On the Lord's appearing: what happens when we pray.

Washington, DC, Catholic University of America Press, pp. 230, paperback, $31.95 (Cdn)

REVIEWED BY JOHN MUGGERIDGE

"God thirsts," says The Catechism of the Catholic Church, "that we may thirst for him." Here is the epitome of prayer. Christ's desire to provide the Samaritan woman with living water prompted her to ask for it. No wonder the Missionaries of Charity inscribe "I Thrist" on their chapel walls.

But desire without knowledge leads nowhere. One has to know what one is thirsting for. In prayer, as The Cathechism puts it, "our first step is always a response," a response to God's gradual revelation of Himself to us, and of us to ourselves. In the Samaritan woman's case, eye-opening and soul-opening took place simultaneously. "Come, see a man who told me all things I ever did," she burst out to the men of Sichar, having dashed back from Jacob's well without her water pot: "Is not this the Christ?"

Answering Christ's call to pray, alas, requires from us something more arduous than expressions of delight at having recognized His voice. The Catechism talks about "the battle of prayer." Our enemy in this conflict knows what he is up against. God Himself having promised us anything we ask for in Christ's name, Satan's only hope is to keep us off our knees. Hence it is when we are about to fall on them that he moves up his heaviest artillery, and Catholics with a proper sense of spiritual self-preservation reply by calling on St. Michael to guard them against the wickedness and snares of the devil.

The battlefield of prayer

Not that even archangelic covering fire will be of much use to front-line Catholics whom no one has taught to identify the sound it makes. Soliders need briefing. This is why On the Lord's Appearing, Jonathan Robinson's lucid, erudite but blessedly jargon-free account of what Catholic tradition reveals about personal prayer, deserves a place on every parish bookstand. For this book, notwithstanding its scholarly apparatus, is far more than just an excursion into the history of religious thought. It is an intelligence report from the battlefield of prayer.

And few Canadian Catholics are better qualified to issue such a report than Father Robinson, who for the last several decades has presided as Superior of the Toronto Oratory, over both a house of prayer and a seminary. In the truest Catholic sense, then, he is a professor of praying. The fact, moreover, that he and his fellow Oratorians observe a Rule going back to just after the Protestant Revolution makes equally unquestionable his credentials as a professor of Catholic tradition. "[A]n historical reality...formed by its passage through time" is how thirty years of daily contact with that particular source of divine revelation have taught him to define it.

Father Robinson discusses prayer in the context of historical reality. Hence the sense of immediacy his writing conveys. It presupposes uninhibited belief in God, "the...Maker of all things visible and invisible." No matter that for us the Lord's appearing takes place, not at a first-century Samaritan well, but in our late-twentieth-century Canadian hearts. As far as Father Robinson is concerned, neither time nor geography can detract from the actuality of Christ's encounter with us there.

Faith and historical reality

Nor from the actuality of His encounters with any recognized authority on Catholic spirituality. One such is Jacopone da Todi, a thirteeth-century Franciscan Spiritual, whose contribution to early Italian literature earns him an entry in The Encyclopedia Britannica. The canonicity of da Todi's poetry, however, is not what interests Father Robinson in it. He bases his discussion of prayer on da Todi's "Five Ways in Which God Reveals Himself" for one reason only: that poem conveys historical reality. "In their efforts to gain Christ," writes Father Robinson by way of explaining the affinity between da Todi and Saint Philip Neri, "they appropriated the tradition of the Church, they lived it, and they handed it on."

So does Father Robinson. He has, for example, appropriated and handed on to us the traditionally held doctrine that praying, is, in his words, "an act of reason." What a relief in our world of o-m-m-m-saying cocktail-party mystics and wicca-babbling earth mothers to be reminded that "the language we use when we pray ought to be carefully considered and treated with respect!" God created our minds as well as our bodies in His image. With Saint Augustine, Father Robinson believes in order to understand. "Prayer," he asserts with the sixth-century Catholic scholar, Cassiodourus, "is spoken reason."

On God's part, as well as ours. Though separated from Him by sin, we remain His adopted children, and no loving parent ever quite loses hope of getting back in touch with family runaways. Not surprisingly, therefore, He appears in da Todi's vision, as a Liberator, Healer, Friend, Father, and Lover, as a person, that is to say, whom we know how to talk to.

Families, of course, are never entirely immune from misunderstandings. Sons, in particular, resent the fact that fathers feel called upon to govern as well as nurture. Well, they have to; even that Loving Father who, according to the misty-eyed Beethoven, needs must live above the starry sky, has to. But the question remains: why do God's most loyal children suffer at His hands? Why, for example, does He so often plunge stormers of heaven into dark nights of the soul? How can such unwarranted visitations be squared with the notion of prayer as spoken reason?

Spiritual darkness

Perhaps they aren't unwarranted. Catholic tradition, as Father Robinson shows, has a rational explanation for them. Our human understanding, which works "by analysing and synthesizing, but not by a direct intuitive grasp of the truth," may prove as serious an obstacle to full communion with God as our appetities. Or, in Father Robinson's words, "God's approach to us is a darkness of the intellect because He is drawing near to us in the truth of his own Being."

Such philosophizing, as Job's comforters found out, never goes down well with those who actually have to do the suffering. More than an explanation for their miseries, they need an antidote to them. And this Father Robinson finds in the prayer of the sacrament of the present moment as developed by the

18th-century Jesuit, Pierre de Caussade. Here is another case of tradition coming to our rescue. When spiritual darkness surrounds us and and we lose the ability to pray or even believe, rather than running away, advises Father Robinson we should ask the Father that this cup may be taken away; nevertheless, "not as we will, but as He wills," and then, as we learn to accept what we cannot change or understand, "God's life begins to grow in us."

But we Catholics should be of good cheer. The war zone of prayer may stretch intimidatingly before us. No matter. We have Saint Michael to be our safeguard, and better still, a tradition which not only preserves his memory but puts him beside us, ready at God's command to cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Above all we have the Church to keep alive tradition. "A Catholic spirituality," writes Father Robinson, "requires for its practice the existence of a community." And most of ours is in eternity. On the Lord's Appearing is itself a prayer, a prayer of thanksgiving for the Church, and more especially for her Queen, Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, who, Father Robinson reminds us, "nourishes and strengthens the living tradition of the Church."

On the Lord's Appearing is available in Canada from Catholic bookstores, as well as from The Oratory of St. Philip Neri, 1372 King Street, Toronto, ON, M6K 1H3, 416-532-2879.

John Muggeridge, a contributing editor of Catholic Insight, writes from Welland, ON.