Prayer is the elevation of the mind to God; its apogee is the act of contemplation whereby the human soul is infused by God's spirit so that it partakes of the divine energies. These energies, typified by the uncreated light of God, bring the soul ever nearer to its divine source. We have already read the doctrine from St Paul: "And because for us there is no veil over the face, we all reflect as in a mirror, the splendour of the Lord; thus we are transfigured into His likeness, from splendour to splendour; such is the influence of the Lord who is Spirit" (II Corinthians 3:18). We believe that we pray, but in fact it is the Holy Spirit who is the foundation of our praying. When we are sufficiently humbled of our usual conceit and can listen in rapt attention to God, He speaks to us and through us, leading us in the adventure of praying. There are as many ways of praying as there are people who pray; assuredly the one Spirit prays through all of us, but we add our own distinctive flavour to the prayer uttered, and this contributes its potency to the product. "Taste then, and see that the Lord is good" (Psalm 34:8).
It is God's will that all creatures should be healed: of this I have no doubt. But I also have no doubt that the healing of God is of a different order from that envisaged by man, even by most healers who work on a charismatic basis. We look for an outward sign of improvement, but God sees into the heart. We desire relief and a return to normal activity, but God looks for a transfigured person. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9). Before we have had time to articulate our prayers even in our minds, God knows their content. He knows what our needs are before we ask Him (Matthew 6:8); He, in fact, makes their satisfaction possible by leading us into that state of inner quiet where we can receive the Holy Spirit. "When you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is there in the secret place; and your Father who sees what is in secret will reward you" (Matthew 6:6). When our will coincides with the will of God, a state that is most fully attainable during the act of contemplation, God informs our will of the part it is to play in the healing of all people. In this way we become true ministers of healing.
When we pray for another person we should first attain a state of inner quiet in which we can be attentive to the divine will. "Let be then: learn that I am God" (Psalm 46:10). Prayer of any real intensity (which is rather different from reciting set prayers) starts with silence before God - just as in any deep communication with another person we should first of all be quiet and "listen" to him, and that not only with our ears but with our whole being. This silence is contemplative prayer. In the silence we are at one, not only with God the Holy Spirit, but also with the spirit of all those who are in need. Then, when we remember these people, the power of God passes through our spirit to theirs, for in prayer there is a spiritual bond between all creatures. The bond is the work of God's Holy Spirit. In intercessory prayer, we interpose ourselves between God and the person for whom we are praying; it is a mystery of God's courtesy to us that He uses us in this great work of healing; indeed, it is amazing that creatures as imperfect as we are should play such an important part in God's healing work for the whole world. "What is man that thou shouldst remember him, mortal man that thou shouldst care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than a god, crowning him with glory and honour" (Psalm 8:4-5).
The essence of all real healing work - and this includes our work in alleviating the suffering that is a necessary part of a person's growth into a full human being - is to be an agent of love. As I have stressed on more than one occasion, the precious fruit of suffering is a capacity of love on a universal scale without ego-centred dependence on the loved one, an attitude that makes itself known in a demanding, possessive relationship that enslaves the object of our affection. If the person in travail meets unreserved love, his sufferings are modified, and he can come to an appreciation of the meaning of his pain much more rapidly. Thus the healing power of love accelerates the necessary cleansing work of suffering and brings the sufferer closer to his true self much more immediately than would be possible in a cold, uncaring atmosphere. The love a minister of healing like Jesus radiates is the first experience of divine love the one in travail will know, and will eventually give to others when he emerges from the darkness of psychical gloom and enters into the light of God's creative purpose.
To be a real minister of healing there are two strict pre-requisites: an ardent love of God and a capacity to love one's fellow creatures. This is, in fact, a summary of the two great commandments - loving the Lord our God with all our being, and loving our neighbour as ourself. When one prays for someone in need, one lifts him up to God in the silence of contemplative prayer, and then one remembers his particular physical illness or mental distress. It is more important to embrace the sufferer with unconditional love than to pray for his relief from a particular illness or difficulty. Once he is filled with the Spirit of God, a deeper healing will occur than anything we may demand. By this I do not suggest that we should not pray to God for our personal needs to be met or our inner questions answered, or even more so that those for whom we are interceding should not be similarly helped. What I am saying is this, that the seeking aspect of petitionary and intercessory prayer is a logical sequel to the contemplative prayer which puts us and those for whom we care in God's loving embrace. Only when we are supported by the everlasting arms of God can healing occur on the various levels of the personality. The spirit inspires the soul and purifies it; the informed soul infuses the mind and renews the body. In this way there comes about a full psychosomatic healing. It may well be that the particular trouble is not removed - certainly St Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was not healed although he begged the Lord on three occasions to rid him of it. It was probably a severe physical pain of some kind, and Paul was told: "My grace is all you need; power comes to its full strength in weakness." St Paul follows this with the important dictum that he prefers to find his joy and pride in the very things that are his weakness, and then the power of Christ will come and rest upon him (II Corinthians 12:7 9).
This, of course, does not mean that we should not seek relief from our travail in the deepest prayer, but that we must be obedient to God's final word, remembering that while we desire instant relief, God wills our growth into mature manhood, measured by nothing less than the full stature of Christ (Ephesians 4:13). The theme of this book is that suffering is an essential part of this process. Only when we have learned the particular lesson that our travail is here to teach us can we put away the past pain and enter new fields of endeavour. In the end it is not so much the pain that is terrible as the apparent meaninglessness that surrounds most suffering like an impenetrable, black pall. When we can begin to see our own suffering as a part of universal disorder, and can visualise the raising up of the whole world "from the shackles of mortality and its entry upon the liberty and splendour of the children of God" (to quote St Paul at his most inspired in Romans 8:21), then only is our condition invested with supernatural significance. Only then can we play our part in this liberation of the universe from the law of death and disintegration that ends all natural processes.
We have to come to terms with our own involvement in and responsibility for the disorder that appears to dominate the world. Every selfish action, every unkind word, every destructive thought has its repercussions not only on those around us but also in the wider psychic environment in which we live as spiritual beings. And what is disordered psychically will make its impact felt in the material world. Our own thoughtless attitudes play their part in fostering man's inhumanity to his fellows. I also firmly believe that man's psychic disorder has a deep effect on the conditions of the earth, so intimately connected are the human emotions and the phenomena of the natural world. We tend to blame God for not intervening to arrest the tragedies of the world, but these are largely of our own creation. They are also, no doubt, a product of the demonic powers that reside in the psychic realms, and which feed on negative emotional forces that emanate from psychologically disturbed human beings. This consideration brings us to another, deeper aspect of healing prayer - that which involves the psychic world in which the "dead" live and work towards their sanctification in God.
The question of prayers for the dead has already been broached in connection with the passage in II Maccabees 12:38-45. It would seem from what has been imparted to many sensitive people, that some who have died are often closer in psychical communion to those of us still alive in the flesh than to the Communion of Saints who inhabit the vast world of heaven. This applies especially to people who have lived selfish, corrupt, cruel lives. Their centre of attention had seldom moved much beyond their physical bodies and the desire nature of the ego while they lived in this world. When the time had come for them to quit their mortal bodies, the immaterial mind-soul was so undeveloped that it hovered around the psychic environment of the earth, being unable, or unwilling, to move into its proper milieu in the life beyond death. I am now speaking of hell, which is not a place but a psychic atmosphere of dereliction, isolation and purposeless, repetitive motion. To the type of person that is so sensuous and hedonistic that he cannot lift his awareness above the level of his mortal body, death is a shattering experience. His physical moorings have been loosened, and he drifts aimlessly in the lower psychical ("astral") world seeking desperately for some body of flesh and bone to which he can become anchored. This "discarnate entity" can cause grave disturbances especially to people with strong psychic sensitivity. While spiritualists may attempt to get into direct contact with such an unhappy soul by what is called a "rescue circle", a much better and far less dangerous means of approach is through intercessory prayer and the celebration of a Requiem Mass. The importance of prayers for the dead cannot be over-emphasised, and it is the entities without faith that need our solicitude far more than those who have lived and died in faith. Indeed, we read in Wisdom 3:1-4: "The souls of the just are in God's hand and torment shall not touch them. In the eyes of foolish men they seemed to be dead; their departure was reckoned a defeat, and their going a disaster. But they are in peace." The peace that the writer describes is not a state of repose but one of intimate communion with God in which all the good things of eternal life are enjoyed. It is clear that we need the help of the faithful departed much more than they our prayers! They are already playing their part in the Communion of Saints.
If the necessity for intercessory prayer is accepted for the indifferent discarnate entities that populate the intermediate zones close to our earth, how much more important it must be for those really evil people who, in their lives, killed millions of their fellow men and filled the world with hatred and violence! In their psychic hell they are in blackness and enveloped in the world's hatred, especially the loathing of the descendants of their victims and perhaps of some of the victims also. This psychic atmosphere of evil is not only appalling in itself; it also casts its noxious influence over the whole cosmos. It was this life-destroying miasma that Jesus had to encounter face to face in His supreme agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and which, I believe, afflicts, though to a lesser extent, many sensitive people today with episodes of unaccountable depression. Fortunately for us, the risen Christ is available to help us in the necessary encounter with the world's accumulated sin; for Him to come to us, however, we have to pray. Only thus may we open the inner door on which He knocks perpetually, asking to be admitted to His rightful place in our own being. This is the apex of the soul where the spirit lies as a pearl of great price. The encounter with this psychic darkness is an inevitable trial on the probationary path of all who are called to higher spiritual service, and its end is the raising up of the evil to perpetual light; the transforming power is love, by which alone redemption is effected.
It therefore follows that healing prayer should not be confined only to the living but must be extended to the dead. We should remember in love not only those who have lived good lives while on earth, but also the criminals, the torturers, the persecutors and those who have seduced the world in their time with vain philosophies and noxious ideologies. The work of intercession for the most evil men now departed this life is assuredly a dedicated ministry. I would not recommend it to those who are unschooled in the life of prayer. They are best employed in remembering people in special present need. But those whose life is centred on God, and to whom prayer is as essential for the life of the soul as breathing is for that of the body, should pray ceaselessly for all souls in misery in the outer reaches of the life beyond death. Contemplative communities have a special responsibility in this work, and so also do those many elderly people who feel that their lives, lacking physical purpose, now have no further use. Indeed, this is a very special service for those who only stand and wait for their summons to pass through the gate of death to enter the new life that lies ahead of them. The future of our planet depends in no small measure on the healing of the psychic atmosphere that envelops it, because the power of the Holy Spirit has to penetrate this layer before it can energise the physical world with life. As the psychic world is cleansed, so will ennobling thoughts enter the minds of those who are burdened with the government of great nations. Then they will be able to grasp their common humanity and the fatherhood of the Almighty, no matter how they envisage Him or what name they give to Him. And then the Spirit of Christ, who gave up His life to save the world, will penetrate their spirit also and renunciation will take the place of the strivings for self-aggrandisement that typify natural man. Demands for victory will be swallowed up in universal reconciliation, and the greatest will be the servant of all.
It should also be emphasised that healing prayer must begin with the person who prays. I cannot be an authentic minister of healing so long as my private life is disordered and my present relationships at home or at my work are unsatisfactory. "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye, with never a thought for the great plank in your own? Or how can you say to your brother `Let me take the speck out of your eye' when all the time there is the plank in your own? You hypocrite! First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's" (Matthew 7:3-5). It is futile for me to pray earnestly for peace in faraway places while there is no peace in me or in my closest relationships with others. Only when I am at peace in myself will that peace radiate from me to my surroundings and start to heal all those in need. Only then will my prayers on behalf of the world be effective, for an attitude of benevolence and love, such as peace engenders, can have profound psychic effects far away from its original human source. That peace is a fruit of suffering long and gaining an inner wisdom that sees beyond immediate personal gratification.
Another rather unlikely component of true healing prayer is a sense of humour. This glorious fruit of suffering comes when we are shown the immensity of God's grace and the insignificance of our personal complaints. I could well imagine that when Job came fully to himself after his shattering encounter with the Creator he burst out in laughter as he saw himself and his previous way of life in the context of God's infinity. When we encounter the rigid limits of conventional wisdom in juxtaposition with the immensity of universal truth, we respond not rationally but mystically, in a paean of laughter. No wonder both Abraham and Sarah laughed when they were told by God that they were to be the parents of Isaac, for it was logically impossible for the aged Sarah to conceive a child. The fool and the clown are divine symbols. They are the way in which logic-weary man transcends the limit of the possible and enters a kingdom where a little child is master of all. Only those who accept the kingdom of God like a child can enter it (Mark 10:15). The kingdom is attained not by violence but by the acceptance of things as they are. The oil that lubricates the wheels of life and moves the cumbersome human organism to its place in heaven is the blessed balm of humour. Only one who has overcome himself in the fire of affliction can laugh unaffectedly at life's vicissitudes. And he can pray effectively also, because he has learned how to get himself out of the way and be an instrument for God's healing power. There is a lightness about true spirituality that brings us into communion with the angels and the blessed ones. "Thus speaks the high and exalted one, whose name is holy, who lives for ever: I dwell in a high and holy place with, him who is broken and humble in spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, to revive the courage of the broken" (Isaiah 57:15). I would think that the broken ones in the twentieth-century prison camps throughout the world are revived through the courage born of celestial humour, for when we are nothing, we are also one with God.
Should we pray for the demonic powers that influence the world from other spheres as fallen members of the angelic hierarchy? Should we intercede for the personified power of evil that is called the devil? It seems best that we should concern ourselves first of all with our own business, which is the transfiguration of human society and the creatures of our world. If we play our part properly in this limited realm, it is more than likely that the powers of the cosmos will attain greater attunement among themselves than at present. Then the great cosmic fellowship, of which we also are a part, may work towards universal harmony.
Despite the terrible times that are upon us at present, this great day of peace and love may be nearer than we dare to hope. For then we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.
MeditationLet the healing grace of your love, O Lord, so transform me that I may play my part in the transfiguration of the world from a place of suffering, death and corruption to a realm of infinite light, joy, and love. Make me so obedient to your Spirit that my life may become a living prayer and a witness to your unfailing presence.