Sebastian Fricke > Recent Status Updates

The prayer of petition can lead to an attitude, where it abandons all preoccupations about what to ask and desire, becoming an unconditional 'yes' to the will of God, to ask for nothing, except to grow in love and to refuse nothing, except sin.
This sounds to me as if not to care about the problems around us anymore, but my heart aches when I see the hurt around me, would this be a kind of wildcard prayer?

".., perseveranter" (with perseverance)
By perseverance their will be a gradual harmonization of our own will with what the Lord desires.
"Prayer gives us a better understanding and acceptance of the situation, and makes us see with God's eyes. What begins as a request for healing can gradually become, through patience, a life offered in reparation."

".., pie, ..." (with piety)
Our prayer should come from a setting of:
- Love of a son to his Father
- Absolute trust
- Concrete hope in God's providence
- Humility, that sees one's poverty
- Love of one's neighbor
- Obedience to the Father's will
- A purity of heart, that seeks only the glory of God
A gift of God, our effort is to remove the obstacles within us, so that the prayer-love of Christ can spring from us.

"necessaria ad salutem .."
The ultimate object of our prayer, as of our desire, must always be eternal life, union with God; there can be no other object that is worthy unless it is subordinated to this end, both for ourselves and for others."
Prayer has to always be under the reserve of: "if this is God's will" and the Holy Spirit will help us to ask for the right things.

What makes prayer efficacious?
Tradition says "necessaria ad saltum, per se, pie, perseveranter" (Things necessary for salvation, for oneself, with piety and perseverance)
"Our prayer shares in the mystery of Christ's redemption: a mystery of infinite love, which, however, remains powerless in the face of refusal by a human liberty"
But I should pray all the more fervently for others. Grace and liberty are linked.

Prayer is a work of God
"The world is not a machine .. but a place of life, that has come from a living intelligence .. open to the action of God .."
"Why did God create prayer? In order to bestow the dignity of causality upon his creatures" (Pascal)
"God in his mercy has freely decreed that it is only with the collaboration of humanity that he will accomplish his plan of salvation: and prayer is an example of this."

How does prayer relate to the eternal will of God?
Prayer seems to change the will of God (Lk 11, Ex 32), but "God's designs are eternal" (James 1:17).
God wills not only the effects of the cosmos but also their causes, prayer is in the order of causes to produce effects that are eternally willed.
"mankind, by their prayers, may merit to receive that which almighty God has decided from all eternity to give them"

What is the connection between cosmic determinism and the liberty of God?
Prayer implies a certain vision of the world, where the ordering of the world is not "a rigid succession of phenomena, following on in uniform manner, like the links of a chain", but rather where the ordering is like a living organism with countless interweaving forces contributing to a finality freely willed by God, for the glory of God.

Doubts of modern society whether prayer can change anything besides ourselves, can be understood with the philosophical development. Primitive religions are pantheistic, everything is about the necessities of life, prayer is natural. For the Greeks the world is ruled by necessity, Gods and men are under the weight of destiny. Science brought the idea of determinism, a constant & universal law, that rules the world.

The next section about the prayer of petition, I read and meditated on for quite a while. While a prayer of thanksgiving or pure contemplation are not very controversial, the prayer of petition opens up some theological questions.
1. Can prayer change anything in the exterior ordering of the world?
2. Why is one prayer effective and another not?

What should we pray for
Workers in the harvest
"It is God who gives the increase, God alone"
"the Church relies on .. contemplative men and women ... as the soul of the activity of her apostles"
Don't worry about your life
"We do have needs, but the Father knows them much better than we ourselves do"
The Our Father as basis
"We must ask for the coming of the Kingdom, and that is what we must seek before all else."

How should we pray
Confident & with perseverance
"Ask for everything, ask for the Spirit, seek God, knock at the door of the Kingdom."
Humble & with empty hands
"prayer must not be founded on our own 'righteousness', but solely on the merciful goodness of God"
Vigilant & without bargain
As the body of Christ, the new temple, self-interested traders and bargainers in our heart have to go and we need to persist.

Jesus tells us about the Father and our behavior is ought to be a practical consequence out of that revelation.
He is good to the wicked (Lk 6:28,35)
The wicked judge listens to the widow, how much more will He listen (Lk 18.1-5)
The lazy friend will help, how much more will He help (Lk 11:5-8)
We, sinners, do good for our children, how much more will He give (Lk 11:11-13)
He awaits us with open arms. (Lk 15:11-32)

".. detachment from the things of the earth is not enough. If the heart is neat and tidy, but empty, seven other spirits, more evil than the one which has been expelled, risk entering in ... If I don't have love, I am nothing, my prayer is nothing!"
".. prayer that asks for nothing, but is exclusively occupied with the person of the Lord, intent on receiving the communication he is making of himself in his Word .."

"One day the Father looked upon us, and chose us to be his sons, His Spirit came down upon us, and made us aware of our deepest identity; he whispered a secret name, and a way to follow. He drew us into the desert, to intimacy with him, and to a purification of understanding of the coming of his Kingdom. We were confident in our human means; we had to learn the paradoxical ways of God, and poverty in the Spirit."

"Prayer is the heart-beat of life, here of Life itself, and so of our own life too. Let us be silent, and pray."
In the gospel of Luke, when Jesus prays, everything revolves around the Father.
"Jesus has shown us how to behave as sons; to live in absolute trust of the Father"
"Prayer expresses the deepest movement of the heart; the heart of Jesus is totally turned towards the Father in the unity of his Sonship."

"For me, prayer is eternal. I can see myself praying eternally, singing the praise of God, with the thousands upon thousands holding their palms in their hands ... the holy people"
"Our being and our prayer will be the same thing. We are our 'weight' of prayer"
"We will all, at last, be Carthusians!"

Starts with an invitation to reflect upon what prayer is to me, followed by the reflections of 7 novices and their novice master.
"Prayer is the ability to be transparent"
"Prayer is your mystery. You, Father. Your secret, Christ. The magic of Love. ... Prayer ,it's this nothing, or this something without which nothing makes sense."
"How to pray? I no longer know how to pray. Why light a candle in broad daylight?"

"When an important person died, it was customary to send a messenger to churches and monasteries where he was known to announce his death and request prayers and suffrages for the repose of his soul. This messenger generally carried long scrolls of parchment .. so that on it those who knew the deceased either directly or by reputation could write a eulogy and their promise to pray for him."
Fascinating & beautiful!

"At the heart of this vocation, there is always that pure, total, 'chaste love for the Lord', ..., that 'true charity' (vera caritas). That , according to Bruno, is the essential quality of the contemplative life."

"Bruno based a moral order, even the supernatural relationship of man with God, upon the very nature of things. 'Beneficial' is what allows nature to achieve the purpose that God has assigned to it."
"Bruno harmonizes solitude and friendship, learning and silence, strictness and affection, 'athletic' competition and quit."

Next the biography goes into the letters of Bruno himself. In a heartfelt message, he tries to encourage his friend, to follow the promise into solitude that he made in the past. He nicely highlights what contemplation is for him.
"The essential fundamental quality of the contemplative, according to Saint Bruno, is living expectant and hopeful with eternity always in view." and to "capture what is lasting"

His decline of the assignment as archbishop is a wonderful example of what obedience can be. He was willing to sacrifice everything he worked for, in an act of obedience, but that doesn't mean a blind yes to everything he is asked for. He discerned, he communicated and he was allowed to create a new hermitage in Calabria. Maybe these steps paved the way, as they made the order less dependent on it's founder.

The phase, when he is called into the court of the pope, really shows his spiritual trust and greatness. He gave everything he had, he succeeded, what he inspired became fruitful and then he has to abandon it, the others become discouraged, disband and his dream seems to collapse.
"In the lives of many saints ... an hour comes when God requires them, in an act of obedience or faith ... to sacrifice their work."

I found it very interesting, that the landscape of the first charterhouse influenced deeply how the spirituality of the order would evolve and even more fascinating, that Bruno was relying solely on the the dream of Saint Hugh of Grenoble for that choice. Overall, that bishop was awesome, he helped them found the order, he protected them, he was a spiritual father and if he could have, he would have been one of them.

An unexpected but interesting read, unexpected as this reads a bit more like a scientific paper than the usual saint stories, but interesting because it isn't dry and it does a careful job of trying to paint an honest picture of the man, leaving aside as much as possible fictional accounts and showing nicely, how he developed from a renowned teacher to a founder of one of the most austere and radical catholic orders.

Great read for a Good Friday as preparation for the peak of the year! Excellent description of the passion from an outsider's perspective, without altering the story and solely imagining a backstory around it and highlighting the history of the time. Thankfully, this book does not claim to get a new perspective via visions and instead just honestly builds a creative fiction around the true events.

The book concludes the chapter on obedience with a remark, that we have countless opportunities to show obedience by letting go of our preferences and submitting our will, which are in no way dangerous. We ought to learn to disobey our internal disordered reflexes, compulsions and addictions. And as a Christian we don't have the obedience of a slave but of a king, freely, with the goal of learning how to love.