With One Accord: Prayer

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

Lucinda M. Vardey

THE ‘OUR FATHER’ IN ARAMAIC

Craig

E. Morrison O.Carm

THE MAGDALA INTERVIEW

Emily VanBerkum with Sr. Jo Robson OCD

EMBODIED LECTIO DIVINA

Monica McArdle

THE POWER OF PRAYER

John Dalla Costa

CONVERSING WITH GOD

Lucinda M. Vardey

PRAYING IN COMMUNION

Kimberley Morton

BOOKS OF INTEREST

John Dalla Costa

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The catechism groups prayer into three expressions: vocal, meditative and contemplative. Our most common and central vocal prayer is of course, the Lord’s prayer, the Our Father. Craig Morrison provides us with some essential background into this prayer as it was originally pronounced by Jesus in his own language of Aramaic.

Meditative (or mental) prayer involves reflecting on the Word of God. A fuller experience of scripture can occur using not only the mind but the body. Monica McArdle offers a practicum for such an encounter in her article Embodied Lectio Divina.

Our guest for the Magdala interview, Carmelite Sr. Jo Robson shares the insights and advice from St. Teresa of Avila, one of the Church’s most significant guides on contemplative prayer. The intent of contemplative prayer is to develop an intimate friendship with Jesus. This purpose of intimate Divine friendship has for many women saints formed the foundation of their prayer lives. Kimberley Morton introduces three saints who have befriended her and helped her to befriend Jesus.

The feminine mystics who wrote about their souls’ experiences in conversations with God, provide much wisdom gained from contemplation. We have summarized some of the content of this dialogic aspect of contemplative prayer from medieval Beguine, Marguerite Porete, Saxon Cistercian Mechtild of Magdeburg and St. Catherine of Siena.

John Dalla Costa writes on the power of prayer and reviews

Brazilian theologian, Maria Clara Bingemer’s latest book on the French philosopher, Simone Weil, whose search for truth and acts of compassion shaped a life of ceaseless prayer in service to the Gospel.

Lucinda M. Vardey Editor

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“Prayer only looks like an act of language ... Fundamentally it is a position, a placement of oneself.”

Patricia Hampl (quoted in Wise Women).

Craig E. Morrison O.Carm is professor of Aramaic and Syriac Languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He has written for “The Catholic Biblical Quarterly,” “The Bible Today,” “The Word Among Us” and “Give Us This Day,” as well as other scholarly journals. His current research is focussed on the critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Biblia Hebraica Quinta. On occasion, he leads retreats at the Mount Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls.

The ‘Our Father’ in Aramaic

Craig E. Morrison O.Carm

THE ORIGIN OF WISDOM AT CREATION

In the closing scene of Jesus Christ Superstar, Judas interrogates Jesus as to why he appeared “in such a strange time.” Part of the strangeness of Jesus’s time was the linguistic crossroads in which he lived. He preached in Aramaic, but in the short time between his preaching and the emergence of the written Gospels (40 years), his message was translated into Greek.

Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth in Galilee in the north of Israel was likely a monolingual Aramaic speaking village. There may have been some administrative activities in Greek, but the language of the marketplace in Nazareth was Aramaic. The more developed town of Sepphoris (6 kms northwest of Nazareth)—the administrative centre for the Galilee region in Jesus’s time—was also a mostly Aramaic speaking town, though that populace might have had more exposure to Greek than the folks in Nazareth.

THE ARAMAIC GOSPELS

There are no surviving original Aramaic gospels. The Aramaic gospels that we possess are 3rd-5th century translations of the Greek gospels. It is quite possible that an original Aramaic gospel existed since the gospel message spread west from Jerusalem in Greek and east from Jerusalem in Aramaic. But these original Aramaic manuscripts are lost, leaving scholars with only a dream that one day they might be found.

I am often asked if Jesus spoke Greek. The answer is simple: if he did, to whom would he have spoken it? Outside of Jerusalem, very little Greek was spoken among the Jewish populace. So when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he spoke the prayer we know as the “Our Father” in the language he learned from Mary and Joseph—Aramaic.

Jesus’s Aramaic peeks through the Greek gospels periodically and these “Aramaisms” are

preserved in our English translations. The most significant moment comes when, in Mark 15:34, Jesus, near death, cries out in prayer the first verse from Psalm 22: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” “My God my God why have you abandoned me?” (The significance of that supplication has to be left for another time, but it reveals that Jesus prayed the Psalms not in their original Hebrew but in his native Aramaic). There are other significant moments when Jesus speaks his own language in the Greek gospels. He says to Jairus’s dead daughter “Talitha qum,” “young girl get up” (Mark 5:41). In Mark 7:11 Jesus utters the word “Corban,” which the Greek Gospel writer translates with “an offering to God,” since his audience would not have known Aramaic. Jesus opens the ears of a deaf man with the word Ephphatha (Mark 7:34): “be opened,” Mary Magdalene addresses the risen Jesus with “Rabbouni ” (John 20:16) and Jesus refers to God as Abba (Mark 14:36) “Father.” Even the “Amen” we say in the liturgy reflects an Aramaic pronunciation.

‘OUR DAILY BREAD’

The “Our Father” has some very challenging expressions that are difficult to bring into English. Among them is “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matt 6:11). Annotated English translations put a note on the word “daily” (Greek: epiousios), as does the NRSV: or “our bread for tomorrow,” offering us a more literal translation for the Greek word “daily.” In the Aramaic translation of this Greek verse we read “Give us today the bread that we need” (literally “the bread of our necessity”), we discover how the early Aramaic speaking Christians interpreted this phrase. But what did Jesus mean? Perhaps he was alluding to the desert manna that first appeared in Exodus 16 to feed the ancient Israelite slaves who had just escaped Egypt and were hungry. Or perhaps this expression is an illusion to all the meals (the word “bread” in Aramaic often has a broader sense of “meal”) in the Gospels, including the Last Supper. Or maybe we just don’t know its precise meaning. As St. Ephrem writes, the interpretations of some biblical verses can be as diverse as the faces of their interpreters. These challenges remind us that we are praying an ancient prayer that was first spoken to a Jewish community in the area around Galilee, a time and place very different from our own.

‘INTO TEMPTATION’

The last few years has seen an increasing debate about the translation of the phrase “Lead us not into temptation” (Matt 6:13). On its surface this supplication sounds a bit off-putting. Why would God lead us into temptation? We can do that just fine on our own. We don’t need God’s help. To avoid this confusion, Pope Francis prefers the translation, “Do not let us fall into temptation” (the current Italian translation). A possible solution for understanding this puzzling phrase lies in its Aramaic translation.

The problem here is not the phrase, “Lead us not.” There is little doubt about its meaning in Greek or Aramaic. The difficulty lies in the English word “temptation.” The Greek word behind the English “temptation” is peirasmon. But this Greek word has two meanings, “temptation” and “trial.” The Vulgate interpreted it with “temptationem,” whence comes the English preference for “temptation.” But when we consider the Aramaic translations of the Greek gospels, we discover that Greek peirasmon was translated in the 3rd century with the Aramaic word nesyuna, which means “trial.” Thus, the Aramaic speaking Christians interpreted the

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phrase to mean “do not bring us to the trial” or, more freely expressed, “do not put us to the test.” In the background of this phrase may be the first verse in Genesis 22, “After these things God tested Abraham,” which opens the story known as “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” When we say to God, “do not put us to the test,” we are reminding God that we do not have the fortitude of Abraham. God could test Abraham and Abraham proved faithful. But we could very well fail and so we pray “do not put us to the test.”

Most of the “Our Father” prayer has a clear, though profound, meaning. I have focused on the two complicated lines in the prayer to help us appreciate the depth of their meanings within Jesus’s Jewish Aramaic world so that we, despite our limited knowledge of that world, might have a richer understanding of “the prayer that Jesus taught us.”

The Magdala Interview

Sr. Jo Robson OCD has been a member of the Carmelite community at Ware in England since 2000. She has a special interest in the writings and teaching of St. Teresa of Avila, and has published articles on this topic in a number of spiritual and academic journals. She is currently coordinator for the initial formation programme for Carmelite sisters in the UK, and is a member of the editorial team for the magazine “Mount Carmel.”

Emily VanBerkum is Associate Editor of With One Accord. For more information on her background, please visit our website.

Emily VanBerkum and Sr. Jo Robson OCD

Monica McArdle graduated from Durham University, UK with a BSc degree and post graduate certificate in Chemistry, but never actually taught full time in school, choosing instead to join Sion Catholic Community for Evangelism, working in schools and parishes across the UK. Her ministry there, for the most part, has involved exploring the use of drama, mime, dance, and sign language as modes of communication for bringing about an experience of the Christian Gospel in the lives of others. This led her, after 20 years in active mission to complete a MA in Somatic Movement and Dance Education (SMDE) at the University of Central Lancashire, where she studied embodied prayer for the research component of the MA, albeit in a secular setting. She then completed a M.Prof at the University of Chester, and is now in her fifth year of part-time PHD studies at Roehampton University, UK.

Embodied Lectio Divina

Monica McArdle

On reading Psalm 63 you might notice how it is strewn with verbs, practically one on every line. It begins with “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you,” then there’s feasting, rejoicing and clinging. Prayer in this psalm is certainly not passive but fully alive and participatory, portraying that prayer involves the whole body. I gaze with my eyes, praise with my lips, lift my hands and lie on my bed to remember and muse. Likewise, God takes an active role: for in the shadow of God’s wings I can rejoice; God fills my soul as a banquet; God’s right hand holds me fast. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the Jerome Biblical Commentary states that “perhaps no other psalm so vividly expresses the intimate relationship of love between God and his faithful one.” What it proves is that physicality is an important part of prayer.

This perception forms the heart of my doctoral research into the role of the body in Christian prayer, with a particular focus on lectio divina . The interest arose out of my experiences as a member of a Catholic mission team working in parishes and schools, mainly in the UK. My ministry involved the use of drama, mime, dance, and sign language as modes of communication for bringing about an experience of the Gospel in the lives of others. Through this work I witnessed individuals coming to a more holistic sense of themselves and a more grounded awareness of God.

These experiences drew me to Somatic Movement Education (SME), which is a study of self from the perspective of one’s lived experience, encompassing the dimensions of body, psyche, and spirit. A fundamental premise for ‘somatic awareness’ is the understanding that body, or ‘soma,’ is an integrated whole, rather than a differentiated conglomeration of categories of mind, soul, spirit, or anatomy.1 The somatic proposition is that through the use of movement, sound, breath, touch, and imagery there evolves a capacity to notice what might be emerging through bodily sensations. It is a means of uncovering and perceiving a spectrum of knowledge that we carry within us: for, as dancer and philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone explains in her book The Primacy of Movement, the action of our “tactile-kinaesthetic bodies are epistemological gateways.” Subjective knowledge can be gleaned through paying attention to the interaction of physical, mental, emotional and aesthetic/spiritual aspects of our lived experience.

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Lectio divina is a long-established form of Christian prayer which is based on a dynamic engagement with the Bible. In their book Lectio Divina: Contemplative Awakening and Awareness Benedictine spiritual directors Christine Valters Paintner and Sr. Lucy Wynkoop describe it as being “an invitation to listen deeply for God’s voice in scripture and then to allow what we hear to shape our way of being in the world.” The 12 th century Carthusian monk, Guigo II articulated lectio divina as consisting of four stages, or ‘rungs of the ladder’: lectio (reading), meditatio (meditation), oratio (prayer), and contemplatio (contemplation). In my research I matched these four components of lectio divina : reading, meditation, prayer, contemplation, with the four key somatic attributes of grounding, bones, breath and movement.

Stages of Lectio Divina

Lectio (reading), an initial acquaintance with a sacred text;

meditatio (meditation), a period of sustained reflection on its words;

oratio (prayer), an active response to God;

contemplatio (contemplation), in the presence of the Divine.

Focuses of Somatic Awareness

Ground:- support, holding, re-orientation, witness.

Bones:- sense of self, connection, strength, presence.

Breath:- life force, bringing movement into 2-way integration.

Movement:- actualisation, expression, personalization.

The following are guidelines for integrating practice and experience.

LECTIO

The first stage involves the passage being read aloud. For this, we are encouraged to become aware of the ground beneath us, allowing the fullness of our weight to drop down with gravity. The aim is to become conscious of the foundation of support and presence that is constantly with us, even when we do not think about it. Grounding, in this context, refers to the connection that each person has with the ground, creating a sense of rootedness and balance.2 An active relationship with the earth is said to develop “one’s ability to perceive and to live in ‘the here and now.’” Grounding can help a person be more present to the prayer experience, and hence move beyond mere articulation of the words.

MEDITATIO

Next the passage is read for a second time, in order to listen deeply for a word or phrase that beckons attention. We then ponder on this word as we sense and explore the shape of our skeleton within us. Dancer and psychotherapist, Linda Hartley writes of how locating and tracing the bones and joint spaces can “awaken the living experience.” The iteration of the phrase as the bones of the body are traced and sensed and provide a clear pathway for meditation.

The passage is read a third time while reflecting on how God is speaking through the passage. What does the scripture say about our relationship with God, and our relationship with the world? The movement of breath brings a sense of expansion between inhalation and a sense of contraction in exhalation. Questions to ask are “What am I receiving from these words?” and “What am I being invited to relinquish, let go of?” For this stage, it is not about practicing breathing techniques, but rather allowing awareness of the rhythm and shape of breath to become a vehicle for relationship in prayer.

CONTEMPLATIO

The passage is read a fourth time, as now we reflect on what response God is inviting us to make through this word. By this stage, the body has become more attuned to the sensed experiences of ground, weight, bone, and breath, and so our awareness is awakened to any seeds of movement stirring within. The felt-sensation might be slight but it is important, for as we give physical expression to it, our response to the prayer is made manifest. If we want to, we can amplify the movement: not forcing anything but allowing the prayer to flow, without struggling for words or meaning, just being and moving as you are in this moment of prayer. There is no need to consider in this prayer whether you are ‘doing it right’ for all experiences of movement are inherently authentic, only occurring in the present moment, and, therefore, valuable aspects of prayer.

Embodied lectio divina provides a gateway to the revealing of truth. Sometimes we are surprised by what we receive, and at other times touched by the unexpected. And so, we return to Psalm 63, with its plethora of verbs and active engagement to remind us that just as our bodies are in constant movement—from breathing to heart-beats and nerve-synapses firing—so too must our prayer, our communication, our connection to God.

Notes

1 as defined by ISMETA (International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association).

2 Grounding plays a significant role in Dance Movement Therapy, as discussed in these articles by P Tord & I. Brauninger (2015) Grounding: Theoretical application and practice in Dance Movement Therapy and B. Meekums (2002) Dance movement therapy. Creative therapies in practice.

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“Your body is your best spiritual director.”

Vilma Seelaus OCD.

The Power of Prayer

It is as if the waters envisioned by Ezekiel flow as words. A trickle from the Temple that babbles into an ankle-deep stream. Praise and lamentation, with desolation and glory spoken and sung day after day until a river flows knee deep and gleaming-clear. Words combine over centuries countless voices add their chants participating in a surge, and contributing to it rendering the waters many cubits distance from the altar hip-deep.

From earliest time the prayers of the Church have been the prayers Jesus spoke: the psalms he beatified and fulfilled— consecrating abandonment on the cross. Praying ceaselessly as St. Paul enjoined the Church sought to make time holy and each hour sacred with its Liturgy of the Hours.

Prayed for millenia

the river of words grew so wide and so deep as to be impassable. Yet that Mississippi-width and Amazonbreadth of waters sustained as Ezekiel foresaw rich growth and incalculable richness along its centuries-meandering length. Do you believe in the power of the prayer? If so then it cannot but be that the world as it is,

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with blessings and beauties wrought from risks and temptation is fashioned (at least in part) from the lake-wide mile-deep river of prayers offered for centuries by priests and nuns and monks and holy women and men.

Do you believe in the power of prayer? If so then we cannot but acknowledge a growing and current deficit— a drought of words from convents now silent and monasteries increasingly empty.

To be clear: God does not need our prayers, we do. All of humanity and our history ahead need as ever the torrent of daily prayer to heal and forgive what goes awry as well as fructify our highest possibilities into concrete reality.

We need to recover the Liturgy of the Hours to lose ourselves de-centring ego-centrism to find freedom in our utter dependence on God.

We need to relearn the Liturgy of the Hours to replenish the reservoir of prayers invoking the grace to replenish the waters that sate the thirst for justice and peace.

John Dalla Costa

Conversing with God

Lucinda M. Vardey

Lucinda M. Vardey is the editor of With One Accord. For more on her background please visit our website.

In compiling a book of prayers by women I quoted the words of a friend who said that “prayer is a conversation that sustains us.” She gave me one of the best summaries on prayer as it intimates not just an encounter with God but a relationship. A conversation that sustains cannot be a monologue, only a dialogue. And, as in any conversation of meaning and substance, it requires complete honesty, offering the possibilities to share desires and longings as well as lamentations, doubts and confusion. It also requires developing the ability to wait, to listen and to recognize the voice of God when God speaks. There has to be a trust that God’s wisdom, love and care is ready to be revealed in how God deigns all to be, and in God’s own time. And ultimately there needs to be a thirst for intimacy and unity.

As a dialogic activity, prayer as conversation is not widely recognized, explained or recorded, probably because it is more of a feminine prayer. However, there are three women who have provided us with some fine examples: French Beguine, Marguerite Porete (1250-1310), Saxon Cistercian, Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210-1297) and Dominican Tertiary and Doctor of the Church, St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380).

Their writings take different forms, but share many similar themes. What they all convey is an effort to get to truth in their own specific ways. In his Treatise on the

Love of God St. Francis de Sales wrote that prayer and mystical theology, to which these women contributed, “is nothing else but a conversation in which the soul amorously entertains herself with God concerning his most amiable goodness to unite and join herself thereto.” 1 The aim of such amorous entertainment is to not only be loved by God, but as Mary E. Giles explained, it is to be in a “relational seeing” where “knowledge cannot be gained independent of the experience of the depths of love.” 2

Learning from scripture also required women to bring scripture alive through unique experiences according to the levels of their commitment to prayer. And by recording their experiences, these three women contributed much that could well have influenced the teachings of men and women saints in the later centuries.

Marguerite Porete begins her A Mirror for Simple Souls with a dialogue between Love and the Soul, that moves quickly into a trialogue by introducing Reason that, naturally, has considerable difficulty with the contents of their discourse. Then God and the Church also join in. At one point, Porete notes that slavery comes from doing all from “reason and fear, whereas real freedom can only come from doing things out of faith and love.” Her book charts the progress of the conversation, where she introduces a ladder to perfection, a metaphor Catherine also uses in her Dialogue . Porete

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has a chapter on “The Dark Night,” which develops a concept introduced at that time by French scholars Thomas of St. Victor and William of Saint-Thierry. She explained that “the truth” in divine relationship is not found in what people say about God compared to what God is, and what God is cannot be said.

Mechthild of Magdeburg defines prayer as a means for transforming the heart. She writes that it makes “an embittered heart mellow, a sad heart joyful, a foolish heart wise, a timid heart bold, a weak heart strong, a blind heart clear-seeing, a cold heart ardent. It draws God who is great into a heart which is small, it drives the hungry soul up to the fullness of God.” 3 She compiled The Flowing Light of the Godhead (a collection of visions, revelations, thoughts and letters) “out of God’s heart and mouth” between 1250-1264. She asks God why God created the soul and the answer is “From the necessity of love” explaining that “God has enough of all good things save of intercourse with the soul; of that God can never have enough.”

Mechthild’s prayer takes the form of gazing at God as God and the soul are in dialogue. Like Marguerite Porete, other aspects enter into the conversation, “Understanding” being one of them. At the end of these dialogues, every woman comes to experience a unity with the Trinity. Mechtild writes:-

“Lord and heavenly Father, You are my heart!

Lord Jesus Christ, You are my body!

Lord Holy Spirit, You are my breath!

Lord Holy Trinity, You are my only refuge and my everlasting Peace.” 4

St. Bernard of Clairvaux taught that the contemplative must bring back from intercourse with God, strength and food for other souls and this can be evidenced in St. Catherine of Siena’s complex work simply entitled The Dialogue.

THE DIALOGUE

While Marguerite Porete’s and Mechthild of Magdeburg’s books model a dialectic between allegories, Catherine’s structure is composed of questions directed to God and God’s responses. Over the course of its writing (purported to be about a year) she gains knowledge and understanding of the truth, love of God and neighbour, the workings of Divine Providence, the bridge (or ladder) up the body of Christ as a way to truth, the five kinds of tears that correspond to the stages of the soul, revelations of the “sacramental heart” (the mystical body of Holy Church) and obedience to the example of Jesus. The Dialogue’s translator, Suzanne Noffke O.P., describes the whole book as “a great tapestry to which Catherine adds stitch upon stitch until she is satisfied that she has communicated all she can of what she has learned of the way of God. It is not so much a treatise to be read as it is a conversation to be entered into.”

Our entering into Catherine’s discourse opens us to the particulars of her relationship with God as well as the wisdom and moral teaching God reveals to her. God addresses her at different times as “dearest daughter, “gentle daughter,” “beloved daughter” and “sweetest daughter,” and identifies Godself as “the fire that purifies the soul.” On the practice of prayer, God warns that if the whole purpose of vocal prayer is based on the recitation of many words—a “multitude of psalms” and “a great many Our Fathers”—it will not please God nor bear much fruit.5 God warns that abandoning vocal prayer for

mental prayer is not advised either: “A person has to walk step by step” because the soul is “imperfect before she is perfect” so her prayer is imperfect as well.6 God advocates that vocal and mental prayer include concentrating on God’s love and God’s mercy for sin, allowing for greater self-knowledge. And when someone who prays “senses her spirit ready for my visitation” God says she “ought to abandon vocal prayer.”7

God summarizes that perfect prayer is as the soul’s “mother” and is reached “not with many words but with loving desire,”8 and this prayer includes doing good to your neighbours by “word or deed” explaining that “loving charity” is “continual prayer.”9

Catherine offers prayers of insight and gratitude throughout her text, for the wisdom gained and in thanksgiving for God’s guidance. The God who speaks to Catherine has a voice of clarity, firmness and directness. God wants a soul to only hope in God and not in oneself, not to serve two masters, citing that the world “has nothing in common with me, nor I with it.”10 God adds “and because none of you are stable in this life but are continually changing until you reach your final stable state, I am constantly providing for what you need at any given time.”11 God assures Catherine that God “seasons everything” requiring her to hold all things in reverence “disgrace as well as comfort” because “whatever I do to provide for the body is done for the good of the soul, to make her grow in the light of faith, to make her trust in me and give up trusting in herself, and to make her see and know that I am who I am and that I can and will and know how to assist her in her need and save her.” 12

In her final prayer St. Catherine addresses the Trinity as light, as a sea that nourishes the soul “for when I look into this mirror (of water) holding it in the hand of love, it shows me myself, as your creation, in you, and you in me through the union you have brought about of the Godhead with our humanity.”13

Notes

1 St. Francis de Sales Treatise of Divine Love trans. Rev. Henry Benedict Mackey OSB (Ill, Rockford, Tan Books, 1997) p. 233.

2 Quoted in The Flowering of the Soul: A Book of Prayers by Women ed. Lucinda Vardey (NY, Ballantine, 1999) p. 358.

3 Mechthild of Magdeburg The Flowing Light of the Godhead trans. Lucy Menzies (CT, Martino Pub. 2012) p. 136.

4 ibid p. 132.

5 Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue trans. Suzanne Noffke OP (NY, Mahwah, Paulist Press, l980) p. 124.

6 ibid

7 The Dialogue p. 126.

8 ibid

9 as above p. 172.

10 The Dialogue p. 281.

11 as above p. 282.

12 as above p. 293.

13 as above p. 336.

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Kimberley Morton lives and works in Toronto. She has had a varied career in marketing, advertising and business development. A longstanding parishioner of St. Basil’s Catholic Parish, she has been involved in its various ministries including serving the homeless in the “Out of the Cold” programme, and accompanying those who are converting to Catholicism in the Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults. She has also served on the Parish Council, is a founding member of the Magdala Conciliary and a member of the lay community, the Contemplative Women of St. Anne.

Praying in Communion

Kimberley Morton

In my life as a Protestant I was taught to believe that the saints were in competition with God for our prayers and glory; thus they never played a role in my life or faith. Since becoming Catholic a new ‘group of friends’ have been revealed to me in the saints. I now understand that they do not, by any means, detract from God’s glory; in fact the opposite is true. God’s glory is magnified through their lives, words and sacrifices.

My conversion to the Church happened very quickly in the summer of 2013. I was in a new relationship with a wonderful man I loved deeply and had decided to start attending Mass with him (of my own accord and with a lot of curiosity). I was becoming aware of the reality of ‘the grace of God’ and I very soon found myself saying ‘yes’ to another kind of relationship; a relationship with Jesus. Not satisfied with prayers by rote, I wanted to balance my need for structured prayer with my desire for dialogue with God.

I became obsessed with the story of the woman at the well and her invitation to relationship with Jesus via the living water “…a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4.14). Her life and experience really spoke to me, and I felt a kinship not only with her suffering and isolation but with her instantaneous conversion. This opened a door for me to the great women of the bible and the saints. I thought I could find my evolving story in their lives and example, and by their suffering and wisdom transform myself so that my conversion would be ‘done.’

Of course it wasn’t as easy as that. Conversion isn’t a one-time event, and never a finished product: whether it is to the Catholic faith or within it, it requires me to give all I can at every moment I am invited by Christ to do so.

“In that reality which we know as the Communion of Saints, these persons exist in relationship to us. We draw a living inheritance from them...”

Margaret Carney OSF.

I take great comfort in reading about the saints, discovering their paths to complete union with God and the insurmountable obstacles each and every one faced. They lived lives to which I can aspire. In the words of St. (Mother) Teresa of Kolkata, “I can do all things you cannot, you can do things I cannot; together we can do great things.”

It’s a joy to be nourished by the saints’ deep love for Jesus. The following women and their stories illustrate for me the gospel truths in a fresh way.

Ven. Nano Nagle, was born in Ireland in 1718 and showed me that nothing is impossible with God’s grace and direction. She lived through the tumultuous times when local Catholics rose against anti-Catholic forces from England, risking her life to minister to young girls who were desiring a Catholic education. Born into a landowning family she had to resort to begging in the slums at night—never tempted to despair of doing good.

Throughout her life of service—Nagle established a religious order as well as a lay missionary society in addition to her schools for educating the inner-city poor— she was beset by difficulties and when close to death told a friend “I think any little labour I have, the Almighty has given me health to go through it; and if I did not make use of it in his service, he may soon deprive me of it.”1

As I approached my confirmation into the Catholic Church in 2015, I pondered which saint’s name to take. I wanted to find a saint with whom I could feel a true kinship, a strong woman filled with grace and love of God and a desire for charity and truth. I found this person in Edith Stein, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Born into an observant Jewish family in 1891, Edith was an educator and the first woman to gain a Doctorate in Phenomenology, a branch of Philosophy. She was drawn to the Catholic faith through numerous encounters with Catholics and by reading the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. After teaching in a Dominican school, she was ordained a Carmelite nun in 1933. Edith had a deep sense of responsibility to others and the truths of the cross indicated by her religious name. She believed “when you seek truth, you seek God whether you know it or not.” 2

Edith and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were seized by the Gestapo in Holland and imprisoned in the Westerbork camp, before they were sent to Auschwitz where she and her sister died. Camp survivors testified that she assisted many of the women and children, and all who accompanied her on the freight train to Poland. Edith believed in the dignity of women and living out their feminine genius.

“A saint,” wrote English mystic and writer, Evelyn Underhill, was one who had “a more

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wonderful contact with the mystery of the Universe, a life of infinite possibility.” She also said that saints supply “the tools of a dynamic love,” a love that is purged of self-interest and made more perfect “at tremendous cost to themselves and with tremendous effect.” Dynamic love is ours to use, “an engine for working with God.”

SPIRITUAL FRIENDS

The saints help me to find balance in my prayer life. How to give, how to receive and how to listen. “One of the themes of feminine spirituality in our age,” wrote Ronda Chervin in her book Treasury of Women Saints, “is the need of men for the spirituality ministry of women, even when men have consecrated themselves to God in religious life. The special charisms of women are complementary to those of men and cannot simply be replaced by a same-sex friendship.” I’m reminded of the Roman noble woman in the 13th century, Blessed Jacoba of Settesoli, who became a close friend of St. Francis of Assisi with whom he regularly stayed when in Rome. He gave her a lamb who followed her to Mass each day and remained by her side as she prayed. He was particularly fond of special cakes she’d cook for him. As he was dying in Assisi, St. Francis called for her to come to him, and bring him the cloths for his burial. She had already intuited that he was in need and came anyway, arriving after his death. This friendship illustrates that even the holiest of men need the comfort and care of women.

Jacoba sought guidance from Francis on how to be charitable but received so much more. She was probably the only woman after St. Clare with whom he ever developed a close relationship. It was when Francis was welcoming “sister death,” he also welcomed “Brother“ Jacoba as he called her, to be the only woman present among his grieving brothers in the monastery.

Author Sr. Chiara Lainati wrote “For it is precisely the prerogative of the saints, as it is of artists of immortal masterpieces, to be alive in every age and always to speak the language of the present.” The lives of the saints are essential for guiding us to holiness, by being in relationship with them, by embracing their friendship, we strive to become one with them in the mystical body of Christ, being led by the examples of their virtues. We are able to be strengthened by their resolve, by requesting their help and, above all, to uniting with them in the service of Jesus, doing our part in our steps to full communion.

Notes

1 Boniface Hanley, ‘For the Poor Alone, The Anthonian (Patterson, N.J.: St. Anthony’s Guild, 1984), pp. 3-29.

2 https://carmelitesofboston.org/history/our-carmelite-saints/st- teresa-benedicta-of-the-cross-edith-stein/

“A multitude of words do not satisfy the soul, but only a holy life, a pure heart.”

Ven. Catherine De Hueck Doherty (O Jesus).

Books of Interest

John Dalla Costa

worked ceaselessly to embody in her entire being through every act and thought, an even deeper prayer of communion with the suffering and self-offering Christ.

It often escapes us that Jesus offered the Eucharistic sacrifice twice. In the cenaculum on Holy Thursday he consecrated the Eucharist. On Calvary during Good Friday he consummated it. With the Eucharistic bread and wine shared with his closest disciples Jesus founded the Church. The Eucharist offered on the cross was instead public, open to the vast skies and natural elements, and open to the gaze of any and all passers-by. It still remains so that while the prayer of consecration is of apex importance to Christians, the kenotic prayer of Jesus on the cross is universal, speaking to the heart of any human being whose heart is moved by compassion.

The enigmatic Jewish philosopher, Simone Weil embraced in full the teachings of Jesus, without ever formally converting. As she grew in mystical understanding, Simone ached to receive Holy Communion, yet she never crossed the threshold to become sacramentally included in the life of the Church. Despite this intentional hesitation, Simone achieved that rarest communion with the actual, crucified Eucharist. She came to cherish the sacrament in ways beyond that of many practicing Christians, without a lack for not receiving the consecrated host, as she

This kenotic understanding of prayer emerges carefully and beautifully in Maria Clara Bingemer’s book, Simon Weil. Mystic of Passion and Compassion. Using biographical details and Simone’s own writings, Bingemer tracks a life that applies rare intellect, and even rarer capacities of the heart, to bear with Jesus the cross of the world’s brutality and suffering. Simone was known from a young age to have tearful empathy for people suffering in distant corners from her world. She applied her considerable intelligence to study the available intellectual, political and economic solutions to the the world’s problems, only to find that any and every ideology eventually defaulted to its own often savage exclusions. An unexpected experience of the passion of Christ touched Simone mystically. Having been disappointed in her search for the truth, she found in Christ’s suffering the ultimate foundation for meaning, prayer and action.

After encountering Jesus, Simone chose immersion rather than conversion—an immersion in a holy communion of suffering to prove the redemptive truth of the cross by living it in solidarity with others. As Bingemer explains, “Only the mystery of Christ can explain the mystery of misery…Only through the incarnation of God, or kenosis, is it possible to shift the focus from oneself to those who are suffering, and to help them out from their lethal circumstances, for it is through the

incarnation that Christ himself lives amidst our human misery.”

Simone enacted her Eucharistic prayer in the midst of the 20 th century’s complex cruelties from economic exploitation, vitriolic and violent patriotism, war and genocide. Bingemer calls Simone “an intellect wounded by compassion.” Trained in the most prestigious schools, Simone eschewed any privilege from her intellectual standing, instead undertaking many experiences— including dangerous and dehumanizing work in a car factory, on fishing boats, and even farms—to experience and express what so many others were suffering. To live in communion with the cross of Christ is the vocation of mystics. However, as Bingemer reminds us, “The cross is not, for Simone, an end in itself…it has no truth but in the fruitfulness of love that is surrendered and completely there—in the Eucharist, in the gift that is both example and source.”

Simone’s fierce empathy summoned an equally fearless pursuit of justice. In this sense, her compassion was itself a prayer, summoning a connection with those suffering oppression or violence, which gave depth and breadth to her longing and love for God. Conformed to Christ’s cross, Bingemer notes that Simone prophetically incarnated insights and actions that the Church itself would adopt in subsequent decades. Her communion with the cross anticipated the teaching of the people of God as “the mystical body of Christ” by the Second Vatican Council. Her turn to reflect the oppressed by experiencing injustices from their point-ofview lived in concrete terms the “preferential option for the poor.” This was later articulated by Liberation Theology, and Pope Francis’ call to go to the margins to learn the Gospel from the excluded, the abused, and those considered disposable by the powers that be. Before Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating and

John Main reformulated contemplative prayer as “solidarity with Jesus’ own kenotic stance,” Simone enacted that radical self-offering in which word-and-deed were fused as one.

I’ve read other books about Simone Weil, and have been deeply affected by her writings, especially The Need for Roots. Bingemer’s book is especially valuable because it does not try to resolve the many contradictions of Weil’s life. With great compassion herself, Bingemer engages Simone’s paradoxes as the living tensions in which a prayerful and thoughtful life creates fruitful discipleship through, with and in Christ’s cross.

SIMONE WEIL: Mystic of Passion and Compassion by Maria Clara Bingemer

Translated by Karen M. Kraft

Available in paperback 146 pages

Cascade Books 2015

An imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, OR.

Mother Teresa (A Simple Path).

“Prayer helps strike a proper balance between Earth and Heaven.”

With One Accord

O God, our Creator, You, who made us in Your image, give us the grace of inclusion in the heart of Your Church.

R: With one accord, we pray.

Jesus, our Saviour, You, who received the love of women and men, heal what divides us, and bless what unites us.

R: With one accord, we pray.

Holy Spirit, our Comforter, You, who guides this work, provide for us as we hold in hope Your will for the good of all.

R: With one accord, we pray.

Mary, mother of God, pray for us. St. Joseph, stay close to us.

Divine Wisdom, enlighten us.

R: With one accord, we pray. Amen.

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With One Accord signature music for the Magdala interview composed by Dr. John Paul Farahat and performed by Emily VanBerkum and John Paul Farahat.

Images used in this edition:

Cover: “Young Woman Praying in Church” by Jules Breton (1827-1906).

Page 2 “A Disciple” by John Everett Millais (1829-1896).

Page 3 Detail from an ancient Byzantine icon.

Page 9 “Young Nun at Prayer” by Sergei Gribkov (1852).

Page 10 “The River Tignana” photo by John Dalla Costa.

Pages 12-14 “Marguerite Porete” (artist unknown); Cover of Mechtild of Magdeburg’s book from Paulist Press edition; “St. Catherine of Siena Writing” by Rutillo di Lorenzo Manetti (1630).

Pages 16-17 Ven. Nano Nagle (artist unknown); “Bro Jacopa” detail from a painting depicting St. Francis’ “transito” in Assisi by Domenico Bruschi (1840-1910).

This edition

Copyright © 2023 Saint Basil’s Catholic Parish, Toronto, Canada

For editorial enquiries, please contact editor@magdalacolloquy.org

ISSN 2563-7924

PUBLISHER

Morgan V. Rice CSB.

EDITOR

Lucinda M. Vardey

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Emily VanBerkum

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Gregory Rupik

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Michael Pirri

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Eric Patrick Hong

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John Dalla Costa

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Patricia O’Grady (French)

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