Holy Desperation by Heather King

Author:Heather King [King, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012080, RELIGION / Christian Life/Prayer, REL012040, RELIGION / Christian Life/Inspirational, REL012070, RELIGION / Christian Life/Personal Growth
ISBN: 9780829445145
Publisher: Loyola Press
Published: 2017-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The More We Pray, the More We Can Afford to Be Misunderstood

One thinks of all the meaningless attitudes and gestures—in the name of God? No, in the name of habit, of tradition, custom, convenience, safety and even—let us be honest—in the name of middle-class respectability, which is perhaps the very least suitable vehicle for the coming of the Holy Spirit.49

—Fr. Alfred Delp

The more we’re grounded in prayer, the more we can afford to let people misunderstand us. The more we also see there is always at least a kernel of truth to the way we are misunderstood.

Fr. Alfred Delp is the German Jesuit priest I mentioned earlier whose Prison Meditations are a classic. One incident, recorded in his diary for 1944, speaks volumes about his humility and his capacity for mercy. The Nazis were beating him and calling him “Liar!” because he wouldn’t give up the names of his friends. He wrote, “I prayed hard, asking God why he permitted me to be so brutally handled, and then I saw that there was in my nature a tendency to pretend and deceive.”50

Prayer gives us the kind of radical self-acceptance that allows us to admit, for example, I am kind of a liar. Or I’m not a very good mother, or husband, or nun, or writer, or follower of Christ, as the case may be. That doesn’t mean we get to be slothful in prayer. We have to have tried, and to have longed with all our hearts, to be better, and to realize that we kind of can’t.

For my own part, I am often unkind, often do angle to be the favorite, get attention, be first in line, hog the conversation.

So when someone accuses me of those things, or points them out, I also don’t have to jump to the conclusion that the person is the antichrist.

This holding of the tension between the way we long to be and the way we actually are is the cross. We’re nailed to our imperfections. We’re attached, our whole time on earth, to our incarnate being that makes us naturally tend toward fear, greed, and lust.

That doesn’t mean we ignore, in weary resignation, Christ’s call to come higher. It means we try as hard as we can, knowing beforehand that we’ll always fall short. It means developing a keen sense of humor about the gap between how we present ourselves to the world and how we really are.

In a March 10, 1956, letter to her friend Betty Hester, for example, Flannery O’Connor observed, “I hate to say most of these prayers written by saints-in-an-emotional-state. You feel you are wearing somebody else’s finery and I can never describe my heart as ‘burning’ to the Lord (who knows better) without snickering.”51

The late Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete wrote, “Have you noticed that many horrendous murderers and serial killers are said, at one time, to have been very religious? I always looked at my most pious altar boys with deep suspicion, wondering what was going on within their religiously agitated minds.

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