ON BEING A PASTOR - #2

Hospitals, schools, and social agencies provide services that the Church once offered people. But the parish offers something distinctive. It is a school of prayer. It instructs members to learn how to access the inner life. It teaches strategies for an examined life. This banquet is available through the practice of daily inwardness and reflective prayer.

The tradition indicates that formal liturgy, public prayer connects with daily inwardness, reflective prayer. The pastor is to assure that the Sunday Eucharist is celebrated well. The fitting praise of God is at stake. Something else is important, too. The liturgy always provides us with rich images. For example, Jesus is good shepherd and suffering servant. He is also new Moses, the bread of life, the way, truth, and the life. He is teacher who unrolls the sacred scrolls. He teaches us inner wisdom. These and other biblical images gradually impress themselves on our imagination. This happens when the Word of God and the public prayers of the Eucharist are prayed well. These images become the fertile soil that we till when we enter into daily inwardness and reflective prayer.

The pastor and other pastoral agents foster this kind of prayer by doing the practice of daily inwardness and reflective prayer. This means that each person is invited to take time each day to orient one's life-direction, to befriend God, to praise the lover of humankind, to cultivate wisdom, to ask for guidance, and to raise the well being of creation up to God. Traditionally this was called adoration. Traditionally this prayer was contemplation.

We are blessed and privileged. We are invited to a love feast within our hearts. The Triune God dwells in the human heart because each person is a temple of the Spirit. We are invited to let go of hectic daily tasks and demanding obligations. We are invited to enter into communion with God.

Our forebears did this. Elisha and Elijah, Hannah and Ruth passionately pursued a life saturated with God, became intoxicated with God. Biblical characters became Christian friends. Biblical people and images gradually found a home in the Christian imagination and slowly pushed out the noxious images of consumption and cupidity.

This kind of prayer has two sources. The first source is the erotic and passionate nuptial poetry from the Jewish scriptures, especially the Songs of Songs. God wants to woo our souls, to be the center of our hearts, to dwell within, and to be friend. God wants to develop an affectionate relationship and a tender love. In short, God wants to convert hard soil and sclerotic hearts in order to create moist soil and kind hearts. Daily inwardness and reflective prayer allows Christ the Bridegroom to enter the wedding chamber of the human heart. Christ teaches a new loveliness and a spiritual self-esteem.

The second source is the Incarnation: the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us. The Word became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. The Word becomes flesh in us. Daily inwardness and reflective prayer allows Christ to become the center of life. The breath of God co-mingles with our breathing. How wonderful: we are simply silent with God, are reverent before holy mystery, are calmed by the presence, are confident with Christ as captain, and are shaped by the divine potter!