The Way of Trust and Love – A Retreat Guided by St. Therese of Lisieux , Fr. Jacques Philippe

It shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

That is God’s promise for the end times. And we are there. … Marthe Robin, a great French mystic, announced a Pentecost of love and mercy on the whole world. It has already begun.

Of course we should not start speculating about when the world will end; that is always very dangerous. The Church may last a long time yet, but we can feel an undeniable spiritual urgency. The world is suffering at many levels.

The economic crises we are currently going through are only one tiny symptom; there are other, much more painful aspects. So many young people are lost, with no meaning for their lives. They follow the vilest and most destructive ways of life and enslave themselves to the stupidest fashions and worst addictions.

St. Teresa of Avila said: The world is burning; now is not the time to be talking of unimportant things.

Faced with all this, however, we should not get anxious. On the contrary, we should be more and more trusting and childlike and peaceful. Mary is the Queen of Peace, and the more crisis-stricken the world is, the more we must be at peace and receive God’s peace, for we can be certain of his love and faithfulness.

While we need to be clear and realistic about the present state of the world, I have no wish at all to use melodramatic terms to stir up fear. Fear is one of our worst enemies. Do not be afraid! Fear not! This is what Jesus tells us constantly. Paul asks, “If God is for us, who is against us?” And God is for us: he has shown that by giving us his Son who died for us while we were still sinners, as St. Paul says in the same letter to the Romans.

So we should not be anxious, but full of trust and peace. To do so, however, we need to be firmly rooted in God, to live by his love, his word, and let him reveal his face to us as our Father, so that we can enter into the true freedom of God’s children.

Our prayer life is of capital importance from this point of view. What the Church needs most is prayer, adoration. I know it isn’t always easy, with the pace of life today as it is, but we have to find time for prayer. We have to make time for a heart-to-heart conversation with God.

There need to be places with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, where we can spend time in adoration. Today, thank God, there are churches that have Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament twenty-four hours a day. God does not ask everyone for the same thing, but everyone does need a minimum of faithfulness in prayer.

We should devote more time to prayer, to adoration, when we have the opportunity. That is not a waste of time—just the opposite, it’s a breath of fresh air for the world. There is nothing more ecological than prayer! It’s not only nature that needs saving.

The main endangered species today is not the polar bear but the human race. Yes, people should try to save the polar bears. They are created by God and beautiful, and the little bear cubs are delightful. But the most important task of all is to save mankind, and mankind will be saved by prayer. The works of apostolate and charity must be the result of prayer and contemplation.

Not everyone can spend hours in church, but each of us must do the little he or she can. If there were a little less television and a little more prayer in our lives, we would be more at peace. For each hour of television news, I think, one needs at least an hour of adoration to be able to digest all that news—not always good news—that floods us. Let’s each of us do what God asks in this.

I know it isn’t easy. Faithfulness to prayer requires a lot of effort, but it is worthwhile. To be faithful to prayer, you need to establish a rhythm, since our lives are made up of rhythms and we need good habits, including established times when we pray, and that’s all there is to it. No questioning it: this is a firm decision we’ve made. It requires a struggle at the start, but afterwards it brings us great joy.

There’s a common difficulty, though. When we regularly spend time in prayer, it goes very well sometimes but not always. A half hour before the Blessed Sacrament may be a time of beauty and gentleness during which we may experience great happiness, a happiness not of this world.

But we may also find it tedious and boring, and think the time goes very slowly. Our times of prayer may be times of poverty and distraction; when we are alone in silence before God, all our problems come crowding into our minds! Regrets for the past, fears about the future, all the things that aren’t going well, whatever causes us anxiety: all this comes to the surface. It isn’t at all pleasant, but we must persevere.

And if we do, sooner or later something wonderful will happen. Prayer follows laws that are flexible and unpredictable, but what I’m going to sketch now remains basically valid.

If we are faithful to our times of prayer, little by little we will be given peace. For God is an ocean of peace, and he will grant it to us. God will give us the grace to accept all those defects of which we become aware. Being reconciled with ourselves requires some hard work but that is one of the fruits of prayer.

When a person is faithful to his or her times of prayer, day after day, week after week, it’s like someone with a well in the garden that’s choked with rubbish—branches, leaves, stones, mud—but underneath is water, clean and pure. In spending time in prayer, you’re setting to work patiently to unblock the well. What comes up at the start is the mud and dirt: our wretchedness, worries, fears, guilt, self-blame—the things we normally avoid. Plenty of people run away from themselves.

There’s a real fear of silence today! But those who have the courage to go forward into the desert end up finding an oasis. Let’s stay with the image of the well. We start digging, and at first it’s not very pleasant, because we come face-to-face with our limitations and human deficiencies. But if we persevere, we’ll end by finding the wellspring.

We discover, to our joy, that at the bottom of our hearts flows a pure spring of water, the presence of God dwelling within us. Even if we are poor sinners, by going to the depths of our hearts in prayer we find pure, clear water.

But only prayer grants us access to the bottom of our hearts. Therapy, even psychoanalysis, can only stay on the surface. Sometimes it’s necessary; it can be useful in clearing stuff away.

But the only things that gives us access to the depths of our hearts, to our deepest identity, to the child of God that each of us is, are faith and prayer.

Parents, through their offspring, have a grand opportunity to spread the faith. They are real missionaries in their own home. They can say at the end of their lives as Christ said of His Apostles: “Those whom Thou hast given Me, I guarded; and not one of them perished.” (John 17 :12) -Fr. George Kelly, Catholic Family Handbook https://amzn.to/2PusNvq (afflink)

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“It often struck me that if cleanliness is next to godliness, cheerfulness is a near relation. The cheerful are truly benefactors of the world in which we move…” – Fr. John Carr, C.SS.R.

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A little six-year-old Protestant boy had often heard his Catholic companions reciting the prayer “Hail Mary.” He liked it so much that he copied it, memorized it and would recite it every day.

“Look, Mommy, what a beautiful prayer,” he said to his mother one day.

“Never again say it,” answered the mother. “It is a superstitious prayer of Catholics who adore idols and think Mary a goddess. After all, she is a woman like any other. Come on, take this Bible and read it. It contains everything that we are bound to do and have to do.”

From that day on the little boy discontinued his daily “Hail Mary” and gave himself more time to reading the Bible instead.

One day, while reading the Gospel, he came across the passage about the Annunciation of the Angel to Our Lady. Full of joy, the little boy ran to his mother and said: “Mommy, I have found the ‘Hail Mary’ in the Bible which says: ‘Hail full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women.’ Why do you call it a superstitious prayer?”

On another occasion he found that beautiful Salutation of St. Elizabeth to the Virgin Mary and the wonderful canticle MAGNIFICAT in which Mary foretold that “the generations would call her blessed.”

He said no more about it to his mother but started to recite the “Hail Mary” every day as before. He felt pleasure in addressing those charming words to the Mother of Jesus, our Savior.

When he was fourteen, he one day heard a discussion on Our Lady among the members of his family. Every one said that Mary was a common woman like any other woman.

The boy, after listening to their erroneous reasoning could not bear it any longer, and full of indignation, he interrupted them, saying:

“Mary is not like any other children of Adam, stained with sin. No! The Angel called her FULL OF GRACE AND BLESSED AMONGST WOMEN. Mary is the Mother of Jesus Christ and consequently Mother of God.

There is no higher dignity to which a creature can be raised. The Gospel says that the generations will proclaim her blessed and you are trying to despise her and look down on her. Your spirit is not the spirit of the Gospel or of the Bible which you proclaim to be the foundation of the Christian religion.”

So deep was the impression which the boy’s talk had made that his mother many times cried out sorrowfully: “Oh my God! I fear that this son of mine will one day join the Catholic religion, the religion of Popes!”

And indeed, not very long afterwards, having made a serious study of both Protestantism and Catholicism, the boy found the latter to be the only true religion and embraced it and became one of its most ardent apostles.

Sometime after his conversion, he met his married sister who rebuked him and said indignantly: “You little know how much I love my children. Should any one of them desire to become a Catholic, I would sooner pierce his heart with a dagger than allow him to embrace the religion of the Popes!”

Her anger and temper were as furious as those of St. Paul before his conversion. However, she would change her ways, just as St. Paul did on his way to Damascus.

It so happened that one of her sons fell dangerously ill and the doctors gave up hope of recovery. Her brother then approached her and spoke to her affectionately, saying:

“My dear sister, you naturally wish to have your child cured. Very well, then, do what I ask you to do. Follow me, let us pray one ‘Hail Mary’ and promise God that, if your son recovers his health, you would seriously study the Catholic doctrine, and should you come to the conclusion that Catholicism is the only true religion, you would embrace it no matter what the sacrifices may be.”

His sister was somewhat reluctant at the beginning, but as she wished for her son’s recovery, she accepted her brother’s proposal and recited the “Hail Mary” together with him.

The next day her son was completely cured. The mother fulfilled her promise and she studied the Catholic doctrine. After long preparation she received Baptism together with her whole family, thanking her brother for being an apostle to her. The story was related during a sermon given by the Rev. Fr. Tuckwell. “Brethren,” he went on and said, “the boy who became a Catholic and converted his sister to Catholicism dedicated his whole life to the service of God.

He is the priest who is speaking to you now! What I am I owe to Our Lady.

You, too, my dear brethren, be entirely dedicated also to Our Lady and never let a day pass without saying the beautiful prayer, ‘Hail Mary’, and your Rosary.

Ask her to enlighten the minds of Protestants who are separated from the true Church of Christ founded on the Rock (Peter) and against whom the gates of hell shall never prevail.'”

A mother holds her baby in her arms, looks up to God, and knows that she, by months of suffering and patience, has co-operated with Him in making and bringing into the world a little body housing a priceless soul. A father stands above his new-born son resting in the arms of his wife, and knows as he picks him up and weighs him tenderly that he has shared with God the Father His very fatherhood; for this mite of humanity, immortal in destiny, is truly his son. Mother and father together have co-operated with God in the astonishing creation of a human being. -Fr. Daniel A. Lord, 1950’s

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Join me as I read to you this lovely article by Joseph Breig, husband and father, who wrote his thoughts about the great influence the rosary has had on his life and his family….”When I get to heaven – as I trust I shall – something very embarrassing is bound to happen. As sure as shooting; somebody who has known me rather too well for comfort on this earth is going to come up to me and say, in a loud voice enough for everybody to hear, ‘How in the world did you get in here?'”

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From Thirsting for Prayer by Father Jacques Philippe

Besides all that has just been said, one means used to foster continual prayer, especially by religious, is to repeat short phrases, often taken from or inspired by Scripture. This is done either during the time devoted to prayer or outside it, during other activities, to keep God always in mind.

According to John Cassian, certain monks in Egypt in the fourth century used to repeat the following invocation ceaselessly: “O God, make haste to my rescue, Lord, come to my aid!” (Ps 70:1).

The beautiful book The Way of a Pilgrim spread the knowledge and practice of the “Jesus Prayer” or “prayer of the heart” in the Western world. It tells of a humble Russian peasant who was moved by the exhortation in the Letter to the Thessalonians “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes 5:17), and wondered how he could put this command into practice.

He traveled through Russia in search of a spiritual father who could teach him. A monk initiated him into the tradition of prayer that consists of ceaselessly repeating, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!,” using a simple rosary of knotted woolen thread and coordinating the recital of the prayer with the rhythm of one’s breathing, while looking into one’s heart.

Little by little, the peasant experienced the benefits: his heart was filled with peace and purified, he felt the joy of God’s presence, he received inner enlightenment about God’s love, developed compassion toward everyone, and saw the world and nature with new eyes.

This tradition goes back to the Egyptian monasticism of the first centuries and spread throughout Orthodox Christianity; in our days it is also spreading through the Western world.

More familiar to Western Catholics is the devotion of the Rosary, with its constant repetition of the Our Father and Hail Mary.

Today, simple repetition does not always get good press. Ours is a world that, having lost its sense of the most fundamental things in life, is permanently in search of novelty.

Now, it is true that repetition can become merely mechanical and routine, but it can also mean that love is being inscribed on the soul for as long as it continues.

It an intrinsic part of life: we are lucky our hearts don’t get tired of constantly beating and our breathing does not get tired of its rhythm!

Rhythm, as I said earlier, plays a fundamental role in human life. It has a calming effect; it allows energy to be used for a considerable length of time without wastage or exhaustion.

The rhythm of repetitive prayer enables a desire, an intention, to be expressed externally through the body and at the same time to take root in the heart. It is an acceptance of reality, of the fact of having bodies, and that our human condition is part of the rhythms of nature and life.

It is openness to a deep meaning that surpasses us, going beyond the perceptions of the rational mind. It gives us access to a sort of wisdom, an intelligence of life, in a dependence on our Creator to which we consent.

Our prayer is called to become not just one activity among others but the fundamental activity of our lives, the very rhythm of our deepest existence, the breathing of our heart, so to speak.

Repetitive prayers help us achieve this, since they are our human effort, our persevering quest, in the hope that God’s grace will grant that for which we ask through our humble, untiring repetition of the same words.

In a talk on the Rosary given at Lourdes in October 1998, Father Timothy Radcliffe, OP, said: If we love someone, we know that it is not enough to tell them “I love you” just once. We will want to say it again and again, and we may hope that they wish to hear it again and again.

1. K. Chesterton argued that repetition is a characteristic of the vitality of children, who like the same stories, with the same words, time and time again, not because they are bored and unimaginative but because they delight in life.

Chesterton wrote: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again!’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again!’ to the sun; and every evening ‘Do it again!’ to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes each daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg .

There is nothing in the least wrong with spending our time of prayer on these repetitive prayers, especially at moments of tiredness, difficulty in mobilizing our intellectual faculties, or else when we feel impelled by the Holy Spirit toward a prayer that, in comparison with meditation, is poorer, simpler, brought back to essentials, not relying too much on intellectual discourse or the work of imagination, but favoring the work of the heart.

This repetition should be done gently, peacefully, without its becoming forced or requiring an effort (which would be counterproductive). We should be attentive to God’s presence in us, while gently merging body and spirit with the form of prayer used.

The rhythm of the repetition can favor our entering into a state of recollection. Being faithful to the humble but sincere search for God expressed in this prayer can give us, little by little, the grace to enter into a state of true contemplation and loving union with God.

The advantage of these repetitive prayers, besides their simplicity, is that they can progressively become a sort of habit (in the good sense of the word); that makes them a valuable resource for praying at many other moments of the day besides the time devoted to prayer properly so called.

It may be when we are in the car, walking, during times of insomnia, while engaged in activities or jobs that do not take up the whole of our mind, etc.

How many opportunities do we, as wives and mothers, have each day to do God’s will, not our own?? Many….many. We do not need a retreat to figure this out. A wife and a mother’s journey is laying down her life for those she loves. And we prove it each time we tend to the needs around us. We learn that most important life-lesson that the hermit in the desert is learning…..to lay down our lives for Christ.-Finer Femininity, Painting by Trent Gudmundsen

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From Thirsting for Prayer by Father Jacques Philippe

The dispositions that make prayer fruitful

Now let us tackle the question of discerning the genuineness of our prayer from a different angle: not the fruits it brings, but the way we set about praying.

A first point (which follows from what I am going to say later, but it is good to emphasize it) is that fidelity should be a principle quality of prayer. Jesus does not ask us to pray well; he asks us to pray without ceasing!

Faithfulness (if, of course, it is not just routine, but is motivated by a sincere desire to find God, please Him, and love Him) will produce all the rest. The main battle in the prayer life is perseverance.

As St. Teresa of Avila notes, the devil does all he can to get souls away from faithfulness to prayer, using every possible or imaginable excuse: it’s pointless, you’re not worthy to pray, you’re wasting your time, you’ll pray better if you put it off till tomorrow, there’s this urgent thing you really must do now, it would be a shame to miss that fantastic TV program, what are people going to think of you, etc.

St. Teresa explains that it is natural for the devil to put up a stiff fight on this point, for someone faithful to prayer is quite certainly lost to him. That person may still fall often, but after each fall he or she will have the grace to rise up again even higher than before.

In order to gain his end, the devil is quite right to use no half-measures on this point! Deceiver that he is, he knows that the souls who persevere in prayer are lost to him, that all the falls he brings about only help them, with God’s grace, to spring up again much higher than before and serve our Lord better: hence his determination on this point.

She invites us, therefore, to persevere in prayer,

no matter what happens or could happen, whatever the difficulties or nay-sayers, whether we reach our goal or perish on the way, whether we lack the courage to tackle the trials of the journey or the world collapses around us!

Prayer vivified by faith, hope, and love

The idea I am going to develop now is simple but very important, and it can provide us with some valuable markers on our personal journey, especially in dealing with the difficulties we meet in our prayer life.

It is this: our prayer will be good and fruitful if it is based on faith, hope, and love. It should be supported by the exercise of the three “theological virtues,” as they are classically called, which are given so much importance in Scripture (particularly in the teachings of St. Paul), because it is they that drive all Christian life.

Having decided to dedicate time to personal prayer, we can set about it in all sorts of different ways: meditate on a passage from Scripture; recite a psalm slowly; converse freely with our Lord; let our heart sing; say our Rosary or use some other form of repetitive prayer; just be there in front of our Lord without saying anything, in an attitude of simple availability or adoration; and so on.

We will return to these different possibilities later on; we are free to use them according to what suits us best at a given point.

What matters, however, is not what particular method we use, but to ascertain the basic dispositions of our heart when we pray. It is these inner dispositions, not a technique or particular form of prayer, that guarantee the fruitfulness of our prayer life.

What matters ultimately is that when we start to pray, when we use this or that method in order to pray, we base everything on inner dispositions of faith, hope, and love.

The gateway of faith

Prayer is essentially an act of faith. It is even the first and most natural way to express our faith.

If someone said, “I believe in God, but I don’t pray,” you could reasonably ask that person, “What God do you believe in? If the God you believe in is the God of the Bible, the living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God with whom Jesus spent his nights in prayer, calling him ‘Abba!’—how could you possibly not feel the slightest desire to talk to him?”

Faith is expressed, renewed, purified, and strengthened when exercised in prayer. Even if we do not realize it (like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who had been speaking prose all his life without realizing it), as soon as we start to pray we are making an act of faith: that God exists, that it is worthwhile speaking to Him and listening for what He will say, that He loves us, that it is a good thing to spend some of our time with Him, etc.

Every prayer contains an act of faith that is implicit but absolutely fundamental.

It is very encouraging to understand that it is this act of faith that unites us to God. “The more faith a soul has, the more he or she is united to God,” says St. John of the Cross.

What brings about union with God is not feelings or thought processes, but faith.

“Many times God allows it to be hard to pray, simply to school us in applying our wills, to teach us that the value of prayer does not depend on the amount of emotion we can whip up. So when ‘Time for prayers’ is greeted with moans and groans, it’s time to explain that saying prayers when you least want to, simply because you love God and have a kind of dry respect and a sense of obedience, is to gain the greatest merit for them. Many times the saints had trouble getting excited about prayers, but they said them, because prayers were due and their value had nothing to do with how eagerly they went about saying them.” -Mary Reed Newland

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