On the Consecration of Ukraine and Russia and the Importance of Contemplative and Mystical Prayer

Friday on the Feast of the Anunciation, Pope Francis had asked every Catholic in every home,  parish, or diocese in the entire Church to join him in consecrating Ukraine and Russia to God in the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I was doing a Communion service for my small daily Mass community and so, I spent some time working out how to give the consecration a significant place while maintaining the importance of the liturgies of the Word and Table/Altar. I chose to follow the homily with the consecration and developed my comments on the readings to specifically allow for this. For the consecration portion of things we began, therefore, with the kiss of peace (we ordinarily do it before coming around the altar so this was not a very major change); here we focused on the prayer we would be doing together in just a few minutes at Pope Francis' request. Reconciliation and peace were needed for this ecclesial work. Many small yes's can have great consequences.

Then we sat for a relatively brief period of silence and quiet prayer. I asked everyone to imagine all the larger and smaller yes's they had said to God throughout their lives, as well as all the yes's the world still needed us to make for the sake of peace and the well-being of our world. Imagine, I suggested, the entire communion of Saints joining us in this quiet prayer. Imagine all the pictures broadcast of the war in the Ukraine or anywhere else. Folks entered into this period deeply and supported one another in this silence as we all readied and allowed God to ready our own hearts for the consecration. And then we prayed a portion of the long prayer Pope Francis had supplied. It began with the sentence, [[At this hour, a weary and distraught humanity stands with you beneath the cross, needing to entrust itself to you, and through you, to consecrate itself to Christ. The people of Ukraine and Russia, who venerate you with a great love.]]

The decision to precede the actual prayer of consecration first with the kiss of peace with its implicit and explicit focus on reconciliation and peace, and then with a period of quiet and/or contemplative prayer was rooted in my sense that all real peace requires that we each be a contemplative presence to one another and to the world as a whole. This sense is something women religious the world over, whether from ministerial or contemplative institutes foster in their own religious families, ministries, meetings, and encounters of all sorts. And, of course, it is symbolic of the way hermit life itself is disposed and empowered to encounter the larger world. The stricter separation we embrace is done so that we can be made entirely whole in union with God and moreover, that we do this on behalf of the world around us which we encounter and to whom we witness for its own salvation.

As Thomas Merton affirms in "The Contemplative Life in the Modern World," [[Contemplative wisdom is then not simply an aesthetic extrapolation of certain intellectual or dogmatic principles, but a living contact with the infinite Source of all being, a contact not only of minds and hearts, not only of I and Thou, but a transcendent union on consciousness in which man and God become, according to the expression of St Paul, 'one spirit.'"  and as he also says, [[What needs to be made clear. . .is that contemplation is not a deepening of experience only, but a radical change in one's way of being and living, and the essence of that change is precisely a liberation from dependence on external means to external ends.]] And this change is not for ourselves only. We are freed by God from this world and enabled to live in it, not as ourselves alone, but as beings in union with God, beings able to love as God loves. Mystical experiences, wonderful as they may be, are never the measure of the mystic. Instead, that call to be  made complete in God and to love our world into wholeness is precisely the reason for contemplative prayer including even the highest reaches of mystical prayer.

Merton writes: [[The mission of the contemplative in this world of massive conflict and collective unreason, is to seek the true way of unity and peace, without succumbing to the illusion of withdrawal into a realm of abstraction from which unpleasant realities are simply excluded by force of will. In facing the world with a totally different viewpoint, he maintains alive in the world the presence of a spiritual and intelligent consciousness which is the root of true peace and true unity among men.

And so, we began our approach to the consecration Friday with the Word of God, a kiss of peace for one another, and a period of quiet/contemplative prayer where the reality of a weary and distraught humanity were brought right into our small chapel in the silence of solitary hearts we allowed to be opened wider (remade) together for the purpose. I wrote in the last post that [[it is absolutely fascinating to me how it is a mystic's infused contemplation takes them out of this world and out of any dependence on self to dependence on God alone precisely so they can live in this world, as a source of peace. The very thing that seems to make mystics/contemplatives stand apart and marks their experiences in prayer as incommunicable and uncommon, recreates and sends them back to "the world" as those who can encounter it as prophetic missionaries of God's (own) peace and wholeness.]]

I think the idea of the mystical way and mystical prayer, and especially mystical experiences always takes one through lesser forms of community with all of their differences, variations, and disparities to a place of really radical difference. But it is done so that we may return to others with the hearts of mystics, those who love as God loves and are therefore capable of bringing even implacable enemies together in peace. In my homily Friday I noted that in Bible study we had been talking about faith as a form of courage and commitment that is capable of overcoming doubt, not by destroying it, but by taking it inside itself and moving forward in spite of doubt. What is true of a Faith that is capable of taking doubt and fear up within itself is that it is infinitely stronger and more resilient than an absolute certainty with no room for these things; after all, at the least instance of doubt, this kind of (absolute) certainty will shatter. Mary's own journey was a journey of faith. It was about faith which grew by taking her very real doubts and fears inside itself and, in God's love, courageously, trustingly, moving forward into a world she would help change forever. 

Mary's smaller and larger yes's  (and Jesus', of course) would transform her world with God's own presence!! Her Fiat and all the smaller and larger yes's that both preceded and would follow it, her experiences of communion and union with God made her life fruitful beyond all imagining. More, it set her apart, transformed, freed, and established her in both her difference and sameness as made for the sake of a new encounter between God and the whole of his creation. As I also noted in the previous post, it is the same dynamic which stands at the heart of all infused contemplation as well as eremitical life's "stricter separation from the world." As I mentioned earlier, when we spoke about eremitical life, contemplation, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and the coming consecration, a friend -- another diocesan hermit -- joyfully affirmed, [[It is all about encounter!!]]. Contemplation, mystical prayer, even the hermit's stricter separation from the world, are about encounter for the sake of God and all God holds as precious!! And so, our service Friday ended with the commissioning prayer: [[Let us go forth to love our world into wholeness!]] It is the prayer of sending I usually use, but on this Friday it seemed especially appropriate.