Becoming the beggar

Spiritual Life, Fall 2003 by Giovanelli, Ken

FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, I've been blessed with the opportunity to attend daily Mass at a church near my office in midtown Manhattan. Since liturgy is offered at noontime and rarely lasts longer than a half hour, I'm often able to spend the remaining thirty minutes of my lunch break in prayer after Mass in the silence of the empty church.

I've come to treasure this quiet time for many reasons. First of all, I've found that my prayer of reflection after Communion tends to flow more naturally into recollection and contemplation if I simply stay behind in my pew and wait until church has emptied out after Mass. Once everyone has left, I sense a nearness to the mystery of Christ that is never as immediate, never as intimate as those precious moments when I am "alone with the Alone" after receiving the Eucharist. Another reason why I love this time and place for prayer is that, despite the bustling city streets outside, there is a unique depth and texture to the solitude of an empty church that invites and enfolds the one who prays. It is a sacred time and place, a private time and place, a time and place of hesychia-silence, stillness, and quiet.

In this atmosphere of consecrated peace, there is a prayer that rises out of the silence. It is primarily a prayer of longing and desire for God, one that has moved over the course of the years from a multiplicity of words and images to a simple loving gaze, much like the intimacy of a human relationship that has deepened over time. No masks or pretensions are necessary in this prayer. We can simply be who we are in all of our "ordinariness," all of our human vulnerability before the One who gives us, in the words of St. Paul, "life and breath and everything."

Being with God

Indeed, prayer at this level is all about receiving. But, even deeper, it is about being, an existential being with God, "rooted and grounded in love," which we experience most fundamentally through the gift of our breath. Just as our moment-to-moment existence flows from our breath, so too should our prayer. St. John of the Cross writes, "For the soul united and transformed in God breathes out in God to God the very divine spiration that God-she being transformed in him-breathes out in himself to her."1 This prayer of being and breathing is still praise and adoration. But, instead of words, we pour out our deepest desire for the Lord in the inexpressible, tender language of lovers: through our breath, our sighs, and-if we're especially blessed-through our tears.

And yet, we are not passive. There is a tension, a passionate restlessness at the heart of our silence-the "naked intent" of The Cloud of Unknowing-which is revealed through many different "movements." We try to name these interior movements as a way of understanding the mystery of the "wound of love" that we bear deep within us. We say our prayer is one of "hunger" because we truly wish to be fed by the Lord. We say our prayer is one of "blindness" because we cannot see the face of the One we seek. We cannot see where our prayer is going-we surely pray in the "night." And, we say our prayer is one of "homelessness" because we so often feel "lost" in our desire for union with God. Once again, St. John of the Cross speaks for us when he sings in The Spiritual Canticle, "You will say that I am lost; that, stricken by love, I lost myself."2

In the silence, there is a whisper: Who is the hungry one? Who is the beggar? I answer: I am, Lord.

If we remain faithful to our time and place of prayer and if we're honest with ourselves, there will come a day when we realize that the arc of our prayer is not leading us to ever deeper consolation-as we might have once expected-but instead, to deeper poverty. This is a singular moment of grace. In this place of spiritual hunger, blindness, and homelessness, we have at last opened ourselves to the mysterious movement of the Holy Spirit who wishes to conform us to the Crucified Lord. We have come to the place in our journey of prayer where we truly become beggars for divine love and mercy, and our prayer is the prayer of the one who waits, and listens, intently for the approach of the Beloved.

Focus on My Prayer

In many respects, we are like Bartimaeus, the blind beggar in Mark's Gospel who sat by the side of the road in the dust outside Jericho. Bartimaeus can teach us something about prayer. He, too, sat in the same place day after day-blind, hungry, and begging. Then, one day, as Jesus of Nazareth approached, he cried out from the depths of his being, "Jesus, have pity on me!" Bartimaeus did not ask Jesus to listen to his ideas and thoughts, but simply to have mercy and heal him.

Bartimaeus shows us that if we wait by "the side of the road" long enough, if we remain faithful to our prayer day after day, Christ will one day hear the plaintive cry of our hearts. He will be drawn to our hunger-which is his hunger for us-and come to us, asking, "What do you want me to do for you?"

Will we be quiet enough to hear his voice? Or, will we have succumbed to a danger inherent in the longing and the waiting: that of becoming so preoccupied observing ourselves in prayer that we do not recognize the hidden moment of Christ's coming? If we're not discerning, we may fall prey to the illusion that our prayer-our waiting, our silence, our hunger-centers around ourselves. We may easily believe "this time of prayer is my special time with the Lord, this darkened pew where I sit is my special place." Without the slightest warning, we may become so spiritually selfish that prayer, consolation-even desolation-can only have meaning if it is our possession. And, then, we have no prayer at all.