Contact with God by Anthony De Mello

Author:Anthony De Mello [De Mello, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-02T22:00:00+00:00

I am going to talk to you about a form of prayer that, on the face of it, would seem to have no place in the kind of retreat I am offering you. At least, so I thought for many years. For years I was much opposed to what has now-a-days come to be known as shared prayer. Shared prayer might have a place in “group” retreats where retreatants sought an experience of Christ in community. This is a “desert” retreat, one where the retreatant seeks Christ in strict silence and solitude and confrontation with him- or herself. All communication, group discussions, sharing sessions, even communication in prayer, was, I felt, a distraction. I still maintain most of this. A group retreat offers the retreatant what an individual retreat does not, and vice versa. I strongly recommend that every priest have an experience of both kinds of retreat; they complement each other. But I am opposed to mixing the two. When this is done they get in each other's way, and the effect is watered down. If you are making a silent retreat, plunge as deeply as possible into silence, avoid all talk and discussions like the plague, otherwise you are constantly knocking down with one hand what you are building up with the other. A group retreat has techniques and methods all its own, and group interaction there, far from being an obstacle to meeting Christ, is actually a means by which we encounter him.

I also had personal reasons against shared prayer. It just didn't fit into the religious culture in which I had grown, so I found excellent reasons against it. It was like making love in public, I said. Moreover, after a while a person is able to communicate with God beyond all words and concepts. How does one share that kind of prayer with a group? All one would say is something like “My God, I love you,” a very trite thing to say: full of meaning for me, but hardly likely to thrill or inspire the other members of the group. These prejudices of mine have ceased, I am happy to say. I have discovered that there is a form of prayer one uses with God when one is alone with him, and a form of prayer that one can share—to one's own spiritual benefit and that of others. Let me tell you how I discovered the value of shared prayer.

I was once giving a thirty-day retreat to a group of Jesuits. Towards the middle of the retreat I thought of all I had been reading at that time about the Catholic pentecostal movement (or charismatic renewal movement as it is called now). How generous the Lord seemed to be in pouring the gifts of his Spirit into these Catholics who sought him in fervor and simplicity. And they weren't making thirty-day retreats! So I said to the retreatants, If God is being so generous with these people, he is surely going to be very

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