Treasure

In September, the Order of Cistercians offered an online formation course on the theme of prayer.  Each day, the Abbot General, Dom Mauro Giuseppe Lepori, OCist, gave a fifteen-minute address.  Today, I would like to share with you some of the spiritual depths he touched, under three themes: the space between the heart and God, treasure in heaven, and treasure hidden in a field.

1)    The space between the heart and God.

Beginning with a text from St Paul, “Work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Col 3:23), Dom Mauro notes that between our heart and God, there is a space to be filled, a space which our freedom is called to fill with what it chooses to put there, or to live in as it chooses. St. Benedict asks us to pray before beginning anything, and if we want our whole life to be between our heart and God as something good, something well done, well lived, it is necessary to fill this space with prayer.

St. Paul, St. Benedict, and most of all Jesus himself, point out to us that the space between our heart and men is too limited to contain our whole life, all that we are called to live, to do, to desire. We have the tendency to live within a single, horizontal dimension, a “flat” dimension, two-dimensional. Paul speaks here only of the relationship between human beings, but he could add also that we must not live only for things, for goods, for our body, and deep down not even for our heart, because all that which is only horizontal does not create adequate space for living our life. Living only between our heart and things, between our heart and our heart, or between our heart and our body – this space would be too limited to contain our whole life, all that we are called, to live, to do, to desire. Only the space between our heart and God, between our heart and the Heart of God, is enough for the human vocation, because God has created our heart in the image of His own and for Himself.

To pray always, to ask always, means to live entirely within the relationship of the heart with the Lord.  By contrast, living on the horizontal level, I may complete a heroic deed, but without knowing that all is done by God and for God. Then this heroic deed is less true, less human, less holy than a small gesture, even an ordinary and daily one, done and lived with awareness of the relationship with the Lord, that is, in prayer.  So, we are not dealing so much with putting a little prayer in our life, but with putting our life in prayer – casting our whole life and the life of the world into prayer, into the relationship with the Lord.

2)    Treasure in heaven.

Dom Mauro goes on to say that if we pray little or badly, it is not because we do not have time or strength to pray, but because basically we are not convinced that we find the treasure of our heart in the relationship with the Lord. “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt 6:21).  If we were truly aware that prayer makes our heart remain in the treasure of heaven, we would pray like we breathe, as we eat or sleep, because we never reject what is vital.

Drawing upon the example of the rich young man, he notes that this story is not so much a call to poverty or generosity as a call to joy.  The sadness of the rich young man reveals to us in negative that the “kingdom of heaven” or the “kingdom of God” is our joy, the true joy of our heart.  The treasures of the earth are not the joy of our heart. We are made for a different joy, for a joy that does not depend on that which we have or obtain on this earth, but on a reality that is “of Heaven,” that is of God, in God. The treasure in heaven is worth all and more than all, it has an infinite, eternal value.

If prayer does not seek the treasure in heaven, the treasure that fills our heart with joy, it is no longer a prayer that is important for our life, nor for the lives or others or of the world. It becomes an activity just like others, next to others, which indeed we too often replace with other activities that seem more urgent. We replace the treasure in heaven with other treasures, those of the earth. The result, or symptom, is that we lose joy, true joy, the greatest joy of our heart.

He gives the example of our common prayer in choir.  If we give all our attention and energy to the musical quality of the chant, we are living on the horizontal level, we are treating prayer as an end in itself and grasping for an earthly treasure.  We can feel that this prayer is a failure if it doesn’t reach a certain standard, and thus we allow ourselves to be stripped of our joy.  At times, joy can be returned to common prayer by a “little one” – by someone who doesn’t sing in tune or who is always on the wrong page, because in them we see the inner truthfulness of prayer that stands before the Father as a beggar.

We must not forget that the essence of prayer, personal or communal, simple or solemn, is always very simple: it is asking the Father for treasure from heaven, our true joy. If there is this heart, this inner fire, then the solemnity of prayer also truly gladdens us, for it remains athirst, in search of a treasure that we cannot give ourselves but only receive from God.

3)     Treasure hidden in a field.

We can say that the treasure in heaven that prayer seeks in order to find true joy is a treasure hidden in a field, and this field is, for each of us, a concrete community that prayer gathers together.

The treasure of prayer is hidden in the field of our community, of our common prayer, of our ecclesial prayer. If we understand this, we learn how we are formed toward prayer and how prayer can and must be rekindled in us, each day, “seven times a day” (Ps 118:164; RB 16:1), and always. Sometimes we have the impression that the community does not help us pray, that we would pray much better by ourselves. Perhaps we would pray better, but we would not learn to pray as Jesus taught us. We would not learn the “we” of every invocation of the Our Father, and this would limit our access to the Father, because the God of Jesus Christ is “our” Father and not just “mine.”

Based on the example of Pentecost, we see that the gift of fraternal love is given by the Father in response to common prayer.  In other words, unity in prayer comes first, drawing the Holy Spirit who gives unity in charity, which in turn draws the world to Christ.  Finally, the treasure that we seek and find in the field of the Church’s common prayer is Christ.  Where two or three are gathered, he promises to be in our midst.  So, the peak of prayer is the presence of Christ.  The Church is always renewed, and our communities with her, when we allow the fire of the Spirit to kindle in and among us love for Christ and the love of Christ, that is, a heart that burns with passion for Jesus and with His passion for the salvation of the whole world.