prayer is not monologue

For Adrienne, prayer is not monologue or even dialogue:

It is impossible for you to pray without also being right with God; that would be like carrying on a conversation while refusing to give your partner a chance to answer; a monologue, however, is never a prayer. (Lumina, p. 54-55)

Yes, prayer could never be a monologue of my words alone toward God. Even petitionary prayer should be seen as the Spirit groaning within us (Romans 8:26). Prayer must be more than monologue otherwise it is only self-talk as good as that could be. Prayer is blissful silence as one is encountered by the Word.

For Adrienne, prayer is not even a dialogue:

A prayer never becomes a dialogue; for either I speak and so do not listen, or God speaks and I am allowed to fall dumb and remain blissfully silent. And in fact, the way every Word of God appears—not sounds—is designed to make us blissful, even when it demands too much from us and uses us up. (Luminia, p. 55)

Yes, prayer could never be dialogue of my words in mêlée with God’s Word. Prayer is God’s word delivered to us, speaking through us. Prayer makes possible, Paul’s statement, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20). As if to say, it is no longer I who pray, but the Word who prays in me.

adrienne for today

Today is the forty-fifth anniversary of the death of Adrienne von Speyr. In remembrance of her, I've written a piece that has appeared in two of my favorite blogs. The first is Land of Compassion (english) and the second is Terre de Compassion (french).

I hope you will take some time today to think of the great gift given to us in Adrienne.

Maybe you could pray this novena or this prayer below.

Prayer for Constancy

Lord our God, give your children ready perseverance in loving you. You know all too well what we are like: moved by your goodness when it comes to us unexpectedly, dismayed by your severity when it reveals itself to us with its demands.

When we live through happy or hard days, we think of you, seeing what comes from you; but in the monotony of every day we grow lukewarm, we forget you, we keep you far from our thoughts and from our action, as if we needed you only on the eventful days, as if we wanted to have you at our disposal

We beg you, change this, let us turn back while there is time, act decisively, tear out our tepidity, replace it with fire or cold or with both at once, only, allow your Spirit to blow in us.

Destroy everything that is not yours, And let us think no thought whose center is not you, so that by this destruction we are compelled to a livelier love.

We do not demand of this love that it be painful or delightful, only that it be yours, forevermore.

Lord, give us the grace to offer you again and again what you have given us. Only in this way will we unprofitable servants not remain fruitless.

Bless your love in us, so that it may yield the fruits that you desire. Amen.

May Adrienne pray for us

why the jesuits love adrienne

Here’s how I see it. When you read Adrienne von Speyr, you will be lead sooner or later to Ignatius of Loyola. When you read Ignatius and you are looking for living this contemplative action today, you might be lead sooner or later to Adrienne.

The blessings of this website is that you contact me. And many of you are Jesuit, either spiritually or actually.

Rev. Raymond Gawronski, S.J.

I love this because a Jesuit, Rev. Raymond Gawronski, S.J., introduced me to Adrienne. He was my dissertation director while I was at Marquette University and is now the director of spiritual formation at the St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver, CO. You might recongize him from this DVD series on the Spiritual Exercises.

What I am seeing (anecdotally) is that Jesuit scholastics are introducing each other to Adrienne. And here’s the important point, she is helping them to be more Ignatian!

In her writings, we learn contemplative action grounded in scripture and raised high by the theology of prayer and the saints. May she continue to guide the Jesuits into ever deeper contemplation and action.

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Ignatius taught Adrienne this prayer:

CORPUS CHRISTI, adoro te tribus sub tuis formis,

Sub forma divina, simili deo patri,

Sub forma hominis, sacrificii et crucis,

Sub forma hostiae rotundæ, sine principio et fine.

Ubi es, est amor sempiternus,

Omni tanges quæ creavit pater,

Omnia quæ passus est filius,

Omni quæ vivificat spiritus.

Amorem tui cum gratia mihi dones, 

ac dives sum satis 

nec quidquam ultra posco.

Amen.

(from With God and With Men: Prayers, trans. Adrian Walker [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995], p. 50)

My translation:

BODY OF CHRIST, I adore you under your three forms,

under the form of God, equal to God the Father,

under the form of man, of sacrifice and of the Cross,

under the form of the round Host, without beginning or end.

Wherever you are, is love eternal,

all things that the Father created, 

all that the Son suffered,

all that the Spirit vivifies.

Give me your love with grace,

then I am rich enough

and wish for nothing further. 

Amen.

how to read the book of all saints

Last year, the publication of the Book of All Saints in English caused quite a lot of excitement. I received many emails from people asking for more information about this fascinating, bewildering book. Here is a collection of advice that I have given over the past year on how to read Adrienne von Speyr’s Book of All Saints.

• Resist the tendency to read this as a reference book on your favorite saints. Often you will look them up to confirm or deny Adrienne’s views of your favorite saints’ spirituality. This book, however, is about prayer. Or better it teaches you how to pray like all the saints. When (not if) you read the whole book, you will discover you have learned a lot about deep, contemplative prayer. Rather than learning a lot about a lot of saints, you will find that above all you have learned to pray deeply and intimately. In many ways, I think we are incapable of proving or disproving Adrienne’s judgments of a particular saint’s prayer. What we read are her teachings about the communion of saints as a deep, multi-layered communion of prayer.

• The Book of All Saints is the first book of Adrienne’s posthumous works. When Adrienne dictated these prayer portraits, it was not meant to be a collected volume. These are spiritual sketches of saints composed over a long period of time. Von Balthasar only chose to collect and publish them after Adrienne’s death at least as far as I can tell. Because of this, the vignettes on a saint’s prayer are sometimes loosely related to each other and therefore are somewhat episodic.

• While Adrienne strives for objectivity in her mysticism so as to disappear in God’s will, she is nonetheless still a subjective interpreter. These are not definitive portraits of a saint’s prayer life. By God’s grace she was invited in as a guest to observe the saint in prayer. She participates imperfectly in God’s vision of the saint in prayer. She articulates imperfectly the status and character of the saint in prayer. I am amazed, stunned, enthralled, repelled, and always drawn in deeper by these prayer portraits. Above all, because of this book, I have learned much about prayer.

• My last advise: once you’ve read it, read it again. New and substantial insights will emerge. I think this could be a classic of twentieth-century Catholic spirituality. 

As always, I am humbled by the good conversations we have. I look forward to more. Please leave a comment or find my email on my about page. Keep reading Adrienne and let others know what you think. I’ve been struck, how about you?

novena to adrienne von speyr

Dear all,

Here’s a novena that was passed on to me in preparation for Sept. 17, which is Adrienne’s anniversary of her death. Sorry for the lateness of this post. But please join in. Adrienne will understand.

• Novena to Adrienne von Speyr (PDF)

My thanks to Sr. Marianna Canteros and a Jesuit seminarian who composed this novena from Adrienne’s book With God and Men: Prayers.

lumina and new lumina

Lumina and New LuminaA new translation is available of the small but valuable work, Lumina und Neue Lumina.  Published by Ignatius Press, this book, Lumina and New Lumina, which is a collection of aphorisms, really contemplative 'insights', should be graciously welcome in the English-speaking world.

"To get or to understand people always means: to look at them from God's angle, from the point of view communicated through Him.  It is not a science but a pure grace."

"Christian hope is a vessel in which faith lives; love carries it."

"Only when you are familiar with silence have you learned to speak; what you have to say can ripen only in silence."

a new year of graces

Happy New Year!  In celebration, here is an excerpt from a prayer of Adrienne von Speyr's called "Thanksgiving after Confessing at the End of the Year": 

Lord, ... we should have sought you in all things, we should have relished the year's joys as coming from you, we ought to have taken on ourselves its sufferings as willed or permitted by you, we ought to have followed every path you opened to us.

And yet there is no need to look back dolefully on this year, for like every year it was a year of your grace.  A year in which you helped us, ceaselessly encouraged us, and showered us with joys and an endless number of good gifts. ...

Therefore, we thank you for having done everything for us exactly as we needed, we thank the Father, who let you become man for our sake we thank the Holy Spirit, whose constant effort has been to realize your mission in our existence.

Amen.

learning about prayer

Here is a quotation on learning about prayer:

"How can you make people understand that they are supposed to grow into prayer?--It is just like with a foreign language: you teach the pupil word by word the language of God and the saints.  And all at once they speak this language fluently.  But this is possible only when you teach them the rudiments very clearly.  In an I-thou relationship.  Then the pupil also hears how the teacher speaks the language with others, he listens and acquires fluency.  The teacher can be God himself or the Mother of God or a priest.  But it does not absolutely have to be a human being.  God can open up heaven to a child (Adrienne von Speyr, With God and with Men: Prayers, 118)."

Adrienne von Speyr's own mystical, contemplative prayer began as a child and I think that this statement on the need for learning about prayer reflects some of her own interpretation about how she was taken into mystical prayer.  Hers was not an ascetical, acquired mysticism, rather she was introduced to it through a sheer gift of God and through her ascent at an early age.