The World of Prayer by Adrienne von Speyr

Author:Adrienne von Speyr [von Speyr, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898700336
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2012-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

IV

PRAYER IN THE STATES OF LIFE

1. PRAYER IN RELIGIOUS LIFE

On entering a religious order, a novice will almost always have to change his way of praying so as to adapt his personal prayer to the prayer of the community; and the change will affect not only his preference for certain kinds and times of prayer but also the essence of prayer itself. In a certain respect he will have to start again from scratch. The contrast may be so great that his earlier prayer, which he considered upon his entrance to be a serious preparation for prayer as a religious, seems now to have no connection with the new form. He resembles the piano student who, having learned many things on his own, has to relearn everything from the start now that he has a teacher. The novice is introduced into both contemplative and liturgical prayer.

He has to attend the liturgy in the new community. There are a great number of externals to which he must adapt himself so that the community prayer will not suffer through his arrival. In praying with others, he must immediately behave as they do. And he must first of all attend to what seem the most external and formal aspects. He may be so preoccupied by observing and following that initially the content of the prayer means little to him. In a rather drastic way he gets to know the life of prayer from another aspect: Instead of being primarily a personal conversation with God, it is now almost exclusively a way of controlling himself, of joining in at the right moment, of using his voice in the appropriate way, of taking a certain bodily position and no other. This shift in the center of gravity to the external can make prayer a self-conquest and a sacrifice. Only when the novice has learned all this does the content acquire a new meaning as well; only then has he the leisure to consider the words and gradually come to see the forms of prayer as simply an accompaniment. The more these forms recede into the background in community prayer because they are taken for granted, the more the content must come to the foreground: This must never be taken for granted and become mere habit. When the religious has overcome the initial difficulties in contemplative prayer as well, the result should be that his personal prayer in daily contemplation has an effect on his liturgical prayer; his spirit of faith must be so fructified by contemplation that, although the daily Hours may be identical or similar, he experiences them new and fresh each day.

If his contemplation is to be fertile in this way, it too must conform to the character of the religious order. Prior to entering, one had contemplated personally in a way that was perhaps completely adapted to one’s state of life. Now a great change takes place: One learns to contemplate in the spirit of obedience; one is initiated step by step,

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