From The Tradition of Meditation, by Laurence Freeman, Meditatio Talks Series 2010 B
For the Desert teachers prayer means contemplative prayer. It means the prayer of the heart, it means continuous prayer and it’s the most important thing in the world to them. It’s the source of meaning. Continuous prayer means “stable tranquillity and perpetual purity of mind”. The word “mind” here, shouldn’t be seen too cerebrally, intellectually, cognitively. It means heart as well. It means consciousness perhaps. This is the purpose, for the Desert teachers, of all
ascesis, of all discipline, of all spiritual seeking. In fact the purpose of everything is to come to this condition of ceaseless or continuous prayer. St Augustine says the same thing on one occasion when he says the whole purpose of this life, the reason we celebrate the sacraments, the reason we read the scriptures, is to “restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen”.
What we see in the Desert tradition is a refreshing and wonderful clarity and priority of purpose. They know what the meaning of life is for them, and it’s the most important thing. That’s why they are living that particular style of life. But they also realise of course that we don’t come to this goal immediately, that we have to see the goal as a sort of long-term goal. But then we have to have an
immediate goal. The long-term goal is this Kingdom of God; the immediate goal is working day by day on yourself, purity of heart. And morality, the moral life, is seen as a means to this end.
It’s something we have forgotten in contemporary Christianity where we put so much emphasis upon the moral code and moral controversies. We often tear ourselves apart arguing about a particular sexual moral issue or a medical ethical moral issue, and we condemn each other, we ex-communicate each other, we hate each other, we break up our churches, we refuse to speak to each other, we refuse to pray with each other over these moral issues, completely forgetting the wisdom of the gospel itself, that this is the foundation of the journey we are making, not the goal itself.
But the Desert monks understood this. For them the moral life, what they called developing the virtues, tends always towards perfection in prayer. That’s why we struggle with our problems, with our faults of character, with the seven deadly sins, with our habits, with our patterns of intolerance or anger or greed or addiction or lust or whatever. This is why we struggle, so that we can come closer towards this pure prayer oratio pura which Cassian calls the capstone
of the whole structure.
It’s this relationship between morality and contemplation that, I think, challenges modern churches and modern church leadership very directly. And judging from what I can see, the clerical leadership of the churches, is not going to get this before the grassroots do. The change in consciousness is rising up as the Holy Spirit usually works through the grassroots not from the hierarchy.
Cassian, in a very left-brain kind of approach, very rational, logical approach, deals with this journey as if it were a project. He uses the parable of the building of a tower. He says if you are going to build a tower make sure you’ve got good solid foundations. Then the solid foundations will help you to withstand storms and earthquakes and all the problems that will arise in life. So the laying of these foundations is what Cassian understands as the ascetical life.
The Flower, by George Herbert
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are Thy returns! ev’n as the flow’rs in Spring,
To which, besides their own demean
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring;
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flow’rs depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are Thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickning, bringing down to Hell
And up to Heaven in an houre;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amisse
This or that is;
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
O that I once past changing were,
Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither;
Many a Spring I shoot up fair,
Offring at Heav’n, growing and groning thither,
Nor doth my flower
Want a Spring-showre,
My sinnes and I joyning together.
But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if Heav’n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone
Where all things burn,
When Thou dost turn,
And the least frown of Thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O, my onely Light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom Thy tempests fell all night.
These are Thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flow’rs that glide;
Which when we once can find and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
