Life Illumined
Learning to Pray
This text was written as a preface to the Spanish edition of Dom André Poisson’s precious treatises on prayer, recently published by Rialp.
‘Lord, teach us to pray!’ This cry stirs in the heart of every believer. In Scripture, it is made at a crucial juncture in the Gospel of Luke, just after Jesus had sent 72 of his disciples out ‘like sheep among wolves’ to proclaim his Gospel, telling them not to bring anything at all with them on the way: no purse, no bag, no spare sandals. The one thing they were to carry in abundance was peace. Such was their possession of peace to be that they could leave it behind in abundance wherever they passed and yet have undiminished reserves. From this peace healing would flow, and pardon.
The vassals of the Prince of Darkness, constitutionally disquiet, would be powerless confronted with this peace, swept off their perches. When the 72 returned and reported on the great works in which they had been instrumental, Jesus, who is peace, remarked: ‘I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.’ A single bright flash was all that was left of the stolen glory jealously displayed by this cosmic agitator, startled to find his host of troubling spirits disarmed by peaceful poor men.
The 72 were conscious that the peace they carried exceeded them. Its source lay outside themselves. It sprang from the presence in their midst of Jesus, who alarmed them all the more with predictions of his imminent departure. How might they continue to pursue his peace, and remain within its orbit, with him no longer there? The answer came one day after the encounter in Bethany during which Jesus told Martha, bustling, that Mary, her sister, who sat at his feet listening, had ‘chosen the better part’. In the light of these words, the disciples were moved when they ‘saw Jesus praying in a certain place’. He, their master and friend, displayed what ‘the better part’ stood for. He not only taught, but showed, what utter attention to the Father’s will looks like. This was how the disciples, too, wished to ground their existence. After he had finished praying, they said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’
Jesus’s response was immediate and precise. He gave his disciples the formula we know as the Our Father. It constitutes the core of Christian prayer. From the beginning of the Church, great teachers of the faith have expounded it, drawing out its various aspects. It is an excellent school of prayer to read the treatises by Fathers such as Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, and Augustine of Hippo. Sprung from these is the fine contemporary commentary, steeped in tradition, on the Our Father in the fourth part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, an inexhaustible resource.
Jesus’s teaching on prayer amounted to more than the provision of a text for recitation, that is clear. It was the sight of Jesus praying that made the disciples wish to learn prayer. The words of prayer, which touch our reason and orient our will, point towards the breaking-open of our heart, the transformation of our being as we dare to aspire, even in this life, to ‘become participants of the divine nature’.
This existential dimension of prayer has attracted generous women and men at all times. It stands for the outwards manifestation of the inward truth, held in faith, that man is made in the image of God and will not find peace, or perfect joy, until his iconic potential is realised in a divine likeness wrought by grace made effective through human freedom. This dimension of prayer is sometimes called ‘contemplative’. People refer to it as ‘the prayer of quiet’, for words are not primary to it, or as ‘the prayer of the heart’, in as much as, by it, the intellect descends into the heart, where Scripture’s anthropology posits the centre of the human person.
Our patrimony offers us a wealth of guidance on how to proceed along this path of prayer. Indeed, the immensity of resources may seem overwhelming. Which ‘school’ of prayer should I choose? Should I follow the intimate counsels of St John of the Cross, the liturgical mysticism of the Cistercians, the exultant effusions of St Francis? Or dive into the boundless sea of the Philokalia? And how can I practise a deepening of prayer responsibly, on guard against both self-delusion and the illusions of the devil, who tries to trip up those who seek to grow in godliness?
Ideally we need an experienced guide, someone who has already passed through the landscape we prepare to enter, who knows its paths and pitfalls. Such guides are hard to find, however. There is no lack of persons with diplomas in ‘spiritual direction’: they are two a penny. But a true spiritual father or mother is a rarity. It was ever thus; but perhaps the sparseness is especially acute in our day.
That is why reliable books are such a blessing. A book can never replace a conversation; but immersion in the testimony of a man or woman of God can become conversation. A word carrying the message of truth become flesh does convey a presence, somehow. Exposure to such presence can turn into genuine friendship.
The past century has produced some very precious books. It is perilous to draw out some, for there will be others I overlook or of which I am ignorant. Nonetheless, I wish to highlight a handful that have been beneficial to me. They may help others. I think of the Spiritual Letters of Abbot John Chapman; of Metropolitan Antony Bloom’s School for Prayer; of The Spiritual Life and Prayer by Mother Cécile Bruyère; of Father, into Your Hands, a book by the Carmelite Wilfrid Stinissen. No single text has helped me more, however, than the one contained in this present volume. I discovered it in a Parisian bookshop a quarter of a century ago in a poorly bound edition that has long since come apart. The volume’s material fragility contrasts with the substance of its content. It gave me food for which I was ravenously hungry. There was a time when I knew this text more or less by heart.
Its two parts are dated: the first to Christmas 1983, the second to Advent 1988. The references are meaningful. Presented here is an account of prayer rooted in the mystery of God made man, revealed in the Gospel and defined with precision at the Council of Nicaea, whose 1700th anniversary we celebrate this year, called to appreciate afresh the consequences for human nature of the incarnation of the Word.
The first published version came out without an authorial signature in 2001. The author was discreetly designated as ‘a Carthusian’, following the custom of an order of monks that does not like to make a display of individuals. We are now free to say who he was. His name was Dom André Poisson. He was a man of my grandparents’ generation. In the archives of La Grande Chartreuse, his biography is summed up as follows, with Carthusian succinctness:
Étienne Poisson was born at Douce, in Maine-et-Loire, on 28 February 1923. After studies at the Polytechnic School, he made his first profession at La Grande Chartreuse on 2 February 1948, solemn profession on 6 October 1953. He was ordained a priest on 13 March 1954. He was made Sub-Procurator in 1957, Procurator in 1961. On 8 May 1967 he was elected Prior and General of the Order, dedicating himself to the aggiornamento of the Order following the indications of the Second Vatican Council. He resigned in 1997. The General Chapter of that year sent him to be Prior at the Charterhouse of the Transfiguration [in the USA] for two year. From there he went to Vedana [in Italy], as Chaplain to Carthusian nuns, in 1999. Having returned to La Grande Chartreuse in May 2001, he died there on 20 April 2005.
Our natural curiosity would like to know more: the story of his vocation, his spiritual graces and trials. We are avid to get a sense of his personality; to know how he evaluated developments in the Church and world during his long ministry, which spanned turbulent decades. But none of this is essential. Everything we need to know about Dom Poisson is contained in the text you hold in your hand. It is a sliver of a book, almost just a brochure. In these pages, though, you will find a concentrated depth of content that a less wise, less humble, less articulate writer would need multiple pages to express. We have here the distillation of intimate experience, presented graciously and lucidly, with a mixture of authority and diffidence. The authority springs from the status of the text as testimony: ‘This’, we are given to understand, ‘is how the living God has made himself known to me, and to his graciousness I bear witness.’ The diffidence springs from the knowledge that the mystery of God by definition transcends any particular account: ‘Such has been my way’, the author seems to say, ‘and I share the account of it for what it is worth, but you must find your own way — and God will help you if you let him, and trust him.’
Dom Poisson wrote these two brief treatises in the form of letters. Each of us can confidently read them as specifically addressed to himself or herself. In terms of content, they are self-explanatory. They need no exegesis from me; I would clutter their elegant essentiality with unnecessary verbiage. I rejoice, simply, to recommend this little book with all my heart. It opened my eyes to ‘the boundless riches of Christ’; it pierced my heart with the light of a trust I had previously only known notionally; and it gave me a sense of what it might really mean to profess with the faith of the Church, defined at Nicaea: ‘I believe in the resurrection of the flesh’. It could do this because its author speaks with authority, of things he knows.
Another twentieth-century Carthusian has written that a contemplative is ‘a man inebriated on pure water drunk from the source’. This book offers you a map pointing straight to the source as well as the bucket and rope you need to draw water for yourself. Draw and drink, deep draughts. You will come to understand, then, what Jesus meant when he said to the Samaritan woman: ‘Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never again be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’.
Photograph from the website of the Charterhouse of Miraflores.