{"id":25035,"date":"2009-11-02T12:30:10","date_gmt":"2009-11-02T16:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/2009\/11\/catholic-prayer-experiencing-a\/"},"modified":"2014-07-17T10:46:00","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T14:46:00","slug":"catholic-prayer-experiencing-a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/2009\/11\/catholic-prayer-experiencing-a\/","title":{"rendered":"Catholic Prayer: experiencing a deeper and authentic prayer life in the Blessed Trinity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where and how do we seek communion in prayer with God? Catholics enter into communion with God through the Blessed\u00a0Trinity. I purposely ask the question this way because so often I meet Catholics who have fallen into a quasi-Protestant manner of thinking and praying. They say, “My prayer is a relationship with Jesus.” They go no further. They also rarely give an indication that there are two other persons of the Blessed Trinity. Certainly, we all are to seek an intimacy with the Lord Jesus, but as Catholics\u00a0our theology and its manifestation in the spiritual life through the sacred\u00a0Liturgy and personal prayer is always in conversation with the Trinity:\u00a0Father,\u00a0Son and Holy Spirit<\/i>. This is an essential point in the spiritual life. You miss this point, you miss the point of\u00a0Catholic\u00a0prayer. In fact, all of our liturgical prayer, save for a few, is\u00a0directed to the Father, through the Son under the power of the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n

Catholics ought not be functionally unitarian: prayer exclusively directed to\u00a0one member of the Trinity but it ought to be trinitarian:\u00a0\u00a0Father, Son\u00a0AND<\/b>\u00a0Holy Spirit. In 1989,\u00a0Cardinal Ratzinger, with his typical clarity, addressed this issue in a “Letter to the Bishops of the\u00a0Catholic Church on some Aspects of Christian Meditation<\/a><\/strong>.” He said, in part:<\/p>\n

\"St<\/a><\/p>\n

“From\u00a0the dogmatic point of view,”\u00a0it is impossible to arrive at a perfect love of\u00a0God if one ignores his giving of himself to us through his Incarnate Son, who\u00a0was crucified and rose from the dead. In him,\u00a0under the action of the Holy\u00a0Spirit, we participate, through pure grace, in the interior life of God. When\u00a0Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9), he does not\u00a0mean just the sight and exterior knowledge of his human figure (in the flesh is\u00a0of no avail”–Jn 6:63). What he means is rather a vision made possible by the\u00a0grace of faith:\u00a0to see, through the manifestation of Jesus perceptible by the\u00a0senses, just what he, as the Word of the Father, truly wants to reveal to us of\u00a0God<\/i>\u00a0(“It is the Spirit that gives life […]; the words that I have spoken to\u00a0you are spirit and life”–ibid.). This “seeing” is not a matter of a purely\u00a0human abstraction (“abstractio”) from the figure in which God has revealed\u00a0himself; it is rather the grasping of the divine reality in the human figure of\u00a0Jesus, his eternal divine dimension in its temporal form. As St. Ignatius says\u00a0in the\u00a0Spiritual Exercises<\/i>, we should try to capture “the infinite perfume\u00a0and the infinite sweetness of the divinity” (n. 124), going forward from that finite revealed truth from which we have begun. While he raises us up, God is\u00a0free to “empty” us of all that holds us back in this world, to draw us\u00a0completely into the Trinitarian life of his eternal love. However,\u00a0t<\/b>his gift\u00a0can only be granted “in Christ through the Holy Spirit,” and not through our\u00a0own efforts, withdrawing ourselves from his revelation<\/b>\u00a0(20).<\/p>\n

I would recommend reading Cardinal Ratzinger’s full letter to the bishops; it is linked above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where and how do we seek communion in prayer with God? Catholics enter into communion with God through the Blessed\u00a0Trinity. I purposely ask the question this way because so often I meet Catholics who have fallen into a quasi-Protestant manner of thinking and praying. They say, “My prayer is a relationship with Jesus.” They go … Continue reading Catholic Prayer: experiencing a deeper and authentic prayer life in the Blessed Trinity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[2508,1791,2123,1792],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25035"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25035"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31271,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25035\/revisions\/31271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communio.stblogs.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}