REFLECTIONS ON ST CHARLES OF JESUS’ ‘PRAYER OF ABANDONMENT’

Father,
I abandon myself into your hands;
do with me what you will.
Whatever you may do, I thank you:
I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me,
and in all your creatures -
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul:
I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,
for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself,
to surrender myself into your hands without reserve,
and with boundless confidence,
for you are my Father.

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Father, I abandon myself into your hands. 

To be abandoned is a terrible thing, 
an act of carelessness 
that takes no account of what may happen to the one abandoned.  
Only an adult can abandon themselves, 

a child does not have the ability to make this reckless act.  

For it not to be reckless requires trust in another 

and a belief that the process of abandonment has a purpose. 

Jesus abandoned Himself into the hands of His Father;

He did so with faith in the One whom He had come to know and trust.

Every aspect of who I am I gift to You with no strings attached. 

I cut all ties; I entrust myself to You and let go of myself in Your absolute care. 

I place myself before You as a child before its Father, leaving myself at the doorway of your house. 

I hand over all power to You and entrust my future to You whatever happens.

do with me what you will. 

As I give myself to Him, God tells me to trust Him, 

trust that in saying ‘thy will be done’ I will be held safe 

and that God will never desert me whatever may happen. 

What matters is to live in the present moment. 

I need to turn to my Father as a child might turn to theirs and look into His loving eyes. 

There is something liberating in living in the Divine Will, whilst needing to resist evil – 

‘Jesus, I trust in You’.

To know God’s will means turning to Him in prayer, and simply saying

 ‘Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’.

Whatever you may do, I thank you:. 

Let me live thankfully, eucharistically, whatever may happen to me. 

And when my heart becomes overwhelmed by sadness and anxiety, 

or desolation begins to cast a shadow over me, 

inspire me to give thanks that the darkness may be turned into light.

In all places and in all things let me see your hand and give thanks. 

In every blade of grass and every mountain peak may I see your glory and give thanks.

And when I cannot see you or sense your presence, teach me to thank and praise you.

I am ready for all, I accept all.

I know that both good and evil will come my way; teach me to accept them

with a necessary detachment and not be blinded by them. Teach me to love through them.

Give me a freedom of spirit to greet them and wisdom to know how to respond

as you responded to those who were the cause of your Incarnation, Passion and Death. 

Grant me gratitude and patience, courage, fortitude and detachment in the face of good and evil.

Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures -
I wish no more than this, O Lord.

My one will and desire must simply be this: ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’.

For in that prayer is encompassed all that God desires and it expresses all that we can desire:.

that the divine good might be accomplished in me and all that exists.

It is what Jesus taught us to pray for and we can pray for no more or less than that:

‘Thy will be done’.

Into your hands I commend my soul: I offer it to you with all the love of my heart,

Take, Lord, and receive all that is your own

For I long to live in you,

to be enfolded in your love,

for my love to be your love

that I may flow with you.

Take my heart and mould it into the form of your most Sacred and Compassionate Heart.

for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself,

‘From Love in Love the leaping flame of Love is spread,

for none can love except by Love possessed.

The love that is outpoured was first Love’s gift of love.

Give, give, and give again is Love’s own song.

For Love is giving love and there is no end to Love.’ * 

 Lord, you continually awaken love in my heart; you who are the source of love and life.

When I gaze upon your revelation in Jesus

my heart is moved and I so want to give myself to you,

to let love flow through me –

love for the one I love and love for the whole of your creation,

especially the most unloved.

Yet it is hard to love those who seem unlovely

and only by your grace can I do this.

Let me gaze on all things with your inner eye of Love

as you gaze upon me and all things

that I may give myself to all that I encounter.

* Fr. Gilbert Shaw: A Pilgrim’s Book of Prayers

PATIENT TRUST IN THE SLOW WORK OF GOD

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves.

Don’t search for the answers,

which could not be given to you now,

because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Then, perhaps, some day, far in the future,

you will gradually,

without even noticing it,

live your way into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s almost four months since I retired from a life which, for 35 years, provided me with meaning and purpose.  As the days go by the sense of panic which emerged with the letting-go of the structures which had provided that meaning and purpose has subsided.  Yet there is still an urge to find something to fill the space.

But, slowly, I am recognising the importance of that space – of emptiness and no-thing.  At another level this might be a primal urge to understand what happened before the ’Big Bang’, before ‘the beginning’ when the Word brought Creation into being.  Whilst creation is good, grace operates outside the natural world in that space where we don’t have control.  I recognise the problem I have in not being in control of my universe, but I realise that only occupying that place of  ‘not-being-in-control’ enables grace to flow more freely.  God cannot easily move us when we are seeking to be ‘in control’.

So, too, I have begun to realise that so much of our activity can act as a distraction and prevent me from giving my attention to the heart.  In his book Into the Silent Land,  Martin Laird makes the point that we are inclined to pay less attention to ‘the mountain’ on which we live our lives and more to the ‘weather’ which occurs upon it.  The mountain represents the ground of our being, the true Self.  ‘The marvellous world of thoughts, sensation, emotions, and inspiration, the spectacular world of creation around us are all patterns of stunning weather on the holy mountain of God.  But we are not the weather.  We are the mountain.  Weather is happening – delightful sunshine, dull sky, or destructive storm – this is undeniable.  But if we think we are the weather happening on Mount Zion (and most of us do precisely this with our attention riveted to the video), then the fundamental truth of our union with God remains obscured and our sense of painful alienation heightened.  When the mind is brought to stillness we see that we are the mountain and not the changing patterns of weather appearing on the mountain.  We are the awareness in which thoughts and feelings ( what we take to be ourselves) appear like so much weather on Mount Zion.’ (‘Into the Silent Land’ p.16)

At times of transition like this it is easy to find ones attention (and, consequently, oneself) caught by the storms as the climate changes.  Yet the mountain is that to which we need to give our attention at such a time if we are not to become disorientated and lost.  The contemplative within us needs to be focussed on the space beneath the weather (the ‘noises –off’): the emotions, feelings, fears etc…, and attend to the mountain.  To fix the eye of the heart on Mount Zion, the centre of our being.  On God, the rock of our salvation.

ADVENT SUNDAY 2008

INTRODUCTION
‘God is faithful. By him you were called into the fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ the Lord’ (I Cor. 1:9)

“I couldn’t do the job you do!” said the electrician who was working in the Rectory last week. “After all, I don’t have any faith”. I decided not to point out that I couldn’t do his job either – I once had to call in an electrician to change a light bulb – but we did have a short conversation about faith.

So many people say something similar yet don’t reflect on the way life without faith is impossible. We need faith in others to enable relationships to flourish, and without those, where would we be?

For the next three weeks I want to reflect on subjects at the heart of Christianity – Faith, Forgiveness and Prayer. Firstly the question of Faith and how it affects the way we live.

Faith, belief and trust.
I think my electrician was getting confused between faith and belief. He probably meant that he didn’t believe in God and we could have had an interesting conversation about God and belief.

But I wanted him to finish his job! There are, of course, a number of concepts which are closely related to faith and belief – trust and hope, for example – and often these terms understandably become confused. In his classic book, ‘Stages of Faith’, James Fowler quotes the following lines: ‘Faith … is a quality of human living. At it’s best it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service: a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and is stable no matter what may happen … Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive, and face others with cheerful charity’ (W. C. Smith).

Now I guess many of us would like that kind of faith!

It has always been recognised that Faith is a gift for which we should pray. For example, the apostles said to Jesus, ‘Increase our faith!’ and he replies: ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.’

So faith is something that needs to grow and develop within us. The trouble is that many grow up without the foundations which enable faith to develop. As children we need to have faith in our parents and such faith is rooted in a belief that the parent cares for the child and that they can trust what they say and do. If that is undermined, faith in them is weakened if not destroyed.

However, parents are not infallible. Some of what the child learns from them will be wrong, and some will be rejected. It’s normal for the child to trust the parent in the absence of other sources of information, but that doesn’t mean they should cling rigidly to everything they were originally taught in the face of contradictory evidence. Which is why adults and parents need the gift of wisdom to know how to respond to children’s developmental explorations.

GROWING IN FAITH
How, then, can we grow in faith? Well, firstly, we need to recognise the difference between belief, trust and faith.

Belief
To say one believes in something does not mean anything other than acknowledging its existence.

“I believe there is a train to London at 9 o’clock” can only be confirmed if the train arrives at 9 o’clock. Or to say, “I believe Persil washes whiter than Bold” means nothing until you try it out. Similarly, to say “I believe in God” means nothing until you begin to enter into a relationship with God and try to understand something of who God is. Then you need to act upon that understanding. Indeed, it has been rightly said that if you want your faith to grow, live as if you had faith!

Trust
Now I may believe Persil washes whiter than Bold but it’s only when I entrust my clothes to the washing process that I will know if it’s true.

I might have a profound belief in my parent’s authority, for example, but if I don’t trust them, that belief may be borne out of fear.

The American author Robert Kiyasaki once wrote of the way he came to understand that there are many people who believe in something, but it was before and during the life threatening missions he flew in Vietnam that he really came to understand trust. He explains it this way:

‘It's easy to believe in something and just do lip service to it. Lip service will only go so far when things become difficult and your belief is pushed to the limit. When we only believe in something it's easy to jump ship and go on to the next best thing to believe in.

Trust on the other hand is something that will go into the battle with you. When you truly trust in a Creator, your ability, your vision, the people you need to count on, then there comes with that trust a sense of peace in making the right choice.’

Faith
“Can I trust you?” is a fundamental relational question. Once we have sensed that we can then we can move on from trust to faith. Trust is, if you like, the bedrock on which a dynamic faith can be built, for faith enables action. I may believe that people don’t drown when they dive into a swimming pool and I may trust people who say I will float, but I need faith to make my own step into the water!

I may believe Persil washes whitest and trust what I am told about the product, but I need faith to place my best linen tablecloth in the wash!

Yet Faith isn’t a commodity we can get off the shelves. It is about the way we act, the devotion we nurture and the way we dedicate ourselves. And it will, at times, be full of emotion.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word used for faith is also used to describe the covenant of marriage, and what lies at the root of the relationship between husband and wife. As a gift of the Holy Spirit, faith needs nurturing if it is to grow, otherwise it will be like that gift buried in the ground we heard about in Jesus’ Parable of the Talents a couple of weeks ago.

In the Letter of St. James the author addresses this problem: ‘You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder.’

So he argues that faith without action is a dead thing: ‘What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?

In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. But someone will say, "You have faith; I have deeds." Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.’

CONCLUSION
“I wish I had faith like yours!” Well, if someone says that to you, ask them if they have ever prayed for the gift of faith and, if they have, whether they have then acted as if they had received the gift?

It isn’t a matter of having a ‘blind’ faith, an optimistic attitude to life or ignoring the problems and pains with which we are surrounded. It is rooted in a belief in a God who is faithful to us. As St. Paul said: ‘God is faithful. By him you were called into the fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ the Lord’.

So it is as we seek to develop in that relationship with God that our faith grows. If our relationship with God is weak, then faith will suffer. And that in which we ultimately have faith will shape who we are becoming.

So for thousands of year’s men and women, in seeking to grow in faith, have turned their gaze upon God, believing that they are held in his loving gaze. And in so doing they have come into a new relationship with themselves and the world around them. Of all the books in the Bible that speak about Faith it is in the psalms that we find how people have realised this gift:

Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens,
your faithfulness to the clouds.
Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,
your judgments are like the great deep;
you save humans and animals alike, O LORD.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God!
… For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light. (Ps. 36)

Faith, together with Hope and Love, is one of the ‘Theological Virtues’ as taught by St. Paul. They are acquired virtues, to be sought by prayer, for they reside in God. There are many prayers seeking this gift, but one of the most beautiful was written by St. Francis. So l will leave you with his supplication:

Most High and glorious God,
enlighten the darkness of our hearts
and give us a true faith, a certain hope
and a perfect love.

Give us a sense of the divine
and knowledge of yourself,
so that we may do everything
in fulfilment of your holy will;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.