Knowing Even As We Are Known

It may be, once again, my own monotonously one-track mind at work. Yet there is a kind of plea - if not an outright complaint - that I find echoed again and again throughout Scripture. And from where I'm sitting, it goes something like this:

Turn again, O God of Hosts! Look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine, the stock that your right hand planted, and for the son whom you made strong for yourself. They have burned it with fire; they have cut it down; may they perish at the rebuke of your face! But let your hand be on the man of your right hand, the son of man whom you have made strong to yourself! THEN [emphasis mine] we shall not turn back from you; give us life, and we will call upon your name!                                                       

                                                                                     Psalm 80: 17-18 (ESV) 

In sum - as I read it - if only we could know the RIGHT person: the right priest or king (or queen), the right prophet, deliverer or savior, and then be around him or her often enough, to the point where their holiness, godliness, etc, could just rub off on us. 

Not an unreasonable wish, too, when you consider the actual way that Salvation unfolds, or works itself out, in the course of both Scripture and post-Scriptural history. In any situation, if not every story, there's nearly always someone - even if it be a "mere" Moses or David or Isaiah - whom we must first get to know, accept, even trust, before we can proceed further. 

Except, of course, that in mere human terms - far from anyone else rubbing off on us - we can barely even rub off on ourselves. Much less get inside of ourselves. Indeed, it's as if we were locked out - as if our most consciously volitional, eager, earnestly purposeful Self were powerless to get at precisely that core of us - that Soul in us - which is most God-needing, God-docile, God-pliant. 

In short, most of the time, even our most morally earnest and resolute Self is pretty useless at grasping the needs of our Soul. Much less meeting those needs. So that even the "best" that we are, even the very best we're capable of, is something we can only work ON ourselves, from the outside in. And even then we can only go so far, so deep. 

The point, of course, being that there's only One who can get really inside us, into our very depths, into the unselfconscious core of our innocence, so to speak - so as to transform us from the inside out. And that is because, being the Maker of ALL things, He is already there. In fact - blessedly for us - He has even gone the entire length of making Himself a Son of Man. And thereby a new, and flawless, Adam. Which means He's even closer.

(Edited.) 

Why I Keep Harping on Prayer

So why do I keep insisting on prayer? As if it were the one necessary groundwork for any solution to - or even remediation of - each and every human problem, no matter how earthly, technical or practical? (Which of course it is.)

Because there's nothing we busy, commanding humans do that works so personally, intimately, knowingly, as does prayer. There is nothing else we do, however proactive and decisive and sure, that is half as penetrating as prayer. Nothing that ushers us so confidently into, not some remembrance or image or abstraction, but the Real Presence - and not just of God, but of anything: any person, place or thing. So that at last we may discern its real nature, and true need. Now granted, since our expulsion from Eden this human world has become a pretty competitive, mutually-isolating and -uncomprehending place. But if there yet remains, in any living thing, some residue as it were of Eden - of openness or unguardedness, of innocence or trust - it is prayer that will most surely help you find it. 

Of course there are all sorts of creatures we may meet - usually human or demonic - who refuse to be known. Or more precisely, who insist on being known only as they know or imagine or present themselves. Indeed, such is the degree of their self-enclosure, that they'd sooner be known in a way that provokes us to fear, anger or even violence, rather than let us know them as they are. I.e., in the Way that most helps us to love them. In a word - and without their being the least bit masochistic - they're the sort of creatures who'd much rather be hit than hugged. Out of sheer cussedness, or pridefulness, if you will.

Now in the case of demons, of course our anger achieves nothing, and we have no hope of loving them in any way they might receive (much less approve of). But in the case of humans, it is only prayer that seeps in through the wall, past any merely human self-image or pretense or armor. And the miracle of prayer is that it does so with the least merely human intrusion or "interference" in their lives.

In short, it is the one influence that accomplishes the most while "doing" the least. Prayer is, in fact, precisely what you "do" when you wish to ensure the fullest possible scope for the fullness of God's work inside that poor creature. Even as you yourself - out of respect for the self-enclosed person's independence and "freedom" - would seem, indeed, not to be working at all.

Random Passiontide Thoughts

If only, just once, we could see for who she is this window, and doorway, that is Mary the mother of Jesus. Because in our Blessed Mother, as in no other saint, we have a uniquely blessed human reminder. Like no other saint or even angel, she reminds that, whatever else the World pretends to be - however comforting, delighting, solacing, enticing - it is at bottom a harsh, bleak, unforgiving desert, second in its sheer poverty only to Hell. After all, look what it did to her Son. 

We can also, if we grasp her life and her trust, see what the Church for all its failings has sometimes been, and in its soul always seeks to be: not just an oasis in our Modern deserts, but the one truly green and refreshing and fortifying hospice in all the universe. Or so at least it is, when her Son the Lamb is rightly perceived, trusted, embraced, rested in. Indeed, if she, of all human creatures, didn't know the very essence of what it is to trust - and rest - in her Son, would anyone else? Would St Peter or St Paul have known, during their lifetimes, necessarily any better? Or might this have been what Paul was ultimately referring to, when he spoke of being himself "in labor till Christ be formed in you?" To know Him, even as His own mother did. 

Again, what the Church has been, and please God can yet be, even in this all-consuming desert of the 21st century.