action, and a deep supernatural interest and
action. The soul will then possess and will cultivate a genuine interest in
politics or economics, in language or history, in natural science or philosophy
in these, as part of its bread-winning or as quite freely chosen studies. And we
will thus, when in dryness and even in anticipation of it, possess a most useful
range of interest to which to turn, as our disporting ground, in relief of the
dreariness or the strain of our directly religious life. I believe Grou’s
spiritual writings remain so fresh, because (given his spiritual experience) he
never, as he tells us himself, wrote on religious subjects except when the
spiritual light and fervour were within him ; whilst at other the far more
frequent times he translated Plato or emended the texts of Livy and Horace.

Some further hints towards the bearing and the utilisation of desolation, as
part and parcel of every at all religious life, and of every at all complete
self-knowledge possessed by the liver of such a life. Thus St. Teresa,
especially in her Autobiography, gives us admirably vivid descriptions of her
times of dryness. On the other hand, I was surprised and disappointed when, some
fifteen months ago, that deeply sincere Indian convert, the Sadhu Sundar Singh,
told me that, never since his conversion thirteen years before, had he ever
suffered one moment of spiritual dryness. I believe, with a very experienced
psychologist and philosopher friend of mine, that this opinion indicates a
strange lack of self-knowledge, perhaps also of what is precisely meant by such
dryness, on the part of this devoted Christian. If, then, spiritual dryness is
indeed inevitable in the life of prayer, we will be much helped to bear these
desert stretches, by persistent recognition hence also, indeed especially, in
our times of fervour of the normality and the necessity of such desolation. We
will thus come to treat desolation in religion as we treat the recurrence of the
night within every twenty-four hours of our physical existence; or as bodily
weariness at the end of any protracted exertion in our psychic life. When
desolation is actually upon us, we will quietly modify, as far as need be, the
kind and the amount of our prayer back, say, from prayer of quiet to ordinary
meditation, or to vocal prayer even to but a few uttered aspirations. And, if
the desolation is more acute, we will act somewhat like the Arab caravans behave
in the face of a blinding sandstorm in the desert. The men dismount, throw
themselves upon their faces in the sand; and there they remain, patient and
uncomplaining, till the storm passes, and until, with their wonted patient
endurance, they can and do continue on their way.

There are generally a weakness and an error at work within us, at such times,
which considerably prolong the trouble, and largely neutralise the growth this
very trouble would otherwise bring to our souls. The weakness lies in that we
let our imagination and sensitiveness be directly absorbed in our trouble. We
contemplate, and further enlarge, the trouble present in ourselves, instead of
firmly and faithfully looking away, either at the great abiding realities of the
spiritual world, or, if this is momentarily impossible for us, at some other,
natural or human, wholesome fact or law. And the error lies in our lurking
suspicions that, for such trials to purify us, we must feel them fully in their
tryingness that is, we must face and fathom them directly and completely. Such a
view completely overlooks the fact that such trials are sent us for the purpose
of deoccupying us with our smaller selves; and, again, it ignores the experience
of God’s saints across the ages, that, precisely in proportion as we can get
away from direct occupation with our troubles to the thought and love of God, to
the presence of Him Who permits all this, in the same proportion do and will
these trials purify our souls. The great difference, in spiritual range and
depth, in special attrait and peculiar calls and gifts, unchangeably inherent in
each soul’s vocation to what it is, and still more to what God would have it
become. True, certain differences, perceptible on the surface, between soul and
soul, largely spring from some changeable causes or defects. And, again, at the
opposite end, the ultimate limitations as well as the possible final calls of
individual souls are completely known to God alone, and to the soul itself, with
some real knowledge, only and when it has advanced considerably on the spiritual
way. Still, even the soul which is but a beginner can, with a little reflection
and some good advice, save itself either much unnecessary failure, or, again,
much vagueness and superficiality of endeavour, if it sorts out, roughly and for
practical purposes, those acts, habits, intentions, self-conquests, etc., which
specially appeal to it in its deepest, most peaceful moments, or which are
specially called for by its particular character in the peculiar circumstances
of its life and call: if it fixes upon these dispositions and virtues, and makes
these things the central objects of its prayers and endeavours. It will work at
these things at least for a while on a relatively wide and deep scale, and, as
to the other virtues and dispositions, it will be content with not completely
neglecting them. If we are faithful and humble in this concentration and
cultivation, we shall come to discover any serious mistakes we may have made in
our original choice, and we can then correspondingly widen, or narrow, or shift,
the field, or alter the methods of our operations.

All this directly concerns our prayer also. For all such choosing of the field
of our spiritual self-cultivation, all our labours in this field, all our little
successes, many failures, and long awaitings of some fruit: all this should be
saturated with prayer by the spirit of prayer and by definite prayer, vocal,
mental or of quiet. And, again, these several kinds of prayer, or combinations
of kinds: these too, of course, should be chosen with due care and
circumspection, according, again, to the attrait, the need, and the experience
of the particular soul, which, however, must never be allowed to eliminate all
vocal prayer.

Bishop Creighton wrote a fine letter, given in his Life, on the wonderfully rich
variety which characterised the spiritual life of the Mediaeval Church at its
best; and, indeed, such varieties continue to flourish in the Roman Catholic
Church. When Frederick William Faber preached the panegyric of St. Ignatius
Loyola, on the occasion of the Feast of the Founder of the Jesuits, in the
Jesuit church at Farm Street, he spent an hour in unbroken, sympathetic, indeed
fervent, exposition of this saint’s spirituality, and only in his last sentence
did he introduce the necessary limitation and expansion: "This, then, my dear
brethren, is St. Ignatius’s way to heaven; and, thank God, it is not the only
way!" A friend of mine, who loved her garden, told me how only one of the many
gardeners employed by her had succeeded with every one of her roses. She asked
him what was the secret of his success. He told her that the other gardeners
treated all her roses, not unwisely, but too generally they treated them all in
precisely the same way; whereas he himself watched across the months each
rose-bush separately, and followed out, for each plant, that plant’s special
attralt as to soil, manure, sun, air, water, support, shelter and the like. So
with souls: let us, without undue self-occupation, learn to discriminate between
them and, again, between them all and ourselves, so as both to respect and
encourage their ways, however different from our own, and to persevere and
improve in our ways, however lonely these ways may be. The Incarnational side of
religion may never be despised nor forgotten, but must always be assigned some
definite place and power within our spiritual lives. The approach to God and the
condescension of God, the Invisible, Pure Spirit, on occasion of, in, and with
the Sensible and Visible the Historical, Traditional, Social, Sacramental must
remain and be cultivated within our souls. The fact is that Pure Mysticism is
but Pantheism; and that Pantheism is, on principle and incurably, a non-moral, a
supramoral and a non-personalist position, within which there is really no place
for a distinct and definite God, for Sin, for Contrition, for the sense of our
being creatures, and for Adoration. All attempts to interpret the whole life and
teaching of Jesus, as simply the supreme unfolding of Pure Mysticism, suffer
shipwreck against the great convictions which colour all the words and deeds of
Jesus, that the consummation is indeed proximate, but not present; that its
beginnings can indeed already be seen, but not its fulfilment; and that even
these beginnings, and still more the fulfilment, are the deed of God, the
immensely Personalist Power, and not the work of mankind, still less just the
operation of the world-whole. The supreme revelation of the omni-present,
non-successive God, took place, in unique fashion and degree, in such and such
years, and months and days and hours, and in such and such places, of human
history. And so, similarly, with His lesser, yet still real,
self-communications.

Now there is no doubt that the prayer of quiet that a certain formless
recollection and loving feeding upon the sense and presence of God of God, as
here and now is a most legitimate prayer. Indeed, for the souls which possess
the call to, and capacity for, such prayer (and their number is, I believe, not
so very small), this form of prayer will feed and fortify their spirit more than
would, at the times when such prayer can healthily operate, any number of vocal
prayers, formal meditations, or Church services. Nevertheless and this is our
present special point such prayer of quiet will remain safe and wholesome only
if some daily vocal prayers, and some more or less frequent Church attendances
and sacramental acts and receptions, continue active within this same soul’s
life. I know well that such sensible and spiritual practices will, to such a
soul, bring with them, at least at their beginnings, a feeling of incongruity,
of oppression, of contraction, sometimes only dull, but at other times very
acute. Yet every such initial discomfort, if only the sensible-spiritual acts be
chosen with reasonable reference to this soul’s special call, and if these acts
be bravely faced and persevered in, will (if not promptly, at least in the long
run) be followed by an increase, very real, and mostly also clearly perceived,
of the substantiality, and of humble, childlike quality in the prayer of quiet,
and in the entire character of this same soul.

Let me illustrate what I mean from my own direct experience. After practising a
daily three-point meditation for some twentyfive years, the new Helper sent me
by God advised me that my prayer should now be mainly informal more of the
prayer of quiet type; but that there should always remain short vocal prayers
morning and night, Mass and Holy Communion twice a week, with Confession once a
week or once a fortnight; and (perhaps most characteristic point of all) one
decade of the rosary every day this especially to help prevent my interior life
from losing touch with the devotion of the people. After over thirty years of
this mixed regime, I am profoundly convinced of the penetrating sagacity of this
advice.

Let me, then, suggest that we should each of us discover, with sufficient
detail, what is the form of prayer to which God appears to call us ; let us give
ample room and opportunity to this particular form; but let us also organize,
most carefully, a certain regular amount of the other kinds of prayer and
worship. The right attitude towards the Sex-instinct, and as to what is, for the
Christian, the sin of sins.

Original Sin was generally considered by Catholic Christians, up to the advent
of the great Jesuit theologians, as a stain, a vicious habit present within
human souls from the moment of their conception and birth into this earthly
life. And especially St. Augustine, following and still further accentuating the
attitude of St. Paul, found this vicious habit to lie centrally in the vehemence
of the sex-instinct. Not even St. Augustine dared censure the sex-instinct as
such; as a Catholic Christian, he could not cast a slur upon marriage in its
essentials. He declared a moderate, readily controllable sex-instinct to be
right ; only the vehemence, such as now characterises this instinct, was evil
and part of original sin. But the great Jesuit theologians found even this much
to be untenable : how could an instinct, without which men would certainly not
face the grave burdens of bringing dependent families into the world, be too
strong, if we grant that the perpetuation of the human race really matters? So
these Jesuit theologians placed the evil, not in the instinct, nor even in the
vehemence of the instinct, but simply in the weakness of the reason and of the
will called upon to control and moderate that vehemence.

Certain difficulties attach also to this view. Yet this view is satisfactory in
that it removes all grounds for pains of conscience as to the presence of the
sex-instinct, however strong this sex-instinct may be (apart, of course, from
such strength as it may possess owing to the bad or slack life led by the soul
which thus experiences the instinct).

Now I believe it to be of great importance that we should realise, vividly and
persistently, that human purity is not only consistent with the presence of this
instinct, but, at bottom, requires it. There doubtless can exist creatures of
God without such an instinct. But man ceases to be human, unpossessed of such an
instinct. Human purity is thus essentially a virtue operating within the body a
fleshly virtue.

Yet Mr. F. R. Tennant’s books, so wholesomely suggestive on this point, should
suffice to warn us how easily we can be led on to think of the body as
ultimately the occasion of all our sins, as well as of our virtues ; or, at
least, to make impurity be, in our minds, the sin, the type and measure of all
sin. For, with Tennant, all sin is but an atavism, a lapse back into the
animalism from out of which mankind has raised itself. Impurity is a direct
atavism a gross, simple atavism, whilst pride is an indirect atavism a
subtilised, compound animalism. But this, I do not doubt, is a strangely
inadequate view, both as to the sheer facts and as to the specifically Christian
position. For the facts readily show that the occasions, the effects and the
reactions of our consciousness with regard to Impurity, are all different from
the occasions, the effects and the reactions of Pride. It is very distinctly not
the animal within us which leads us to pride and selfsufficiency, whereas it is,
quite as distinctly, the animal within us which does lead us to sloth, gluttony
and impurity. And as to the Christian outlook, its genius is sensitively keen
and final concerning which is the central, the most heinous sin. The central
sin, for the Christian, is Pride . and Self -sufficiency, distinctly more so
than Impurity and Sloth.

I take the occasion, the very possibility of such pride and self-sufficiency, to
spring, not from the body at all, but from the delicate poise of our imperfect
freedom. We possess a real, but only partial independence; we own a limited
power and a limited selfdeterminative freedom, and even these our fundamental
qualities we owe, not to our own making or finding, but we hold them as gifts,
as creations of God. The very deep doctrine of the Fall of the Angels grandly
illustrates this position. The Angels are without bodies; yet this does not lift
them above probation, but merely makes their testing a testing in Humility
instead of Purity. And, again, this absence of bodies does not make the
alternatives or the Fall of these Angels to be less. On the contrary, it makes
them greater.

I can only say that these two convictions, as to the nature of human Purity, and
as to the rank of Humility amongst the virtues of all the creatures of God, have
greatly helped my prayer. For the conviction as to Purity has freed me from much
previous scruple and depression: and the conviction as to Humility has, I feel,
anchored me more deeply and more securely in the Christian Ideal, in the
Christian life, and in the rich Christian fact the life and spirit of Jesus
Christ, Our Lord. A right attitude towards Temptation and towards Sin. Such an
attitude springs from two vivid perceptions: a keen sense of the difference
between Perfect Liberty, as we found it to characterise God, and Imperfect
Liberty, as it exists in man and, indeed, doubtless in all the higher and
highest creatures of God; and an equally keen sense of how all-penetrating and
all-characterising is, for man, the effect of this his Imperfect Liberty. The
first sense, as to the Imperfection of our Liberty, will save us, as we have
seen, from all pride, not only in our perhaps actually being some kind of Byron
or Don Juan, but even in our ability thus to fall away from what we should be.
And the second sense, as to the special character conferred upon all our moral
and spiritual life by this our betwixt and between position of Imperfect
Freedom, will keep us awake to the fact that, for our special human kind and
degree of virtue, Temptation is indeed necessary, in the long run and upon the
whole, for the perfecting and testing of our moral and spiritual life.
Temptation Temptation to sin is necessary; but not the Commission of sin, not
sin itself. Both these facts find their supreme illustration in the earthly life
of Jesus. His Sinlessness the unquestioning conviction of His sinlessness
appears in the oldest documents, but also His Temptedness. This temptedness
disappears already in the Fourth Gospel. Yet the Synoptic Gospels (especially
St. Luke), and the Epistle to the Hebrews, give varied and quite unforced
expression to the reality of these temptations and to the primitiveness of the
belief in their reality. We thus secure the text: "He was tempted like unto
ourselves in all points, yet without sin." This, for the Humanity even of Jesus
Christ. And we affirm the doctrine "without Sin, without Temptation, without
Suffering" this, for God indeed even for the divinity of Jesus Christ. "Credo in
Deum Impassibilem," declared the Council of Aquileia.

I wish we could all vividly realise how all grave sin, actually committed by us,
leaves at least for and during this our earthly life scars and limitations upon
our souls, even after our most generous penitence. Thus St. Augustine did not
simply profit by his sins. They became, indeed, the occasions for a grand
humility and for the keenest sense of the mercy of God. He became, in spite of
his past sins, a greater Saint than is many another saint whose sins were far
fewer or far smaller. But Augustine the Sinner, even when he had become
Augustine the Penitent, did not surpass, not even equal what everything else
being equal would have been Augustine the Innocent. He would then, for instance,
not have so closely grazed Gnosticism in his treatment of marriage. So, too, the
noble founder of La Trappe, the vehement de Ranee, did not simply profit all
round by his former sins, heroically repented of though they were. His aversion
to all critical historical work, as part of the lives of monks, is doubtless an
excess, and an excess which forms part of the reaction from his former worldly
life. Here, too, the model of all models is Jesus Christ Our Lord Jesus, and not
even St. Paul. Our Lord’s Humanity really grows and grows "in favour with God
and man" amidst real temptation. But Jesus commits no sin; nor is there any
trace of a reaction, still less of any excessive reaction, from a sinful life,
or, indeed, from any single sin. And this Sinlessness does not spell weakness,
but the fullest power.

Let us penetrate our prayer with these discriminations, and let us beware of
loose thinking about the profitableness of sin, which, alas, even great poets
such as Robert Browning have, at times, encouraged. I am very sure that, if we
keep persistently awake to the contrast between ourselves, the tempted and
sinning, and Jesus, the sinless but tempted, and again God, the living Reality
beyond all sin and temptation, we shall greatly strengthen and fruitfully
articulate our prayer. The Divinely intended End of our Life is Joy overflowing
and infinite, a Joy closely connected with a noble asceticism.

There is a wholesome, a strengthening zest attached to all action which is right
and appropriate for the agent; and there is an unhealthily weakening excitement,
which accompanies or follows all activity that is wrong or inappropriate. Hence
one great end, and one sure test of right living and right dispositions, is the
degree to which such living and dispositions make zest to prevail in our lives
and make excitement to disappear from them. Now there is no zest comparable to
the zest, the expansion, the joy brought to the soul by God and the soul’s close
union with Him. True, here below, we require to the end a filial reverence,
fear, restraint; virtues which, in the beyond, will continue deepened, in the
life of Adoration. True, again, we must never cease to fight Self, to flee from
Self. "The love of God, even the contempt of self," must more and more supplant
the "love of self, even to the contempt of God." We never may directly seek mere
pleasure. Yet it is also true that we possess, deep within us, a spontaneous
affinity for God. Nature draws us to God, as the dim, though most real
background and groundwork of our existence; and Supernature raises this
semi-conscious affinity to an active hunger for direct and clear vision, for a
true participation in the Supernatural Life of God. Hence we must, in our
practice, beware of deciding, as to what precisely to think, to do, to be, in
execution of God’s will for us, directly and simply in favour of what we do not
like, or what we like least. We ought, instead, quietly to concentrate our
thoughts upon God upon His will and His various calls, and upon discovering
which of such forms and degrees of moral and spiritual life most draws the soul
in the moments of its greatest clearness and peacefulness, as to what is somehow
meant for it. There will be plenty of opportunities for a large and deep
asceticism within the life thus chosen, when we come, as assuredly we will, to
have patiently to hold out, and laboriously to advance along the road a road
which, nevertheless, will be the road to Peace and to Power for the chooser.

We will not, of course, rule out, for ourselves or for others, the practice, or
at least the spirit, also of bodily austerities. The spirit, and even some mild
amount of the actual practice, of such austerities is, indeed, an integral
constituent of all virile religion: the man who laughs at the plank bed and the
discipline is a shallow fool. Indeed, some souls are, undoubtedly, called to
more than the minimum indicated, and only find their full peace and
persuasiveness in some such bodily asceticism. Thus there was a Sacred Heart
nun, of whom I heard some time ago, who dearly loved, and anxiously watched over
one of the pupils of the convent school, a beautiful young woman. This young
woman, soon after leaving the school, took to an evil life and became a wealthy
man’s mistress. The nun knew well how unavailing would be, in this case, any
direct appeal to the girl’s religion or conscience. So she wrote to the girl
that she was sure the girl loved her and wished her to live for many a year.
Well, she merely wanted the girl to know that, on every day during which this
her immoral life should last, she, the nun, would scourge herself till her feet
stood in a pool of her own blood. That she had already carried out this plan
daily since she knew of the girl’s condition; and that nothing could or would
stop her but the girl’s own written announcement that she had left the man. The
days went by. At last the girl wrote. The nun had gained her point. Is not that
grand?

Yet it is Love, God, that first should be in our hearts ; and if that Love then
impels us to such deeds, we will attempt to do them, to feed and to express our
love of that Love, and not otherwise. There is an admirable letter on asceticism
generally from Fenelon to Madame de Maintenon. My own daughter, a Carmelite nun,
spoke simply the spirit of her great Order, when, some little time ago, she
answered an Anglican married lady, who declared herself repelled by all such
mortifications how could they ever form a part of the Christian life? Did not
God Himself send us crosses, sufficient for all purposes, through and within our
duties? Why arbitrarily add to these? The nun answered that she did not, indeed,
find any trace of an attrait to such mortifications in her questioner let her
cheerfully leave such things alone and serve God joyfully along her way. That
these things are never more than instruments or applications of the one spirit
and way of love and of service. But that the lady would be unwise did she go
further if she condemned all such things for everyone. God’s calls, within our
one great common vocation, are many and various. Souls exist which are as truly
called to such mortifications, as her soul was not called to them. Who are we,
to lay down the law and the limit to God? In either of these two paths, as
Denifle draws out finely in his great Luther book, the general direction, the
End and the Measure are the same the love of God above all things and the love
of our neighbour as ourselves. And this love of God, where uninhibited and full,
brings Joy it seeks God, Joy; and it finds Joy, God. I used to wonder, in my
intercourse with John Henry Newman, how one so good, and who had made so many
sacrifices to God, could be so depressing. And again, twenty years later, I used
to marvel contrariwise, in my intercourse with the Abbe Huvelin, how one more
melancholy in natural temperament than even Newman himself, and one physically
ill in ways and degrees in which Newman never was, could so radiate spiritual
joy and expansion as, in very truth, the Abbe did. I came to feel that Newman
had never succeeded in surmounting his deeply predestinarian, Puritan, training;
whilst Huvelin had nourished his soul, from boyhood upwards, on the Catholic
spirituality as it flowered in St. Francis. Under the fine rule by which the
Roman Church tribunals require, for Canonisation as distinct from Beatification,
that the Servant of God concerned should be proved to have possessed and to have
transmitted a deep spiritual joy, Newman, I felt and feel, could indeed be
beatified, but only Huvelin could be canonised. Our prayer will greatly benefit
by the great facts and discriminations we have been considering. Without in any
way forcing, or escaping from, our real attrait, our prayer will thus possess a
double virile asceticism. We shall feel ourselves, even if personally not called
to very definite or to large bodily mortifications, in spiritual touch with, and
supplemented by, those who are; and, again, we will deliberately hold ourselves
as pledged to much renunciation of facile pleasures, as the condition and cost
of our own abiding. THE END


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/huegel-f-f-life-of-prayer/
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