EP 6 - Repentance, Prayer and Sacrifice
00:00 No, no, peace, domine, domine. No, no, peace, domine. Seh-ga-mi-mi-seh-ga-mi-mi-ku-da-ra-mi-na.
00:27 7. Early Christian spirituality had three inseparable ingredients. Repentance, prayer and sacrifice.
00:42 Kangesetus. One means that the love that a person could be united with God, through which alone the human being could be united with God.
00:58 This whole process took place within the mystical body of Christ, therefore we hold de Holy Spirit. First this love was directing to loving God, as embodied in Jesus Christ our Lord, while he was on earth, through meditation.
01:18 Secondly, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, this would lead a person on to come to know and love God, as embodied now in the risen and glorified body of Jesus Christ in heaven, then to be taken up, to be united with him in such a way that they could love the Lord, their God in heaven, in with and
01:45 through Jesus Christ, to receive the fruits of their contemplation. I've spoken about this before, But all therefore depends on love, that is this essential ingredient that has to be generated through repentance, prayer and sacrifice.
02:05 There is no other way. In the September of the year 1524 St. Francis of the Seas he was praying on Mount Laverna.
02:16 Mass was over, he was outside now, praying, and all of a sudden he heard a rustle, and something began to draw closer and closer to him.
02:30 And this something appeared to be an angel, a serif. But as it drew closer and closer, he saw that it was Jesus Christ our Lord, not only Jesus Christ our Lord, but Jesus Christ our Lord with the marks of crucifixion on his hands, and on his feet.
02:48 And then he received something for which he prayed. Those same marks now began to appear on the body of St.
02:56 Francis. And they were to cause him great suffering. Not least because, in contradiction to any other stigmatist, the nails were actually in his hands.
03:11 so much so that the early sources described they created a little circle on the other side of his hand, big enough for you to put your finger in.
03:23 And this was a source of great pain, but he'd asked to experience something of the suffering that Christ had undergone on the cross for love of us.
03:33 However, just before this took place, St. Francis received a revelation from Christ. He heard his voice, it was quite clear, and yet it is so often overlooked as being unimportant, and yet is the most important thing of all, because Christ said to him, less thereby, any misunderstanding, it is not by
03:59 suffering that you are united with me, it is not by suffering but through love. a primacy of love then became not just important for Franciscan spirituality, it had been important there from the very beginning.
04:17 It had just been brought back again for ordinary people by St. Francis of Assisi. It was there right at the very dawn of Christianity.
04:27 It is love and love alone that can unite us with God. 1. What I want to do now is to examine each of these three ingredients, repentance, prayer and sacrifice.
04:45 Now, I've spoken to you about repentance before at some length, so I won't mention it much now, except just to remind you that the word repentance means to turn back to God Yes, but to continually turn back to God, there is no word in our AMAYAKH for somebody who has repented or is going to repent.
05:11 There's only a word for somebody who is in the process of turning back to God, is a continual turning process.
05:18 One of the great Jewish rabbis, my name Elzia, once said to his students, it is, sorry, you must repent the moment you die, be ready to repent the moment you die, to which they would reply, but how do we know we're going to die?" He said, you don't, therefore you must repent all the time.
05:43 …and also for the first Christians, they were called on to turn to God continually, both inside and outside of prayer.
05:53 Every moment was a moment for repentance. Now, what I want to do next is to explain how repentance is part and parcel of the inner dynamic of prayer.
06:18 But first of all, let me tell you a story. 179. I went to a retreat by Cardinal Hum. 169. And in his very first talk, he said he was called to Rome when he was an abbot, to take part in a seminar on prayer.
06:38 And there were abbots and asses from all over the world. And he found himself presiding over one of the groups in all the to get things going he said I decided to I went round everybody in the room and I said can you tell me what prayer means for you and one person said well I think prayer is about really
07:03 having a conversation with God and coming to know him in that way another said yes but I think perhaps scraptede visite chilli گ Basically cool , i yeah but i think it badass reising and opening the heart to guards and when he finished and was about to call and enter the proceedings then, i bears God
07:29 up from the bag said one moment, i beg you, you're not getting off the hook. What do you say prayer is.
07:35 – Well… I don't know if I said, Gardner, Hu, me, was only an Abert at the time, and if you are an Abert and you end up Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, well, you've got to have many gifts and one of them is diplomacy.
07:56 You've got to be a diplomat. And he gave a very good diplomatic answer. …he said, well, I believe I agree with you all.
08:10 I agree with everything you've said because in one way or another you've been saying the same thing. But I would like to add one word to every definition that you've given.
08:24 Prayer is trying to have a conversation with God. Pré is trying to raise your heart in order to love God.
08:35 Pré is trying to listen to God. It is all in the trying that pertains to the very essence of Pré.
08:47 In the trying is the dying. In the dying is the rising. And in the rising is the receiving of God's love so we actually receive God's love as we try to raise our hearts and minds to receive it.
09:12 It is all in the a trying, a margin to people going into prayer. One of them falls asleep.
09:28 The other one falls into an ecstasy, taken right out of themselves, lost in heaven. – Are they praying?
09:43 – No. Neither of them are technically praying. The person who's fallen asleep, now Saint Teresa Leisier, I remember did say that she did say that you can offer up your sleep and you can, and that's fine, but technically it's not praying.
10:00 The person who is an ecstasy, norave, technically praying, why, because God is doing everything. And when you're asleep, you are doing nothing.
10:14 So, where is prayer? Prayer is between the sleeping beauty and the ecstasy. And what is happening there? A person is continually trying to raise their heart and open it to God to receive his love, continually trying over and over and over again.
10:43 When I was praying this morning, preparing to come for this broadcast, I placed myself before God to be lost, to be taken out of my self in a profound act a contemplation to be still an experience is loved.
11:14 But after about two minutes, where are you going for your holidays this year? Are you going back to Monte Carlo to stay with that Mary and her niece?
11:30 Or are you going to stay with Uncle Joe in Liverpool, visit him in the old people's home? And then I remembered what I should be doing.
11:43 And I went back to prayer, hoping to be lost in contemplation, but then it came again. Are you going to accept that retreat in California, or are you going to go to Rome and protest d'est outside the Vatican, and know what I should do, but, and so it goes on.
12:05 Is my prayer in any way like your prayer? If it is, don't give up because Saint Teresa of Havela said that you will always have temptations and distractions in prayer.
12:22 In fact, you can't pray without them. Unit is a continually turning away from temptations and distractions and turning back to God and hear the repentance comes in to help raise your heart in such a way that it can be open to receive his love.
12:50 Now, if in half an hour best make it quarter of an hour, if in quarter of an hour you have one hundred temptations and you say it's a waste of time, I say to you it is not a waste of time because one hundred times you have repented.
13:09 One hundred times you've said no to yourself, one hundred times you've said no to what you want to do and you've turned to God.
13:17 vous avez été practicing selfishness or practicing, practicing to become a selfless person by producing a whole series of the selfless acts and that's the only way to learn to become selfless to develop a habit of selflessness that opens us to the love of God.
13:41 It's all in the trying. Dств launches if you go to Prayer and you start to think about that wonderful holiday you're going to have yourself in the washels and then how you're going to get the money to get there and the court of an hour is up and you've been away in Cloud Cook söyle a that is a different
14:08 matter, of that is a waste of time. But if you've made 100 acts of repentance and turning back to God, then you've been practicing selflessness in what Saint Angela of Folly New calls the Scholar Divini Amores.
14:28 The school of divine loving. That's what she calls prayer, because that is precisely what prayer is. It's not where you go to have wonderful, contemplative experiences to be taken out of yourself into ecstasy.
14:43 If that's what you're there for, believe me, you're going nowhere. Why? Because you're only going for yourself. What's in it for me?
14:51 You go for God, for His honour and glory. ו хотите impon gibi, dét Deus объедение.erek Reprendir Reprendir Re exhaustion Un säga Un созн dripping Now there are many different types of prayer and I'm not going to start innumerating them here.
15:32 But different methods and means of prayer are merely the way in which we help to keep our hearts and our minds open to receive the love of God.
15:47 Do you remember the story …be probably not read St. John of the Cross. Sorry, it's a long time since I read him too, but St.
15:56 John of the Cross, I remember, does tell the story about Moses. They're going through the desert towards the promised land when they are attacked by the e melechite.
16:13 Now, like a good general, he leads his troops into battle from behind, and then takes up his position on the mountainside, though I'm not criticizing or suggesting in any way that there is any cowardice in poor old Moses.
16:30 I say poor old Moses, because he was well over a hundred at this time. He did his best, and his best was to pray.
16:39 Whited he saw that the medicites seen the worm winning, he started to pray and he opened his arms to God.
16:49 In prayer. But you know it can be very tiring on top of a mountain with your arms out stretched and gradually they began to drop.
17:00 He was tired and then all of a sudden the am Medicites started to get the upper hand. se prondett mas追gok.
17:12 Pioneer, il leit bara, il hore, il hore, il il hore, il ple Lights, il Evenric, il kol' carst felic Snowheart.
17:19 In95 don't go on and on and on. . . 1. They defeated the Americas, their bitterest of opponents in the desert. Now the point I'm trying to make is that these props symbolize, if you like, the means and methods of prayer to help us to keep raising our hearts and mind to God.
17:58 Now there are so many of them, as I said before, I'm not going to start enumerating them Here, I mean the rosary, the stations of the cross, for instance, the slow meditative reading of the scriptures, using the Jesus prayer, or whatever.
18:15 They are means and methods, try to keep your heart open at all times to God. Remember the words of Dom John Chapman, a great Benedictine retreat master.
18:35 He said, pray as you can, not as you can't. In other words, the means and methods aren't important. 폭 B evening what helps at midday might not help at midnight so they can change all the time.
19:15 They are not important except insofar as they help you to keep repenting in such a way that your repentance raises your heart and mind to God.
19:32 Now let me just for a moment put the a microscope on our Lord Jesus Christ himself, when he is praying in the scriptures.
19:40 He goes at the beginning of his life into the beginning of his public ministry rather into the desert. And what happens there?
19:52 He continually tries to raise his heart and mind to his father to be lost in contemplation of his father, which was the prayer of default, his default was contemplation.
20:06 When Christ went into prayer, it was to contemplate the Father. But even he had a human nature, a weak human nature as we do.
20:18 And that was prone to temptations and distractions. …and so he encounters the devil, time and time and time again when he is trying to contemplate the Father, he is drawn away through temptations.
20:41 And the same happens in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knows what is about to happen, and he prays, Father, Father, that this chalus may be taken away from me.
20:58 And as he is praying, he is assailed by terrible distractions. How many times has he come to Jerusalem, have seen criminals there outstretched on posts and crossbeam, slowly bleeding to death, slowly dying, suffering, being laughed at and mocked?
21:18 …and he begins to realize what will be happening to him the very next day. Again he turns back to his father to seek his father's help and strength for the ordeal that is to come, but time and time again the temptations come again.
21:37 He knows he'll be taken before that delitante header to be mocked and laughed at, to be stripped by the Roman soldiers to be scourged to have a crown of thorns crushed into his head and then the carrying of the cross, and then the battering of his hands into the cross on Calvary and that slow, terrible
22:02 death. And yet he prays farther that this chalice may be taken away from me, but not my will, your will be done.
22:18 So you see, even Christ now, in His prayer, He has to experience temptations. Remember again, then Saint Teresa of Avila, you will always have temptations and distractions in prayer.
22:42 It's what you do about them that that is. Are you prepared to continually turn away from them and keep turning back to God, or are you just going to wallow in them and waste your time?
22:58 If you are continually turning back to God, you are practicing loving in the school of divine love, la scola divini amoris.
23:10 That's why you go there. You see, loving isn't different to any other form of learning. If you want to learn to write a bicycle or the card, if you want to learn a foreign language, if you want to learn the piano.
23:27 I mean, I heard an interview some years ago. Le tom opunauègre echenete перепquéгigirare'I Pianist, and he said that he prey played rather practice nine hours a day.
23:51 He was discovered that he was a musical genius at the age of three, but still he had to practice nine hours a day to share his genius with the audience on the concert platform.
24:07 continue practicing. Now, what is the most important thing any human being can do? And that is to learn to love.
24:18 There is nothing more important. Do we think it just happens one day you fall in love with God and everything in the garden is rosy?
24:27 No, it doesn't. It's a prolonged lifelong process of practicing, of daily carrying our cross, as we continually try to raise our hearts and minds to God.
24:45 And now to move on to the final word sacrifice. The story of Arthur Rubenstein really as answered why we must sacrifice in order to a learn to love, in order to learn to share his genius with listeners on a concert platform, he had to practice again and again and again and again.
25:15 And if we are going to learn the love to love God, to experience God's love, to be filled with God love, and to share it with other people, we've got to learn to receive that love by dying to self day after day.
25:29 That pertains to a the very essence of prayer that is the sacrifice that we must make and without that sacrifice we will never learn to pray.
25:40 Now there's all the difference and people often get mixed up here between the sacrifice that is necessary to receive God's love, and the sacrifices that are made after receiving God's love.
26:06 And so we read the lives of the saints backwards. We see them perform acts of heroic virtue. We see in them exemplary holiness.
26:25 We see them performing acts of mortification that would make us shudder. …and people make the mistake of saying, I want to become a saint, so I will follow what they did.
26:44 …and they come to grief, because what they did was done under the influence of love, …with love all things are possible, without it nothing is possible at all.
26:55 When you fall in love and you love someone, you want to show your love for them. You're able to do incredible things that without love are simply impossible.
27:10 You want to demonstrate your love. She shows just how much you love them. But before you are filled with love, and now I'm talking about the love of God Before you receive God's love, before you are possessed by God's love, you have to continually practice daily repentance in prayer by continually raising
27:39 your heart unmind to Him, you're practicing selfless giving, you're practicing dying, you're practicing rising, you're practicing receiving the love of God It's in this sort of mystical process that goes on in prayer that a saint is gradually formed, gradually transformed into the image and likeness
28:01 of Jesus Christ our Lord. It is a gradual, continual process. So don't make the mistake of seeing the great actions of the saints and think you can follow them.
28:12 And by performing those actions yourself, you become a saint. There's no hope. You'll come to grief in no time at all.
28:24 Sinc to reason again, there's only one way to union with God, there's only one way to receive His love. And that is to pray any one of points in another direction, then they are deceiving you and they are.
28:37 It is a gradual ongoing process. so those that are the three major ingredients of the spirituality introduced into the early church by Jesus Christ our Lord.
28:56 Isn't it interesting that at least I find it interesting, …but when you read about our Lady of Fatima and her message, …it is simply this, repent, pray, make sacrifices, …since Fatima there have been other, and many other, I believe, many other genuine appearances of our lady.
29:35 And it's always the same message. This for me, you know, makes me immediately think this is authentic. This is not coming from some demons of the devil or somebody misleading us.
29:46 It is always the same message. It is repent. …and pray, make sacrifices. …and then offer them up when you go to Mass on Sunday.
30:09 There you will receive the strength to continue this endless process of turning to God in prayer, advised him, only in prayer, but turning to God in the neighbouring need.
30:24 S Does it all times, you had in fact repenting or continually turning to God, and receiving in return from him, the strength to become an ever more committed disciple of Christ?
30:43 Sarapani Acadiena von Paul sul estona di St. Daniel disk. Amaii era du waίαςibum. Amaii era Amaii era Amaii era Amaii era du rawum deustu ugur.
31:12 Winifreds, Hilton Mersey, a suburb of Manchester. And when I joined, I went to the leader of the group, as it was called.
31:26 And I said, well, tell me what is our ladies' message? What is it she wants us to do? And he said, when it's very simple, it is simply to repent, ,to pray and to offer sacrifices.
31:51 Who was it who said that the end of all our journey is to end up at the place where we first started?
32:08 and to know that place for the first time. I know he's a poet, a famous poet, but he doesn't matter.
32:20 How true? How very true. At least it's true for me.