That one-word question, how, has been on my mind the last several days. How do I be a Capuchin brother now; how do I love God and neighbor now (and once again); how do I choose every day what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, radically, with abandon. Everything comes back to how, or the means by which I fulfill the aims I have vowed to live, with God and a cast of hundreds as my witness. It is why I am reading the late Fr. Michael Crosby’s Spirituality of the Beatitudes with great intent. It is his how-to for living the Beatitudes of Matthew’s Gospel. What a gift God gave the Capuchin family through our brother Michael. I don’t want to part with this book! But I want to share it with others, donate it to someone or somewhere where it will be picked up again and do some good for others.
This morning, how finds focus in the question Jesus received, “teach us to pray.” Yes, I want to know, too, how to pray. Yes, Jesus’ prayer to God that begins “Our Father” is an answer, the answer for many of us who regard his prayer as the ultimate, the classic, of prayer. But even Jesus’ answer to his disciples feels more like a what than the how that I crave. Yes, I accept what Jesus has taught. Now I want to move from description or prescription to method, to practice. This calls for spirituality. This calls for wisdom. This calls for attention, for concentration, and perhaps most of all, for discipline.
In Bolivia, it has been a challenge to pray well, to pray with attention to what makes for excellent practice. The trials of insomnia made it hard to pray. You can pray or you can sleep, but you cannot do both at the same time. You cannot pray if you are not rested. Without one you do not have the other. Also, the challenge of language immersion has made it hard to pray. With almost all of my vocal prayer being in Spanish, those periods of common prayer with the friars, reciting the Liturgy of the Hours or the rosary, feel more like language-learning exercises than a spiritual practice. When you have to concentrate on pronunciation and comprehension, when you are stuck on the words, then you are thinking more than you are praying. Likewise, if I am listening to a homily or spoken prayers at celebrations of the Eucharist, then my mind, which is trying to understand what is being communicated and gets frustrated because it doesn’t, overrules the soul, and prayer doesn’t happen. Many evenings I ignore the homily entirely and meditate instead on a word or phrase from the Gospel. It is easier to participate fully and consciously in the celebration of Eucharist when we hear the rote prayers and give the rote responses, because they are the same every day. Finally, my experience of a loss of confidence or trust in God’s love a few months ago has made it hard to pray. I won’t go back into those details here; you can browse through previous posts on the blog for that. Slowly, I am re-integrating God and Christ and Holy Spirit into the One-in-Three that God is.
So on this Sunday I am simply sitting with how and offering the question to God. Just to think the word or utter it silently from my soul transforms me, transports me, maybe brings me closer to the One who can aid me. The question then becomes almost a command, a demand, even: Show me how. Show me the way, dear God, dear Jesus. Then, ultimately, a declaration: I will be how I want to be. Holy Spirit, make it happen! Amen.
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